What is the point of carriers in X4?

[Alci]

If none of the above, what is the purpose of a carrier?

to make it 55 ships per carrier easier on your CPU

Also I would expect resupply and fix them, you have technicians aboard after all, they won't fit S ships.. but the logistic thing where all NPC ships should also restock... noone knows.

[mr.WHO]

I recall buying 200 fighters in XR and trying to send them to combat area a system away.
I end up having an arrival time delay between first and last almost 10 minutes.

SImply having carrier ferry and launch them at destination is an improvement, but I hope of auto-repair and rearm of docked fighters.

[recnelis]

Has anyone figured out a GOOD reason to use a carrier other than its cool? With the loss of Fuel or ammunition there seems to be little need for them.

Negatives:
Carriers travel drives are slower
Carriers thrusters are slower
Carriers take forever and a decade to retrieve all fighters/drones

So the positives are:
Mobile repair facility (i think, haven't tested because i cant find anyone to damage my craft)
Mobile ammunition store (Actually i dont think this works since you cant transfer missiles without a Warf)
Compact Travel
Mass Deployment (all fighters will be present at the battle)

[MutantDwarf]

I'm pretty sure you can only send a single ship at a time on a Venture in the asynchronous multiplayer mode (that is currently disabled, but likely will be enabled within the next few months). It'll probably be sent with all of the ships docked to it, though. Thus, sending a carrier filled with fighters would net you a higher amount of combat forces in the other player's universe than sending just a single non-carrier ship.

[burger1]

Carriers have a ton of hit points and they can carry a lot of missiles. Other than that they have more docking bays for m and s ships. They can also hold a reasonable amount of defense drones. The teladi one also has about 17k cargo space for containers so you can still do missions with it.

[Gideon_Prime]

In theory, Carriers would make great resupply points in X4 for missiles, serve as a mobile repair platform, and play a role as a fleet transporter. Unfortunately, none those features are working correctly at the moment. Combined with wing/fleet/escort mechanics being largely broken, they are mostly pointless outside of having something large for enemies to shoot at. However, in that role, they are quite good at directing fire away from your fleet.

[recnelis]

I am unaware of the multiplayer mode.. sounds interesting.. thought i would prefer to carriers have a better purpose.

Repair facilities
Ship building faclilites
Rearming facltilties

I would also prefer if all vessels took fuel (energy cells) to use their travel drives..

[Cabrelbeuk]

I think carrier make sense (currently, have seen some nice mod idea here) only on large scale fight where you need all your fighter to come out at once and not 2 minutes from each other coz auto pilot getting a bit stupid or just not coordinate. Plus the heavy weapons.

Like attacking a shipyard or a station from another faction.

[Baldamundo]

Negatives:
Carriers travel drives are slower

This isn't universally true. Haven't looked at all the stats for every races ships yet, but certainly the Paranid have some capital ships with extremely fast travel drives.

[Baconnaise]

Paranids have the fastest ships/engines. Teladi has the best shields. Argon is whatever.

[Cybertrigger]

i currently see no point in them at all, i did try it out got a zeus with 5 nemesis 3 mintaur and 2 adler M class ships each supported by 4 bussard attackers.
It was a pain to watch it try to fight a xenon destroyed within like 5 minutes all but the M ships got totaled by the destroyer, 2 M ships slightly damaged.
then i decided to go in with my personal nemesis ship with which i had before taken down destroyers and took down the destroyer and recalled all other ones.
which has 4 beam guns and a intelligent missle launcher with intelligent heavy missiles equipped and also 2 beam turrets.
whats weird to me the ships did really no damage at all to the destroyer and had different weapon layout from beam guns to plasma.
the ai is just simply to stupid and is basicly suicide running, if ships return there is no refill or repair mechanics currently avaible thats happening on the carrier.
aslong they dont change something about it carriers are useless but kinda cool to have so i got 2 zeus , 1 kondor and 1 collosus guarding my main phq factory just for the looks.

They would be somewhat usefull as a mobile small and medium ships base with the capability to repair and refit vessels that dock and get transfered into the internal storage.
Also currently turrets you cant control how they should behave on the bigger ships just on M class from what i have seen with the turrets being shown at the top and you can click on how they should behave.
I remember in older X games you could control those yourself even sit in them and shoot before later you got a turret control which you could setup or switch fast with a key combination.
If they have a problem with showing to many turrets then ontop of the screen there should be atleast a key combination or in menues how to setup a behavior of the turrets.
both things would be best to also change settings when you arent on the ship.