Ships & Modules

I started training for one, can now fly it well on the alt that flies it and still haven't undocked it.

A carrier is good for being a low sec taxi for your ships OR its good for a well organised fleet with a doctrine that supports the use of the carrier and it supports the doctrine back.

So the first question you ask yourself is 'why do I need a carrier?'

If you believe that in a years time you'll have a well formed military presence and the skilled FCs that will mean you aren't just whelping it then go right ahead. Much like any other ship you or your fc will lose lots of them before you realise what they are good for....

Another thing here, in a year to 18 months you will have an absolutely useless pilot for 99/100 situations, 18 months is not really enough to fly a carrier well, let alone anything else on top, so you will end up sitting docked up almost constantly and only getting involved once every 6 months.

To fly a carrier well you need:

maxed tank skills for shield and armor, maxed cap skills, maxed fitting skills (3-6 months),

around 10-15mil sp in drones (maxed support skills all T2 combat drones this will take around 8 months -1 year),

carrier 5, fighters 5, (6 more months)

cap remote reps, shield emission, energy emission 4/5, tactical logistics 4/5, jump drive cal4/5 jump fuel conservation 4/5, Cybernetics 5, Science 5 (another 6 months)

So after 2 1/2 years you have a decent carrier toon who can do nothing else .

To give you an idea of the actual scale of the project I bought a 20mil sp focussed carrier toon (ie one that did what you plan) last month and estimate that toon is still 18 months away from being viable (another 15-20mil sp).

Now your 5 year old corpmate may well be months off doing carriers well but then he already probably has 40mil sp in the right support skills.

If you are really determined to go carrier get a second account just for that, then train the toon you have as a day to day pilot, or vice versa.
Better still train your toon to fly a T3 well (6 months) then 6 months doing wormholes and incursions make 15-25 bil and buy a carrier pilot from the character bazaar and save the ballache of training and around 18 :)

Incidentally chimera is a bad choice, Archon/Thanatos are the best carriers atm.

Or just listen to all the people on here trying to tell you it is a bad idea for one in your situation.

Hmmmm...

TO answer the OP on uses of a carrier and how to use them well.

1. Carriers are not solo ships. This is an important lesson, and one that many people do not take to heart endding up with some very funny loss mails for everyone else to show off.

2. Actual Carrier uses
2.1-> Logistics
--> moving your stuff around, this is the most common use for carriers. Transporting stuff around the fringes of empire so that you do not have to do the 30+ jumps of lowsec makes life much easier. But you are mostly just a defensible ship hauler that takes forever on a station to gank, Its not impossible, but you will most likely be able to dock before they can bring enough guns to bear on you. provided you did it right and did not aggress or bounce off the station.
--> POS/ Structure repping, Usually done in fleets and insanely boring solo. good for saving the tower of your isk making buddies while you struggle for that plex.
--> MIssion/WH support. another popular use for carriers, Support means that you have filled your highslots with drone control mods and are sitting just barely outside your pos shields. while assigning drones to people actually doing stuff. usually an alt character.

2.1.-> Flying missions or sitting in a Sleeper site.
-->Everyonce in a while i hear about some lol mail of an officer fit carrier in a wh getting ganked by a tier 3 bc fleet (or in the past, an ahac/dictor group) Or even a ratting carrier getting found by a lonely mostly afk cloaky with a batphone connection. Try not to be this guy unless you are in my sector of space and not a blue.

2.2. Fleet carriers.
-->sometimes there is a call over coms for a trojan carrier to be the first to jump through a contested cyno and light a new one when the drake dies. this is a sometimes good use of a carrier but more often then not you will be filing the paperwork for a alliance replacement and searching for some fighters to put into the next one. this one is up to you.
-->More often though is the triage carrier call, some alliance head has gotten his alt into some stupid skirmish and needs support. This is the batphone call. Be prepared to be in a fleet of carriers trying to save a nightmare or bhaalghorn worth more then your total net worth.
--> the last and most seemingly often, the biggest time waster is the CTA call, rep this pos, be prepared to fight x, shoot those structures. if you are not a well skilled carrier pilot, you will most likely be asked to downgrade to meatshield bs.

3.Well for smaller work, sure you can assign fighters to sit on the gate with your dictor buddy, and since the gate gun aggro changes im sure there will be more of this (im not 100% sure that gates wont shoot fighters but i hear they do not shoot drones anymore) sure you could assign drones to fly lowsec missions or whatnot with your friends, but you will really need a pos setup (or i guess station works too) or a group of carriers to make any real dent in anything.

I would say train for it, most of the skills are useful for other reasons. but caldari carriers are bad for many things. do not focus on it because of racial history, Ive got a thanny ive undocked twice, and could fly the others if i ever got around to buying one of them. As a nominally empire pilot (havent had a stint in null for more then a year now) i havent found a good use for a carrier. though i would have loved to have had one when i was a null pilot.

Isk spent on skillbooks is never wasted*, you simply arent using them to their full potential.

*except for skills changed/removed by CCP

Man Liang you were so wrong for that on soo many levels, but gawd was it funny as hell.

OP: I have owned a carrier for 5 years and I have never used it in combat. I have used it for capital fleet ops back in the day and for ratting but beyond that it's of little use today thanks to supers.

Carriers are like the swiss army knife of new eden, not everyone need them, but when they do <33333

People have pointed out most of the really huge problems with flying carriers. The thing that's been missing, and hopefully which will help the OP make less terrible decisions is WHY carriers aren't a good choice most of the time.

The reason is this: Any fight that you can bring a carrier to, the other guys can bring things that kill carriers. You might think you are somehow power gaming by going for the biggest ship that a single person can reasonably aspire to, but eve just doesn't work like that. Anything you can do the bad guys can do, and chances are will do so with far greater elan than you.

Once upon a time, I was in a corp with some RL friends. They were stupid people. They wanted to go knock over a POS on a decent moon in Aridia. They decided they would take out all the stops and bring their carriers with them. At this point I told them I wasn't coming with them, and that they'd all die.

They didn't even make it to the POS. They got into a little fight on a gate (about 10-15BS on each side). They thought that dropping the carriers in would help matters. They did not. Everyone still died, and so did all the carriers. During this period I mocked everyone involved in corp chat, because my pre-cognative abilities are apparently strong.

So yeah... If you can do it, someone else can. It takes either exceptional intel or giant brass balls to confidently deploy just a few capitals, and even more so to just deploy one.

I find my carrier to mostly be a cheaper alternative to a jump freighter that is able to hold fit ships. I have had it since 2006-ish and have dropped it in combat 2 times and taxied my stuff around low and null 100x +. If you are the only carrier pilot in your corp and you live in low-sec or null your going to be like the neighbor with the pickup truck... "hey man, you mind hauling my stuff?"...every time you move operations. If thats what your looking for go for it, but totally expect to eventually die. I know people who are willing to fly 50 jumps in a noob ship just to get in on a carrier kill.

This sums up quite good what carriers are good for, move stuff around and eventually rep pos mods/shields, personally I see it just like a ships freighter for null.
For a 2B+ mark ship it brings nothing interesting to your game experience but more constraints (specially when it comes to rep stuff and you'll understand what I mean at some point), you'd have far more fun with those 2B+ filling your hangar with T1 full fitted cruisers/BC's.

I rolled an alt in May '11 and started it towards carriers. I didn't have it in one until August of 2012, and it's /still/ training carrier relevant skills.

Believe me, carriers are not a trivial skill training path as they take over a year of focused training even for a somewhat passable fleet role. I have 40M SP on my main and I have not even injected a single capital-related skill, and have no plans to do so anytime soon.