Maths good, your logic based on a lack of experience though is profound. Without all the maths, heres how you know its weaksauce, 10 tanks on the field and none get killed by swarms. Simple maths. Now all your clip size and prof is im sure correct, but the swarmer will very often not have time to get all of these away much less reload due to the fact that he has to be within 100 meters, infantry that immediately kill you, the tank will target you and wisely so, and if all else fails they will out run your swarms, math doesnt account for practicality.

I don't think your math is accounting for all the factors. Not many tanks worth worrying about would be running without reps for armor, so though you said no mods, you should at least account for the 100hp per second the lowest mod gets you. If you want to talk about mod less tanks, then keep the swarm numbers to militia.

So with that in mind, two questions.

Question 1. How much shield and armor can recharge/regen between volleys? Then Reloads?

Question 2. How much distance can be put between a tank and a merc firing swarms accounting for your proposed speed reduction

Question 3. How many volleys do you think a merc with a swarm launcher can realistically get off before that tank can escape his firing range?

Fact is it takes multiple proto swarm volleys to take out a militia LAV at the moment, do you think there is a problem with that?

I'd love to see a test of how many volleys it takes for a proto swarm to kill and unfitted Sica (just sitting stationary) and a Soma fitted with 1 Rep. I bet it's more than the math you have up says.

1 mil ISK to the person who puts this video up first, showing both militia and proto swarms.

I don't know if this was made clear in the initial post - but I take your point (but as non-AV infantry, so make of that what you will). Tanks can just clear they battlefield if they get in any trouble, they are like an unholy hybrid of rhino and field mouse.

And that is just scary.

No, the problem is ABSOLUTELY damage. The fact that you had to use Proto Swarms as the baseline for your argument is as much proof of that as anything else. STD and ADV swarms are, in most cases, not even worth mentioning on the battlefield and with the way that Swarms scale as you level them up, even at ADV you'll have trouble taking out any sort of LAV let alone being a threat to any Militia tank someone takes 2 seconds to call out on the field.

1. AV needs damage done to vehicles reflected as a WP bonus to further incentive their continued use.

2. Damage for STD/ADV swarms needs to be raised SIGNIFICANTLY in order to compete with the proto variant. There is a MASSIVE 50% bonus to damage going from STD -> PRO, this is unprecedented when it comes to literally any other weapon in the game. Toss the +1 Swarm per tier thing and just raise base damage of the 4 base swarms as you level up, keep PRO where it's at in terms of overall damage and make STD and ADV much closer to that base.

If by that you mean standard swarms would fire 6 missle per shot then I would agree, as then the isk cost would be well worth throwing 5 av swarmers (And temporarily cripple your team against the 13-15 infantry vs. your 11 infantry) at them if each suit costs 8k each.

All an increased cool down would do would have the tanker recall instead of waiting for cool down. The duration needs to be shorter. Tanks don't leave the redline with their hardeners on and only stay out as long as they're active. They activate them IF and WHEN they start getting hit by AV. At that point they have the length of their hardener to neutralize that threat. Only if the hardener goes down and the threat is still present do they need to retreat. The rest of the time they can just keep their figure on the god mode button without using it.

I understand what you're getting at and would agree if not for the passive reps. There are times when tanks just seem to passively rep through my 2 clips of ammo before moving on. No hardeners are required for a tank to ignore a SL.

What bugs me about the SL is that they are too easily countered. All that it takes is a hardener or a repper. Just about every tank runs at least one of these things. I've sat there with 2 other blueberries just desperately pelting a tank with SLs while it sat killing others with hardeners and reps. This is unacceptable. It should not be "one module to counter one infantry". Right now a tank's survival is not necessarily dependent on the pilot's skill when it comes to AV. It all comes down to whether or not the SL pack can be within 100 meters when it's hardener runs out.

The situation you outlined is militia tank, unfitted, sitting there taking a beating from a proto SL. This never really happens in practice so I don't really concern myself with how quickly I could or couldn't destroy it.

I appreciate you taking the time to run some numbers and I realize you acknowledged that you only ran them for this scenario. I would suggest someone takes this to the next level and includes a module of some sort (rep/hardener) as this is the case that people see most often. To base an opinion about AV based on a scenario like this would be like basing an opinion of the flaylock on a situation in which someone stands still to take the direct impact shots.

So if you were to rephrase you OP, swarms damage is fine if all the following are true:

STD gets 6 missiles
Cool downs take twice as long
Vehicles can't be called in for 2 minutes after return (which wouldn't work because you call before you recall)
Only one hardener per vehicle.
Reduce tank speed

Is that the base we are working from now?