After my most recent update to StarMade v0.199.435 I have noticed that beam weapons are no longer able to damage blocks, and inflict damage only upon armor HP and shields. In doing so, the beams drain Armor to 0% while leaving structure HP untouched, and without destroying any blocks on the target entity.
I tried to see if there was anything useful in the log on this, but the only thing I could really find was that when it seemed to be happening, the appropriate 'logstarmade.#.log' seemed to be flooded with messages saying "CHECKING HIT" with a time-stamp, but nothing else.