Combining weapons

I’ve been reading the OpenGL blue book.  Reading hundreds of pages of dense technical data without much context is getting tedious.
I’ve also been thinking, you know what game was fun?  That kirby 64 game.  And it was fun not only because you could swallow almost any of the enemies and steal their powers, but because you could combine any two powers into a new one.  There was a huge number of combinations and it was fun discovering them all.  Why not have that in a shooting game?  So, take a beam weapon, and a missile weapon, and when you combine them, you get a missile which shoots beams at anything within a range when it explodes.  It’s just surprisingly difficult coming up with an entry for every combination of a large number of base types, considering a lifetime of playing shooters.