Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I see your point, but couldn't you do the same thing with 4 pulse-Apocs for less than half the price, with way better tracking and range? Not to mention better locktime, more agility, etc? And if it's so appealing for pirates to put capitals on gates, why don't you see carriers doing it? They can do plenty of dps to subcaps (well over 1000 dps with fighters depending on fit) while RRing their tacklers / support from well off the gate. Hell, you can even keep the carrier on the edge of a pos shield and just assign 15 fighters to your tacklers if you want to. No need to put the carrier in danger.

Do you see this happening in lowsec all the time?

e: I'm honestly curious. The only time I spend in lowsec is while moving caps around, and 99% of the time its either empty, or some macho elite pvper YARRR type cruises by in a sniping Maelstrom and blows up your cyno Ibis before insta-warping off to a safe and trumpeting about it in local.

The reason people don't do this is for the reason I stated earlier in the thread... you can shoot down/bomb the drones and remove the carrier's DPS (and carriers don't like fielding spare fighters when they know that they are going to be quickly shot and destroyed... they cost 20 to 40 mil a pop).
Plus, fighters deal craptastic damage against anything smaller than a battlecruiser... and if you use smaller drones so you can actually hit smaller stuff you give up those "nice" DPS numbers... and those smaller drones are still destructible, take time to reach the target to apply their DPS, and can be outrun. Mounted guns have none of those problems (but they do have their own "specialness" which can be mitigated using a variety of remote mods).
Also... alpha striking is quite hard to do with drones... which gives people time to react accordingly.

tl;dr: the EFT numbers for carriers are misleading and don't take into account a number of factors. Battleships will almost always deal equal or more damage than a carrier unless the target is standings still or is HUGE.


You cannot assign fighters in 0.4 space. You can also only apply 5 fighters per ship (and said ship cannot use any of its own drones). Fighter HP cannot be seen remotely (so they can be taking damage and you'll never know). And if an enemy or friendly enters a POS the Fighters automatically are automatically "lost."