The Dragon would be extremely OP if it has Accelerated Ammo Feeder!
Anyways Fast Racks is actually really great on it. It can knock down shields with its guns, and then turn a broadside and fire a prodigious volley of torpedoes, or just spam MRMs etc etc whatever.
I'll disagree on the first part:
The Dragon's AI is hardcoded into always facing the enemy it prioritizes with its nose due to the downsized single TPC at the front being fixed, meaning only one large ballistic mount (out of 3!) would be focusing on a target while the Accellerated Ammo Feeder is active. It even has no medium ballistic mounts facing directly in front of it, just three small ones you're inevitably going to use for PD.
Hell, even with non-vanilla weapons like the Balor Smartgun (from Legio Infernalis) making it able to shoot the front enemy with two large ballistics (it's got very bad flux-damage efficiency but the shell it fires has low tracking capabilities to compensate) the ship still struggles in the damage department.
Fast Missile racks on the Dragon gives me the same exact feeling I would experience if Alex&colleagues got drugged out of their minds while on a
Raging Lockdown Zoom Bender and gave High Energy Focus to the Eagle instead of its Manouvering Jets (If you're reading this Alex, I'm sorry, it was the first comparison that came into my head for some reason). It's "ok" but it misses the point of the whole ship as far as I'm concerned. The Dragon is already really tight on ordinance points (stock 250, 275 with skills) if you actually want the two fighter bays to do anything remotely impactful, giving it an ability that would make its inefficient weapon arrangements somewhat effective for a short amount of time would be swell.
The Atlas Mk.II has Accellerated Ammo Feeder for Ludd's sake! And that thing can get double gauss/hurricane MIRV working!!
P.S: You know, even giving it a downgraded version of the Odyssey's plasma jets that recharges faster instead would really do wonders. Manouvering Jets would probably fit it even better since it does not broadside like its non-bootleg stepbrother and something that only boosts it forward would really screw with its already poor survivablity, being one third carrier and all that.
Edit: oh would you look at that, I forgot about the rest of your post entirely and only focused on that specific part that triggered my spaghetti feelings. Very Italian of me, I know.
The dragon setup I am using right now has two heavy fighters+expanded deck crew, the most long-ish range, most DPS itensive kinetic weapon I could find across my modded campaign since it's the one weapon it's going to be shooting most of the time (Arteria Heavy Railgun from The Great Houses, 26 OP, 1k range, fast fire rate, basically a premium version heavy autocannon on most aspects), a Balor Smartgun from LI right behind that and general PD everywhere else. I also managed to cram PDAI, ITU and Hardened shields while I was there. It has no flux capacitors so it can get overwhelmed really fast but it's mobile enough to fend for itself most of the time.
I've found any OP investments in missiles to even use the special skill to cripple it way too much anywhere else, so I did not bother even installing any:
-use Sabots and it's going to want to get close and get murdered
-use Salamanders and they're not going to be useful against the ships the Dragon struggles most (actual combat carriers/battlecruisers and not a combined bastardization of the two like itself)
-use Harpoons and the Dragon is going to spam them on the first frigade it overloads with the railgun and they would be reduntant considering I've got a large HE weapon already installed
-use fancy stuff like the Karion Seeker from the Great houses to waste 30FP in a virtually zero damage EMP gimmick just to have the enemy eat it, walk up to you anyway and blast you to kingdom come
Edit: I edited this reply way more than I should have.