Does LR mean Long ranged? If this easily replicates, please give a defined scenario (ship loadout vs enemies in simulator, or a save right before a battle) where it replicates to identify possible bugs/so concrete changes can be made.
I'll note that because burn drive has a long cooldown and is on slow ships, it often is the best move to burn in far closer than the maximum weapon range of the ship, because the retreating enemy will otherwise get away during the cooldown. It is very situation dependent though I agree - burning into HILs/Reapers is no good at all.
Sure, take the Support Dominator build that's in vanilla right now. Test it vs any ship in simulator and you will find it prematurely stops
With Gauss Cannon (1200) + ITU (+40%), this gives the support dominator somewhere around 1600 range per say
but ideally sure just stop at 1200 range then that's ok.
Okay what about those light needlers (700) and light assault gun (700) with ITU (+40%) giving us roughly ~1000 range. Could that be the case why the burn drive AI stops at around 900-1000 range?
So I removed them off the Dominator Support variant and it still does the exact same thing, despite only having TWO gauss cannons as its main weaponry.
My own issue with burn drive is that the AI will often deactivate it too much, so the complete opposite!
I feel this can be mitigated by the fact that ending burn drive early should give you a lower cooldown.
Like yeah if you use the entire burn drive duration, 10s cd. If you only wanted to use it for 1 second, ok it's a 6s cd (10s-4s duration left)