Well tnjrp, I'm glad you asked

Specifically I was asking because I was curious about something I noticed in the rules for vehicles. You will notice in the vehicle builder that AFVs can have up to 4 fire actions, but need not have four, and as far as I can see they receive no bonus or penalty for taking less.

Reference, page 78, vehicle restrictions by type explicitly states this. You'll also note that on page 50 when fielding rather than building a vehicle "Vehicles need not purchase a weapon for each slot, and may be purchased without any weapons at all...", but the paragraph does not imply any kind of discount for a 4-FA vehicle fielded with only 1 weapon, beyond the PV savings from forgoing the weapon itself.

I'm pretty sure some of the Official Armies have AFV-type vehicles with less than 4 fire actions, or less than 8 weapon options, or sub-optimal allocation of CDW weapons. The Vobian Mini-Jet has only one weapon slot, and I'm certain there was a vehicle frame with one weapon slot for a CDW with no other option.

Another thing I noticed was that Demian said some time back that vehicles could theoretically have more Damage Capacity than the maximums in the builder. I assumed the given limit was, as at Defiance: Vital Ground without the upcoming expansion, a "genre rule". Which led me to believe that the 2 FA/ 4FA rule (2 FA for everyone, 4 for AFVs) was a genre rule for the default Defiance genre wherein Mecha are no match for tanks. Years ago in Legions of Steel: Planetstorm, it was said that a mecha caught in open terrain was meat to even WW2 era MBT weapons. I got to thinking that the "realism" quotient of Defiance was around the same as for PS...

... and that therefor, the 2FA for mecha rule was intended not so much for point-for-point balance but to deliberately and arbitrarily limit mecha relative to AFVs. I have no problem with that and respect it as a valid genre choice, but it is inappropriate to pretty much all strider/walker type vehicles available as miniatures- the broad popular scifi genre assumption is derived from Battletech and is in essence that mecha are less efficiently armoured than tanks, or just all-round superior.

The LOS/PS Superfortress was vastly overarmed for DVG default but I managed to wiggle it in by use of combo-weapons. However, the Kryomek(TM) striders are a bit less forgiving, some being explicitly and solely designed to strafe with three independent but identical weapons, ie some frames only exist to take advantage of three fire actions. There are other problems converting Kryomek(TM) universe stuff to D:VG but it seemed to me this might be the simplest to solve simply by adjusting genre rules/house rules, which might result in a game dynamic shift but hopefully not an actual points value per game value shift.

However, I wanted to pick Demian's brains a little and confirm my suspicion. EDIT FOR CLARITY: So, Demian, would you care to elaborate?