5" guns, in case this is a symptom of other problems:
This is on a custom arena with protect objects turned off.
Shooting at the CA causes damage to things on the CV as partially shown in the jpg. The CV radar was also on damaged. In addition, you can see the explosion on CV but not always. At first I thought it only occurs when something is destroyed but it appears the explosion happens whenever the CA takes damage and not necessarily when something is destroyed.
I couldn't duplicate the response when hitting the DEs.