Ships connected to FFD units are so ineffective so as to be actually comical.
A ship that can fire every ~5-20 seconds, which could wipe out the entire ground force in an hour or so if we didn't care about collateral damage, fires
once in an 8-hour window. Then its durasteel and energy-shield penetrating, WDM-scale firepower can apparently 'miss' by not being able to handle fortification level. A light vehicle can dodge the blast while being actively target-painted by the FFD unit.
Also this target painter unit is 1.25 the tonnage of a heavy anti-vehicle cannon, and it takes the same logistical burden to sync it with a ship as it does to direct an entire support-artillery battalion (it's a bit of a pain to manually assign ships to FFD-equipped formations). As it is, it's hardly worth the effort to set it up.
It would probably be good if we could get some kind of modeling of space-based weaponry acting with some kind of 'AOE' - in the sense that a single shot from a spinal-mounted railgun is probably going to leave a half-mile wide crater, and a laser will actively turn the atmosphere to plasma in a significant radius of the targeted soldier.
To model this we might see any of these from FFD'd ship fire:
- the number of shots multiplied by some factor. Perhaps dependent on a quadratic function based on HS - 1 HS (small gun) weapon = 1 impact, but 4HS weapon (big gun) = 16 impacts
- fire as many rounds as their ROF allows in ~120-600 seconds. Perhaps a variable number dependent on some measure of the intensity of the engagement
- these shots might ignore entrenchment, and/or miss chance entirely. What's a target painter good for otherwise?