You could make a special frigate that, with 20% chance of success, can shoot a torpedo into a vent port and instantly blow up any capital ship...

On a less serious note, wouldn't smart bombing their fighters be more effective? or just killing their fighters in general? I don't see a problem with a 2 billion + isk ship being able to tank, 8:1, a 200 million isk ship.

It becomes less a question about who can field more carriers, but who can destroy the enemy carriers dps faster, and then bring their own dreads on the first to sweep up.

It's a war of attrition, and race for cap backup.

I just read a very interesting essay on the proliferation of slowcats, and capital warfare in general: http://themittani.com/features/slowcats-final-word

A major point of this piece is that a force of 800 alpha-maelstroms is not effective against a force of 100 archons. What ratio of BS to carrier is acceptable to constitute a 'fair fight'? I would say it is NOT 8:1, and certainly not worse than 8:1. A similar force of neut BS's was also said to be ineffective. Cap resistance is just too high, and reps are too strong. Marauders certainly aren't worth fielding as they aren't cost-effective and T2 insurance is awful. So what would work better?

I'm thinking something similar to the attack BCs (talos etc). Low EHP, yet very high mobility and dps for its class - expanded to a BS hull. XL guns are just too big to include as a logistical component for BS fittings though, so normal BS guns will have to do. Fully fitted I'm thinking: 70k EHP, 0 rep, ~3500 dps, no drones, 40km optimal, 80km falloff, cost: 350M. Role bonuses would, of course, be necessary to attain that DPS amount. To keep these from wiping subcaps off the field, a HUGE tracking penalty should also be included as a role bonus (yes, these would still be effective against sentry-domis that like to sit still).

However, low EHP and tracking would keep them from being effective against other BS hulls and smaller that ARE moving, and the low, BC-class EHP with BS-class sig would mean these are very killable by subcap fleets.

As such, a subcap would be created that would be wanted against caps and supers, that would also make other subcaps useful on-grid as a counter to them.

A second possible (and dare I say, dangerous) idea would be a BS EWAR module that reduced targets shield or armor resists by a very small percentage, limited to 1 per ship, such that a large BS force, as they are now, could reduce the EHP and rep effectiveness of an enemy carrier to manageable levels.

Nerf non-triage capital RR will solve this issue without needing to powercreep BS's.

Hell, make it so capital RR only works when a ship is triaged, and then it will take much less than 800 BS's to gank an archon as Triaged ships cannot receive RR.

sentries....thousands of them. u might be able to smart bomb all day long and still not clear the drones.

This

An Archon (for example) has a drone bay size of 80,000m3. That is enough space to hold 3,200 sentry/heavy drones (fun fact: the Archon has the smallest drone bay - as the Hel is capable of carrying 7,000 sentry/heavy drones. Your disco party might never end.

800 alpha-maelstroms is not effective against a force of 100 archons.

sentries....thousands of them. u might be able to smart bomb all day long and still not clear the drones.

Using 3200 T2 Curators as a baseline(Highest ehp set you can have) the EHP of the drone bay in an archon is 12.5m.

The next assumption is that every archon is carrier 5 and can launch 10 sentries.

With this we end up with 10 weapon batteries per archon at 1.25m EHP each.

The next assumption is that the BS smartbombing are using T2 SB and have lvl 5 smartbombing skill.

This gives a DPS per SB of 60. For one smartbomb it would take almost 6 hours to clear all the drones of an archon. Fill this out to say an abaddon with 8 SB you get 480 DPS dropping the time needing to clear out an archon of drones to about 43 minutes.

Depends on the number of abaddons you throw at the problem, the more you throw the fewer that die due to the fact that the drones die faster and the delay on re-assisting drones.