Would probably have to nerf my vehicles too. They are still designed to fight those 'vanilla bungalows/bricks of death' while being realistic and plausible :P.
For pistol animations, the weapons can be on its own turret block and LWC. The switch can be triggered based on some LWC setting like range, or maybe breadboard for more complex logic. The arms would need A LOT of spinblocks, like my legs for each joint. These would have to be controlled by the breadboard. Currently the arms are fixed, so it cuts down on the spinblocks. Having fully animated arms would nearly double the spinblocks

As for cost effectiveness. I could see these work in a custom campaign using its own economy settings and with enemies the are more balanced towards something akin to your more realistically scaled/looking units (as opposed to laser/missile spamming, tracked vanilla bungalows/bricks of death that are the norm).

If anyone would be able to pull off the neccessary spinblock wizardry needed for the extra pistol animations... let's just say it wouldn't surprise me a bit if you had made the pistol functional.^^

They aren't super combat effective when compared to vehicles, especially for their cost. But they can still fight, perhaps could work as AI opponents in 'easy' category.
I have considered possible CCs but I only have one faction(which i guess is technically fine if its just 1v1). I only dabbled a bit with the editor so not quite an expert on working with it.

Haha, it's all right! If anything, the fact I wasn't certain only shows the wizardry of what you've already accomplished :D
Out of curiosity, do you plan on compiling all of these in a CC? I think it would be interesting to have a CC with infantry like this, but I haven't really fiddled with them to get an understanding on how combat effective they are...

Its just lore. yea sorry, it doesn't actually use the pistol. Although I think it is theoretically possible to make that animation but would require an absolute insane amount if spinblocks and turret blocks squeezed

Probably a silly question, but how does it switch from the SAW to the pistol? Is it just lore stuff, or have you managed to do some sort of black magic wizardry to get it to actually switch weapons? :0