The experiences in this thread track pretty much with how DropShips operate in just about any rule system. They look tough and powerful, but with the exception of the monsters you normally only see post-3060, they never have been. Leopards, Unions, Overlords, even the deceptively-named Fortress...not a single one of them is a self-deploying castle. They're bare-bones landing boats with paper-thin hulls and light defensive guns that do little more than remind attackers that they're not actually playing a carnival shooting game.
Consider a lance of mechs, in TW scale. Let's be pessimistic, and say each of them is putting out 15 damage each per turn. (Not much, given the weight of mechs most folks will send after a combat vessel weighing over a thousand tons.) That's sixty damage per turn. After five turns of that hitting one armor facing(I'm assuming the MechWarriors have a minimum of sense), literally every DropShip in TRO 3057r except the Intruder(Upgrade) and Overlord-C is outright dead, and said Overlord is heavily overkilled by the seventh salvo.
As Battletech players, we're all used to big=scary, with bigger usually meaning scarier. For the vast majority of Battletech's history, DropShips have never fallen into that pattern.
