What's the point of Carriers?

[Olfrygt]

S-Fighters should be faster in combat, but slower travel speed (or can't keep it up for longer periods of time). This + pathfinding adjustments could make carriers useful if u want to travel through a few sectors.
If u want wanna make myself happy, remove the ringhighway.

Theses changes could help L traders aswell.

[spankahontis]

I don't know why people are fixated about "how launchtubes are better on carriers and this makes carriers better".

In 9 out of 10 cases if you need to launch fighters fast it mean you FAILED to operate carrier properly - carriers shouldn't suppose to make combat launch under fire.

Launch tube doesn't make carriers much more useful over Destroyers in actual combat.

Unfortunately carriers in X don't really work the way they do in real life. They're big battleships that drop lots of fighters. We don't really have fuel range or anything to worry about and most weapons don't use ammunition.

Using a carrier to attack into another sector is a good reason to have rapid launch ability, send the carrier in and then launch all the fighters, but even then there's not really a reason why you would need the carrier, you could just send all the fighters through.

A carrier is just a fighter wrangler, basically. You stick the fighters in the carrier to keep them all together and then poop them all out at once toward the enemy. It's a bit lame but aside from fighter missile resupply, there's not really any other thing you would need a carrier for in X, without changing how fighters work pretty heavily.

If carriers could assemble their own fighters from parts, that would be an interesting idea. But that's gonna have a lot of overlap with the supply ship idea. You could perhaps make them militarized supply ships, with better guns and shielding than general purpose supply craft in exchange for only being able to service or construct fighters.

I don't know if they do this but one thing they SHOULD do when parked on a Carrier is repair crews on the Carrier should be able to repair the fighter to 100%.
Where as in space they should be only able to repair them to 70%.

But I see what you mean if they have none of the physical problems a real life carrier has like fuel, ammo and repairs.