That's not how weapons work.
In this game it is.
But still, what remains is how would you balance a highly accurate machine gun against onfoot opponents?
The trade off is that the situational awareness when buttoned down inside an AFV is atrocious, there are countermeasures to sensors, and the vehicles themselves are sitting ducks for other weapon systems.
Anyone foolish enough to stick their head out around these things, without a plan and/or support, still dies without knowing what hit them, as should be expected. Basing balance around the assumption that vehicle mounted weapons are extremely accurate and lethal at long range is better than subverting that assumption with inanity.
Range. The Scarab is a sniper that can take out grunts from half a kilometer away, before they even know what hit them, but if they manage to get to you unseen it's goodbye with the tiny shields. The Scorpion should be the short range brawler with the gun only hitting things 200m or less away. At that point sharpshooters will already be able to reach you and the others will be trying to get to you. You have the shields to tank that, but can still only mow down one opponent at a time, unless running a closely stacked group over.
The problem is that this doesn't make any more sense; it's still an overt contrivance to address balance issues that only exist due to other overt contrivances or glaring omissions.
In any credible setting damage, range, and accuracy are all complimentary attributes for most weapon systems. Handling, often in terms of rate of traverse for a turret, field of view, and rate of fire, are the only things that get worse, as a rule, as you scale a weapon up.
Unfortunately, the game gives vehicles (and suits) a nearly complete defense in the form of shields, and doesn't provide nearly enough tools against sensors. Settlement turrets should be a real threat, and close quarter fights inside a settlement should always be risky, but shields mitigate too much of that and settlement turrets have always been garbage. Even ships have difficulty quickly taking out a Scorpion.
And again, if you accept that a ship can have a speed limit in the vacuum of space and that a missile system or any other ship size weaponry is limited to 3-6 km range... then you should also stop making references to real life weapons
I don't accept these absurdities any more than I do the ones surrounding infantry and surface combat, but even if I did, acceptance of one does not mandate acceptance of another, especially if one feels the end results are very different. Some of the ship based absurdities are easier to swallow from a gameplay and networking perspective, while the surface balance decisions simply make the gameplay more universally worse than it would otherwise be, IMO.
From concept through execution EDO's combat is silly, mostly because of it's astonishing lack of internal consistency.
He does discuss the design decisions of the surge repeater at:
Source: https://youtu.be/VCp6c4dXABw?t=858
Case in point. A small IFV, even one that is inexplicably massive and powerful for it's size, should not be a credible threat to the ships we have, certainly not without altering existing balance to make those ships credible threats to each other. They then decide, for whatever inane reason, that stationary infantry should be able to survive several lucky shots from this anti-ship surge repeater. So, they invert the bloom, and that's where the weapon really jumps the shark.
The degree of bloom/spread on the other weapons that have it in ED is already pretty crazy, but it was a long established precident, and one that had at least vaguely plausible explanations behind it. Inverting bloom ruined that. It makes zero sense (the handwavium explanation proffered is lunacy), was completely unnecessary (except, perhaps, to mask other balance issues that should have just been addressed themselves), and went from encouraging trigger discipline and pip management, to forcing 4 pips in WEP and just spraying harder to maximize the number of semi-accurate shots one had.
The philosophy that everyone, no matter how inept or unfortunate, should get the opportunity to react after they've been caught doing something dumb or reckless, is gameplay doctrine I find fundamentally anti-entertaining.
