At present, they shoot a group of missiles in a circle out from the center of the ship. This accomplishes little more than aggroing every friendly within missile range.
Solution:
Massively reduce sensitivity so that the missiles do not split immediately upon firing. Possibly add an arming time to ensure this.
Give fragments tracking capability and reduced range, so that they have a chance of hitting the target. If uniqueness is desired, make the tracking capability extreme and the detonation range low, so that they spilt just a few seconds before hitting.
Oh, yeah, I meant to report this one. I believe the problem is specific to the Uragan bolt. It isn't a standard fragmentation weapon; the submunitions are aimed. However, they only aim at ships that are enemies of the firing ship. Since ED capital ships tend to get into fights with things that are technically friendly, such as the player or random Ares (see http://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=3829), the submunitions have no targets and fire evenly in all directions. I don't think this affects the Kairyu missile or TM7 launcher, but it's not obvious what the difference is. My best guess is that because the submunitions from those weapons are guided, they acquire the firing ship's target, even if it's friendly, if there are no other targets. If I'm right, unguided autotargeting submunitions should consider the firing ship's target a valid target.
Also, I agree the Uragan (and Kairyu) generally shouldn't split so soon. Currently, they split after 1 tick. This is not so terrible when firing from a gunship at nearby gunships, but looks silly when fired from a large ship and makes the Uragan ineffective against distant targets. I opened http://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=4170 to make failsafe dependent on the firing ship's size. But the Uragan (and maybe the Kairyu) probably should wait to split until there are targets within some reasonable range.
It turns out they do sometimes spray in all directions even when there's a hostile target. I think this means the AI thinks the range of the submunitions is longer than the range at which they acquire targets.