Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That was merely and example. Furthermore the ship only gains a bonus to LIGHT drones, and has little capacity to replace any lost drones. Add this to it's complete absence of turrets or missile launcher hard points and you have a ship that not only has a direct counter (smart bombs) but can't sustain in a fleet fight should it lose it's drones.

Unlike other combat ships this one can have its combat capability completely removed, thus the extra fire power to the drones.

good idea to small gang warfare +1

Drone DPS is dependent on the defending ships size due to tracking. This means that an ishtar flying a full set of heavies would not have the same DPS vs a cruiser or frigate that this escort carrier would. It could change its drone set up but now it doesnt have the same DPS as the escort carrier, not to mention the time to change drones.

Furthermore with a lack of weapon hard points this makes the ship a relatively good logistics ship, something the ishtar is not. To put plainly the Ishtar is an assault ship, where as an escort carrier is a support ship. It adds great defense and great attack to a small gang but in a larger fleet might not bring as much to the field. It would be a GREAT ship to have in wormholes.

interesting concept but the issues it creates with sub capitals in highsec would be bad business, you would have to have a counter to it, and lets not forget how this would impact incursions and mission runners.

rather then create a new capital lets create a new line of sub capitals for all 4 races, droneboats with 10 drones deployable at level 5 but no guns/missiles. sure some ships do have drone bonuses and such but but why are carriers the only ones that get to horde a swarm around? sure server issues limited droneboats in the past and that's why i think we don't have ships like that now. but with the advances of ccps server hardware and their performance team to reduce drone server demand i think its' well within boundaries of possible.

as drones come in all sizes so should this ship line: lights frigs, meds crusiers, heavys.sentries bs. with the new drone damage mods coming out i understand that this might need some tweaking but please bear in mind that this class of ship would have no means of damage other then the drones. while being very slow and unagile they should have a great active tank for pve... like a domi able to afk missions. just tossing that out there.

You should do a search for Murder One's carrier ideas. He thought of this about 5 years ago.

Of course..

Here's my thoughts on this

Mini Carrier - at lvl 5 able to field a full fleet of 10 drones of light, medium, heavy, or sentry.
At all skills lvl 5 with 10 heavy drones with no drone bonuses, you would get around 650 dps. This is a reasonable amount, but perhaps a bonus of 3% per lvl gives you about 767 pure drone dps. Then you could perhaps give it similar bonuses to ewar drones if need be. The major bonus it would need is a bonus to control range and velocity of drones.
Now, my theory is that this ship is allowed to fit a siege module. Without the siege module active it has about half the range of a logi ship and less rep amount as well.
When in siege mode it is immobile and has an increased sig radius, but has increased rep range(enough to rep modules of a POS from close to the center) and has a greatly increased rep amount.

Mini Dread - Fits 8 large turrets, similar mobility to a standard battleship, but a good bit more tanky with massive damage bonuses, HORRIBLE TRACKING/exp velocity, a large sig resolution/exp radius, and bonuses towards resistances/rep amount. This would make these ships quite effective for POS bashing and their mobility would also help to avoid POS dps, however they're not very effective at engaging sub capital ships.
This means these ships would be great at what they are designed for, but would be required to have a fleet for their own security. This would fit very well as a t2, tier 3 battlship, which are supposed to be specialized ships.


Obviously these are very crued ideas in their current form, but with some TLC they could not only be extremely helpful ships in low and null, but could also fill a massive gap in high sec.

Let me just interject right there since your not a carrier pilot....

1) The ship your proposing will take minutes to align. It will slow down all fleets its flying with.

2) Will be only be able of fielding 5 drones, amounting to a not so modest 500-700 DPS. Battleships do better than this.

3) It has no fleet value aside from being tackled on gates.

4) It'l be a suicide boat since you wont be able to mwd or burn back to the gates to escape in low-sec.

5) It'l take ages to target anything.

6) No logistical role - See point 3.

7) You can add large remote reps to it, since from the sounds of things it wont have enough CPU or powergrid for a capital remote repper. Battleships can do this also.

8) EHP wise, it sounds like this thing will be between an Orca and a Battleship. Orcas die rather quickly....

9) How many highslots will it have? Because adding drone control modules will allow expanding the drones beyond 5. Will it have any turret or missile slots? Because that might be your saving grace angle.

10) It'l cost 5 times as much (at current prices at time of post) than the Dominix battleship which will, for the most part, fill this role superbly.


I could go on... but you get the idea.








Dont get me wrong, I'd love having hisec carriers that could use gates.









What I dont want, is another dominix in drag pretending to be something it isnt.

Basically there is a huge difference between a carrier and a drone boat.

I dont care much about the drones, but having some more or less combat oriented carrier vessel for high sec would be a great idea. I am using an Orca as some sort of "highsec carrier", since i dont want to be forced to dock, but stay out in space for 2 or more weeks and still be able to refit, repair and change ships.

The Orca is more a hauler than a carrier. Paperskinned and not even agile enough.

Id prefer some kind of light carrier that has less cargo space than an Orca, but a bigger corp hangar for ship transport. If it also has drone capabilities in direction of fighters, this would be stunning, but is not really necessary, since there is few in highsec that makes me think id need those.

The discussion about "....carriers is all low and null sec..." is nonsense. Carriers shall be available for all, since all pay the same price for the game and have therefor also the right to fly one, if they want. And yes, a light carrier for highsec is an absolutely good idea.

Very interesting idea. Because jumping into billions worth carrier and low-sec isn't an option for casual gamer - thus my mission runner stuck in Dominix / Rattle for a year(s?) already.

Also fighters aren't necessary - I'll be happy with 10 sentries instead of semi-worthless short-range torpedoes and blasters.

I never said no logistics role, that was other people who said "Logi+Drones is OP!" I do not agree. See rebuttal of #3.


That was the point, it would have BS sized logistics with some bonuses that are not quite as good as Logis but good enough for a heavy BS fight.


My original idea was to have a tank that was comparable to a well tanked BS plus a little bit. So that would be a pretty tough nut to crack, but balancing it to make it viable is something beyond us in a thread, it would have to be tested to figure out the right mix of EHP.


I had not considered how many slots it would have in each. I am not against giving it some highs for other weapons, it has to have some highs for Logistics modules. My original idea did not include DCU's since it was a skill based ability. If we take it to 10 drones instead of 5 plus 5 fighters, then I think it should be by skill, not DCU. If we use DCUs to get it up there, there would be other consequences like longer skilling time, more PG/CPU needed or another one of those "98% reduction in PG" bonuses, also it would mean that the ship would need a full 8 high slots in order to fit DCUs and Logistics.



The dominix is a racial battleship that has a lot of other racial skills to train to. If I want a stepping stone kind of carrier gameplay before i get to CAP ships and I am specialized in Caldari ships, then I have to cross train an entire other races ship line. This is something that CCP doesn't want to be the case (see how they are changing the ship skill progression for things like command ships).