Carrier Conundrum
by A scientists life in Eve on Sep.07, 2012, under Eve online
Over on Sisi for the past few days, me and some of my Corp mates have been conducting some tests around Sov mechanics, Outposts and Outpost Upgrades.
As part of these tests, we have had to shoot an Outpost through the two reinforced timers down to 0 structure to claim it. We completed this last night.
While doing this (and to a few groans on TeamSpeak), I mentioned that I thought the Fighters and Fighter Bombers were essentially a bit stupid. At the time, I was dual-boxing with a Wyvern and 20 Fighters (the character only has Fighters trained to IV) and an Aeon with 24 Fighter Bombers (still needs Advanced Drone Interfacing V to get the maximum number of deployed drones).
Now, consider how big an Outpost is. It’s not small. My 24 Fighter Bombers were hitting the Outpost for 4,200 damage each. Every time. My 20 Fighters, however, were hitting the huge Outpost for varying damage, anything from under 200 to over 1,000. That’s a very big range of damage. I’d say the average was around the mid 500′s.
Why? Please explain why my little fly can’t hit the 10 floor building it’s flying around perfectly every time.
Anyway, that was more of a moan rather than my actual point. What I really wanted to raise was that my Fighters and Fighter Bombers could continue to do this without a break. No reloading. Continually until something else stopped them. I can see the Fighter Bombers firing missile type things, and the Fighters seem to be firing various things like projectiles and hybrid rounds (not including the Amarr lazors here).
Compare a Scorch Bomb. At base, it does 6,400 HP Thermal Damage and takes up 75m3. Then look at a Fighter Bomber compared to a Frigate.
A Cyclops Fighter Bomber is 5,000 m3 and weighs 12,000Kg. An Atron is 22,500m3 and weighs 1,164,000Kg. Hmmm.
See a problem here? Where does the little Cyclops store the infinite amount of missiles / bombs?
So….. my thought would be that Fighters and Fighter Bombers need to have charges to fire. These charges are stored in a newly created Drone Charges bay on Carriers and Super Carriers.
The idea would be that Fighters and Fighter Bombers need charges to fire, and after they exhaust their charges they automatically travel back to within, say, 3k of the Carrier / Super Carrier and magically reload from the ammo bay, just like we can use carrier ship maintenence bays to refit ships now for example.
The bays would need to be set so that you don’t run out of ammo after 10 minutes, but also you shouldn’t be able to deploy a Carrier (or Super Carrier) for hours and hours without having to organise the logistics behind resupplying the Fighter charges. Also, it would be pointless having the Ammo bay set at something like 3k m3 only to have the massive Corporate Hanger able to resupply it many times over allowing for protracted deployment periods.
This would also make choice of Fighter / Fighter Bomber type more important, as I would make racial charges for the four types. Amarr Fighter charges would be Capacitor based to allow the Energy Weapons to fire, the Caldari and Gallente might share a Hybrid Charge maybe, and the Minmatar would obviously be Projectile based. Same theory for Fighter Bombers with the Fighter Bomber charge type being based on usual racial damage.
These are just my observations having flown a Super Carrier on the Test Server only, and only for a limited period so far, but it just didn’t make sense that these things had unlimited ammo in such a small package. Make the Fighters and Fighter Bombers more meaningful and make the logistics of keeping Carriers and Super Carriers deployed more involved.
I can almost hear the flames against this idea approaching now, and the angry “nerf Titans, not Super Carriers” shouts too. However, I can’t fly a Titan yet, so I can’t properly observe from my own perspective. What I can say is that shooting structures with Super Carriers and Fighter Bombers is stupidly easy and just doesn’t really make sense on a number of levels. Sure, a fleet of 30 or 40 would rip an Outpost to pieces in short order, but that fleet couldn’t then just keep hopping from system to system and killing stuff – it would need organised logistics behind it to keep it deployed.
Put anything into hostile territory that’s moving stuff around to resupply other things and you have vulnerability. That’s a good thing.
Anyway, it would give me more stuff to build, which is clearly a good thing!
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OK you convinced me that drone ammo usage is unrealistic. But you did not convince me this change would improve carrier/mom mechanics. What problem are you solving? And why is it not a problem with standard drones too?
You know what – that’s a really good point. I suppose I was attempting to nerf the function of Super Carrier blobs just jumping around a region reinforcing lots of things quickly, virtually unopposed. I wanted to make owning a Super Carrier (less so a normal Carrier, but by association only) more involved. Why not go further… why not make Capital ships that cannot dock have some sort of requirement to be actively maintained – i.e. they actually consume things like robotics and superconductors etc.
I guess the short time I’ve spent sitting in a Super Carrier convinced me that I wouldn’t ever put my main character in this. It would always be an alt account, or at the worst be looked after by a parking alt. The gameplay simply wasn’t engaging enough – it was too limited. Give me more to do – some logistics and upkeep mechanics maybe.
I guess I was just taking a really narrow view on a much bigger subject.
As to normal drones – maybe it could be argued somehow that Fighters and Fighter Bombers are different, although realistically I’m not sure how you could sensibly do that, but then Eve often doesn’t show consistency and realism and maybe it could just be widely ignored, or behave sort of like the civillian guns you get on noobie ships that don’t require ammo? Not a good comparison when you look at the damage output of an Ogre II of course!
I don’t know – I’m just looking at a specific thing and trying to ignore everything else around me – including other consequences
There are many levels of this I truly do agree with you on. Primarily in the sence that SC/Mom’s do not dock, how do they resupply anything? Putting up a cap array af a POS is worse than dangling meat in front of a jackal. That being said, there really isn’t a depletion mechanic for anything drone related in EVE… I think it’s an interesting avenue to explore as it would finally wipe the smirk off of so many rattlesnake pilots if they actually had to consider logistics. Not to mention the Nyx
While I partially agree with you, I did sit there for about 4 hours not at the computer with my fighters blasting away at the station, but how often will that happen?
If you’re attacking an outpost, how often are you going to be able to sit there and take advantage of your infinite ammo? You’re probably going to be attacked by several titans every now and then, and you won’t have time to think about where all the ammo is coming from. Not to mention the cost of the fighters anyway is a little bit retarded (When I originally got my carrier I was shocked at the 25mill per fighter), and I don’t fancy having to add ammo on top of that, ESPECIALLY bombs, which are pricey!
It’s an interesting idea, for sure, but I hardly remember to put on a warp scram before I go hunting, like hell am I going to remember my drones AND to put ammo in their bays.
Nano-ammo.
A very dense item that is the majority of the mass of each fighter/fighter-bomber. 1m3 of the ammo unrefined is the equivilent of 100m3 of normal ammo, thus 1000m3 of mass of the fighter/fighter-bomber is the equivilent of 100,000m3 of normal ammo.
And being as the damage done by each fighter/fighter-bomber is always the same there is no difference or delay in firing because there is no need to reformat for different ammo types.