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[red_frog]

Before You read this post please be advised that English is not my first language, because of that there may be some mistakes or some misspelled words.

I think that fragmentation damage should be more effective against shields and less against hull. let’s say to give it 200% damage to shields and 25% to hull and 25% to armor.

Explanation why:
This is how I see damage types:
Kinetic weapons use rounds that do not have any explosive mass or very little of it to presumably transfer all of its kinetic Energy to shields in order to overwhelm them.

HE based weapons use round that have a lot of explosive mass that explode on impact to shred armor.

Fragmentation damage in game is from what I can see based on shells that explode before impact creating a cloud of shrapnel to shot down incoming missiles and small crafts (fighters) with exception of vulcan cannon that is using its high rate of fire to create a bullet storm to shot down any threat. From my point of view a cloud of small metal fragments or small rounds would do almost no damage to hull and armor but they should do well against shields. By making fragmentation damage effective against shields weapons based on this type of damage can contribute more to the fight besides acting as PD. New fragmentation damage can also be used for Sabot SRM. For me those missiles are a little bit to strong when it comes to their damage output against armor. Thanks to implementing new damage type Sabo is still going to be effective against shields and would stop being an universal missile capable to destroy ships by spamming them endlessly.
I can also see some problems that could be created with this change. Flaks and vulcan cannon could became to powerful and the easiest way to balance it out would be to lower their overall damage. This could create situation where their damage is too low to be an effective PD weapons. This can be resolved by adding a to them a modifier that is incising their damage against missiles and fighters by X%. I believe that it would be simple to implement judging by existing skill called Advanced Countermeasures. Thumper as a general weapon should get some kind of a new damage type exclusive to kinetic weapons (maybe to missiles as well) that deals 100% damage to everything. It could be called HE (with delayed fuse) or something.

So what do you think about my suggestion. I am aware that it is not perfect idea but i really wanted to share it with the rest of the forum.

[SCC]

From gameplay perspective, making fragmentation damage kinetic damage, but squared is superfluous. Being good against shields and bad against armour is kinetic damage's job already.

[DatonKallandor]

There already is an anti-shield damage type. There's no reason to have two. If frag needed a modification at all I'd give it bonus damage to strikecraft and missiles.

[Linnis]

I can't imagine how shrapnel does better against shield... If we imagine the simplest version of a shield that the shield uses energy to absorb energy, then any explosion would have more than half of its energy be wasted. But pure single directional kinetic energy has to be almost purely absorbed by the shield so it makes sense.

I think the problem with fragmentation right now is that its tool tip displays damage backwards.

instead of 100 damage, 25% to armor/shield and 100% to hull.
should be 25 damage, 100% to armor/shield and 400% to hull.

This way there is less math required into knowing how much damage a weapon can output. Also damage to hull is one of the least important stat there is.

[Retry]

The game has four damage types: Anti-armor (HE), Anti-shield (KE), Anti-hull (FRAG), and general-purpose (EN).  There's no gameplay or game design reason to turn FRAG into Anti-Shield 2.0.

From my point of view a cloud of small metal fragments or small rounds would do almost no damage to hull and armor but they should do well against shields.

Frag already does minimal damage to armor.  You're very wrong about small frragments being ineffective against internal components; spalling is frequently a big component of internal damage to vulnerable components in real life (such as machinery and, well, people).  As far as anti-shield performance goes, well, there's no real-life equivalent to shields, so frag weapons can perform however we need them to perform.

I can also see some problems that could be created with this change.  -snip-

I think that long list of additional changes that's required to make the original suggestion work (including introducing another unrelated damage type) says a lot about the viability of this suggestion.

[red_frog]

Well after reading replies I realized that my idea was really bad. Sorry for bothering you all and thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[DatonKallandor]

You did bring a point to the front that is useful, because this:

I think the problem with fragmentation right now is that its tool tip displays damage backwards.

Is 100% true. Having to do math to compare DPS numbers between frag and non-frag weapons is a problem that's easily fixed.

[Megas]

The biggest problem with fragmentation is minimum armor.  Because it prevents all damage going to hull, fragmentation never does full DPS against a ship.

[IonDragonX]

The biggest problem with fragmentation is minimum armor.  Because it prevents all damage going to hull, fragmentation never does full DPS against a ship.

Now that is sad. Makes that skill that gives +150 virtual armor seem that much more important.

[Goumindong]

The biggest problem with fragmentation is minimum armor.  Because it prevents all damage going to hull, fragmentation never does full DPS against a ship.

If frag didn’t have 1/4 hit strength vs the armor portion of hull it would go a long way to making it a lot better. The problem isn’t that it’s hitting armor is that all weapons get their armor penetration multiplier while striking sections that have minimum armor left.

So a 100 dmg HE weapon does 70 dmg vs minimum onslaught armor (no skills) but 100 frag damage does 25. The frag weapon has to have almost three times the DPS of the HE weapon to break even here at the same Flux per second. If it’s armor pen vs hull was 1 rather than .25 it would do 53 dmg and actually be competitive vs HE

That or just tweaking an internal component dmg factor that applies when hitting minimum armor. Such that taking frag damage on hull shuts down more systems than normal. 

[Thaago]

That is somewhat counterbalanced by the extremely high damage that frag weapons do. IIRC one of the reasons minimum armor was implemented in the first place was because vulcan pd guns could chew through hull shockingly fast.

[Goumindong]

That is somewhat counterbalanced by the extremely high damage that frag weapons do. IIRC one of the reasons minimum armor was implemented in the first place was because vulcan pd guns could chew through hull shockingly fast.

Sure but also no. Light mortar DPS vs 50 armor. = 28.125/OP. Vulcan Vs 50 Armor = 18.75 /OP

Vulcans would still be weak vs high armor targets. Vs a no skill onslaught a Vulcan would go from minimum armor dmg of .15 to .22.

Now OK sure there are plenty of targets that aren’t onslaught but it will still do base min dmg to anything that has the +150 armor skill. And we could always tweak it’s damage/hit down if that was an issue. Since it’s dmg/hit is irrelevant to its main purpose

[Thaago]

Let me clarify: I wasn't talking about the +150 armor skill, I was talking about minimum armor existing at all! The Vulcan used to do the full 500 DPS vs exposed hull, or 125/OP. That was somewhat unbalanced.

[Megas]

The only frag weapon that is good for killing things now is Locusts because it does so much, and the missile swarm is reliable.

Dual flak is passable since it is multipurpose and AoE.

But something like Thumper, it is only useful early-ish when enemies are weak with low armor.

[Thaago]

I really like the Thumper as a pirate/low tier weapon because its weak (good to have weak early game enemies) but potentially a nasty surprise if it does land on exposed hull. Just a little bit of spicy to keep things interesting.