I think mechanically it is very difficult to make shock damage work effectively without causing other mechanical issues.
Currently we have the issue that shock damage is negligible for large ships, but absolutely crippling for smaller ships, which is one of several issues making ground support fighter worse than useless. That suggests that we probably want to tighten the shock damage distribution somewhat.
However, if we make shock damage more effective against larger ships, the question is what kind of counterplay do we have? There are basically two options: (1) fight outside of the enemy's range, which will be a buff in favor of missiles (probably a good thing, they need help) and will also reinforce the speed/range tactical superiority that is already something of an exploit (arguable, but I would say neutral or bad depending on what you want to accomplish); or (2) use shields (I would say bad, as shield superiority to armor beyond the early tech levels is already very well established, we don't need even more reasons to trivialize the shield vs armor decision).
So if we change shock damage, it is not sufficient to make it "more", we need to use this change to somehow introduce "more interesting" in terms of gameplay decisions.
An interesting physics insight here is that you can estimate the impulse or impact force as F = E*D, where E is the damage energy (=armor damage) and D is the average penetration depth. Since Aurora uses a range of triangular damage depth (i.e., penetration) distributions characterized by gradients, G (lasers have G=3, railguns and particle beams havd G=2, particle lances have G=infty, and all other weapons have G=1), you can write that the force is
very approximately F = 0.5*sqrt(E/G) if we neglect the effect of armor thickness vs tech level (otherwise, shock damage would increase against better armor which is just a ludicrous mechanic - let's assume high-level armor is also better at damping shock damage due to copious quantities of handwavium). This actually introduces an interesting mechanic, as high-penetration weapons will do less shock damage.
Naturally I have pictures:
and the same plot with a shorter y-axis:
Here I've simplified to SD = min(E/M,1)*(0.20*E/2)*0.5*sqrt(E/G) to smooth things out and get rid of some odd boundary cases. We can see that the effect is principally to increase shock damage across the board in most relevant cases. There is some reduction of shock damage for smaller ships which could help GSFs a little bit but it's not a huge effect.
We could tighten up the distribution over ship sizes by changing M --> sqrt(100*M), where the factor of 100 is arbitrary and preserves the same shock damage for a 100-HS ship.
and the same plot with a shorter y-axis:
This brings the curves closer together which I think amplifies a bit more the effect of damage gradient i.e. weapon type. Fighters are now much less vulnerable to shock damage against ground AA as well which I think is a noticeable change.
In addition I think regardless of how you change it, if shock damage is bumped up we need to make a couple of ancillary changes - these are aimed at bringing shields into line a bit since they are already so much better than armor at mid-to-high tech levels, and their value against shock damage would only widen this gap:
- Shield/armor balance needs to be brought closer. Ideally this would be done by rescaling the armor tech values, which currently increment by around +20% per level instead of the +25% that is most common in Aurora. I have tried making this change in the DB, but it interacts badly with ground forces since the weapon damage tech values are not accessible in the DB.
- Mesons need a clean-up to be more generally viable, as they would be a great anti-shield counter if they weren't so terrible in every other way. I think the fact that Mesons require advancing in three tech lines, versus two for most other weapon types, is a serious problem; additionally, the penetration tech levels can be buffed somewhat - I think the meson mechanics are fine but the numerical values are just too low, combined with the crippling RP cost for such a niche weapon.
- Not really a related change, but the RP cost of plasma weapons could probably be pushed back up, as their high shock damage plus benefit for ground forces is probably too good at the current very low RP cost (alternatively, make GU attack tech separate from weapon type, which would solve several problems).
Finally, as a side note the changes I suggest would imply that particle lances do no shock damage, which I think is probably reasonable as they are devastating enough already.