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[Sharg]

Since the Clan patch, there's a debate about burst-fire versus FLD (front loaded damage), and whether burst-fire should be applied to Inner Sphere ACs. Others say doing so would eliminate the Inner Spheres one advantage against Clan autocannons. There is a way to balance IS burst fire with Clan autocannons: advanced ammunition.

These ammunition types in combination with burst fire would give the Inner Sphere a different play style than Clans, without the concentrated FLD. According to lore, advanced ammunition isn't supposed to show up until the mid-3050's, but this game only loosely follows lore, and it isn't table top.

The most applicable types of ammo for this game might be the following, described generally in TT terms:

Armor-Piercing Ammo

Sacrifices some damage to give each burst a slight chance to score critical hits on underlying components, even with remaining armor

Precision Ammo

Decreases the ammunition per ton to significantly increase the projectile speed of each burst, allowing for greater accuracy.

Incendiary Ammo

Lower projectile speed, but adds a sizable amount of heat to the target with each successive hit. I say "sizable", because, as we all know, Flamers are next to useless, so whatever affect this has, it has to be pretty big to be useful.

Caseless Ammo

Greatly increases the ammunition per ton, but adds a small chance to jam the weapon on each shot (note that this does not give standard ACs the "double tap" ability).

These ammunition types are only applicable for standard Inner Sphere Autocannons. To make things simpler to implement, players may be restricted to one ammunition type per Autocannon caliber (no swapping between types). Each ammunition type could also have a unique tracer color in-game, to help people recognize them in combat.