Hammerheads, Safety Overrides, and Chainguns are all all right on their own. It's the synergy that gets them to become frigate/destroyer mulches.
Personally whenever I do actually use them I use one Heavy Machine Gun and one Chaingun so it slams through shields too.
But to be fair that is also a highly specialised hammerhead as anything that doesn't die at the sneeze of a HE weapon on the hull just MURDERS these Hammerheads with no mercy. It's the Sunder of medium ballistics.
Let me ask, how often are you all using chainguns on other ships? I'd imagine not often as otherwise heavy mortars are usually the better conservative choice. So if anything they are still not great.
A hammerhead with other builds is nice and decent, punching up into light or medium cruisers for sure, but is hardly an overpowered death dealer.
I'd personally put the cause on Safety Overrides, but I barely ever use it as I prefer longer battles over range rather then quick decisive clashes. But SO has always seemed like it takes the advantages of speed and flux dissipation for the costs of a hard to know range penalty (which doesn't always matter for short ranged weapons) and a CR timer debuff which while annoying in longer battles is non-existent f you just win before it applies.
Honestly I'd take a high tech light cruiser outlasting a HE stacked SO hammerhead, or at least punishing it when it burns it's flux too high to survive a missile barrage.
That if probably an offtopic, but am I the only one here, who dislike SO?
To be clear: I do not deny it's crude efficiency, just do not like to use.
I don't dislike it existing, I just don't use it as I don;t like my ships destroying their CR bar after a minute or two into a battle.