Object Managment

I'd set it up so projectiles are managed by a central projectile manager, rather than by the individual ships.

Imagine if ship Q shot, and then was deleted (presumably from you blowing it up). What happens? The shot disappears.

I'd figure it's also much cleaner code to update "all" the shots and ship collisions in one take from a giant pool than it is to iterate through each ship, handle its shots, pass in all the ships the bullet might collide with, and then see if there were any collisions.

Yesss, projectile manager...

Basically a resource_manager that manages temporary caches of projectile objects, such as rockets, laser beams, bullets, etc...

The objects themselves, such as CShip, might make the request to the resource_manager to handle his bullet or laser beam, but he doesn't do it himself, otherwise the previous would happen, what the other poster mentioned...

You shoot a rocket, you die, rocket goes away, no good!

If you're worried about keeping track of who fired which projectile (for score update or whatever) then simply have eadch CProjectile object contain a pointer back to their CShip parent.