it will take you under 15-35 seconds (matters what direction its heading) to kill a level 10 cap (if the cap has no anti-fighter abilities) with 40 bombers, even if he has 35+ flaks the cap will die,

Wondering what I should look out for in his fleet that could counteract the subverters.

Frankly, the cost of huge 30+ carrier fleets exposes why this is daft: you're spending 50k+ to kill a 3k ship. Wazoo: if there are local frigates or jump inhibitors you'll lose far more than 3k in carriers before you can escape, and their remaining forces will just pursue you anyway. Unless the strategy only works with yet more money spent on backup fleets or defences...

So if a far more expensive fleet kills a cheaper one, how is this unbalanced again?

Oh sorry, here I was thinking any discussion of 'unbalanced' elements might want to actually look at if it's actually a problem or not. If you've got such a massive resource advantage that you can throw such huge fleets of raiding guys around and your opponent can't muster any defence... maybe that's because you're winning? It's absurd to nerf bombers so 'absolute asspiles of them' aren't going to dominate 'single targets worth 10% the value of the carriers'. Such a focus on carriers is going to leave you wide open to counterattacks (since they have zero endurance in combat) unless you have even MORE of a huge advantage to fight it off. Again, if you have way more stuff, you're going to win. This isn't 'unbalanced'. Remember WW2?

Killing capital ships is so easy in various ways it surprises me so many people focus so much of their fleet supply on them. Expecting a single $500 structure to survive an attack by $35k of carriers is simply asinine: it's like saying 'my three Krogoths destroyed your base lololololol' - no shit, you bring more to the table you win.

lets look at this objectively and not with these stupid comparisons.
you cant state that the 30 bombers in their whole lifetime only kill one cap or in that battle kill one cap, theres many other factors that have to be included, how much time/supply/tech you spent on 30 bombers what they killed (will be more than one cap across a whole game) what the opponent spent on his fleets/structures/tech, how big the penalty there was on your/his income due to supply differences..etc, theres too many factors to make blank statements like your above statement.

for example: 30 carriers cost under 23k (all resources and including teching up to them for vasari, cheaper as advent) and are 240 supply, wasnt your first number 50k?

think you kind of skimmed through my post, I was stating/implying how you can kill a few structures and even level 10 caps with enough bombers long before the flaks kill the bombers (even if theres nearly an equal ratio of carriers to flaks) and thus its great for harassment and assassination (just stay at edge of enemy system, kill few caps) or in many cases make the opponent just decide to quit, I wasnt stating how the carriers are actually fighting the rest of the fleet.

however if the enemy is smart in scouting, he can usually get some cap ability that could help instantly (pushing them away..), but for some reason most people don't.