((BTW, the carrier fighter compliment feels a touch low in comparison to the other captial ships' compliments. It seems to me that a dedicated fighter carrier would house a bit more on average. compared to a gun-heavy tank. I might be missing something though, so don'ttake this as a criticism, just a niggling uncertainty from me.))
Well, keep in mind, the Carrier has room for another 18 fighters in the empty cargo space so it can hold 40 Fighters. It has been given armor, and enough weapons to where it is not a sitting duck and can fight if it has to, but it's really, really not intended to be sitting around in your wall of battle.
Compare it to a Waller, which is the next ship size up (Huge as opposed to Large). Waller has over one and a half times the armor, more redundancy in internal systems, over five times the missile capacity, bigger and stronger armaments, higher defenses, etc. While it has 27% of the fighter capacity, it's really designed to be a slugger with enough fighters to improve its point defense.
Check out the Armored Carrier in comparison. That's built to Waller size with some very close armor, but has double the missile capacity of the Carrier, better sensors, better defenses, etc. It also manages to have a max capacity of 50 Fighters.
I am sure I said this, but hyper band limits are not "The ship
cannot go faster" so much as "We have decided that they
will not go faster." Smaller ships can go faster in hyper because the increased odds of failure are offset by the smaller cost of losing the ship. Also, its relative mass means that its chance for an error is less than the chance a bigger ship takes.
But to be clear, there is some leeway in hyper generators and compensators; that's why a ship with a particularly good engineer can afford to push its compensator harder and cut its safety margin thinner than a ship with a less skilled engineer. That's why some ships are faster than others of its class. To be very clear, courier boat engineers are highly trained professionals operating on very close tolerances; see the logistics score difference between it and most other ships? The higher the hyper band, the more dangerous and damaging it is.
So, in theory, you can decide that your Supercruiser is going to punch into the Zeta bands, but you're really not going to want to do it for too long, because exceeding the maximum capacity of your compensator long enough means your entire crew will be instantaneously subject to the Chunky Salsa Rule*, and your ship is going to show up out of hyper completely drifting, assuming the AI on board doesn't accidentally get caught in a grav wave and break up anyway before the hyper generator fails.
*Any situation that would reduce a character's head to the consistency of chunky salsa dip is fatal, regardless of other rules.
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Topic: Mercenary Fleet OOC: 10?/10? charter members, ??/?? members. Transit 1 (Read 29117 times)