EVE General Discussion

Supercapitals were never designed around being something individuals progressed towards. They were supposed to be alliance level assets - extremely powerful, extremely useful, extremely resource intensive. The idea was that alliances would have a handful of supercarriers and one titan. That model was designed around an Eve that had far fewer sources of income and a lot less money circulating. Even their initial estimates were off pretty spectacularly as major alliances started fielding two, three and even four titans within a few months of their introduction.

Now there's a ton more money in game. At the alliance level you had people who controlled significant portions of the game's raw material (Tech) and the rental empires drawing vast amounts of liquid wealth from their serfs. Not only that, so much more money is available to the individual that an individual can realistically hope to own a supercapital ship if they've played for a year or two and want it. To be fair, that isn't most people - but if I'd felt the twisted desire to really gun for a supercarrier I could have done it within a few months.

Supercapitals were not designed around the idea that a group could put hundreds on the field. The advantage conferred by supercapitals is exponential, not linear. 20 supercarriers can form a remote rep chain that will tank anything but a major call to arms kind of fleet. With Titans you can essentially chose to wipe out as many dreads or carriers as you have titans in one shot. (A while back the problem was "Tracking Titans" - titan guns used to be able to track subcaps with some efficiency, so if you had 2-3 dozen you could set up a death ball that orbited an enemy fleet, ensuring that at least a few of the 5-8K DPS titans have a clean shot on a subcap)

KW- showed that the multiplicative advantage conferred by mass supercapitals is approaching its logical end state: you can now form a fleet that can't realistically be destroyed. It may be mathematically possible, but the node just can't handle it and you have the option of crashing the node when in danger. Hence people's disdain for the things.

Using a fairly standard passive fit fleet aeon (assuming an erebus in system for armor bonus), each aeon tanks 21,515 dps per other aeon. With 20 aeons on field, that's 19 other aeons or 408,785 dps. A triple magstab 425mm megathron shooting javelin and dropping 3 gardes is 921 dps. You need 443 megathrons before you can even start breaking a super, at which point you need to chew through 57 million EHP. If you assume 800 megathrons, that's 328,797 dps, or 173 seconds to kill a single aeon, or half an hour in 10% tidi. To alpha one of those aeons off the field, you need 19534 megathrons, 4844 maelstroms, 1066 moros, or 592 arty naglfar. 31 Moros would be able to break the reps. A fleet of 50 moros would take at least 148 seconds to kill an aeon, and would lose at minimum 11 or 12 moros in doing so.