I wholly disagree. Continuing to advocate the inclusion of non conventional assault weapons had a negative impact on Dust 514 tank operation if in fact you could even call most HAV in this game Tanks.

The hall mark of a tank's main gun is fire power and currently in this climate the Railgun is the only one that offered powerful, accurate fire, over long ranges in a manner appropriate to the battlefield role of the Main Battle Tank. This I feel should instead become the norm of turret types. Powerful rounds with damage application out to medium or long range, slow rates of fire, reloads between every shell or volley [1-3 shells].

E.g- A Large Railgun fires every 1.8 seconds. While it does have a slight charge up time that is rather negligible while talking about TTK vs Dropships as by the time the first round lands the dropship hase roughly 1.8 seconds to react to the next shot. If every tank fired a round then reloaded over the course of 3-6 seconds depending on turret type dropships would have much greater room to react to enemy fire though they would likely take more damage from that first shot.

Not only do I believe this would extend vehicle TTK especially against dropships and the like on the provision they are not OHKO weapons vehicles like dropships would have a very noticable window with which to escape the situation and coupled with their speed and the lower rate of fire from tanks they should theoretically be harder for tanks to remove from the field but still possible if we have good aim.

Not only this but it opens up room for another battlefield role. It means that tanks become primarily focused on anti vehicle based gameplay as well as long range fire support and the pilots lose their significant AI capacity in favour placing that in the hands of small gunners. As I mentioned previously I believe this allows for a tier of Medium Turrets to bridge the role between Anti Vehicle and Anti Infantry and could theoretically be fit to vehicles like MAV as squad support weapons.

Also it brings vehicle DPS into line with AV DPS I'll look for my spread sheet and post it here later.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me.

Nerfing railgun alpha would be very beneficial to the tanking and dropship communities.

Why?

Railguns have very high alpha damage and 1 shot doing such massive damage puts the railgun ahead immediately in a fight.

With hotfix echo, tanks will be able to fit damage mods much more easily. Getting hit from 300m for 2k damage is very frustrating for any pilot. This makes hardeners very ineffective.

Nerfing rail damage and buffing rail fire rate would help this.

For example:

cut damage in half
double fire rate, ammo capacity

This would give the same dps but require rails to be strategic instead of fitting a pile of damage mods in the redline as we saw with the major tank overhaul in the past.

I also think a range nerf would be very warranted. Running a blaster tank is very frustrating when some jerk pokes his head out of the redline and retreats. But apparently trolling with a rail gun is intended :(

I want a variant of the rail gun that acts just like that. We used to have one with low alpha, and a higher RoF, slower to overheat. It was my favorite.

I would rather have some turret options myself over just one type of rail.

And to those saying high alpha is what it's meant for, step out of that box you are living in and see the rest of the world for a change.

Edit: the high alpha rail should have a shorter range as well.

In EVE this sort of thing is dictated by Ammo as I am sure you know.

Incorrect. The Regulated and Compressed rails were akin to the 75m and the 150mm rails in EVE (aside from the fact that Regulated Rails had HIGHER requirements for some odd reason vov), with the compressed (150mm) having higher damage, but a lower tracking and worse ROF and ammo cap (and just to say **** Rails, heat too ), while the Regulated (75mm) was the complete opposite.

Ammo affects them a lot, but the type of rails you fit did in fact matter, and it still does in EVE.