I dunno about that. Handguns and SMGs are alright within about shocker shock-cloud distance, but rifles are hot trash. Actually hitting at long range is damn near impossible, even when “long range” means “across the room,” forget about “down the street,” and the aim time on them means they’re absolutely terribad. The chances of hitting are low, the time to use is high, and the damage output is not good enough to justify either of those drawbacks.
This is with Rifles 7 and Marksmanship 5, mind you, so not exactly inexperienced, either.
I think they’d be more useful if you could take a knee/drop prone, and actually fire at fairly significant range, but they’d still need a massive damage buff to be worthwhile.
I take a rifle with me to grind Marksmanship; I actually use a Glock and American 180 to kill things. That is the opposite; mind you, the exact opposite of conventional firearms wisdom, which is that the handgun’s purpose is to fight your way back to the rifle you shouldn’t have let go of in the first place.
Also, the mods are often so ineffectual as to be actually worse than useless, given that they increase the weapon’s weight and with it, aim time, whilst bringing little or actually nothing to the table.
Now, about vehicular turrets, he’s entirely right. Frankly, vehicular turrets are very poorly implemented.
For one thing, a mounted weapon suffers recoil - any well-designed weapon mount should with absolute firmness mount the weapon to the chassis, thus placing so damn much mass and hard material reinforcing the weapon that unless it’s a big enough gun to make the entire vehicle jump, the recoil will have no effect.
Thus, bullets go all over the place, and automated turrets simply go full auto and do not stop firing until they kill the target; thus, an M2 Browning in an auto-turret is very capable of emptying nearly a full 100-round belt trying to kill a basic zed, having much more the effect of a Cone of Bullets spell cast by a demented d20 Modern Wizard rather than an M2 Browning machine gun engaging a turret.