I would like to take this opportunity to put forward an idea, that while may initially be met with revile and anger, is actually a sound evolution of the covert play style. And will introduce new tactics and strategies for offensive and defensive play. I introduce to you, Stealth Heavy Bombers.
Stealth Heavy Bombers.
Destroyer Hull with less agility, similar to T1 ehp so a “glass canon.”
4 Torpedo Launchers with a ceiling of 1500dps heated. Light bombers can hit 1150 dps with heat and polarized launchers.
Two Bomb or Heavy Bomb Launchers (Can use all existing bombs as well as Heavy Bombs, which are focused damage to capitals and supercapitals)
Powergrid and CPU to comfortably fit 4 Torp launchers, two bomb launchers, prop mod, damage mods etc.
Covert Ops Bonus
5% bonus to racial Bomb type damage
15% bonus to racial Torpedo type damage
Racial Destroyer bonus
10% bonus to Torpedo explosion velocity and flight time
15% bonus to Torpedo max velocity (means they have to get slightly closer than Light Bombers)
Role Bonus
99.7% reduction in Torpedo Launcher powergrid requirements.
50% reduction in Cloaking Devices CPU requirement
No targeting delay after Cloaking Device deactivation
Can fit Covert Ops Cloaking Device, Covery Cynosural Field Generator, Bomb Launcher and Heavy Bomb Launcher.
Cloak reactivation delay reduced to 20 seconds.
Heavy Bombs
Focused area of 1m, effectively they can only be used on Capitals.
Travel 20km once launched (introduce slightly different attributes so if players aren’t on the ball with what they’re firing, they’re not effective)
Damage wise, I’m not sure what would be balanced here, but as they are focused like focused void bombs, it would stand to reason they would do considerable damage to a large hull. This would need to be a balanced amount that isn’t OP, but is useful.
All constructive feedback welcomed. If you’re going to shoot holes in the idea, at least come up with a balanced recommendation, rather than shrieking OP.
Bombs (as they currently implemented) are designed to do significant AOE damage to several subcaps a once. On top of that the AOE damage of bombs means you are limited to launching only about 8 at a time before your bombs start destroying others launched by your fleet.
The idea i’m getting from your heavy bomb proposal is a single fire heavy damage shot that has no AOE. Because of this lack of AOE the only limit to the number of heavy bombs that could be launched at once is the number of heavy bombers in a formation. I can already see formations heavy bombers de-cloaking, firing enough bombs to take out a fax, warping out, waiting to reload, cloak, and repeating. That seems a bit OP to me.
Also, would defender missiles be able to take out a heavy bombs? Or would you need something like a “Heavy Defender Missile”, if so what would be able to fit those? Besides Heavy Anti-capital fighters already kind of fulfill this role and do a very effective job at it.
OP, why would I ever fly a regular bomber with 3 torps/1 bomb, when I could fly a heavy bomber with 4 torps and (I assume I read that right… but even if it’s “or” the argument stands) 2 bomb launchers?
You say they’re capital killers, but they’re better against subcaps than regular bombers. What’s the purpose of a stealth bomber, when you add the heavy stealth bomber?
The only way for these to be remotely balanced would be to give the heavy stealth bombers a bonus to be able to take BLOPS Bridges but no CovOps cloak, be significantly less mobile than regular stealth bombers and have less range than stealth bombers.
The ability of a ship to take a black ops bridge is pretty much dictated by whether or not it can currently fit a covert cloak. Hence why asteros and strats can bridge, but a t3c without the covert reconfig subsystem cannot.
Black Ops themselves are the exception here.
A more fitting rule would be: Can either fit a covert ops cloak (Blops can’t), or fit a covert ops cyno (Astero and Stratios can’t).
I would take stealth away from them and make them somewhat like historical naval torpedo boats-- fragile and vulnerable but capable of taking out a battleship thousands of times their tonnage if they get lucky.
The niche is ensuring that fielding your supercaps is never a risk-free decision, because even a small alliance has some effective means of self-defense. And it encourages large fleets to make sure their caps are properly supported by sub-capital ships, because it would be hard to run a lockable anything through the gauntlet, and smaller DPS ships would have fast enough lock time to lock and destroy the large torpedoes before they impact.
Right now there’s a real dearth of both effective defense against heavy capital for people that can’t field a roughly equal number, and a lack of reason to have smaller combat ships on the grid unless they’re specialists like your tacklers.
If you look at how the cap new balance scheme is made, you will realize this is actually by design. If they didn’t want carrier to have the current efficiency at dealing with sub-caps, they would not have made fighter as good at dealing with them as they currently are.
I like the idea of subcaps that can fight capitals effectively without an enormous blob. This is different from the most common idea: T2 attack battlecruisers, and as I look at it, it looks pretty well balanced.
The main issue I see with it that capitals with MWDs will still be VERY hard to hit. Rather than a bomb, maybe a single large torpedo, but that torpedo can be intercepted by a defender missile. This way you can still fight things like MWDing carriers or drifting dreads.
Just drop it to one or two torp launchers. Two bomb launchers.
Maybe a new ammo based off EFPs. Its big and slow so it deflects off smaller ships that move more than caps to cover the not so effective action against subcaps.
Not sure if sarcasm but yes you can be impressed. It was a realy genius fight and it was very close … we both are close to run out of cap booster and ammo but he run out of structure first i will never forget the 20 man in local and only a caracal want to help this dude
I just want to say that capitals not are that strong as anyone think but you need to know what you can do and what your capital enemy can do snd then its ‘easy’ to kill a capital with a very small grp or maybe solo
but yes you can be impressed. It was a realy genius fight and it was very close … we both are close to run out of cap booster and ammo but he run out of structure first 
i will never forget the 20 man in local and only a caracal want to help this dude 