What is the point of any Carrier but the Raptor?

[Imperial Good]

The I turrets are almost totally useless against so much firepower.

The I easily has 17k DPS Of turrets of its own, which are also a lot more accurate than Plasma. I can assure you that a player flown I could effortlessly kill any NPC Raptor.

[Redwyrm]

You are still talking about what only the player can do. I don't see it happening without your direct control.

Well, i don't see reason leaving Raptor in NPC's hands. It's practically a flagship.

Although now i am curious if NPC can survive toe to toe Raptor vs Xenon I.
Alas i am done with X4 for now to test it. Maybe one day later, after Egosoft finally hear reasoning and boost ingame economy again.

[GCU Grey Area]

Personally prefer any other carrier than the Raptor.

It's expensive to build & I simply don't need a carrier with that many guns - my carriers stay at the back with the auxiliaries. My carriers just need to have sufficient firepower to fend off the occasional S or M fighter which gets past the rest of the fleet. Most of the time they never fire a single shot.

I also do almost all of my fighting in-sector & when playing as a Split always hated the inordinate length of time it takes to launch fighters from a Raptor. Most other carriers can launch all of their fighters in a matter of seconds & they're moving off at full speed almost instantly. Not so with the Raptor. Any fighters in internal storage first need to use the deck lifts before they can even take off. Then they all need to fly down almost the full length of the Raptor at 50m/s before they can leave the Raptor & finally get up to full speed. Entire process can take well over a minute.

In my last game (playing as a Split) I only used Raptors for my OOS gate defence fleets. For all the important fleets, which would generally be operating in-sector (i.e. station demolition & ship capture fleets) I went to the trouble of stealing several Colossuses from Argon Prime, just so I wouldn't have to put up with the incredibly slow fighter launches from a Raptor. This was particularly important for my ship capture fleet. My marines were carried by a dozen Cobras - no way in hell I was going to wait for them all to launch through a single M dock.

[Redwyrm]

Personally prefer any other carrier than the Raptor.

Point is, Raptor is not a carrier. It full-fledge dreadnought... with some fighter launch capabilities
It main strength is 108 plasma turrets, with immense DPS. And since you invest everything in plasma turrets, for most effective anti-capital and anti-station DPS, fighters are just needed to deal with other fighters (and corvettes) enemy throws at you. Frankly 28 chimeras more than capable decimate anything sub-capital enemy will dear to put against you.

Think of Raptor as of Star Wars' Super Star Destroyers. Those also carried lots and lot of fighters. But no one really called them carriers. Again, mainly because they posses immense firepower on their own.

[GCU Grey Area]

It main strength is 108 plasma turrets, with immense DPS. And since you invest everything in plasma turrets, for most effective anti-capital and anti-station DPS...

Wait - you use it against stations? Doesn't it just get torn apart by L Plasma turrets? Even a Raptor's going to be seriously outgunned by defence platforms (e.g. this one:https://www.dropbox.com/s/npwt9i2ny53l6 ... 1.jpg?dl=0). Not really seeing the benefit of using a Raptor, which has to fly into turret range in order to shoot at stations, rather than a fleet of destroyers which doesn't.

[Imperial Good]

Point is, Raptor is not a carrier. It full-fledge dreadnought... with some fighter launch capabilities
It main strength is 108 plasma turrets, with immense DPS. And since you invest everything in plasma turrets, for most effective anti-capital and anti-station DPS, fighters are just needed to deal with other fighters (and corvettes) enemy throws at you. Frankly 28 chimeras more than capable decimate anything sub-capital enemy will dear to put against you.

Think of Raptor as of Star Wars' Super Star Destroyers. Those also carried lots and lot of fighters. But no one really called them carriers. Again, mainly because they posses immense firepower on their own.

I think you have the roles inverted. Use the Raptor for anti-fighter with full flak loadout, and then use the fighters for anti capital and station. Nothing beats blowing up XL ships in a few seconds while also stripping them of all their surface elements thanks to the power of HOP Blast Mortars. DPS? Well >200K odd think...

My video series for Split Vendetta showed this in action. A ZYA defence station destroyed in a few minutes without the raptor firing a single shot at it. Not all its 100 ships were anti-capital as well, with most of them being anti fighter.

[kobayashimaru]

We can just go on and on here inventing excuses why something is this way or that way, but the truth is rather simple- Egosoft needed a "wow ship", an OP, cool looking ship to boost the sales of the DLC. The other carriers are worthless compared to Raptor. Period. We can try to ease our minds by inventing silly explanations as to why other carriers are still viable, but it's all moot.
Same is with Asgard, but this time other races don't even have a ship of that class so there's nothing to compare it to.
I wonder will there ever be a DLC that will bring all the vanilla races up to par with rhe DLC races, at least after the Boron with their own OP ships come out of course. You could even make a nice little story out of it, like with M3+ ships in X3- the other races saw how effective the Split and Terran battleships were so they went and designed their own dreadnoughts.
PS. Does anyone ever uses Phoenixes or Behemoths, at least for any other reason besides pure whim?

[GCU Grey Area]

PS. Does anyone ever uses Phoenixes or Behemoths, at least for any other reason besides pure whim?

In my last game, although I was playing as Split, I went to the trouble of stealing a couple of dozen Behemoths for my demolition fleets (along with several Colossuses & Nomads). Behemoths are quite simply a lot better at destroying stations than Rattlesnakes, particularly if most of those stations are going to be Argon (my main enemy in that particular game) & therefore loaded with lots of ARG L Plasma turrets with a significantly longer range than Rattlesnake's main guns. Did amuse me to blow up Argon stations with their own ships, however mostly did it because I didn't fancy having my warships under constant & prolonged fire while they were still getting into position to shoot back. Rattlesnake's shields are rubbish, didn't think they'd do well in such a situation. Did have quite a few Rattlesnakes but I kept them well away from any stations, mostly guarding gates into ZYA territory.

[Alexei_Gladkikh]

To be true, power of any carrier is immense and they should not operate alone.
The only time when you need your fighters docked are when you travel. I never understand why you need to launch them fast? So long as carrier has capacity to repair/refill them that good enough.
After arriving to sector you going to fight, launch your fighters.

So, the only time when you need to do it fast is if you jump into fleet. Well send your capitals first them.

When I choose carrier, my biggest criteria was speed. I wanted carrier that does not slow down my fleet.

[jlehtone]

PS. Does anyone ever uses Phoenixes or Behemoths, at least for any other reason besides pure whim?

SCA Destroyers are the cheapest that there is. They are Phoenixes and Behemoths. Dozen Phoenixes at a Gate do slow down Xenon flow.

Any Carrier can bring enough interceptors to traffic control. To demand Raptors for such menial chores would be a whim.

[Zaemar2017]

PS. Does anyone ever uses Phoenixes or Behemoths, at least for any other reason besides pure whim?

Has anyone ever used Phoenixes? They're a terrible design. I use Behemoths all the time. They make excellent flak platforms for dealing with drone swarm.

[jlehtone]

Yes.

Used for what?

They have superior design features, but could benefit from a tail turret.

[Warnoise]

It is simply unabalanced. Like Teladi combat ships being objectively the worst in all classes. Raptor is better than any other carriers. The extra M launching pads the other carriers have has 0 effect on the battle. M are useless in big fights anyway since they always tend to die the first.

Also at the stag you can buy a carrier, a 100M or 60M wont make that much of a difference.

[cranium1]

So how is the Terran Tokyo? I just want to roleplay with Terran only fleet.

[GCU Grey Area]

Has anyone ever used Phoenixes?

Yes. Did a Teladi game a while ago, so used Phoenixes exclusively as my destroyers. They're OK, main guns are a bit weak but they can do the job (eventually). On a more positive note they are quite durable ships (decent shields & hull strength) & are essentially immune to being immobilised by a single torp to the engines (unlike all the other destroyers).

[TKz]

So how is the Terran Tokyo? I just want to roleplay with Terran only fleet.

I built two of them yesterday. They work well, but are not really powerful (turrets are barely enough to defend against a few squads). Shielding is great though.
But the biggest problem is ... 58 S ships only (I almost don't use M ships). The only great thing is that they are really easy to build (like all Terran ships), it costs a lot less to build a Terran shipyard than a commonwealth shipyard.

As I don't use carriers in direct combat (even Raptor), it's equivalent to half a raptor (but not half the price unfortunately).

[Redwyrm]

My video series for Split Vendetta showed this in action. A ZYA defence station destroyed in a few minutes without the raptor firing a single shot at it. Not all its 100 ships were anti-capital as well, with most of them being anti fighter.

If you really talking about few minutes, you clearly over exaggerate those "200k DPS", there clearly some bottleneck you not taking into account. Plasma-raptor usually taking care of standard Xenon defense platform in roughly 5 minutes. And that's real 17k DPS... actually could be more, but your really would benefit of equalizing range of Split large plasma turrets, and Argon medium plasma turrets. Meaning you would go with max DPS for large plasma, but rather range improvement for medium plasma.

What i trying to say, would your 200k DPS be true, you'd rather be able to kill station in about 25 seconds...

[Imperial Good]

If you really talking about few minutes, you clearly over exaggerate those "200k DPS", there clearly some bottleneck you not taking into account. Plasma-raptor usually taking care of standard Xenon defense platform in roughly 5 minutes. And that's real 17k DPS... actually could be more, but your really would benefit of equalizing range of Split large plasma turrets, and Argon medium plasma turrets. Meaning you would go with max DPS for large plasma, but rather range improvement for medium plasma.

What i trying to say, would your 200k DPS be true, you'd rather be able to kill station in about 25 seconds...

And as I said, not all the fighters were equipped for anti-capital with most of them being equipped for anti-fighter as this was a general use and experimental carrier.

No point really guessing as there is a video...
https://youtu.be/u16WHi3wvNA?t=3187
At 53:00 the fighters are launched. This does not count towards the damage time as this is all preparation for the attack.
At 53:55 first damage is done to defence station. Fighters still launching from the Raptor so most are not even in position yet.
At 55:00 first modules destroyed.
At 56:20 station destroyed.

It takes 1 minute from the first damage until first module is destroyed. The station then lasts 1 and a half minutes from then until complete destruction. From this we can conclude that if all the fighters were anti capital (most were not) and arrived at the same time then the station could easily be destroyed in under 2 minutes. I highly doubt an all Plasma Raptor can kill it with anywhere near this speed.

Here is another video showing a Zeus be destroyed in a few seconds.
https://youtu.be/XL8CmAdbtEI?t=750
At 12:40 the first shot lands.
At 12:50 the Zeus is destroyed. 2 seconds were lost due to me pausing as I could not believe the damage being done.

This DPS is comparable with a continuous main battery fire from the Asguard, which can also destroy a Zeus in a few seconds. Like above this was only with a fraction of the carrier filled with anti-capital fighters, it would have been even faster if all were.

[Midnitewolf]

The other carriers are more tanky as they have more shield generators. They also offer a better M launch ratio than the Raptor which has only 1 M landing pad as opposed to the Colossus's 4. For purely carrier operations any of the others work fine. Only advantage Raptor has is that it can operating as a heavy destroyer of sorts as far as damage goes.

What I'm more concerned with is why does the Tokyo have as many pads as the Raptor and yet only 40 S slots. Its annoying trying to build a Terran fleet and now needing multiple carriers. Though at least it seems to work out so far.

This allows for extremely fast launch and landing speeds due to the low queue depth. The Raptor was useless as a M carrier as it would take many minutes to undock all the M ships in hold.

Ok I get that being able to launch and recover its wings faster is an advantage, but lets be honest here it isn't like it takes a long time for the Raptor to gets its fighters on station and when I do get them on station, I will have 100 of them to any other carriers 40. Also in most cases, I see the enemy coming soon enough to get everything up and prepared before they get in range.

As far as M class ships, I haven't had much luck with them other than to see them get shot down rather quickly. You would think that because many of the Corvettes have speed and agility not much worse than a heavy fighter, while having 5 times the Shield/Hull durability of a fighter and at least double the firepower, that Corvettes would be terrifying but even the fastest, most heavily armed and armored/shielded Corvette I can come up with gets shredded. I had a walk over battle against 5 Xenon DDs where I had my combined fleets of 1 Asgard, 1 Raptor, 1 Monitor, 16 DDs and about a dozen Corvettes. My only casualties of that battle were 3 Nemesis Corvettes. I guess my point here is that using M's as part of your carrier based strike force seems debatable.

Finally, I think my biggest issue isn't that no other Carrier matches up to the Raptor, and I feel there is definitely a role for a "Light Carrier" in your fleet, but why do these "Light" Carriers, at least in comparison, cost the same as a Raptor. I was going to buy a Tokyo but found it crazy that on high preset it was costing me 64 million credits vs a Raptor costing only 68 million on high preset. I get that the Tokyo has better shielding (thought much worse hull) but the Raptor carries 60 more fighters than the Tokyo, has two more 3 more S docks so technically can get the first 40 fighters out FASTER then the Tokyo, has something like 60 additional M turrets to fend off fighters and actually has 8 Capital Class L turrets giving it a capability of at least going toe-to-toe with a DD if it had to or actually participate directly in the main melee if it wanted to. Oh and despite its size, it is faster than then Tokyo as well. Also despite one of the other factions carries being better at handling M class ships better, everything else is similar to what the Tokyo offers. All that is well worth 4 million more to get a Raptor.

So honesty, either other factions CVs need a drastic price slash, maybe down to in the 30-40 million range to make them more economical or the Raptor needs its cost doubled to reflect that is is about twice the carrier of every other one in the game. However what I would really have liked to see if Carriers in general being more diverse combined with a cost change to reflect what they bring to the table. It would be nice if we had a nice spread of capabilities. One that handles M class ships better or hell only handles M class, one that carries 60 S class, maybe another that handles 80. Maybe a 30 S capacity carrier with 30 S dock and with no M capability but has the firepower of a DD. That would at least make it interesting and I could see all kinds of places to fit carriers like that in my fleets. However, all things being equal on cost, it just doesn't make a bit of sense to me to buy any other carrier than a Raptor, well unless you are roleplaying.

[BlackRain]

The Raptor can not get fighters out faster than the tokyo. The tokyo unleashes all fighters in just a few seconds.