Creating a decent mech build is a process of trial ... and this mech. I wanted to cram a ballistic with good damage into a Firestarter. There have already been a few good (or at least infamous) examples. The Urban Fire, Pocket Shotgun, and Ersatz Hollander Those roads have already been walked a long time ago (read: before the Civil War weaponry came out). I tried a UAC10 which was either too slow or had no backup weapons. The UAC10 also required me to get far too close to the enemy front line for my liking. Then I tried a RAC2, but the spin up time was getting me killed. Having to maintain what is basically "beam on time" is death for a little machine like the FS9. As a side note, I've had little success with the RACs in anything under 70 tons. I ultimately settled on the storied XL255 for the engine, and the hand-spraining UAC2 for the primary weapon. The two medium pulse lasers have enough punch at close range that lights who pierce your ranks should regret their actions. The focus for this mech is fire support, and hammering big targets that fall out of position. The cockpit shake and high reverse speed is surprisingly effective against big, waddling targets. When I'm on point, I'm depositing 300~400 damage into the enemies regularly. A better pilot could pull down more. As far as downsides, this mech gets rolled by MG builds and withers under guided missile fire. Also, crit builds will strip you of your weaponry fast because there are so few occupied crits. This is something that you can mitigate by crit-padding an LBX2 and sliding a DHS in the torso. Ultimately, I like the bullet rain better. I went back and forth about whether the two MPLs should be in the CT or arm. Ultimately, I think the flexibility of the arm-mounted MPL adds a lot to the build. For the CT laser version, I was able to use 1/2 ton less armor and carry a 1/2 more ammo. Without ammo quirks, 2.5 tons of UAC2 ammo goes rather quickly.
I'm also working on a 4MLAS and a 6 SLAS version of the build. I'm not sanguine about the the longer beam time of the ML for this build, and I have never quite gotten the performance promised out of the SLs.
