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I know diddly about cap ships. Why is there so much gate camping when you can just cyno in your capships wherever you want? (And, if you are rich enough, your mom or titan with support fleet inside?)

Capships without support soon are no longer capships.

This is because, IIRC, a capship with a tackle-point on it cannot jump/warp out when it gets into danger, and can thus be overwhelmed by a larger/better fitted capship fleet.

The gatecamps both disrupt supply runs (capships eat ice products to go into siege mode and cyno) and lock down support fleets, allowing your own support fleet to lock down the enemy capships, which can then be whittled down by either a very strong BS/carrier fleet, or by a larger friendly fleet o' dreads.

But we're seeing significant numbers of motherships and titans in this war, which can carry a support fleet inside them if I'm reading this stuff right. Therefore, you can cyno in your support fleet inside your supercap. Is that not the case?

Also, I would assume carriers, not haulers, are the preferred method of hauling ice products in wartime, but again I know diddly about POS warfare and capships. I guess a carrier doing hauling duty is a billion isk not helping on the front lines.

Heh, you're judging the ships by their name instead of by the meta-gaming and the taking-advantage-of-EVE-quirks that goes on with fleet warfare.

These are multi-KM sized ships with cargo hold spaces only as big as a truck, by design.  And, as far as ships inside of ships, I think the game's core limits that, but even if it didn't, there's simply no time to launch and start organizing your fleet once the enemy is within range.  I would say that with most battles in EVE, winning depends on being ready and coordinated enough to lock down the enemy and shoot within a microsecond of seeing them.  There are no epic battles; if something takes too long to blow up, even if it is a space station the size of a small moon, you simply bring in more firepower, and reduce the encounter down to 30 to 45 seconds.

That's my impression, at least.

Motherships have a ship and items hangar and a clone vat bay. Titans have these plus a jump bridge array. From the battle reports I've read, it doesn't seem like these features are used. Why aren't they used is my question.

Leading with your supercap does present problems in terms of keeping it alive until your support fleet arrives, I will definitely grant you that. Though you can cyno in the dreads/carriers at the same time as your titan or mothership, so that's probably sufficient to get your support in and ready.

It takes 30-45 seconds of lag for you UI to react to anything and the major problem with motherships is ship ownership and general lagfest that ensues in any serious fleet battle.
Thing is, I don't want just _any_ interceptor. I want exactly the interceptor I have best skills for with my own special fitting (that cost 8 times ship value btw). Otherwise I'm just a dogmeat on battlefield. That's the veteran player aka rich bastard view on issue;-)
Even if you do it goon-style: there is still a problem of who's overseeing ship giveout (impossible in battle situation, where MS pilot has worry about his own ass) and who has to pay for the ships. It only works if you're dealing with expendable tackler 300k/piece. Otherwise it's worthless.

So it's more of a UI and corp permissions issue then a MS/Titan issue?


I buy that, the UI in general is laggy and often designed poorly, can't imagine what a pain it must be in fleet lag.

That and logistics.
After all you don't know which MS will be online during next op and when he'll be near your station so you could load/update your spare ships. You might end with loading your prized faction ship on Ms that won't show on op in next two weeks or will show carring a design three nerfs old:)

I buy that too. Hope they fix it somehow, because the fewer gatecamps the better.

What dwindlehop wants is for the fleet to all assemble, all dock in a mothership, have the mothership cyno to where you want to go, everyone undock in the new location, and proceed to pwn.

I don't know if a mothership can cyno with someone else docked inside. No one else seems to have answered that either.

I would guess that no you can't. What you can probably do is everyone store their jump clone and ship in the mothership, have the mothership cyno to where ever, and then everyone jump clone in. The problem would be you can only clone jump every 24 hours so you can't get out after you go in. Better off for everyone to just be flying carriers and dreads I'd think.

Can carriers be jammed? Still be interested in finding out why the carrier we killed didn't seem to be fighting back.

Edit: Apparently carriers can be damped.

That just seems like another UI and corp role/permission issue. From what little I've played with all that corp inventory stuff, I can see how it would be a giant pain in the ass to use it effectively.

Seems like member hangars inside supercaps would fix some of the problem.

Carriers can theoretically be jammed, although they have a very high sensor strength that makes it difficult.  However, they have horrendously long lock times, and a few remote sensor dampeners can change that from horrendous to ridiculous, as well as giving them a targetting range that doesn't even reach outside their own model.

A carrier in direct combat has a short life expectancy, they aren't built for it.  Any capital without a support fleet is in trouble, although the Mothership/Titan immunity to EW makes them significantly more likely to be able to escape even they can be Energy Vamped to keep them in place if they're completely exposed (and the Titan DD is cycling).

Titans can take their support fleet with them, but it burns a lot of fuel and they have a limited capacity (works out to about 50 BS or equivalent mass in smaller ships for a round trip of significant length).  You'd have to pre-stage the fuel for longer trips with more mass, but anyone who got left behind would be stuck on standard routes.

Most really significant fights take quite a bit of time, even if both sides are committed to an all-out win or lose battle through choice or lack of options, the shooting can take 15-30 minutes for a single fleet engagement (which may be preceded by many hours of mutual cat and mouse).  A single POS reduction can be over in 10 minutes if you have plenty of dreads and no fear about putting them in Siege mode, but when there are 10+ POS in the system, they're all stocked with 3 days+ of Strontium, and you *do* have to worry about a surprise ambush so you can't use Siege, taking a system can be a matter of weeks.  Goons hit ED- with 200 people and 20 dreads the other day, they got two POS's in the whole night (and they'll have to come back and win a six-hour battle on Friday for that to do them any good).

--Dave

If I remember rightly, the support fleet thing for supercaps is a bit limited by how you carry the ships: assembled or unassembled.

Mahrin will be able to correct me, but I think that carriers can carry unpackaged (ie assembled) ships (just frigs and cruisers?), whereas others carry them unassembled (which means no rigs or insurance, quite apart from the delay of getting them together).

Carriers and Motherships have a ship hangar that can hold fully assembled and fitted ships, but the capacity is very limited and it's not practical to carry anything larger than frigates.  Unassembled ships can't go in the Ship Hangar, they have to go in the Cargo hold, and if you don't have a POS Ship Maintenance Array there's no way I know of to get them put together.

--Dave

See?  Like I said, there is a thing called a carrier, and it has something to do with space.

Carriers can assign their uber fighters to other ships. Their main use at gate camps is to hide in a POS while someone else uses their fighters to unleash hell while they are completely safe.

This one I am positively cockily confident about: the last patch nerfed carriers' ability to sit inside a POS's shields while they have fighters allocated.

Ah shit, thats right. Ok, now they'll just have to get a deep space safe spot :)

Deep safes aren't safe anymore now we have 1000AU 3d scan probes.  However you can launch fighters just outside of POS shields, assign them and impulse back inside without losing control or anything.

Really?!?  Well that makes that one pointless nerf.

Only a couple of hours until the shit hits the fan in RKK's shipyards.  By which I mean the node crashing.

You sure about this? I read when you move inside the POS again you lose control of the drones.

That's what I had thought too.

Carriers should work that way -- you place your carriers inside a support fleet, just like navies do. Send your fighters off with your offensive forces, or keep some back to cover your support fleet, whatever.

You could well be right, just repeating what I've read. :)  Still the guy did say he'd tried it out on test (precisely: delegating fighters then moving back inside shields).  Not relying on deep safes is golden though, but you do need scary Astrometrics V.

Astro 5 isn't that scary (it's only a rank 3, I believe).  I've got it on both accounts, as well as the supporting scanning skills.  And yeah, I've busted 600+ AU safes (my furthest was 1200AU).

--Dave

Don't forget that quite a few people trained Astro V because it was initially required for Salvaging, before that got nerfed down to III.