Thanks for your help.  I was thinking of actually implimenting broadside guns for many ships, and maybe even a slow firing, high armor penetration torpedo launcher, by changing all ships weapon count from 1 to 2 or 3.  I imagine I just have to look at the capital ship text data and copy/paste its second and third weapon text data, and edit the weapon behavior to be more suitable for a smaller vessel.  Is this easy as I am thinking?

Shield negation via research is one.  Messy, but pretty useful b/c I don't think mitigation is applied to shots that negate shielding.  So that *could* be armor penetration in a way.

Anyways Manick, I really hope you get this mod working.  It will be good to have a mod with naval battle type battles in it.  Especially the larger gravity wells and longer-ranged and more powerful shots.

But Affects_Only_Hull won't let it do shield damage.  So it will be near useless as a weapon, and as an ability it will be OP.

BTW Annatar, does AFFECTS_ONLY_SHIELDS ignore mitigation when doing shield damage?

I guess my terminology used in my previous posts was a bit confusing when speaking about the game, so I'll explain myself a little better.  I don't really fully understand the game mechanics either myself, and even though I understand the concept of shield mitigation I don't really want to bother myself with it.  It sounds way too complicated because of all the ways it can change during a fight.  Shield negate from phase missiles I understand more, but I am not sure how to use it for balancing things.  What I basically want to do is have the capital ships be tough enough to withstand many more shots than they currently do against small vessels, but still be vulerable to other capital ships, torpedos, and maybe even bombers just like in real life.  In contrast to real life, a WWII destroyer, if it was lucky to even get in range, probably wouldn't penetrate the armor of a battleship since the belt/deck armor was thicker than their shells, but it could launch a torpedo at it and really mess it up.  The easiest thing to do would be to just raise the stats of all capital ships dramatically and make them only vulnerable to each other, and somehow torpedos.  I was thinking about doubling all their stats, and effectiveness of their abilities, and start balancing from there.  But I would have to think of a way to make torpedos deal a great amount of damage to capital ships if a frigate/cruiser was fortunate enough to get close, but also not be so overpowered that it can even be abused against other small vessels.  I don't think simply adding a long cooldown would do the trick, because if it was designed to just deal a large amount of damage compared to the ships primary weapons, it could be used to wipe out small ships quickly without any effort. 

I wish their was an ability in the game that caused a percentage of damage per second instead of a set number, that way it could proportionally do way more damage to a capital ship.

Well, you can make an ability only target capital ships, and do splash damage. So you could keep the frigates' normal weapons, and give them an ability for anti-capital torpedoes in this manner. It could only be targeted on capitals, but it would also do splash damage to nearby targets, regardless of what they are.

The only unfortunate thing about it is that all ships are limited to 4 abilities, so you would not be able to do this for capitals unless you took out one of their existing abilities.

Its just as Sparda says, especially since the main guns on the capital ships will already deal a great amount of damage and have a large range.  More modern battleships, after pre-dreadnoughts, rarely used torpedo launchers anyway. 

And great idea Annatar11!  I never would have thought of implimenting a torpedo attack as an ability.  I almost forgot that abilities had target type limitations, which makes it perfectly viable.