Yeah, obviously it's intended to try and balance the OPness of the weapons (and yep, I've seen some of the drama: that kind of people that wants to policy how other people enjoy their single player game won't ever be satisfied anyway so... *shrug*), but as I said I feel the friendly fire downside doesn't really balance them out: it practically makes them completely useless (unless, as stated, in some solo ship challenges). My point is indeed it doesn't balance an otherwise OP weapon, it virtually takes it out of the game entirely (well, at least those like the black hole, cluster torp, etc; a couple of the piercing ones are still realistically usable, albeit with some frustration, by the player, just not by the AI): up to the point you'd wonder what's the point of having them there at all.
They are not more "balanced", they are virtually less useful than a PD laser. Balance is about keeping choices open: a gameplay component, to be balanced, needs to be useful, but not so better than any alternative as to make those redundant, hence the point of it giving the player more choice. But, as stated,
it needs to be useful, otherwise it's just bloat.
You yourself say that the aim of your mod is that the player is gonna have "to think multiple times before using (your weapons)": that's my point, the friendly fire drawback is such that there's nothing to think about, there's no choice whatsoever:
they aren't usable, let's look at something else.
Now, if that applied to just a couple of them that'd be one thing (
"oh, look, this is a quirky one trick pony, cool!"), but when basically half the weapons in the mod are novelties you can't normally use (not "at a sacrifice", not "forcing you to make choices": you basically just can't and that's it) the reaction can end being more in the tone of
"oh, look, ANOTHER unusable proof of concept with pretty colors... great... remind me why did I have this mod installed again?". Which is basically what happened to me after several hours: I had half a dozen of your rare drops just stored, unused, on my main planet, and only 2 or 3 actually found any use in my fleet. After a while, the annoyance of having so much redundancy (not to mention the annoyance of going from the joy of getting a super rare drop to the disappointment of discovering it's a worthless one) won over the coolness of having a couple usable ones mounted on my Yamato (and man did the Phalanxes look fitting there). I could have kept the mod installed for those few weapons that I like but... heh, I try to to keep my modlist in check (and yeah, I've also finished the HVBs introduced by your mod, so no further content waiting for me anyway: it was cool to be on the receiving end of those Phalanxes though
).
In any case my point isn't to go back and rework/remove what's already in here, mind me (wouldn't make sense anyway for things such as a black hole generator not to do friendly fire): it's just a suggestion to try and focus on other kinds of ideas and drawbacks for new weapons in the future. While on one side we have the usual OP/flux/ammo balance passes, on the other the additional limiting factor could come in the shape of other quirks like, I don't know, the interferences we see in a few other mods. Those still usually are just about flux to prevent you from stacking several special weapons on the same ship, so it wouldn't be enough; in this case they could, let's say as an example, halve your shields efficiency or even disable it completely for a few seconds while firing, so here we have the downside "choice" you are talking about, that "thinking" you expect to induce: should you bring that superweapon knowing that right when you fire it you risk that Gremlin throwing a reaper in your exhaust port? It'd be indeed risky, a legitimate drawback... but the choice would still be there as the weapon would indeed be useable, albeit with care. "Should I bring that superweapon knowing that if I fire it most likely I'm gonna kill my whole fleet as well and have to either savescum or ragequit" doesn't really sound like something I have to think much about.