[Suggestion] this game would be objectively more fun for a majority players if A2G ESF's were toned down.

Current projection of "warfare" railguns is that it would be possible to fit one on a ship, and it will require massive amounts of power to operate.

Smaller railguns are of course possible, but then they compete with normal gunpowder weaponry (explosives are really good at getting things moving);
so your flimsy ESF will likely never have a railgun that is functionally much different from a normal cannon.

Oh, and I mentioned a railgun in my post.. learn to read.

awww... No sadly, you're quite late on technology. A railgun automatic weapon would allow faster bullets, with a WAAAAAY faster firing rate (no need for cartridge and a lot of the other time-consumming mechanics). But hey, do your research a little bit please, and overlooking the wikipedia page really isn't enough.

And where do you get the power from?
Your tinfoil hat won't be providing enough of it.

Batteries need to improve by some orders of magnitude, improvements in conductivity, and the designs need to become more sturdy etc; they also wear out very fast,...
afaik; USA is working on railguns for ships. not tanks, not aircraft, not infantry.
USA has the biggest defense budget around so..

You may be thinking about coilguns instead.

I agree, the power needed for handheld gun would be huge...

Infantry is relatively invalid here. You are pounding infantry and enemy armour from a flanking position, and I would assume you have put a distance between them and you have terrain to your advantage (you probably deserved to get wrecked if you don't have either or both). Rockets are laughably pathetic, and to make things worse for those pounding dirt, infantry AV is going to get nerfed. This means that you only have to worry about opposing tanks and fairies. Fairies are easily spotted when running towards you and they could attempt to try use a longer flanking route to you, but they would probably be spotted by your supports. No support? Fine, I suppose you would be wise enough to keep moving every now and then right?

As for enemy tanks, it'll depend on who has better certs, who fired first (usually you) and who has a better position (usually you). When you take damage, get behind the hill, repair, rinse and repeat. What about ESFs? When you have that tiny bit of hp left and you are burning, it's hard to land safely when a single pebble or just a little bump can cause you to explode.

So ESFs are op when newbies can't be bothered to shoot them? Same thing, tanks would be op if every player decides to farm infantry instead of shooting tanks. And mind you, not every weapon which can damage an ESF can scratch a tank. Does this make tanks even stronger?

... faster RoF?
Why don't you check how fast the MG-3 fires, and that's 7.62 nato rounds.
To get a coil gun (forget rail guns, those don't really exist in a size that humans can carry around with them) to get anywhere near as high in the volume of fire, velocity, force and above all reliability of the gun itself (maintenance, how prone it'd be to break etc)... there's a reason for why gunpowder cartridges are still the norm.

While a coil gun could pull ahead of conventional firearms at some point in the future, that time isn't now.

New technologies are amazing. I suggest you go look at our automated engie tower, then just google "Metal Storm". That's tiny machine that can shoot up to 1 000 000 rounds per minute. Give it a few years to have an auto-ressuply system. Then patch that unto an esf. (There's a grenade launcher version, I suggest you check it out).

Yet it doesn't now. And it's certainly not going to be field ready with regard to durability, maintenance and ease of use relative to conventional firearms.

He was only trying to reply sarcastically to another guy who wanted to have realistic VTOL functions on ESFs (make them unable to hover like helicopters).

Why are you so ridiculously hostile?

You reap what you sow;
one poster gives his view that ESF shouldn't be so hovery-fighters, provides a IRL reference (actual hoverjets..),
and the response is "sure, just give me a 50m radius missile".. yeah, that post deserves a sarcastic follow up.

ESF's would still work without hoverfighting*; game would not work with 50m radius mushroom clouds etc.
*without hoverfighting: the proposal would be that "hover" burns afterburner fuel.

Okay, going to be honest incase this was said already, I havent read all of the replies to this thread.

What if the cockpit of a ESF was weakened to small arms fire, so that when a ESF aims down at ground forces, it also exposes its vunerability. Keep the effectiveness of the weapons. I dont think a soldier should be able to take multiple missiles and live.

This increases the risk of ESF without lowering the effectiveness. I personally like how A2G ESFs can take out alot of people, I just hate not being able to retaliate without being in a designated AA weapon.

Are all cockpits equal size etc? Reaver cockpit is far forward, scythe cockpit may be partially blocked by those side forward pointy wings.
I also think it would require some recoding etc.
I'm not overly fond of the "snipe into the cockpit!" ability in certain.. other games.
It also doesn't fix AA against other sources.

On the subject of the size of the cockpits, that doesnt matter to much. Reavers are already notorious for being flying bricks with large hittable surface areas all over. All cockpits are exposed when looking at them head on, as they would have to be when firing A2G. Shots from the side at a Scythe could be blocked by their wings. Again, doesnt matter to much because the plane hitboxes are already unbalanced.

As for the snipe into the cockpit, it wouldnt be that much of a weakness. Even a Railjack shot into the cockpit wouldnt do as much damage as a solid hit or few via AA fire. Is more of enough of a weakness that having 2-3 guys firing into the cockpit the pilot would be forced to break off his attack.

I dont find designated AA to be that much of a problem. They are good deterrents when manned. Annoying when I am flying ESF myself, but having a ESF able to take down AA firing kinda misses the point of AA.

Not sure what is more disappointing, that fact that came from a TIW member or you ignored that fact that everything still kills an ESF.

I expected better.

I do have a suggestion:

Get rid of all secondaries on an ESF

Problem solved! What's next on the PS2 Agenda?

This game would be more fun for a majority of the players if the only vehicle in it was the sunderer.

Does "everything" kill an ESF in the sense that its resistance values allow any weapon to deal damage to them besides explosives, or in the sense that everything in the game is a viable counter to an ESF?

Obviously not everything in the game is a viable counter to an ESF.

However, the ESF does have weaponry that allows it to effectively kill anything in the game.

I don't care if you're disappointed in me for pointing this out. Why do I need to be validated by you?

But we are talking nano-scale build weapons here. That means that you can make every molecule's properties work to it's maximum effect. Considering the rechargeable shield that every soldier already carries, and the amount of force that can be regenerated to lift a person up with jetpacks simultaneously (which is huge), it would be a relatively simple affair to get enough power into a bullet. First you spin it up until heats up and melts, this spin will cause it to be more accurate and will meant that wind and outside forces (such as the armor it has to penetrate) have less effect. Then you launch that piece of superheated molten goo at your enemy. Basically it's a long-range shaped charge. A Shaped charge is also designed to liquify Copper for instance upon impact and ram a stream of it into the enemy armor, if I'm not mistaken that's how current HEAT shells work most of the time.
To give you an indication of the force:
A bullet's recoil on the weapon is equally large as the force it will apply on impact (minus air friction etc). This is why a bullet deflected by a helm will cause more confused reactions on the lines of "was I hit" than "I got a concussion". Look at what the recoil does to someone, even with repeated shots they stay standing, it usually doesn't have the force to push someone over, and it simply can't if you brace properly.
Now we first put the force of a man lifted into the air into it, the same force required for your jetpack. That's already a few hundred times more then the current bullet has when it hits your enemy. We don't want the recoil to blow the soldier away, so we put it into spinning and heating the material. That energy will be released one way or another... and that's going to be when it hits the target. With that much energy in one bullet, it will explode. In fact, it could probably mean that a .50 caliber bullet explodes with the impact or a grenade.
One more thing to show how powerful it could be. Current bullets get their power from their speed, weight and having as small an impact surface as possible, thereby cutting through the enemy. These new type of bullets would hold a hundred times more energy upon impact, and simply drill and burn it's way through. With the right mixture of metals you can probably make droplets shoot into random directions after impact with armor, so after penetration it will cause multiple burning holes into the body.

Depending on the powersource, the spinning up can take a fraction of a second. You don't even need to spin it up beforehand if you are in a hurry, and do that while it's being launched. Add the cartrigde to the sysem: rather than having a spring or similar push the bullet into the chamber, the weapon itself can pull it out. It might be possible (not sure) to pull all the bullets up out of the cartridge and launch them fast enough that the first one hasn't even left the barrel and the next two are already moving behind it. That would probably compromise some of the bullets speed and power (the propolsion of the last one is going to drag the one in front back). Another problem is the demagnatization period afterwards, but with nano-scale weapons and future materials such as graphene or better, the dissipation of the magnetic energy between shots shouldn't be too much of a problem I guess. Add in wireless powering technology and you aren't limited to the size of a cable to power your weapon.

And then we haven't even begun talking about what a bullet shot at relativistic speeds by railgun can do... at 90% of the lightspeed one bullet has the force of a tactical nuke... The biggest problem would be preventing the bullet starting it's nuclear reaction before it even leaves the barrel. The bullet will move thousands of times faster than the air particles, which will bond with the front of the bullet, and "bonding" in this sense means "atomic fusion" which is a nice nuclear reaction that would obliterate the weapon, wielder, and anything that it comes into contact with (hopefully the target) before the nuclear reaction slows the bullet down enough that it doesn't bond with the air.
But when you got that kind of power, why the hell are you trying to propel a bullet with it in the first place? Why not just create a giant energy shield against similar weapons, put some kind of super-important structure in it that can transport people across large distances like a warpgate for instance, and then go to war with nano-build sold...

oh...

You want to nerf my giant OHK explosive shotgun mounted on my airplane?

Agreed... moreover, ESFs that are killed by lockons -chose- to be killed by lockons. 350 meters is one afterburner boost away. And then, the guy with the lockon has to sit there, feeling sad, lonely and unloved. The second significant AA shows up, aircraft leave in most fights. Meaning you wind up with a vehicle that cannot do anything useful once they leave. You have burned nanites, time, and energy, and certs, for no payback. I also don't get the mentality of most ESF pilots that think, for some reason, they should be immune to dying when loitering over targets. Ground attack should be done, when enemies have AA, in low altitude, strafing runs. That is the fixed-wing approach to a2g combat in reality. That, or very high altitude bombing. Which is not very effective in Ps2 due to render distances and graphics limitations on many players.

Good discussion, though, guys! keep it up!