Originally by: Shadowsword

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I was toying with the idea of owning a Carrier sometime in the future, and wanted to see how well they could tank, so I opened Quickfit, and here's the result:

For an Archon, with all relevant skills at lv4 (so 20% resists bonus from the Amarr carrier skill, and a 24 seconds cycle for capital repairers)
Dual capital armor repairers, 3 T2 active hardeners, 1 adaptative nano membrane II, cap power relay, 4 cap rechargers II.
With that fit, all resistances are well above 75%, and you can sutain the tank for about 6 minutes.

How well does it tank? About 3400 base DPS, and that's why I think this thread is needed. In a fleet battle, 3400 DPS isn't much. That's about 5 BS worth of firepower. Given the low number of hit points carriers have, for capital ships, 10 BS would destroy an Archon or Chimera in 35-40 seconds, and that would be even faster for a Nidhoggur or a Thanatos.

Given the money investment represented by a Carrier (250-300 millions of insurance, 300-350 millions worth of fighters, 100-150 millions of modules, which gives 650 to 800 millions put to risk, against a 60 milions worth of insurance+T2 modules for a fleet BS), their relative fragility and pretty good firepower, in large engagments carriers are going to be called primary and blow up before that can even lock a battleship and have their fighters come half-way to their target.


So, you have a ship that, because of jump drive mechanics, isn't usefull for mobile, small gang warfare, and yet that can't survive long enough to be usefull as ship of the line. Dreadnoughts also have the same problem, but can use siege modules to change that.


The solution, imho, would be to decrease a lot the cycle time of capital tanking modules, while keeping their cap use per second constant... That, or make carriers able to use jumpgates, so they could be used as small gang flagships.

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