Ok, 1st: the damage tech working on the characters isn't quite so simple as it was created specifically for metals e.g. we have a thickness, burn, denting and temperature set of values we work with to evaluate how to render it and characters don't work in the same way. However character impacts are normally rendered with decals (I'm guessing projected) and that usually ends up looking pretty nasty, now rendering the character damage into a object space would certainly work and wouldn't look so nasty; that's a good possibility. The Character crew are super hard at work at the moment but they have got a unique UV set which could be used for damage stuff and they use a layer blend shader already, so we could do something like increase wear and dirt values and localise that using a damage map system.
2nd: (In relation to the GDC talk) So when we started the damage tech we were working with a very talented Vehicle Artist Neil McKnight who was working on the Gladius (still my favourite ship) and we were moving away from a damage state system to a more procedural system, however there was still debate as to whether we needed any form of state in there, or more specifically a sort of 100% destroyed ship carcass which would be an artist created asset; we decided against it in the end because it added more unnecessary work for the artist as the procedural damage system was more than capable of creating the look we were going for. So because we had this carcass at the time of development, we had access to its relevant data so we could do vertex manipulation to move the standard assets vertices towards those of the carcass when damage was taken. In the end we settled on using a screen spaced perturbed normal technique, which gives a great result.
3rd: (Again, in relation to the GDC talk) The ideas about GPU particles rendered off when we do damage and could also link with our concept of the removal of metal (thickness level in the damage map) so the more metal lost we could spawn off an amount and size of GPU particles which signify how much metal came off. And because we use an object space position map we could spawn them off at the impact location without having to feed back damage visualisation information to the CPU to produce the effect and location of spawning we want. We should probably get around to making a GPU particle system first though, I'm sure that's on the VFX list of requests.
4th: (Finally, in relation to the GDC talk) There is a new piece of GPU technology which we could take use of with DX12/Vulkan which is tiled resources. There's a possibility we could use this to split up the Damage maps and Position/Bone maps with tiled resources and stream the data about when needed. However since the GDC article we have made plans to improve the Damage Tech system to get around some mesh streaming issues we have and also make the Position/Bone Map quicker to render so that we don't need to store them on the GPU whilst they're not being used (we only need them when rendering the damage into the damage map) and we can render them just in time when an impact pushed to the GPU. The plan is to use a proxy mesh to render these position/bone maps instead of LOD0 or LOD1 of the actual geometry, that will make them cheap to render and in terms of memory will be equally as cheap PLUS they'll always being available in system memory (which fixes our streaming issue), unlike the current geometry which gets stream in and out as required. So yeah the damage tech is cheap for performance (it barely even registers as a GPU performance dip) and substantially lower VRAM usage than the old damage state system (so you can stop calling it Damage States because there's no states any more

) but we can reduce the VRAM usage by half with this new technique of just in time rendering of one of the maps.
AND FINALLY, we have recently (not that recent, but stuff becomes a blur after a while so I can't remember when any more) done a little bit of fix up for the damage tech to get the glow to seat a bit better so now the cool down decay is more reminiscent of the laws of thermal dynamics (I said reminiscent, because in reality they're nothing like the
calculations of thermal dynamics, I only had 8 bits to do the glow calculations alright!
I'm no physicist but I don't think it's possible to do any thermal dynamics calculations using only 8 bits of memory storage. However what it was reminiscent of was, hot stuff cools down quicker than warm stuff < I'm sure you can tell we're super technical here in the render team

) and whilst doing this improvement noticed that as the glow goes down towards the cool end of the spectrum and it blends in with the metal colour, stuff gets a little, well....erm....green! So yeah, we have to fix that at some point because it'll be super noticeable on cap ships when they take damage. To put it simply, damage tech never sleeps because we've got too many ideas