gust is outright broken. it has all the advantages of squall(save for effectiveness vs frigates) and none of the weaknesses. it has higher dps than squall since it splooges out missiles way faster. despite this, it has a nearly nonexistent refire delay. if you play this game at all you'll know damn well the AI will literally never drop their shield unless they're at nearly overloaded. as a result, gust is effectively an autowin button against anything cruiser/cap size or at/below enforcer speed. it also has the secondary effect of pushing medium sabots out of relevance. since the medium sabot refire delay is very high relative to gust, you'll always see gust and almost never sabot so it's not really filling a niche; just pushing out sabot from relevance.
speaking of refire delay, the medium hammer rack's refire delay is very low for the amount of ammo it has. medium missiles always have relatively high refire delays compared to their small counterparts because the medium missile slot is available to nearly everything under the sun and they don't suffer from the ammo limitations of their small counterparts. the medium hammer's refire delay should be at least a second or 2 longer because it already does more damage per shot compared to the medium reaper(4.5k vs 4k).
refire delays is also this way to balance against missile specialization because the skill halves refire delay. if the refire delay is already relatively low the skill makes it nearly nonexistent. base missile dps can't be too high because the game will nearly always assign an officer with missile specialization to these ships that can slot it medium missiles. as a result, what you get is double of what you see.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll try and address it.
I find Gust vs. Sabot is situational, DPS wise the Sabot has a slightly higher DPS (202 vs. 216). The sabot has a much higher burst making it more effective at overloading shields whereas the Gust is better at sustained pressure due to its shorter refire delay. The sabot also has much higher EMP (80 vs. 216) (the sabot also gets +25% chance of +200 per hit) while the gust has a higher hit strength giving them different roles on unshielded targets. The gust also has that tracking issues vs. Frigates/Destroyers but that was offset with damage potential/ammo count (12k vs. 15k). There is an issue with the AI using missiles in that they're much more liberal with the application of Gusts but I find that when they do use Sabots it's much more devastating - If you want a good example of the liberal use of Sabots check out the Gizzard which is set to use missiles like they're going out of fashion, the LG variant in particular is set to use a nasty combination of Atropos and Sabots by default.
You are right though, the Gust is strong, but it's situational if it's actually better than the Sabot, generally I find I'm using Sabots as general purpose missiles and Gusts on 'capital killers'. But don't panic, the gust is going to be nerfed! Alex has plans to nerf the Squall and the Gust uses the same warhead so when he updates the Squall it will automatically carry-over.
As for the Hammer, I'll take a look, the large hammer has a cooldown of 5.45 seconds and the small (double) has a cooldown of 1 second. The medium sits at 3.5, which I considered a happy medium, I'll probably bump it up to 4 but I can't really go higher than that.
How did you feel about the Atropos Pod, you seem to have an idea of how you want missiles to feel and I hope I've satisfied there.