It's not just weight. In the La7 weight is negligable between the two. The difference is stopping power, round-per-round damage, and ballistics. The 2-gun option has bad ballistics. Rounds drop a lot more. They do a lot less damage as well. In the same session (some time ago) I upped a 3-gun, a 2-gun, a 3-gun, a 2-gun (etc) to compare. I would have a harder time hitting any angle or deflection shot with the 2-gun setup. Coincidentally, when I *DID* hit, it did less damage (I landed no less than 20 hit sprites from a P51's prop to it's rudder, I don't care if they were scattered, 20 should have done something, but not a single thing fell off or started leaking). The 3-gun option has faster rounds or something, they fly "flatter" and with a better trajectory. This allows much easier much simplified shot setups. They also almost always destroy/maim on the first burst [fighter targets, not bombers].
Considering the huge boost in damage and trajectory, and the fact that they were so rare, I'm with the "perk 'em" crowd. I know first-hand how dweeby the LA7 is. I flew it for a week and got over 100:25 kills/deaths in it (just a little over one week, actually). It's very much an easy mode plane. I think folks might actually have to learn a few things if they were forced to compute lead when aiming, and required to land more than the first hit-sprite to bring a plane down. The 2-gun package requires these virtues. Are they virtues? Probably not, but they're good things to learn for all the newbies in La7s
