A Dreadnaught equipped with short range anti-capital ship weapons should be good against… capital ships. Supercarriers have wings of fighters and heavy fighters, which should make them more generalists. The supercarriers can also be repaired by a FAX while a Dreadnaught can’t really do much damage outside Siege mode and so needs to rely on just having a large EHP pool. A specialist should be more cost efficient at it’s role than a generalist, so it seems a bunch of Revelations with anti-capital weapons should be good at killing a group of Supercarriers and FAXes if they can close the distance.
There are some similarities I see to subcap fights like an Afterburner Neuting Dragoon vs a MWD Catalyst. The Cat wants to apply direct damage to the Dragon, while the Dragoon would rather have his drones to the work and not be within blaster range. If the distance is closed, the Dragoon wants to keep a high tracking situation since that minimizes the damage the turrets do, but high traversal barely affects light or even drone damage against destroyers.
Back to capital fights. Large fleets are likely to be mixed with different types of capitals and subcapitals (no all Dreads for example), but it’s certainly possible for one side to be heavy on Pulse Laser Giga Dreadnaughts and one side to be heavy on super carriers. The side with huge Dreadnaught superiority likely wants to get them in range and the side with more super carriers likely want to stay away. The thing is, Dreadnaughts need to use siege mode to get the most out of their turrets. Unlike the subcap situation, they can’t just slowboat into range. So I’m not really sure how they are supposed to do this. And low sec might just be worse Team We Have Lots of Anti-Capital Revelations and other Dreads needs to close the distance and have multiple HICs to hold their targets in place while Team We Have Lots of Supercarriers just needs to stay away.
Gonna need several screen (blocking) fleets made up of smaller ships to help close distance between two or more groups of carriers. I’m completely inexperienced in-game regarding these big toys, but many IRL battles between carriers during WW2 were recorded and could offer some interesting answers to your question.
Supers and Dreads are not on the same scale. One is built to eat the other. Dreads can kill an unsupported super but if all things are equal supers are going to win.
Dreads and carriers are more comparable and when you are just looking at ship to ship combat have similar roles Carriers and HAW dreads are built to tax or overwhelm triage logi. where anti cap dreads are built to kill a FAX outright. (or carriers) Supers combine carriers and dreads together letting them melt sub caps or chew through capitals.
Eh… that would suggest super carriers (and their smaller cousins carriers) would always win and anti-cap dreadnaughts would be screwed, That would be the result that approximates WW2, which I assume wouldn’t be very interesting. A super carrier has flexibility in its fighter complement. So it could launch Firbolgs to kill a HAC, Equites when an enemy carrier is present, Mantises if it sees a Dread. Or shadows if the owner didn’t want topredos for some reason. For a dread, if you fit something like duel giga pulse lasers on a Revelation, that’s pretty much only good at shooting big stuff. If it’s only good at that one thing, game balance wise it probably should be either superior or at least cost efficient at that one thing than a generalist.
Of course, the dreadnaughts actually need to be in range to do anything.
Since the time of making the original post, I read a story of Dreadnaughts actually getting Theta Sig’s super capitals and they killed a few before the attackers’ bubbles faded and rescue came. This was apparently a victory for the attackers since their Dreadnaughts were easier to replace. I think the article was making a mispelling of Theta Squad, which IIRC is an Imperial standing fleet supposed to rescue friendlies who are attacked on their home turf, or maybe they’re unrelated. So I guess the answer to how dreads get in range is they cyno or warp in.