The largest, toughest, most powerful ships in the game will still be fast reaction "blob" forces and that's just wrong! The only difference is they'll only be able to react faster than just about anything else within a shorter range, but within that range they'll still reign supreme.
Just like in real life, the drawbacks to really big ships (besides expense and manning requirements) should be that they're slow, ungainly, difficult to maneuver and highly dependent on consorts and logistics (support and supply lines that is, not magic healing ships).
They're great for defense because they don't have to move very much or very far and it's much easier to support them close to home.
They can be good on offense too, provided they have time to get where the fight is with the necessary consorts along and with proper (hopefully secure) support and supply lines in place. They work well against more or less stationary targets that can't move (or at least can't move quickly) and against other large fleets also containing very large ships.
What they are not is a quick, fast reaction force. They *aren't at all good at catching small, fast forces which can simply evade and stay out of range, though a component of the support fleet consorts may be.
Stop messing around with half measures CCP and do the right thing. Remove jump capability from everything larger than a Black Ops battleship and put capital ships into the role they belong in.
Edit: Found a comment over at Mabricks Mumblings by Druur Monakh who says it better than I did.
In RL, battleships have fallen out of active duty because they are big, lumbering hunks which take ages to get to their destinations, and then easily fall prey to superior numbers of smaller, lighter vessels. Aircraft carriers are big and lumbering as well, but at least they can bring numbers of smaller, lighter vessels with them. But even aircraft carriers are not sent from one end of the globe to the other willy-nilly – the travel takes time, they can be intercepted en-route, and if the carrier is sent over-there, something else has to step in to do the carrier’s former job here.Druur gets it!
I think a simple fix for capitals would be jumping into a cyno would drop all capitals at a random location in the system (however, at the same random location, to prevent straglers). You would then have to warp from wherever you landed to the engagement. This way, they can still be used as a relatively fast response unit (within their now lower range), but would need smaller ships to keep their opponents busy, rather than just guaranteeing a jump right on top of the enemy. I would allow jump bridges and blackops cynos to not have this dispersion factor (you land where the cyno/JB is).
ReplyDeleteYou're too kind - I just occasionally stumble over a pebble of truth.
ReplyDeleteBut in this context, I found this quote from Elise Randolph in the new threadnought-in-development (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5102919#post5102919 - and she could be just being sarcastic)
"I think if a titan could have a 20-50million m^3 ship maintenance bay it could start tweaking the role of the ship and make it more en vogue. It would allow an alliance to have a strategic asset in the Titan, have a subcap escort fleet to position the titan (or titans) deep into enemy space, and be able to base out of it instead of forcing every attacking foe to live in NPC null. So in this brave new world with 50million m^3 SMAs, an alliance that would have moved 250 carriers twice - jumping from NPC station to NPC station completely risk free - could instead move 10 Titans + an escort fleet of 200. Through gates. Loaded with billions of isk worth of ships. Think of how glorious that could be! Please I need this."
Add in an actually useful Clone Vat bay, and a Titan could be the EVE equivalent of an RL aircraft carrier.
Not sure about the ship maintenance bayb but otherwise I'd be ok with that, as long as it's really slow and can't jump.
DeleteJust remember aircraft carriers carry aircraft not ships of the line. IOW, they carry small, fast, lightly crewed, relatively short ranged, attack craft that require support from larger ships and they don't carry full fledged, self sufficient ships that can operate independently. Not even frigates.
In fact it's ludicrous to think any military organization would even consider having ships of the line carried to the front by even larger ships.
To clarify that, I don't like ship maintenance bays being used as basically a giant cargo hold for ships of the line.
DeleteMaybe maintenance bays should be exactly that, unusable when the ship is moving and the ship can't be moved until the maintenance bay has been emptied of ships.
Correct - it was a random idea, with many details missing. But I found it interesting that the leader of a super-heavy alliance would even entertain such thoughts.
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