I never said that I admitted that there is no real need for the Light Carrier.
YOU said that because you are trying to reverse mind read and make yourself believe something that isn’t even wrong.
If I didn’t think there wasn’t a need for the Light Carrier then I wouldn’t have posted the idea to begin with. The real question is: when have you had an idea yourself?
I can tell you with pretty high certainty that CCP won’t view your idea as a good one as I’ve been here for long enough to have seen these kind of ideas before.
The same was said about:
Mining Barges
Wormholes
Faction War
Moon Mining
Citadels
Triglavian space
all ideas that were criticized you are now.
It doesn’t matter how long you have been playing Eve Online or not. The fact that you keep saying that you know for certainty that CCP won’t create a Light Carrier proves that you have an overriding low self esteem and simply fall in line because you don’t want to be ridiculed or laughed at.
I have been playing this game and many other games for longer than you have been alive and I can say for certain that the Light Carrier would fill a niche that High,Low and Null would benefit from greatly.
Besides you are just a bot account to begin with based on your continually use of the same the syntax over and over again.
Artificial Intelligence always fails are generating new input because it can only receive input that the programmer wants the AI to produce as the output.
The problem that kills your ship idea is that you are trying to change a game-mechanic by adding a new ship that won’t do anything to the game-mechanic you are trying to change. Your limited view on the game has lead to you focusing on a single thing in Eve and buffing your ship idea to counter that without thinking how it would affect the game-balance overall.
What niche would this fill in high? In low? Or in wormhole-space?
The easiest way to discredit yourself is to attack the person not the points they made. Thank you for showing just how bad your idea is.
The benefits that a Light Carrier would bring to the field in High, Low and Null Sec.
Alpha Clones could fly the Light Carrier
The Light Carrier could be used in High Sec to rat the belts, Anomalies, Ghost and Sleeper sites along with giving Pirate FOB and Incursion runners more options. The Light Carrier could also be used to deal with the NPC mining fleets which put a drain on mining operations in High Sec.
The Light Carrier could also be used to more rapidly dispose of Citadels.
In Low, Null Sec and W- Space along with Drifter space the Light Carrier would bring rapid deployment of defense forces at a cheaper price than Carriers and Dreads. Assault forces comprised of Light Carriers coupled with Force Aux ships would make assaulting systems more rapid and less expensive for Alliances.
5.Turbo Tanking Hot Squid Squad.
Assaulting W-Space systems with the Light Carrier would bring new PvP content into W-Space as the Light Carrier would be able to pass through wormholes from High Sec into W-Space as well as being used to launch assaults from W-Space into High, Low or Null.
Some drawbacks would be.
1.Alpha Clones flying a Light Carrier would have to use Skill Injectors to skill up to use it. The attributes for the Light Carrier flown by an Alpha Clone would be 75% its full potential until unlocked via a subscription using either real money or in game ISK.
2. A High Sec corporation fielding a Light Carrier In High Sec while not having any Citadels would become War Eligible.
3. Once a Light Carrier was purchased and made active by a High Sec corporation, active meaning that the Capsuleer boarded the Light Carrier in a station or a Citadel, the Capsuleer could not leave the corporation for at least one month from the date of boarding the Light Carrier.
4.Jesus didn’t like it.
5. Alpha Capsuleers could only fit T1 or Faction modules to the Light Carrier as well as being only able to use T1 or Faction Short Range Carrier Drones.
6.The Light Carrier could only use Acceleration Gates designed for it in High and Low Sec.
7.Riding down a bumpy bike trail with no handle bars, with no handle bars…or seat.
8.Could not use a Cyno in Low Sec…or High Sec for that matter…don’t even ask about W-Space.
9.Could only be docked in Citadels and not in an NPC station.
10.Cannot be tethered in High Sec.
11.Struhar
12. Could not use the Network Sensor Array in High Sec.
13. Could not use any cloaking device in phucking High Sec either.
14. Could use only one lunch tube in High Sec to launch its farmers from…Two tubes if Amish farmers are being launched from it…if this buggies a rocking don’t come a knocking because you don’t want a HOT DROP -o- CLOP lit on ya. <---- New bumper sticker for Amish buggies…IT’S HOT DROP -0- CLOP!.
15. Alpha Clones could not use a Clone Bay
16. Alpha Clones could not use Command Bursts.
17. Okay…you, you, you and you across the street.
18. Why is he still online?
19. Two Bee decided.
And yet again you buffed this thing. This is never going to be usable by alphas. You keep sabotaging your own idea by buffing it insanely. This is currently more powerfull than a normal carrier or even a battleship.
My version of the escort carrier suddenly seems like the most balanced idea ever…
No. If anything, a ship like this would be a T2 upgrade on a battleship (most likely the third one), an alpha would never be able to fly this.
Ratting belts? Really? Would you use a marauder to do that? It’s a waste of time, effort and resources. Any destroyer would be better to do that. Or a Venture.
I don’t think FOB or incursion runners would change their already existing doctrines, unless this new ship is objectively better than everything they currently use. But if it is, then it needs to be nerfed.
NPC mining fleets? Those were made to be difficult. Also, marauders.
Destroying hi-sec citadels would be an extremely specific niche.
I don’t know why low and null corps using capitals only, cruisers are much cooler, and can be rapidly deployed to defend or attack with.
W-space can also be attacked with literally anything else, and smaller ships are probably more efficient than a single big target to do that.
And there is an awful lot of drawbacks for this thing.
Smaller ships don’t have the firepower to bring citadels with in a timely manner. You have to have a large compliment of them to achieve the same firepower as a Light Carrier. Ten Light Carriers could slip into a wormhole and begin the attack on the Citadel, cloak up and wait until the next timer unlike a large fleet of battleships that could be use elsewhere too attack another Citadel.
So instead of one wormhole being attacked a wormhole alliance could attack two at the same time thus generating double the content.
Just so we’re clear here: drones and fighters don’t work on anything but M structures, they can’t handle POSs and anything with PD. I can’t tell if you understand that
That depends on a lot of things. Damage cap for “small” structures (like an Astrahaus) is (factoring resists) ~6k DPS, and figure ~19-20k DPS for mediums (I think Athanors?; large structures- like Keepstars are going to require a ton of effort to remove no matter what; I may have also mixed up some of the sizes in terms of where Citadels start/end so it might be medium/large/XL).
The thing is that in highsec you’re looking at one large structure- the Perimeter Keepstar owned and operated by TEST. So most of it is going to be smalls and mediums.
For smalls… you basically throw something cheap like a polarized Talos, Oracle, or bomber (optionally a polarized torpedoPhoon is also an option) if you want to be lazy, or you bring a Leshak if you want to see if you can get a fight.
In fact a pair of good PvP fit Leshaks (IE not doing some stupid like quad radsinks, something that’s only really useful for Incursions) get most of that damage cap pretty easily once they hit full spool- it takes ~2 minutes and if the structure is defended then full spool is something that might not be possible a lot, but hey part of the reason to use Leshaks is to see if you get a fight in the first place so that’s not a huge drawback.
Similarly if you really want to go all-out on an expensive mega-DPS platform then you can run polarized Vindicators.
Leshaks or polarized Vindis are probably around the same pricepoint that you’re going to be looking at compared to this goofy “light carrier” proposal of yours, and they both:
already exist
are actually good at the job
do not introduce a migraine-inducing micromanagement function on top of the already nigh-incomprehensible fighter control mechanics (from the outside looking in as a non-carrier pilot at least)
Leshaks in particular- like most of the Triglavian ships in fact- have a surprisingly low mass for their size. It’s not quite as crazy as the SoE Nestor (which IIRC is roughly cruiserweight in terms of mass), but it’s a pretty significant difference compared to most other battleships.
A quad DDA carrier with three FSUs is probably looking at ~3k DPS. Assuming we split the difference (because I’m not entirely sure how to interpet the OP “45% of a regular carrier DPS” statement and whether it’s a 45% loss in DPS or if the valuation is set as 45% of regular carrier DPS) at 1500 DPS… well we’ve run into a problem.
Which is that all the existing “restricted” (either due to in-game ‘law’ like highsec and capitals or due to transit mass like in wormholes) options are all able to much more cheaply hit that level of DPS (particularly if you’re structure bashing where application is basically irrelevant), or are able to exceed that level of DPS for similar levels of investment.
As an example polarized Hecates are ~1k DPS and generally less than 100 million, while polarized Talos are ~1.9k DPS and less than 200 million. Due to the low cost (and good T1 insurance in the case of the Talos) they’re easily scalable if you have friends and easily replaceable if you don’t expect opposition/defenders and some show up.
If you want to go for blingy polarized fits if you expect no opposition, for sub-billion ISK values a torpedo Rattle will dump 2.2k DPS and a similar Vindicator will hit 2500 DPS. Yes yes these are thinly tanked polarized fits that have no business getting shot at… but a fairly robustly tanked Leshak with only two damage mods can spool to 2k DPS and still have the room for utility/tank/mobility to be very dangerous to anything that decides to pick a fight with it.
At present the likely pricepoint (and SP investment) of these light carriers of yours basically means that you might as well fly Leshaks, because they’ll do the job just as well with less vulnerability to anti-drone/-fighter tactics (which are a notable issue for larger structures that incorporate an AoE damage “point defense” effect).
If you’re sieging into a wormhole, then there’s the possibility that the locals have built capitals inside the hole- and you may not be able to get caps of your own into the hole. But that’s okay, because Leshaks (do you see a theme here?) have already carved out a bloodied reputation for being excellent whaling ships for small gangs, and ragerolling a Leshak gang into the target hole is certainly possible if you’re at the organizational level where you are deliberately targeting WH occupants who are likely to have capital assets.
Similarly if you’re already at the organization level to slip multiple battleship-sized assets into a target hole to go bash a Citadel then you can probably economize the time of those assets by leaving some scanning doods inside the hole (alt status optional) and then if you need to leave you just rageroll back in. Or since it’s equally likely that there would be multiple Citadels in the hole, you economize your structure bash group’s time by having them just go hit everything instead of only one thing.
Considering that these light carriers are actually a bit behind Leshak performance (and far behind the economy polarized options, either in terms of scalability/affordability or performance), I don’t see why a fleet of polarized ships and/or Leshaks couldn’t do the exact same thing of hitting the timers and then finding something else to bash while leaving a scout to keep an eye on things.
Like this idea seems like it’s supposed to be more scalable and flexible for this role but it’s absolutely not because it does a worse job than polarized econobash setups or Leshaks (or presumably comparable brawly armor battleships like “battle” Vindicators or Marauders).
I was looking at the Orca and can see a Light Carrier being built from its hull.
Light Carrier Characteristics - Base characteristics would also include race specific defenses and two high slot weapon slots for race specific Medium weapon types.
5% optimal range bonus for Medium Hybrid Weapons
10% tracking speed bonus
Light Carrier Bonuses (per skill level)
5% bonus to Light Carrier Drone damage or 5% bonus to Drone velocity
2.5% bonus to Light Carrier Drone hit points or 2.5% bonus to Repair Drone amount
2.5% bonus to Light Carrier Drone optimal range or 2.5% bonus to Drone EWar (race specific)
Role Bonus
Can fit Networked Sensor Array or
Can fit Fighter Support Unit
Can fit two Command Burst modules
25% bonus to Core and Combat Scanner Probe strength
10 + bonus to Relic and Data Analyzer virus strength
100% bonus to Tractor Beam range
75% bonus to Tractor Beam velocity
Okay, so first off, I think we need a clear design goal as to what the point of the light carrier should be.
If the goal is to bring a limited form of carrier fighter mechanics to a wider variety of regions and a wider range of players (assuming that this platform requires SP investment roughly comparable to a T2 battleship with T2 equipment), then a lot of what you’ve delineated is redundant, unrelated, or outright detrimental to the job.
If it’s some other goal then we need to nail down which attributes contribute to the goal, and what doesn’t. Unfortunately without knowing the actual design goal you have in mind (beyond nebulous “anti-ganking” which… basically anything can really do because anti-ganking is reliant on Crimewatch mechanics and not ship mechanics), this comes off as basically trying to multitask to many jobs on the same platform.
It will be critiqued as such.
Okay I suppose that’s a passable observation and it’d certainly be an interesting way to broaden the ORE lineup too, to provision a new ICS variant that’s designed to provide “fighter cover” to a mining operation.
I’m not sure how useful it would actually be in practice outside of simply being a much fightier Orca (maybe we see a rise in roaming battle carrier-Orcas or something, which would at least be entertaining).
So… I’m guessing just “armor vs shield” tank and the relative speed/agility values that tend to trend between the different races or something? This bit doesn’t make a lot of sense given the bonuses you further delineate.
But… why? What even is the purpose of this? Particularly with the minimal bonuses you’ve sketched out these two hardpoints will be basically worthless and used for almost anything else over two poorly/minimally bonused gun/launcher systems.
Like I could see some (weak) arguments for a special exception to allow a bonused Defender Launcher (which would be somewhat interesting, since a Light Carrier would probably be very vulnerable to bomb waves by comparison to regular carriers), but… what is the reason for a pair of cruiser guns that will be basically useless?
That’s a lot of different jobs that this thing is designed to support from the outset. EVE being a sandbox technically an Orca already does or has been used for most of these jobs, being a preferred “mobile home” for nomadic wormhole living for example- and the Battle Rorqual has vastly eclipsed the Battle Orca in terms of how capable and entertaining such a choice is, but the Orca was never actually envisioned as being used as an actual mobile base for wormhole living, nor as a platform from which to go and fight other players.
This seems like a really big misstep in terms of this design of this concept.
As mentioned the medium weapon shtick is basically “wut” and might as well be literally worthless. This also seems to indicate that you expect for there to be both racial and non-racial “light carrier” skills which… brings up some questions about how exactly the skilltrain/skill requirements for such a ship actually work.
Wut.
Seriously.
Wut.
Okay to actually break this down I don’t remotely understand what you’re trying to communicate with this because of the “OR” statement that’s getting thrown in on every line (also the notation regarding Drones when this is supposedly a Fighter platform?); like is this some kind of magical modeswap or is it for sub-variants or…
Yeah I think “wut” covered that pretty decently actually.
The NSA is already a hugely touchy balance problem on actual carriers, and even more so when you start looking at it in comparison to battleship lock times vs an NSA’d carrier.
It’s actually absurd (granted some battleships just have inexplicably truly godawful scan res like the Scorpion Navy but still).
And this is supposed to be remotely balanced?
Is this supposed to be plural or just noting that FSU restrictions are basically a case of “light carriers, regular carriers, and supercarriers can fit one or more FSU modules”? Syntax is important.
Otherwise I don’t fundamentally see an issue with what could be viewed (crudely) as babby’s first carrier getting access to a module which is critical in function to the ship (IE, FSUs have big effects on actual fighters).
Well it fits with its Orca origins I guess. I’m not entirely sure this is a great idea but it’s at least consistent with the other capitals and pseudo-capitals (like the Orca) that are intended for more flexible usage beyond “is freighter”.
I’d probably restrict it to one burst though.
Wut.
Okay, really, why do we need a bunch of fairly significant exploration bonuses on this thing (mainly the probe strength but also the analyzer virus strength)? Not only that, but if you already have an SMA and you’re cocky/confident enough to straight up drive this thing into an exploration site… then why not just carrier a hackfit Imicus (okay maybe not an Imicus because it is beyond hideous) or Astero or Covops frigate and then eject it from the SMA, board it, hack the cans, and then throw the loot into the fleet hangar and the hackbote into the SMA?
At this point it’s practically a useless bonus because most people won’t bother actually using it that way (understandably as well; the time cost of safing up, scanning, then ejecting the hackbote, warping off, hacking, coming back, unloading cargo to the fleet hangar and loading up the hackbote into the SMA before boarding this thing when finished is probably still less than warping the Light Carrier to the hack site, slowboating to all the cans, and then leaving).
The tractor beam stuff is… consistent with its origins as an Orca I guess, but there’s not really a clear reason as to why it should have those beyond “it used to be an Orca”.
So there’s probably about 900 things I’d have to dig into on Sisi that would probably involve some skill extraction/injection to respec my main to carriers (I’ve probably got the SP to do so it’s just all in subcaps and has been… literally the entirety of my EVE career), but I’m pretty sure that squadron sizes are not defined by ship limits- even the Guristas capital/supercapital ships which get unique access to fighter squads- the Caiman dread and Komodo titan- don’t have defined squadron sizes like this.
Which leads me to think that it may not be possible- or simply practical- to artificially alter the squadron size.
It also makes me question why you didn’t just… restrict the squadron quantity? That is to say, why not just have a single fighter tube instead of 3 reduced-strength squadrons? That seems like a much more elegant solution to the problem, and also a more practical solution particularly given the roughly 900,000 other different things you think it should also do.
Granted I might also consider dropping the total bay capacity to ~20k instead of 25k but that’s just me.
So a fair bit less than an Orca. Surprisingly this is decently reasonable, though depending on the actual design goals the cargo/fleet hangar may need to be cut down quite a bit; since there is the question of “is it a light carrier or a repurposed Orca?” does kind of come to mind when reviewing the Orca’s bays and then comparing that to actual carriers.
Uh… so is that the total raw HP or just the structure, because this is actually more than almost every non-supercapital in the entire game has for raw structure HP. Like only the Rorqual and supercaps (supercarriers and Titans both) have more than 175,000 raw structure HP.
In fact that’s nearly as much as most carriers have in raw HP across all protection layers- structure, armor, and shield. That’s… really, ah, quite insane if you actually expect people to agree that this notional light carrier of yours should have that much raw HP and still get to go to highsec and do as it pleases there.
The volume also seems weirdly large but volume doesn’t come up very often to begin with since that’s ~2.5-3 times as much volume assembled as an actual Orca let alone full carriers like the Thanatos or Nidhoggur. But okay whatever volume like I said doesn’t come up all that often.
The mass is also super weird though. Like sure it’s half the mass of an actual carrier (roughly speaking) but it’s still about 4 times as much as an actual Orca which seems very strange sicne this is supposedly an Orca sized ship and Orcas are big and all but they aren’t quite “can grow to four times the mass and 3 times the volume with no discernible change in model size/dimensions”.
Also part of your previous argument(s) supporting the concept is that it’d be used for at least crossing wormhole chains to carry out structure bashes, but with a 600 million kilogram mass nobody will use it for that; you can easily squeeze 6 battleships (or 5 and change in random supporting assets like logi, ewar, scanning, or links) for the same mass cost, and probably fit through a lot more wormholes considering that wormholes have two mass limits: the max single transit (IE you must be this small to use this wormhole) and the total transit mass (IE only this many ships and no more).
If you want to use Leshaks (the… not so much challenger as “already choked out all the competition and now owns the top spot” option) Then you can very nearly get ten Leshaks through a wormhole for the same 600 million kg mass (I did say that Leshaks, like all Triglavian ships, have oddly low mass for their hull types; Leshaks are ~63 million kgs vs the usual 98-105 million kg tonnage of most T1/T2/faction battleships, though still nothing on the 20 million kilo Nestor).
Even battle Orcas are more mass efficient than this proposal as presented.
I… I just don’t understand. What is the actual goal behind this concept? Is it the ultimate do-everything ship (that doesn’t even do everything well enough to justify itself compared to alternatives?!)? Some kind of malformed monstrosity that pretends to multitask? An introductory platform for the extant fighter mechanics?
If you read the beginning of the thread I decided to get away from Carrier based fighters and instead use normal drones and Light Carrier based drones, hence the Or.
Light Carrier based drones would be drones that have a primary weapon such as a blaster or railgun with a secondary weapon such as a heavy rocket.
The role of the Light Carrier is a multi-role Light Carrier that is able to travel into Low or Null and perform exploratory missions on its own while providing its own support in the form of Light Carrier based drones.
At 400 mil per Leshak that is over 4 billion ISK alone for the ships not to mention the modules and ammo which could well run into the 15 to 20 billion ISK range for the Leshak fleet.
A Light Carrier at around 2 billion fully fit could stay on station far longer than the Leshak could which would have to have a support ship on standby as well for ammo thus reducing the number of Leshaks able to pass through the wormhole that would reduce the Leshak Fleet’s over all performance.
The Light Carrier would be able transport up to 2 Navy Ospreys and an assault frigate or two thus allowing a Light Carrier Fleet of 10 to bring an additional 20 to 40 combat ships to the fight opposed to only ten Leshaks.
One of the theory’s behind the Light Carrier design is that it would be able to scan down Ghost sites and remain at the Ghost site while performing its hacking role. Along with dropping cheaper T1 and T2 hacking ships to support the hacking role of the Light Carrier. The more Ghost site products on the market reduces their cost allowing for more use of them that provides PvP pilots with cheaper modules that are top line to fit their ships with.
The main issue here is not even the mass efficiency. With that mass this ship would be basically locked to the cap-holes, so there is no use for it in WHs at all as you can just as easily fit a carrier in there