I have a few suggestions concerning making carriers with the battleship and cruiser hull sizes, though this is mostly going to be talked about in regards to battleships as I find I have trouble thinking of anything smaller acting as a carrier.
The main problem with making carriers right now is that they aren't really carriers. They're battleships with a few hangers to keep fighters in. Historically speaking (and I know this is not a historical game but it's still relevant), carriers were mostly support ships and mobile launch platforms. They did not have the massive guns that you find on dreadnoughts and other types of battleships. The only real armaments you would see on carriers were point defense to shoot down enemy fighters, missiles, etc. (essentially AA guns) and some smaller weapons for shooting at close range (but never anything with the amount of firepower a battleship or cruiser's main gun had) targets. The way carriers should work in order to make them more like carriers would be to add sections with no main gun but with loads of fighter/bomber slots. Personally, I would go with about 8-10 slots for a battleship hull and 3-6 for cruisers.
Now, I could understand carriers just being a battleship with some fighters on it in the early days of having that tech because, at that point, you would still be trying to figure out the best way to utilize carriers in space so just shoving some fighters on an existing warship makes sense by then.
My suggested solution to making carriers a bit more workable would be an alteration to the tech that gives you fighters by separating it into two techs, one for cruisers and one for battleships, and make it a multi-tiered tech. The first level should just give you fighters while the subsequent levels should start by giving you rudimentary carrier hull sections for each type of ship and improve the sections by opening up more options for how many strike craft you can have per carrier. This would, obviously, be something that would require some systems to be reworked as changing carriers like this would make it necessary to change combat formations so that carriers always position themselves at the rear of a fleet formation and don't try to engage in the same way other ships do and would also require something to make other ships protect your carriers so something like this might be a little tricky to implement. This is just my idea on a way to improve carriers which currently don't really work like carriers. As I said at the start, they're currently somewhere between an early experiment with using capital ships as carriers and (maybe?) actual early world war 1 carriers.
The main problem with making carriers right now is that they aren't really carriers. They're battleships with a few hangers to keep fighters in. Historically speaking (and I know this is not a historical game but it's still relevant), carriers were mostly support ships and mobile launch platforms. They did not have the massive guns that you find on dreadnoughts and other types of battleships. The only real armaments you would see on carriers were point defense to shoot down enemy fighters, missiles, etc. (essentially AA guns) and some smaller weapons for shooting at close range (but never anything with the amount of firepower a battleship or cruiser's main gun had) targets. The way carriers should work in order to make them more like carriers would be to add sections with no main gun but with loads of fighter/bomber slots. Personally, I would go with about 8-10 slots for a battleship hull and 3-6 for cruisers.
Now, I could understand carriers just being a battleship with some fighters on it in the early days of having that tech because, at that point, you would still be trying to figure out the best way to utilize carriers in space so just shoving some fighters on an existing warship makes sense by then.
My suggested solution to making carriers a bit more workable would be an alteration to the tech that gives you fighters by separating it into two techs, one for cruisers and one for battleships, and make it a multi-tiered tech. The first level should just give you fighters while the subsequent levels should start by giving you rudimentary carrier hull sections for each type of ship and improve the sections by opening up more options for how many strike craft you can have per carrier. This would, obviously, be something that would require some systems to be reworked as changing carriers like this would make it necessary to change combat formations so that carriers always position themselves at the rear of a fleet formation and don't try to engage in the same way other ships do and would also require something to make other ships protect your carriers so something like this might be a little tricky to implement. This is just my idea on a way to improve carriers which currently don't really work like carriers. As I said at the start, they're currently somewhere between an early experiment with using capital ships as carriers and (maybe?) actual early world war 1 carriers.
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