One of the biggest problems with battleships is their speed. They have lots of other problems, obviously, but I imagine that gangs might start roaming with them if they weren’t a 100% guaranteed death. And by guaranteed death, I mean the suicide of the player in preference over the long travel time.
So I had a thought. And keep an open mind, it’s a radical thought. What would honestly get messed up, if they gave T1 (only T1) battleships jump drives with like 2-4LY of range? Would be able to jump to normal cynos, and also to combat recon cynos, which have the same light time as a covert cyno but can only be jumped to by battleships (blops and otherwise) and are visible like normal cynos, lit only by combat recons, another under-represented class of ships.
It doesn’t collide with blops, because blops are only there to bridge bombers anyways, but even if they weren’t blops have cloaking bonuses, massively larger range, and massively lower fatigay.
It doesn’t collide with capitals, because battleships and capitals have almost no overlapping gameplay between them.
It doesn’t oppress other subcapitals, because battleships are still among the easiest ships in the game to kill on account of said “other problems”.
It doesn’t buff blobbing groups, because they blob with caps already. Going down to T1 battleships would be a downgrade.
It doesn’t really hurt small groups in their home space, because if you were going to get blobbed by these, you were just going to get blobbed by a “current meta” fleet anyways.
The small range and normal fatigue means that they’d be spending a good bit of their time gating, but a properly planned fleet could easily use jump drives to speed things up, or avoid the currently inevitable gate camp that will lead to their un-fun demise, or to enter a fight with good grid placement.
The jump drive would take a high-slot, and said module would require all the regular jump drive training that you would normally need/benefit from. Said 2-4LY of range would be with JDC5. Fitting requirements could be balanced such that normally tight fits wouldn’t work, a trade-off for the massive increase in mobility. The fact that it’s a fitted module means that existing fits and their associated metas are untouched directly.