I think that the main problem with carriers, that no one is focuing on in any of the post, is what is there function of a carrier in a combined fleet.
If you look at it, the support and heavy cruisers work best at close range combat, making them the perfect comb. arms fleet. But the carriers are a different story. The carriers fight at long range, which is out of range of the support abilities of support cruisers, and out of range of fire support form the heavy cruisers. If you do close with a comb. arm fleet with carriers, you are told by main people on this form, that you have made an error. That because carriers add no support abilities at close range. Also on top of that, in close combat, squadrons come out on top of enemy flack while not build up! This leads to the loss of entire squadrons the second they launch.
As I see it, there is only two way to build a fleet in sins. One is build a fleet of heavy and support cruisers, as the heavy bring the firepower, and the short range abilities of the supports keep them in the fight. The second is to produce a carrier only fleet(or almost carrier only). The reason, is that if you close to attack, you risk your unarmed carriers, this makes bring heavy cruisers a problem, as you can't use them, and that they take up supplys. You can't bring support cruisers as there short range abilities only work on the ships near them.
As it stands now, there is no 50/50 (close combat ships/carrier) combs that will work for people like me, that like to use both fighter and close in combat ships. There is not even a 25/75, 75/25 or and thing in between. This is were the problem is, you must fight at long range or at close, without the abilitie for one to support the other.
What we need to fix the problem, is something that will allow long range carriers to support close range combat ships, and allows for close range combat ships to support longe range carriers. I've seen on many post, the ideal of just increasing the damage output by 2 to 3 times what it is doing now. But this will just make us all spam carriers, as it would if we increase the damage output of the LRM by 2 to 3 times what they do now.
There right now there are only two ways to fix this problem iun my eyes.
Ones is to give all squadrons an special abilitie that help the close range ships when the close to fight. It need to be something not in use by any other faction, on any of there ships. There reason that special abilities where not used in games like homeworld 2 and to some level in star wars empire at war, was the fact that you could destroy subsystem. This mean our special abilitie should be something like, turning off the secondary weapons on a enemy ship for example.
The second is to have a better fleet command system which act like an special abilitie. But in both cases, they need to do the same thing, which is allow us to have mixed fleets of long and short range ships.
