This is just a small part of a bigger theoretical project to expand (and in some cases modify) the weapon lists, as well as make certain weapons more competitive with each other, and in a few cases weed out certain options.
For the Rifle Cannon Revision, the goal was to make the weapon simple, reasonably competitive, and introtech-friendly. The "new" Rifle Cannons do away with the -3 damage penalty against high BAR armor if it has regular ammo (if it's "primitive" ammo, like 21st or 22nd century, the damage malus still applies, but that's not something you'd see in an intro-tech game).
I started with the canonical 3 Rifle Cannons at first, the Light, Medium and Heavy versions. The pattern here is that Rifle Cannons get more range and more damage as they get heavier, but become less efficient too (both in terms of excess heat and damage/ton). So the Medium cannon is basically unchanged except for a bit extra ammo. The Light Rifle got lighter and the heavy cannon got heavier.
I was just going to leave it at that, but I was looking a bit closer and I realized that I could fit an oversized rifle cannon at the heaviest end of the weapon scale in and have it fit snugly in the setting, with a weight class around that of your typical Gauss Rifle (since the Heavy was only around the weight of an AC5). And then I looked at that and I thought "Well, one more couldn't hurt..."
Weapon Damage Range Heat Shots/ton Tons Crits
LRC 3 4/8/12 1 24 2 1
MRC 6 (1)5/10/15 2 12 5 2
HRC 9 (2)6/12/18 4 8 9 4
SHRC 12 (3)7/14/21 7 6 14 7
CRC 15 (4)8/16/24 11 5 20 11
LRC=Light Rifle Cannon
MRC=Medium Rifle Cannon
HRC=Heavy Rifle Cannon
SHRC=Superheavy Rifle Cannon
CRC=Colossal Rifle Cannon
Clan versions: Add +1/+2/+3 range to the small/medium/large range brackets, +1/+2/+3/+4/+5 damage for LRC/MRC/HRC/SHRC/CRC
