I swapped over to experimental to see the difference and it does feel fresh, but after reading the other comments I felt like having minor changes would have been better, like how there's an XVI and pirate variants of certain ships (I forgot which mod it was from since it was from one of my previous version's playthrough, but I recall something on the lines of "more armour, more crew", because they replaced the automated systems as a "luddic refit")
However, I do like the the shieldless systems, and it could make for a fun, rare "elite forces" fleet/variant instead of being a direct change to the luddic standard fleet, maybe the oldest knight order or some extremists knight order that sees shields as "too high tech"
I only played around in simulation in my campaign though so I don't have direct battle feedback, personally I like picking up variants of ships and specializing them, so I would love having some minor differences in a luddic dominator vs a normal or XVI one.
that being said apparently I can't swap back to the official version after going shieldless (I'm an idiot for not backing up my save), but since I only have like 1-2 of them, I'll just put it in my headcannon that the normal luds use the normal shielded variants and I picked up some elite variant.
On a side note, I was testing out the suicide bomb craft in simulation(not very intensive testing though so take it with a grain of salt) and it felt weak, like even with the big prometheus it seems like the only thing I can kill is an atlas, not to mention the suicide speed boost occasionally pushing lighter ships so fast that they just outrun 80% of the explosion from the momentum of being pushed away. It's even worse with the dram, since it just slams into larger craft so hard it dies from the impact before it can explode. It just feels a little underwhelming at the cost of a whole ship, I expected the large Prometheus to be like a siege weapon, softening up stations for the rest of the fleet, or crippling a formation of lighter craft, while the dram was basically torpedo XXL, a nice tactical punch to larger craft, or take out high priority light craft. I understand that the explosions are weaker since with the boost its much harder to avoid compared to last time.
For now I feel like they have become a "oh the problem will settle itself" situation compared to the old version's "Oh lawd he comin" situation when a suicide ship closes in. Maybe it'll fare better in actual battle after some armour gets stripped, but it'll be quite hard to position them without lots of friendly fire.
Maybe have a small close range explosion that isn't fragmentation to crack nearby armour and shields before the usual fragmentation wave hits? or build in some sort of armour damager in the front (I know I can put guns on them but they have a tendency to get shot at and stop working)
however if I am just using them wrongly please do tell me.