I've never seen a dropship take enough damage to explode outright even under volly rail and forge fire

I'm sorry you haven't played with people that know to take out aircraft quickly :(

It'll be less of an issue once we get grouping and functional comms, then people can properly focus fire and work together.

i"ve been running a FG since i started. I've taken out literally hundreds of dropships, i've never once had one explode before hitting the ground, even when putting an extra round in them. Honestly, HAV's and LAV's explode as soon as their armor reaches 0 so it makes no sense that dropships don't. If you want to bail you had your chance when you saw the shields and armor dropping, if you wanna gamble on your pilots flying skills then you should suffer the consequences if they aren't up to the task.

I ride in them nearly as much as i blow them out of the sky, and as things stand now i feel absolutely no sense of urgency when the armor starts dropping. I just sit calmly in my seat and wait to see if it's going to start falling. If it does press circle, press X, go about my buisiness. That just feels wrong IMO. When the armor starts getting low i should be thinking seriously about bailing before that thing blows if i don't have confidence in the pilots skills to get us out of a bad situation.

Skill up and use your mates. It's quite easily done. You're not a one-man-army.

I'm using proto assault forge, and I'm using enhanced damage mods. Militia ships were going down in 2 shots when I was using a basic forge and militia gear. You really expect me to believe I'm not doing enough damage to a militia ship to blow it in the air in two shots with proto gear? I'm not asking to be a one man army, I'm asking for dropships to act like every other vehicle instead of some weird safe haven where you don't actually die when you run out of hp. I'm pretty sure at this point you have no idea what you're talking about, or you fly a DS and don't want to actually die when we kill you.

Vehicles already have hidden structure HP. Hit it hard enough, it explodes. There's no real need for this change, as you can already blow them up, taking the passengers with it, in mid-air.

Actually, I mostly use a combination of tanks and sniper rifle, very little use of dropships, since without proper grouping and comms they can't be used particularly well as a gunship or for troop insertions.

That said, I have repeatedly and consistently contributed to blowing up dropships before people can bail out. You're doing it wrong. From the sound of it, you think that just using slightly better gear should magically turn you INTO the one man army that you're not. You're wrong. Work with your team, that's your problem.

Bottom learn, learn to ******* play a team-based game, or go the **** back to CoD where you kids belong.

EDIT:
To expand, if you're two-shotting a vehicle with INFANTRY weapons, then that's an argument for MORE defences on vehicles. No one infantry troop should be able to be NEARLY that much of a threat.

No, you can't. Ground vehicles explode instantly, killing all inside. A dropship doesn't explode unless it's touching absolute ground, and if it's not, it's purely timer-based. If a dropship is parked on a roof of a building, it doesn't count as absolute ground. I can fire a kill shot on a junky militia dropship using my tank's railgun, and then fire 2 more railguns (over 4000 more damage) and THEN some time later it will blow up, not because of the damage. If my passengers are firing missiles at the dropship, guess what, it still blows up only via the timer.