Are you planning to apply parallax occlusion mapping to the underlying components of a damaged ship?
TL;DRParallax occlusion mapping is already used on damaged ships, combined with real geometry where there is space, because it looks like geometry cheaply while full modeled ribbing would be too expensive.
They already do. Yep, already done, did it. Basically, there's two parts of the underlying geo. So you've got the exterior surface of the ship, and then you've got either damage POMs, which are the parallax occlusion maps, and those are a single plane that look like 3D geo due to how the textures are. And then you've got the actual geometry where you have space. So if a wing is actually thick enough to have, say, the skeletal ribbing as you go through, and then you have a POM under that, that way when you shoot the ship, you can still see through it. But yeah, we combine both techniques with that. So we've got POMs all over the ship to do your rivets and your insets and all sorts of cool stuff that we don't have to charge. And then we use it for the damage too, because why not? It looks awesome. It actually simplifies the process, because you don't have to model a full set of geo; it looks like geo at a glance. It's all extruded-looking and such. So it's great tech.
I wish we could actually model the full ribbing of a ship, build it like you'd see it in a real construction of a spaceship, but it's too expensive to draw all that when you're not seeing it.