We all know the large guns are unbalanced, so here are my suggestions for roles and ways of achieving them.
Roles
Flak: Flak
PDC: Stronger and more accurate Flak + Finisher + Sidearm
Torpedoes: Utility
Railgun: Alpha strike + Main gun of light craft
MAC: Consistent good damage
Suggestions
Flak: keep it
PDC: keep it
Torpedoes: Introduce new warheads like: EMP = Temporarily turns the ship into it’s critical state as in unable to move or shoot. Armour-Shredder = Reduces maximum health to create the effect of armour being stripped away and taking more damage. Acid Warhead = Damage over time, highest damage of all weapons by end
Railguns: Increase damage to MAC levels per shot. Massive burst potential but good shots are hard to find
In my view, the primary point of airforces are information/bombs/torpedoes, basically a wave-strike weapon where they do sorties (launching, firing torp, returning, loading torp, launching), and the light fighters are meant to be superiority fighters vs enemy fighters, not anti-ship weapons systems. We’ve already Repeatedly run into the issue continuously since pre-launch of critical roles not getting fulfilled because of people bumrushing to be the solo rambo pilot because they want to be Mr. Rambo and not work as a team. Despite it being meant to be the auxiliary “get more slots for overmap stuff” role. Simply due to the automatic draw that lone-wolfism seems to have in gaming (especially in the modern SS13 community, people ignoring bodies and blood all the darned time), despite this being a COOP server.
I definitely like the torpedo ideas, shredder would be a bit weird to balance but could help out in battles with alot of carriers.
Is your suggestion for railguns that they gain some form of high inaccuracy stat or to make them literally a MAC with an autoloader? Like 70* inaccuracy? If they’re not ludicrously inaccurate even at short-medium range then they should always have less damage than the single-shot MAC.
Have you played as a pilot? it is VERY hard to aquire effective railgun shots, with MACs you can simply keep running circles around enemies dodging shots, with rails you have to either know how to drift well or get into a spot where dodging shots is impossible.
They are never used due to the fact that you can throw 2 MAC shells at an enemy in the time another run can be commenced and even then you need a good pilot to use them well.
Also about the torps: Pilots can still use nukes and NTP-2’s this is just to make the torp tubes actually used.
I’d like to counter the railgun point by saying: I am an expert gamer and will obliterate any enemy if I have the ability to shoot 12 consecutive railgun rounds into their face.
Also, just because MACs are super easy to use doesn’t mean they should be the standard. In fact, I am of the opinion that MAC’s are too easy to use in their current state and that railgun damage (due to their 4 round burst per railgun potential) is scaled pretty well.
The railgun being a coaxial weapon also incentivises better and more risky piloting, while just having macs reduces piloting to moving away from stuff which is flying at you and getting close-ish but still far away from enemies so you can hit them.