Assault dropship users have to frequently aim through opaque dropship, relying heavily on enemy tags and guess work to hit their targets. Because tags don't show until you get fairly close to the object in question, pilots have to get close to potential hostiles in order to find out that they're hostile or friendly. And because aiming with a dropship is highly dependent on enemy tags, this means you have to hover relatively close to the ground to aim at ground targets.

When targeting certain objects the camera will randomly zoom in. This is bad for two reasons. The first being that it's completely random with no player control over it and causes slight disorientation. The second is the zoom itself. By zooming in, it become harder to control the dropship which is imperative to aiming. The zoom also decreases the pilot's awareness of their surrounding making the pilot more vulnerable to threats.

Getting downed in 2 shots from large rail turrets is pretty rough but manageable with evasive maneuvers and good active module management. Although I admit that I'd prefer it take 3 large rail slugs to down my assault dropship.

... no its not. Railguns 99.9% of the time can 2 shot you before you can even react with reverse thrusters .. railguns on unhardened ships = death

on a lighter note, nice thread. Although it only focuses on 1 tiny aspect to dropships. not even the entire aspect of turret aiming. What i would like to see is the ability to zoom in your turret, 1st person, to snipe targets and get serious air support down from a distance.

Rails and forges hit my python too hard... First shot= loss of shields, knocked off balance. Second shot= Zero armor.... Third shot= insult to injury

4th & 5th shot: because fire rate is too high, they need a 350m range, or 400, im tired of being shot 600m away

yeah, people usually sit in the red line with militia rail gun blaster tanks and take out plenty of vehicles without risk of being harmed. Its very annoying...unless YOU HAVE A HIGH SPEED LAV PACKED WITH 10 POUNDS OF REMOTE EXPLOSIVES AND KAMIKAZE INTO THE ENEMY TANK AND BLOW HIM TO THE NEXT WORLD OF EDEN! Although they'd probably just buy another one for like nothing. A duvolle tactical assault will cost you 77thousand isk, and a full blow huge godlike tank will cost you 59thousand or 97thousand for a better version...something is wrong with that.

Ok. After flying around a bit more, I have confirmed that I can survive large rail turret fire with some very fast module usage.

However I believe dropships in general need more HP on the grounds that dropships are medium class vehicle but are downed in the same number of large rail turret shots as LAVs.

Railguns 99.9% of the time can 2 shot you before you can even react with reverse thrusters.