Carrier Class

I’ve done it before so why should I be nervous? I’ve crawled my way up from a frigate class ship into a Battleship and have commanded my Dominix in many successful Sleeper encounters. Going into Capital ships is just another logical step, right? Not to me.  The ships are big, the modules are expensive, and the entertainment value is high.

After 1.5 years of playing Eve, I am entering a time when I am stepping into an entirely new philosophy of ships – Capital ships – massive, slow to align, Oxygen Isotope consuming behemoths. Some have big guns, some repair things at great distances, some huge Cruiser sized drones, and some crush a hangars worth of ore down into an Iteron V.

I’m sure you have faced the “what am I going to do with my character now” point in your Eve career. Invention wasn’t calling out to me, I can already produce with Material and Production Efficiency V, I have good Dominix skills, so maybe now is the time where I should go play with the big boys in Capital ships.

After pulling up the current contracts, I found a Thanatos in a station with insurance. I read the contract twice, read it again, check the price, confirmed the item again, check the price again, ahhh OK, *click*

I picked up my Thanatos, the Agamemnon I, in the Lonetrek region on a contract for 700M. It is currently docked in station awaiting the completion of a few more skills before I bring it into WH space.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Carrier ships and here is what I have learned:

1. First and foremost, a Carrier is a support ship. It is not a tackler or a DPS ship. Its main role is to repair your DPS, electronic attack, tacklers, or other capital ships.
2. A Carrier is not a toy to be bounced off of large asteroids (!).
3. You can be taken down by a single frigate. (There is a good killmail floating around somewhere where an AFK Carrier pilot was taken down by a frigate. (Help, anyone?))
4. You can be prevented from jumping by a single warp scram.
5. Items that you put in the corporate hangars can’t be scanned by a cargo scanner.

Now, what to do with a Carrier in WH space:

1. Use it to kill Sleeper Battleships and support your mates at Gravimetric and Ladar sites. Note that warping a Capital ship to a Mag or other encounter site will trigger 5x additional Sleeper spawns (yikes).
2. Keep it at the POS as a show of force. If you were not very aggressive and saw a few Battleships, a Carrier, a Rorqual and lots of POS modules, would you continue to scan or move on to the next WH system?
3. Conversely, if you were an aggressor and saw such juicy targets as a few Battleships, a Carrier, a Rorqual and lots of POS modules, would you camp the system and hunt us down?
4. Haul ships and modules when relocating to a new WH. A POS in WH space is like a campfire while out on a long nature adventure; you setup camp, do some activities, put the fire out and move on. After you anchor a POS in your system, the site respawn rate drops significantly. Moving ships one by one is a pain so putting a few ships in the Carrier will drastically lower relocation time.
5. Close those pesky WHs as not all WHs are welcome. Sometimes you get a hot nullsec WH that everyone wants to come have a peek in your system. A jump with an Orca and Capital ship will close that right up.

Sounds like fun, aye? Hopefully you might run into me someday in WH space launching some Bouncer II’s or closing a WH.