Nah, they do no such thing. I'm having a hard time understanding why people like flak frigates, since in my limited experience of using them, they barely do any damage to anything other than fighters/bombers, which my own cap ships' fighters are more than capable of dealing with. Pretty useless unit unless someone is stupid enough to spam carriers exclusively... so, pretty useless unit overall.

Flaks receive less damage from (Tec and Vasari) LRMs due to armour type and do more damage to LRMs due to damage type they do.
Flaks also have the advantage that if you position them right they fire at multiple targets at the same time, which you cannot read out of the damage charts(!).
Additionally Flaks have much HP and armour, giving them some staying power vs LRMs.

Flaks are not the "perfect" counter, fighters and heavy cruisers are more effective at killing LRMs quickly.
However, flaks need only two labs and thus are easier to reach than carriers or even heavy cruisers if you are under LRM pressure.
Also, their high HP and armour lets them hold out a while vs smaller numbers of their direct counters too, if that should be necessary.
The multiple weapon arcs and sturdiness combined give the flak a significant long term advantage in fights vs LRM blobs, if both fleets consist of comparable resources (The flak fleet can have somewhat less resources as flak ships than the LRM fleet and still be victorious, but 5 flaks wont win vs 40 LRMs... )

The same amount of resources in flaks will defeat the same amount of resources in LRMs easily and with few losses in "sterile" fights.
Of course, as posted already, a pure LRM fleet will seldom fight a pure flak fleet, and once you have a big flak fleet but the enemy stopped building LRMs (and carriers) that many flaks become somewhat useless...

In conclusion however flaks are a cost effective and easy to unlock way to bolster your fighting power vs LRM-mostly and LRM-only fleets.
Incidentally there is much whining about LRM spamming... so it might be helpful if some players try it for themselfs or simply accept that on a per resource basis flaks beat LRMs.




Interestingly flaks will be like 5 times better at fighting LRMs than light frigates... since LRMs are the direct counter to light frigs.

Flaks are just a good bargain, thats the main thing. They excel at their specialty of shooting down strike craft but become worthwhile because they are moderately useful for other tasks. Despite the fact that there are more effective methods for dealing with LRMs, Flaks do a good enough job cheaply enough while simultaneously shooting down strike craft that they are extremely useful in a fleet.

Its not like you're going to mass Flaks in the way that you mass LRMs. The LRMs deal good damage to everything, including platforms and cap ships. Nothing replaces that kind of utility. Flaks are almost necessary just to be able to defend yourself from the predictable tactics that emerge from the dominant DPS of LRMs. You need to defend your own LRMs from fighters, which Flaks are great at doing. You need a unit that can shoot down the enemy LRMs, which Flaks are decent at. Its a worthwhile unit at a very reasonable cost.

Flaks are great because they're cheap and they're good insurance. They're good for protecting against fighters, and good insurance if you want to go all heavy/cap.

That being said they are very hard to use. I wish they had a close/guard command that would just force them to stick to your cap ship or your seige frigates like glue. My flak frigates are always wandering off when I want them to stick to my siege/caps.

LRM's have to stop while shooting and if they are moving away from flaks, by the time they turn around the flaks should be in range (speed difference is tiny). Flaks are one of the only types of ships that can move while shooting without any problems.