Unbound Inferno, on 18 July 2013 - 06:02 PM, said:
Relatively speaking. Its the measure of time to say that amount of damage was dealt.
How fast it fired could be anything inbetween. Autocannons for example were supposed to be extremely fast-firing bursts not rifle shots.
Autocannons are tricky to put into the game:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Autocannon
"Caliber is fluff for the size of the barrel that the shell or shells are fired from and no standard caliber has been set for any of the classes of Autocannon. Autocannon in a class vary by manufacturer and model. With the fluffed number of shells and caliber being specified, no Autocannon has been specified to be one shell fired for each "round" or burst of fire. Probable exceptions are the 185 mm ChemJet Gun Autocannon/20 mounted on the Demolisher combat vehicle and Monitor Surface vessel or the 203 mm Ultra Autocannon/20 on the Cauldron Born A BattleMech. "
Regardless - the game grouped them into classes and assumed that all damage from an autocannon burst would be deposited into a single section of the mech.
Which is what this game attempts to emulate with the ACs.
That's been the guiding principle for all weapons up to this point spare the laser - which has had its damage spread. This was necessary to make ballistics competitive with laser weaponry (as a Jenner with a 30 point insta-alpha is kind of hard to fight against when it takes about 3-6 times the tonnage to even begin to compete with ballistics... unless you start to horribly depreciate the damage energy weapons do - which brings up problems with designs that don't pack 6 of them along).
So, while it might sound like a good idea to shift autocannons over to a different system... I'm not so sure that's a great idea in the long run, as it would require considerable adjustments to the behavior of lasers to make ballistics truly competitive with energy weapon performance.
Which is the main reason why the PPC is in the state it is. It's vastly superior to other energy weapons under almost any engagement profile and competes against the role of ballistics - which require more tonnage and space for the same functionality and even damage.