Obviously, this is highly related to the recent Lib changes, but I don't see what would make this change any less justifiable than the buff to the firing angle of the Lib's tail gun. For the Liberator, the buff to firing angle allows the tail gun to be a significantly more effective deterrent to the Lib's supposed primary/hard counter, the ESF. For the MBT, the buff to firing angle would allow the secondary gun to be a somewhat more effective deterrent to the MBT's hard counter, the Lib. The most compelling argument against this that I can think of is that it would unfairly punish ESFs which, at worst, could be mostly mitigated by just giving ESFs somewhat higher resistance to the MBT AV secondary weapons. I'm sure there are some other decent arguments against this, and I'm interested to hear them.
Primarily this doesn't happen because then AA scales up way too well. All those secondaries on the ground being able to point straight up would make large fights even more unapproachable.
This... doesn't even make sense. A bunch of anything being able to point anywhere makes large fights difficult to approach in any vehicle that represents a large target. A bunch of Daltons being able to point straight down makes a huge area extremely unapproachable for the majority of ground vehicles, as does a bunch of AV MAXes or AV engi turrets or manned AV base turrets.
But those ground vehicles aren't visible from all angles. AA scales much faster than anything else because it's not only the front line that can engage, its everything.
AA is only good for one thing... AA. Libs and ESFs are good at everything. Still, tanks should not be free kills when air hovers over it.
Dalton Libs are supposed to counter vehicles. AV weapons aren't intended to be AA weapons. Secondaries are intended to be sidegrades, and it happens that the default gun, the basilisk, is actually decent against both vehicles and air. Consider using the default gun to achieve exactly what you are looking for, no changes necessary. Also, the esf is not a hard counter to the lib in any way. The ESF is similiar to the lightning, while the lib is similiar to the MBT. Both the ESF and the Lib can be built to handle the exact same roles in combat. And as you said, it would most definitely punish ESFs, but it would also punish dedicated aa like the skyguard and AA max as well as actual AA secondaries, which do exist.
This would be a compelling point if the AV secondaries could lock on or had projectile speed that was comparable to that of dedicated AA weapons - or any other means of extending their effective range (like flak's proximity-based detonation) against a relatively fast moving target with an extra degree of freedom (i.e. ground units have X/Y freedom, air has X/Y/Z freedom). However, since the vast majority of the weapons that would be effected have projectile speeds below 300m/s, allowing MBT secondaries to aim at air creates a negligible increase in threat to air in general, only creating a significant additional threat to air that is hovering in place or relatively close by, and either moving fairly slowly or nearly on a collision course with the tank. Furthermore, it's not like these weapons didn't threaten air at all, just air that was almost directly above them, so the only additional threat being added is from the tanks which are directly below the air unit, which kind of means that it is only the front-line's threat being added in this case, because tanks that were further back already could engage air using these weapons, it just hardly ever matters because this particular set of weapons is ineffective against air at that range, for reasons already mentioned. You are switching back and forth between talking about a whole vehicle loadout(Dalton Libs) and a specific weapon slot(MBT secondaries). You should be comparing either slots or loadouts, not comparing one to the other. The weapon that primarily defines a Lib's role is the belly gun: Dalton/Shredder/Zephyr for AV/General/AI; the weapon that primarily defines an MBT's role is the main cannon: AP/HEAT/HE for AV/General/AI. The weapon that secondarily defines a Lib's role is the tailgun, it can have the same offensive role as the belly gun to create a highly focused offensive lib, a different offensive role to create a more well-rounded Lib, or a defensive role to eliminate/deter/mitigate the Lib's primary threats. The patch didn't make the tailgun weapons on Libs any more effective stat-wise, it just allowed them to actually aim at more targets. You say that "AV weapons aren't intended to be AA weapons," but the tailgun change made bulldogs(non-AA) more effective against ESFs who come too close, did it not? Not by changing the stats, but just by letting it have more freedom to actually aim at them. The AV weapons already can be used against air by getting the tank on the right incline, just like the tailgun could always be used to hit pursuing ESFs as long as the Lib was flying at the proper angle. In both cases it's just a matter of relaxing an arbitrary constraint that only serves to artificially limit the gunner's ability to defend against immediate threats. So, what's the hard counter to the Lib then? What match-up gives a Lib the same likelihood of dying as a tank has in a match-up against a Lib? If Shredder/Zephyr Libs were significantly less effective against tanks, so only Dalton Libs were practically a death sentence to tanks, and then Shredder/Walker Libs were a death sentence to Dalton Libs, there could be some argument made for balance - but a Shredder Lib doesn't have that sort of overwhelming advantage against a Dalton Lib, and Shredder/Zephyr Libs are just a slightly slower death sentence for MBTs than Dalton Libs, but it's still completely one-sided. Do you see nothing wrong with having a single, extremely powerful air unit that is the hard-counter to all ground vehicles and has no hard counter itself? I disagree, because I don't think the AV weapons would be superior to these weapons even if they could angle up, because the AV weapons have relatively low projectile speed compared to AA weapons, which makes it much more difficult to hit fast-moving targets with 3 degrees of freedom at more than ~60m, and that's not even taking into account things like flak detonating on proximity. Allowing these weapons to aim straight up doesn't allow them to significantly threaten all air because their effective range against fast-moving targets is ****. Dedicated AA, meanwhile, serves the purpose of threatening air in a large effective area. Allowing these weapons to aim straight up merely allows them to be used to defend against air that is actively threatening the tank itself, the accuracy drop off against fast-moving targets at range is simply too steep for them to threaten air across more than a tiny portion of the battlefield.
