How do component destroying weapons work?

It's hard to tell what's wrong, as you haven't given us the details of the damage type you're trying to create.

Take a look at some *-Only weapons in stock and Balance Mod. They have varying degrees of shield/armor skipping, and each have a line that specifies what internal damage they can deal.

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A project a day keeps the deadline away.

My last stock game (1.66) I constructed specialist component damaging ships and I found the only one that worked was the shield damage. Max tech damage weps in engine and weps never did any damage at all as long as they still had armor. I'm not sure if the component targeting ones did any damage at all as when the armor was depleted I never stopped the conventional weps from firing. I also tried attacking a planet loaded with weps platforms with the idea that my ships would target only the weapons and leave the planet intact. They wasted my ships, which never damaged the platforms at all.

I didn't think they skipped anything and you actually needed to penetrate the ship for effects to take place. I never believed in this kind of finesse anyway. Its always better to just simply blow things up.

In stock the component destroying weapon don't damage or sjip armor. Try to see the files DamageTypes.txt, in data folder, and change what you want. If you want cdw bypass armor, set it here.

DamageTypes.txt defines whether such weapons have armour skipping and/or shield skipping.

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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

New with the game, but on a previous (failed) map attempt, I had designed a ship with both DUCs and Ionic Disp (skip=shields anti-engine) 2 each. It was frustrating that the ID didn't seem to work. The AI would use a fighting retreat and I would lose time and again even though I had his ships outclassed (he only had lower level DUCs, but more of them and much less armor).

I had thought "optimal weapon range" would be the right choice given the combined arms, but half the effective range of my DUCs was 1 slot farther than the IDs range. So my ship never closed to a range that would allow the IDs to fire. A quick change to "short waepon range" remedied it and I started winning the battles handily.

It appeared the weapon was broke, but it was just my design and strategy choices.

That might not apply here. But make sure it's broke before trying to fix it. Just my .02 (I play stock, for now)

I think it would actually make much more sense, if Engine only, weapons only and other component damage only weapons would do half damage to armor/shields.