Excuse me but you are overdoing it far too much. First off you cut down the rate of fire and now aswell the alpha damage? Are you out of your mind? I make a example of how much the DPS drop is going to be:

-20GJ particle accelerator
direct hit damage: 400HP
rate of fire: 120 RPM
DPS: 800

-20GJ praticle accelerator after the fix:
direct hit damage: 280 (30% damage nerf)
rate of fire: 92 RPM
DPS: 429

You are nerfing a turret by ~ 46%. This way too much espacially cause its a highly underused too. Allmost nobody is using it and i see mainly python pilots with missiles flying around. Sure you see here and there a incubus WITH A GUNNER and small rails but they take skill to use cause the dropship is constantly moving and you need to get direct hits. And you seem to forget that lowering the rate of fire has aswell a unintended side issue. Because the turret has heat build up per second it means that you will get less shots off before overheating with reduced rate of fire.

So if you want to get trough with this ridicoulus change then you either get rid off the heat build up completely on small rails or if its not within your possibility then reduce it to a very low number. So that i can get all 24 rounds off without the turret jamming up.

Instead of going full nerfhammer you better reduce the direct hit damage only by 20% instead of 30%.

Small blasters beeing a alternative? Dont make me laugh. Sure they got buffed and they are going to receive more buffs but the horrible hit detection makes them unreliable.

1 single swarmer on top a rooftop means the death sentence to LAV's cause with small blasters you cant really fight back. While with small rails i can reposition and let my gunner have a go at it. Blasters look good on paper but are horrid in practice. And ya know what the slpash damage addition will cause to small blasters? Raining death from stacked incubus pilots.

I know about it cause small blasters did had splash damage in the closed beta. They worked okish but small missiles where ridicoulusly OP at that stage so nobody cared about them. So what happends when we take super buffed small blasters, stick them on a incubus and add 2 pilots on it (gunner+pilot)? Hmm i think a turret that fires 2700 rounds per minute with a weapon that has splash damage and a 200 round clip might be something not too healthy for infantry.
But hey dont listen to me im just the crazy one around here. Nothing that i say could be right? So lets start this show by throwing cactuses at each others head. I start by throwing 6 at Ratatti.

lol no you wont. infact its a indirect nerf on the python.

Current damage profile from small missiles:
shields: -31%
armor: +29%

New damage profile:
shields: -20%
armor: +20%

So good luck with that shoting down a incubus which is a armor tanked dropship. So your missiles will be doing LESS DAMAGE vs armor. Enjoy it fool.

I like the idea, can CCP do it though?

Unmanned direction is killing me, it never seems to line up how I want it, sometimes I even try to get into the turret, line it up, and then drive into battle and hope it is looking in the right way.

FYI the turrets on a RL tank are generally +20/-10 degrees, and the top-mounted machine guns are usually +65/-10 so you may or may not have too much leeway before things 'look silly' :(

I don't think it's fair that a large turret can point up so easily. The defense should have to do with small turrets, not large turrets.

Tanks die to helicopters in RL. Choppers are also vulnerable to infantry in ways that tanks are resistant to.

It all works out.