Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, this is an "escort carrier."

A super carrier can use fighter bombers. I guess a regular carrier should be able to as well as its a type of carrier?



The point of this ship isn't just to provide damage, if you bothered to read what the op has been posting. Its a support ship.



Confirming something you don't like is babble.



Useless if alone? Yes. But allowing it to have a massive drone bay like a carrier and up to 10 drones would mean that it can be very versatile with its drone usage (lights, mediums, heavies, different ewars), while still not being able to use fighters.

Good effort tho buddy.

The domi is not a drone carrier... its a drone/turret hybrid... there is no drone carrier out there at all ( unless you count carriers but they can also fit fighters )

Big deal. 5 drones per pilot. Your cowarding at a POS so you cant rep your own drones. You can, but then youd have to recal them. By the time their assigned again, its game over. People have been shooting fighter drones for ages, its an effective counter. That and smart bombs. Fighters die, your gang fails. Your point is mute.

Otherwise, legitimate assigning tactic is legitimate.

This is exactly why the Escort Carriers have a separate fighter bay and drone bay. A limited fighter bay (25000m3) allows up to five fighters.

Drone bay of 525m3 allows for 10 large, 5 sentry, 10 med, and 10 small concurrently for versatility.

They also DONT do a ton of DPS, that wasn't the point, as you pointed out.

nothing is in stone
i was merely trying to simplify things for people who like to overcomplicate things, i could say my last post had teh makings of an overpowered ship or i could say it looks like it could be very weak, alot has to do with perspective

a drone bay of 25000m3 hmm lets look at this shall we, that can hold an aweful lot of drones or, 5 fighters (or a mix of the 2)
commonly on my own vexor i use a 2 hvy, 2 med, 1 light + another 5 lights, i use a similar setup on the myrmidon, ofc these are gallente

examples of diversity and typical racial bonus's :
gallente having 30k m3 + drone bonus to hp or dmg
minmatar may be comparable in speed and manouverability to a normal armor bs but only 20k m3 (no other bonus)
and the amarr and caldari might only recieve standard bonus's for armor/shield resists + energy transfer bonus's

those are just a couple of examples i could think of atm without making it too long, i personally LIKE the idea of 'escort' or 'light' carriers, but if they are going to be called carriers then they should share some carrier attributes, although ive never really looked at the size diference between fighters and the heavy/sentry drones (5000m3 vs 25m3) which in itself could be another thread (2500m3 fighter variant "insert whetever name here")

ps - see now we are getting complicated again....

There is no reason why a light carrier needs to be able to carry fighters. Simply being able to field more heavies is sufficient, especially given the new drone damage module.

If a light carrier can field fighters, and moreso if it can assign them, it pushes too far into the niche of the current carriers.

love the general idea. all the quibbles are valid points, i personally am on the fence about fighters. also, perhaps instead of +1 drone per level, perhaps instead you could consider 20% damage and hitpoints per level? also, you could keep the fighter and drone bays as a single bay, assuming you keep the drone space under 5000m3 (which you plan to based on what i've read).

expanding on that blurb a bit.

my general understanding of this, having read the thread, is basically an orca-sized ship (midway between capitals and battleships - an orca is neither, yet shares good qualities of both) that is a dedicated drone command/control platform. i find i fall on the mildly buffed large remote reps side of things, but i am far from convinced either way. i find the burst rep amount from capital reppers to be too much for such a ship; a boosted large would be far more appropriate. i also agree with a small range increase, but not one comperable to logi cruisers - about 26km sounds just perfect. enough to be used as a center pin in PvP (or PvE), but not enough to give full mobility to a gang, especially if the ship itself is roughly as slow as an orca.

while i dont believe that carriers would be pushed out of use by these at all (or removed from their niche or whatever the PC codeword is these days), i also am not convinced that fighters would be anything more than redundance. my vote, as of now, is to strip fighters from them, simply because drones would do it better in my eyes. i dont believe that having them assignable is really worthwhile, either from a PvP perspective (because, lol fighters) or a PvE one (because sentries would just be more effective, at least in anoms and the like.

beyond that, you guys seem to me to be running in circles, explaining the same things to one another time and again. agree to disagree, and then go quibble over something else imo.

thing's i'm curious about:

would these be allowed into gated deadspace? (i vote yes, based on orcas/freighters being allowed to do so)

can, in OP's eyes, they use capital local reps? (i vote yes regardless of which way the remote repairs discussion goes, but perhaps with some negs.)

would love to see some dev interest in this. i think it's a valuable way to expand the capital roster without making new LOLHOTDROP ships.

You know people use heavies in large fights too right? I.e. a cap fight is taking place, battleships are also on field, deploy heavy drones/whatever drones you got.

You don't need fighters to be part of the fight dude. 10 Heavies is more than enough damage that should be coming from this "support" ship.

first off, general response: i think you're thinking of these in a bit smaller terms than i am. you're thinking of them being effectively battleships. i disagree with that - this ship feels to me to be a touch smaller than an orca, if you understand my meaning. so, you'd need capital legos to build the thing, but you could also afford to enlarge it slightly - not a carrier's capacitor and HPs of course, but something comperable to a freighter or orca's HP values. see where i'm going with this?

as for large fights in nullsec, if you're familiar with the PL fleet doctrine they call "slowcats", that should answer your question right there, although i dont see why they would alter it to a smaller ship class in their specific case. a TL:DR as i understand it for slowcats: patheon RR carriers (not triage, in other words) that have sentries stuffed full in their drone bays. launch, assist to target popper, recieve 13k alpha every 4 seconds in whatever flavor you choose. regardless, if you make this orca sized, you wont see it in nano roams, but the possibility of keeping a wing, or even a doctrine of these in a state of readiness for an alliance is signifigant, especially for home defense fleets. their ability to put damage down on many different sizes of ships, balanced by their material cost and slowness, would serve particularly well there imo.

i like your explanation of large local v. capital remote. i'm still not sold on the capital remotes, but i respect why you came to that descision.

i'd like to again highlight the 20% damage/HP per level versus the +1 drone per level. i think that'd be all the buff you need to make them viable - fighters unfortunately would not be viable in a combat situation in null that i can think of. i think it best that they be scrapped - it's still a carrier in the fact that it's a drone dedicated platform capable of launching more than the usual 5. (guardian-vexors not included, of course.)

I like how you structured your argument against fighters and as such I am willing to scrap the fighter argument unless someone smarter about carrier tactics than me can make the argument on more than aesthetics.

As for the drones, I feel it is a good idea to have 10 without the damage buff rather than 5 with a damage buff. This would allow them to field otherwise less fielded drones in certain circumstances that don't benefit from a damage buff (like ECM, Target painter, web, etc).

As for the sizing question with Orcas, I should point out that the shield and armor HPs of these are BETTER in most cases than the ORCA and the orca's only thing is structure (which is roughly 4X that of these) but since that can't be active tanked, it makes the overall tank ability about the same.

I should point out that the concept art that i stole from deviant art (but gave credit to the artist) has some dimensions that I think are too small. The concept art dimensions are that of a BS, I think these should be more like 1200-1500m long give or take. Their masses and such on the stats I posted are more in keeping with general scale (2X a battleship size) of an Orca.

EDIT: if just drones, then I would amend the stats of these ships to remove the fighter bay and increase the drone bay from 525 to 650 (to allow 10 heavy, 10 sentry, 10 med, 10 light drones in bay at once). Does it need to be more than that?