Swarm launcher variant that fires swarms that detonate in the air after a 20 seconds, and do splash damage to any vehicle within the large splash radius. Lower direct damage, and smaller magazine.

You sir, just described autocannons. Those should get their own category.

I am not familiar with those, can you tell me more about them?

I like the look of those variants, as long as fire-and-forget swarms are kept as well.

That's coming from someone who uses HAVs frequently, by the way, and as someone looking forward to more aerial vehicles in the future. The only other issue I can see is that I believe we've had confirmation that countermeasures will be coming at this point, which would of course all be useless against remote-guided weapons. You also can't discount the fact that we'll drown in a sea of whiners if fire-and-forget swarms are removed an everyone has to lead their targets. As a veteran of the MechWarrior series, that's no issue for me, but I think we all know that many of our community would be woefully unprepared to handle such a change.

Fire and forget are removed for laser guided. This adds the smallest amount of skill to the weapon. Note that those variants are very fast, but have the shortest range. A true fire and forget variant would probably look like this:

New Standard Swarm Launcher
4 missiles, heat seeking (fire and forget)
150 damage each at prototype level
Flight speed: 100 m/s
Flight time: 6s
Min arming distance: 100m
Splash radius: 1.5m
Magazine size: 4

I edited it into the stats in the OP.

a varient that uses a boresight would be rad. Long flight time. Medium speed, low damage. Maybe 2 per round and a clip of 2-4. You could fire multiple rounds into the sky and apply the boresight to your target. All active missiles would home in on the target while the boresight is on the target.

If there are counter measures and alert sounds, the Alert would sound when the boresight is on its target and countermeasures could be used to mess with this missiles. It probably wouldn't be very effective but could provide some interesting tactics and would be a blast to use.

The only inherent problem would be, they would then need to nerf the DS hitpoints down, otherwise they'd be more overpowered than they are now.

Breach damage needs to go down. All AV damage needs to go down in my opinion as a balance for vehicle hp, I think the 600-1000 damage range for the other variants is a lot better than what we have now. Breach damage isn't a concern by itself, but things should be balanced around assuming team play (so things aren't useless in organized games), so having that wildly strong hit would turn out to be an insta kill if others are attacking the target.

During my time in the army I was a field tech, which also meant operator for the TOW missile system. This is a wire guided system where the electronics attempt to keep the missile in the center of the cross hairs so the operator is manually tracking the target with the scope. There's no target lock. There's no target painting. The only thing to warn the target that the missile is on it's way is if they see the puff of smoke from it's launcher and short acceleration thrust. The missile does fly at just over MACH, but still, there's no indication of the incoming ordinance until it hits or misses.

This leads up to my question of... Why do people think that a manual aim zero lock on weapon, such as the "boresight" described above would be, should give the target an alert tone? Just asking.

During my time in the army I was a field tech, which also meant operator for the TOW missile system. This is a wire guided system where the electronics attempt to keep the missile in the center of the cross hairs so the operator is manually tracking the target with the scope. There's no target lock. There's no target painting. The only thing to warn the target that the missile is on it's way is if they see the puff of smoke from it's launcher and short acceleration thrust. The missile does fly at just over MACH, but still, there's no indication of the incoming ordinance until it hits or misses.

This leads up to my question of... Why do people think that a manual aim zero lock on weapon, such as the "boresight" described above would be, should give the target an alert tone? Just asking.

why not have an AA version of the HMG? it would simply just have like 500% more effectiveness vs dropships and dramatically more range, but do overall alot less damage per shot and less effectiveness vs infantry

Im under the impression that the boresight sends out a mass of radio waves that bounce off the target and the missiles guidence intercepts that rushes to the target. It was in some flight combat simulator I played back in the day so I may just of had the mechanics wrong. (The missile had a range of some 60-100km so I don't think it was wire guided)

There's nothing to say that there couldn't be tight beam, perhaps even laser, wireless communication between the missile and the launcher, but that still wouldn't give any warning to the target.