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For a fast aerial recce craft for a cash strapped mercenary unit, the Warrior H7 series of vtols are pretty good in my experience, they're very fast and most versions have long ranged weaponary so they can use a combination of their speed and range to make harrassing nuisance potshots or act as spotters for artillery or indirect LRM fire with virtual impunity (IIRC, keep them moving at Flank speed and the other guys will be shooting at a +5 penalty to hit making hitting even at short range unlikely in most cases, and they're easily fast enough to outrun any 3025 mech)

SRM carriers are tricky to use, as mentioned they're very slow and whilst heavily armed they're pretty short ranged and very fragile. They're very niche in terms of use being too slow, short ranged and poorly armoured to last long outside of a defensive battle in built up areas and even then you probably won't get to fire more than a couple of times before being knocked out although admittedly it could potentially cause a lot of damage in that time. If you use them, I'd expect to have to replace them, and likely their crews, pretty frequently. I wouldn't use them in my own units for that reason, I prize crew survivability over other factors especially for my armoured units, it's the same reason I'm very reluctant to use AC-20 armed Demolishers, whilst they can dish out a lot of damage in my own experiences they have a disturbing tendency to blow up and kill their crews. Plus of course for a mercenary unit the costs of having to regularly replace destroyed AFVs is going to eat into your operational profits big time.

Similarly, regular infantry are one of if not the least efficient units in C-Bill terms, being incredibly slow, shortranged and vulnerable, but quite expensive at the same time. That said, my own mercenary unit has plenty of infantry for fluff reasons, but it's pretty expensive to keep recruiting replacements for combat losses and unless they're heavily supported and kept in cover (and probably even then) they're likely to take pretty heavy losses. That said, using Karnovs for transport can give you a very fast albeit very fragile unit capable of seizing and holding ground. Just probably not for very long if there are enemy units close by.