The reason that dropper chopper loadouts aren't as good as ASF loadouts is that they emphasise damage over range. Mostly this is due to trying for TACs (Through Armour Criticals) on their targets (please note that I'm talking table-top rules, I'm not sure how they relate to Sunhawk's system). To sum it up if you roll a 12 on 2d6 to hit a target in the tabletop rules the target has to roll to see if it takes a critical hit. In the aerospace rules, however, this is expanded so that if the hit does damage greater than one-tenth of the starting armour value of the location it hits then they roll for a critical hit regardless of the roll to hit, and in addition to rolling a 12 to hit.
Let's take an example. One of our Gyrfalcon II interceptors is going head-to-head with a DCMS Shilone and scores a hit with its Enhanced ER PPC, doing 12 points of damage. Because this exceeds 6 pts, or one-tenth of the Shilone's starting armour of 60, it rolls for a critical hit regardless of what the roll on the dice is, making a crit chance much more likely. If the Gyrfalcon had rolled a 12 for the same hit then it would have rolled twice for critical hits (one for the 12, and one for the TAC from doing 12 points of damage against a threshold of 6 for the Shilone's armour).
So far so good. Now we come to the dropper-choppers, who need to pack weapons that do more damage to use against a DropShip's armour. This is because the damage threshold for a DropShip's or ASF's armour does not lower as it loses armour - it is based off the starting armour value. So as a result a lot of weapons which will cause TACs on fighters will not cause them on DropShips - if the Gyrfalcon II in the example above had gone head-to-head with a Leopard CV Dropship (with a Nose Armour of 140 pts) and hit, it would not have forced a critical roll with the hit from its Enhanced ERPPC, because its damage of 12 would not exceed the Leopard CV's threshold of 14). So in order to force TACs on DropShip fighters designed as dropper-choppers have to carry big guns, and with introtech that means the AC-20. And while the AC-20 causes a hell of a lot of damage when it hits it has a relatively short range, so fighters which carry AC-20s like the Riever, Transit and Lightning can do a lot of damage up close but are outranged by ASFs with PPCs and LRMs. Woth omnifighters we can swap the weaponry out between missions.
[X] Mecha Football GO!
[X] Agree
[X] Hold them in secure camps