You're basically just reinforcing the point. They can't even balance what they have. How could they do it on something as extreme as a C4 railgun?
And on picking a number in between: there is none. It's an inherent problem of "only good for players" vs "universally useful". We have plenty of people who already now claim that NPCs with railguns cheat. (They do not. But being computer controlled, they have excellent timing. I guess the algorithm just a few milliseconds before the railgun would fire checks if it's on target or not. If yes, it fires. If not, it "releases" the button and thus doesn't fire. ) This is with the current railguns.
Now imagine C4 railguns. If they do damage adequate to the size of the hardpoint, an NPC with a railgun heavy setup will just erase ships which are not fully engineered. It would delete new and mid level players without them ever even seeing what hit them. We really don't need yet another thing to quickly eliminate new players. If they on the other hand are scaled accordingly, so that they do not end up as the playerbase eliminators, they will feel too weak. Especially as veteran players will evaluate them in fully engineered PvP. And PvP fights in fully engineered ships take a while. A short damage peak matters much less there than for new players. Which means they will be seen as severely lacking.
And then FD is in a catch. Either people will forever blame them for creating the weapon but not making it effective. Or they create a massive elimination weapon for new and casual players, doing even more damage to their player base. Neither of them really sounds good.
In contrast the idea of "same weapon, more ammo" is viable. There you are right. They did the same with missiles, after all. They also early during development were like "and we will also have large missiles", etc. Which we never got. They also had problems there, a C4 missile launcher would have ended up as a torpedo launcher with more ammo and faster torpedoes. By firing the same old missiles, just carrying more of them, they avoided this problem. Although I think a C4 missile launcher should have much more ammo than it currently does. But that's a different topic.
But I also have to be honest: if my C2 railgun, now slotted on a C4 mount, would have double the ammo but would still do the same damage, I wouldn't ever put a railgun there. I'd accept the lower ammo count and keep it in the C2 slot, while using something stronger in the C4 slot.
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