I am quite tired at the moment so I will only be responding to #10 right now with the rest tomorrow.

I am only speaking in terms of pythons as I only fly pythons and will only fly pythons.


The Assault dropship is suffering in survivability currently which is also effecting its transport ability. Transporting infantry to an area is fine, you can keep up a decent speed and altitude and get boots on the ground where they need to be, even if there is an av presence which just means you cant stick around and provide fire support. If a swarm launcher engages you, regardless of tier, you have to run, this makes extraction impossible. So a good 50% of the transport role, the role dropships are designed for, is covered with the other half being impossible.
With balance in mind, straight buffing the assault dropships tank is only going to bring back 1.8 dropships and the cycle of nerfing and buffing that nobody wants. Something will have to give, and since the offensive capability of dropships is still really good id say some ground could give there.
ideally I would like to see something like this,

Increase splash radius of small missile turrets

Decrease splash damage of small missile turrets

Increase direct damage of small missile turrets

Increase base tank of the assault dropship

increase ROF skill to 5% per level (optional, could be talked about further after results of the first four)

increasing the splash radius and decreasing the splash damage creates turrets that suppress enemies, wound them, and force them on the defensive. This creates a decent LZ, even if the LZ is hot and prevents shock troops from coming under fire as soon as they hit the ground. The slightly increased ROF is so a dropship can blanket an area, possible killing one or two enemies with the splash while clearing an area for the ground team. The enemies are weakened and are hiding, prime for an assault.
Tho gunners do want to kill things, I mean that's pretty much their only job and source of WP, so upping the direct damage of the small missile rewards accurate gunners for placing their shots well and being skillful, any gunner will tell you its pretty damn hard to get direct shots consistently from a moving dropship. This also keeps small missiles useful against vehicles.

Important
The best thing you could do for a pilots quality of life is to add an early warning system for swarm launchers. The optimizations in 1.9 for swarm rendering helped, a good half of the time I can see swarms before they hit me. A third of the time I can trace them back to their source. (roughly) I get myself into bad fights because I don't know all the information, and swarms pop up (or don't) when its too late for me to do anything about it, sometimes when they are right in front of my ship.

funnily enough there is a prime example in this Dust 514 2011 trailer, at 0:24 you can hear the early warning system of the dropship. (this also happens to be the video that made me want to be a dropship pilot before dust came out)

The concept is pretty simple, when a swarm is acquiring a lock long beeps sound for the pilot signifying someone, somewhere is acquiring a lock on the ship. When the swarms are fired the beeps change to a rapid set of beeps signifying swarms are inbound. I don't need an indicator telling me where the swarmer is, I don't need to know how many or even how far they are away from me, I just need to know that I am in a fight so I can act and strategize accordingly. I need that 5 seconds before the swarm hits so I can know how to react, otherwise I'm just guessing.
This would be such an enormous help to pilots without even changing any stats to v/av. I seriously just cannot stress how much of a quality of life improvement this would be!