Ship type idea...

Yes, it would be very good addition to this excellent game. Always dreaming about something like Tiger's Claw\Concordia from WC series.

Believe me, I would love to play with Carrier class ships in this game.

it only makes sense to have carrier type ships, space is just a big ocean

Also supporting the ideas of carriers are Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. (Surprised that one wasn't mentioned!) Fighters would, militarilty speaking, an excellent tool to use. Logistics and life support might end up as issues, but having the ability to deliver precision strikes, to have a full array of weapons (Eg one fighter with Mass Drivers and one with Beam Weapons; it'd help a lot when it comes to engaging enemies with good armor, for example.), and provide the enemy with significantly more targets.

I support carriers!

Ultimately, carriers would likely be there for a couple of these benefits:
#1 - Resources for maintaining a fighter or other ship in the hangar should be NIL. You use the carrier to transport your fighters and thus, preserve resources.
#2 - Possibly the carrier might be armored heavier to transport the fighters to a location.
#3 - Carrier should potentially have more substantial engines which can rapidly move fighters somehwere they might otherwise not be able to reach.

If we can do these things then having a carrier class ship would make sense.

One of the combat starbase upgrades is mini-fighters, that add +1 beam attack to everything in the area. From this we can infer that maybe all the larger ships have fighters, they just aren't explicitly put on the screen. It has also been mentioned that tiny ships still seem to be kind of large, like maybe the size of corellian corvettes or other small patrol craft.

-Dewar

I did mention this early, using battlestar galactica as an example, along with the mini fighters tech for starbases. I fully support carriers. it shouldnt be too hard (saying this with no knowledge of how hard any of it is haha) to add a tech to research for fighters, and then in the ship design screen you get a "fighter bay" like the colony or troop pods, that you can add onto the ship. that way you could not arm the ship with real weapons but have the fighters as a 2 missle attack or whatever you might want to have the fighters armed with. theoretically if you take the tiny hull and the huge hull, shouldnt you be able to use your logistics and create a fleet of tiny ships within a huge ship? that would help keep it balanced and keep the carriers from becoming too over the top powerful. anyway, i really hope stardock looks into this, a lot of people are interested and with their new 3d engine and cool looking battles, it would make for some awesome ship to ship fighting. so long story short.... GIVE US CARRIERS STARDOCK!

Well, I'll say I don't think carriers are a good idea. Most of the discussion around fighters has basically been an end-run around the currently designed weapons systems.

You're *supposed* to have to commit to a certain weapons-mix on your ships. Being able to quickly swap out beam-fighters for gun-fighters (ah, Starfire) would make the whole idea of specialization pointless - no one would run anything but carriers, the flexibility to target your opponent's weakest defenses is too powerful. Now, if it cost as much as a ship-upgrade to change fighters... well then, that'd work, but then you haven't really changed anything but graphics then.

The only way I can see it working is if fighters were considered a fourth weapon "type", with their own unique defense. But at that point, I'd question whether you've really added anything to the game other than "cool-factor". Mind you, cool-factor is nice. But considering that you've just added another complexity for the AI to try to keep up with, I don't think the cool-factor outweighs the down side.

A tiny class hull is roughly twice the size of, say..an F-16 AFAIK...

I dont think that carriers will make it in, But..There is oppertunity for a mod.

A modder could cheat a little bit and create a weapon, And that weapon will be a small craft hangar. (Roughly size 30)

I'd assume it possible to create a weapon effect to give the illusion of a light fighter coming out of the weapon apature, Moving in, Shooting and returning to base..

And do not forget the one-season-only-series 'Space Above and Beyond' with the 'USS Saratoga' as a space fleet carrier

Carriers are so popular in sci-fi (Star trek notwithstanding) because naval warfare is used as a parallel and carriers have been the primary focus of naval warfare since WWII.

One way of incorporating a carrier idea (this has been discussed elsewhere on the forums so its not my idea) is to introduce modules that improve the speed and range of any other ship (perhaps limiting the hull size of these ships) in the same fleet as the "carrier". This would allow you to build fleets with one large "carrier" withe ppor weapons but good armour and these support modules, combined with a horde of small ships with good wepons and armour (for their size) but no extra engines or life support. While not strictly a carrier, these support ships would function tactically very much like carriers in the game.

Carriers are so popular in sci-fi (Star trek notwithstanding) because naval warfare is used as a parallel and carriers have been the primary focus of naval warfare since WWII.

One way of incorporating a carrier idea (this has been discussed elsewhere on the forums so its not my idea) is to introduce modules that improve the speed and range of any other ship (perhaps limiting the hull size of these ships) in the same fleet as the "carrier". This would allow you to build fleets with one large "carrier" withe ppor weapons but good armour and these support modules, combined with a horde of small ships with good wepons and armour (for their size) but no extra engines or life support. While not strictly a carrier, these support ships would function tactically very much like carriers in the game.

Perhaps a module that takes a lot of space which allows a ship to share its total Life Support range with all other ships in a fleet with it. If it has no weapons and decent armor, it will be the last ship that enemies try to kill, therefore, a Carrier is a completely viable idea.

More than just allowing carriers, this allows true 'support' ships, rather like refuel/rearm ships in a naval task force. It sounds very logical to me that space fleets should have supply ships that allow them to extend their range beyond what their internal stores provide.

Going further, perhaps a component that allows its speed rating to be used for all the other ships in the fleet. Another essential for the 'carrier' concept, but also an interesting conceptual ship that would create some sort of 'warp bubble' to help transport an entire fleet.

Now, the balancing... First, these ships will have a pretty high logistics score. Secondly, these components will take up a lot of space. Meaning, that second component that allows a ship's speed to be used for its entire fleet, would disallow it mouning five or six engines and being ridiculously fast; it might mount two or three at most if it foregoes defenses altogether

So why then would players use this tactic? Late in the game, you could make very viable Tiny and Small ships by forgoing engines and life support and just mounting tons of armor and weapons (or just weapons). But, right now this is more of a defensive tactic and a desperate one at that, who wants to wait ages for a bunch of little ships that'll die fairly fast to get to the combat theater? With a carrier, they can be transported at good speed and at long range.

Logically, all other ships in the task force would want to escort their carrier / supply ship so it doesn't make sense for the carriers to get killed first. Thankfully, it would also be nonsensical in the current design for enemy ships to go after the carriers first. Especially if they're using a non-cargo hull, and they're loaded with armor, they're the LAST target the enemy would go after.. they don't want to hammer away at this armored barge while fightercraft are raking them with withering fire. It becomes viable to lead the entire taskforce, carrier and fighters, into battle. edit: Just want to point out I just noticed the poster above me said pretty much what I said just not as longwindedly. Sorry.

Brillig,

Let me ask you this -- what does every major navy in the world have? What are their navies centered around?

With those questions out of the way, let me clarify my ideas a bit. First of all, I'm not suggesting or proposing that the carrier allow for fighter modification -- for weapons changes while the carrier is underway. Fighters on board the carrier would be limited to their current layouts. Yes, it would provide players an incentive to be more diverse with their fighter layouts, but if you limit a carrier to the logistics limit in fighters, I think that isse would be marginalized.

Let me also clarify my ideas a bit:

1) The number of fighters a carrier could carry (fighter here referring to the tiny or maybe small hull size) would be dependent on the current logistics size researched by the player
2) A "fighter bay" module would be available for construction taking up enough space on a cargo hull or whatever such that only a minimum number of weapons would be available to be added afterwards

If these ideas were unacceptable, I'd go with the mini-fighters ideas mentioned above.

Truth be told, I honestly can't see why, in the future, the carrier would not remain an important part of fleet strategy. Fighters wouldn't be powerful enough to wipe out large-scale capital ships easily, but I'm sure that they'd pack enough of a punch. Throw in some anti-fighter tech for good measure, and you'd be set.