[jp10]

Beaten Zone. This is mostly applied to machine guns. When you fire bursts of machine gun fire at a target you have bullets that will hit the target, go past the target, fall short of the target and to some extent some will go left and right. This area is the beaten zone. This gives machine gun/automatic burst type weapons a little bit of an area effect to hit or suppress multiple targets.
In the game this is simulated by having machine gun fire into a hex sometimes (randomly) giving suppression points into adjacent hexes.