What exactly do you mean by rate of fire? Like...the weapon cooldown?
You will note in the game files for anything with weapons that there are two important numbers: damage and prebuff cooldown
DPS, or damage per second, is simply the damage (per attack) divided by the cooldown (time between attacks)...the in-game values that you see are DPS values...
WeaponType "Projectile"
damageEnums
AttackType "COMPOSITE"
DamageAffectType "AFFECTS_SHIELDS_AND_HULL"
DamageApplyType "BACKLOADED"
DamageType "PHYSICAL"
WeaponClassType "AUTOCANNON"
DamagePerBank:FRONT 72.000000
DamagePerBank:BACK 0.000000
DamagePerBank:LEFT 0.000000
DamagePerBank:RIGHT 0.000000
Range 3150.000000
PreBuffCooldownTime 4.000000
This was taken from the Kodiak...as you can see, it does 72 damage every 4 seconds, which is 18 DPS...
Things that affect "weapon cooldown" do not affect it in the way you'd think...for example, a nice 50% weapon cooldown bonus (which is actually -50%) you'd think would halve the cooldown time (and effectively double the damage)...however, a 50% bonus to weapon cooldown actually just increases DPS by 50%...
Weapon cooldown penalities (which are actually +%) work differently, and operate like a damage modifier 1 / (1 + x%)...so, a 50% penalty to weapon cooldown would multiply damage by 1 / (1 + 50%) = 2/3...so, it would reduce damage by 1/3...
