This paper assesses some of the current state-of-the-art fracture criteria that are applicable to coarsely meshed shell structures through comparison with various indentation experiments and a full-scale collision event. In this context, a coarse mesh is a mesh that is not able to resolve all strain gradients and is typically a shell element with length >> plate thickness. The focus is placed on the robustness of each criterion applied in a design situation, i.e., to what extent the criterion can be trusted to yield reasonable results for a wide range of applications when calibrated to only the data from a uniaxial tensile test.