Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Supercarrier Disucssions - Part 1 - Drones

There is not a lot of conventional wisdom to be found on the intertubez about fitting and using supercarriers. This
is most likely due to the fact that out of Eve's hundreds of thousands of pilots, the number of them owning a supercarrier is a small percentage of those.

Side note: I've gotten to like calling them supercarriers over motherships or moms.

So this post is part or a short series with me pontificating about a part of the ship class and you commenters then telling me why I'm full of shit. Onwards!

* * * * *
Part 1 - The Drone Bay (No, not the periodic podcast)

Relevant Ship Bonuses:
- Can field 3 additional Fighters or Fighter-Bombers per Caldari Carrier level
- 200% bonus to Fighter or Fighter-Bomber control range

Relevant Stats:
- Wyvern has 200,000 m3 drone bay
- Fighters and Fighter Bombers are 5000 m3 each
- Wyvern has 12500 mb bandwidth
- Fighter bandwidth is 125, Fighter-Bomber bandwidth is 500.

What this all means is that a supercarrier can potentially launch a flight of 25 Fighters/Fighter-Bombers if they have Caldari Carrier V and 5 Drone Control Units installed in the high slots. Of course, the first lesson you learn in Carrier School is that, generally speaking, Drone Control Units are not worth giving up your utility high slots for on a carrier, and triply so on a supercarrier. We'll go on about high slots another time, for now assume we are not going to bother with any drone control units as 20 drones is sufficient for my purposes.

You could take a flight of 20 Fighters and another of 20 Fighter-Bombers and call it a day. That would fill up your entire drone bay and leave you with no point defence against non-capital targets. On the other hand, one might think why bother with Fighters at all? Well, Fighter-Bombers are not assignable to fleet mates but Fighters are, so we want some of them for tactical flexibility. Here is what I propose as a first pass.

As you can see, simply removing one Fighter or Fighter-Bomber gives enough space for a flight of:
- heavies
- 2 x mediums
- 2 x lights
- medium ECM
- sentry
- medium armour reppers
- heavy armour reppers
- medium shield reppers
- heavy shield reppers

... and still have 1800 m3 for more drones left over. Yes, I know I should get tech II sentries, its on the list.

Should I get more E-War drones? Another flight of heavies? Sentries? And should I have spare Fighter-Bombers and cut back the number of Fighters to merely 10 or 15? What's the loss rate of drones for supercarriers? What mix of the different types of Fighter-Bombers is the best?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

2 comments:

  1. Depends on how smart you are with your fighters. With a Supercarrier I doubt you will lose many fighter or fighter-bomber drones as you will be in harms way less often than a carrier on a station.

    The more often you assign fighters the more chance you have to lose them as it's easy to pick them off one by one, just remember you can recall them and they leave regardless of warp scram or webs on them.

    Get t2 sentries FFS!

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  2. hmm thats a hard question and i know how id answer for a regular carrier but you dont have to juggle 2 kinds of fighters. Id say go with at least 1 full flight of bombers, with a few spares. then do a full flight of regular fighters and your spare drones. as for how many spares, ask yourself how often your going to be usinng it as fleet support assigning fighters out.

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