Current State of Carriers

[Shabine]

I recently returned to Elite with only one real pathway in mind; start from zero, get back into my Krait 2, engineer the hell out of it, and then proceed to do all the things with it. I've even been convinced by one of this forum's denizens, against all better judgement, to give Odyssey another go. Maybe I'll scan a plant or shoot a few faces. Might be fun. That said, one of the reasons both I and so many people I know left Elite a while back was the introduction of fleet carriers... which none of us could figure out the reason for. They're a pain to move, they cost a lot of money and they keep costing us money, and their functionality for someone like me was practically nonexistent.

Now, everywhere I go in the bubble, the system maps are full of these beasts. The lines stretch on for days in some places. So clearly, people own (and possibly even use) these monsters. I was hoping that some of the people who post here could give me some honest feedback on their experiences with carriers since they came out.

Has yours improved your life at all? Does the experience of owning and operating one provide you with more utility given your playstyle? As someone who prefers to pilot one very specific ship, they don't appeal much to me, but have any of you found ways to make them profitable or, at the very least, viable to support the activities of you and your friends? Are they simply a convenient place to store and move a massive fleet, or have you experienced buyer's remorse since you added it to your list of assets?

 

[alexzk]

Has yours improved your life at all?

Yes, I don't fly more then 10 jumps on ship. I see many other people who don't do even 2 jumps without carrier. Last update brought boost to exo bio pay outs. 1-2 evenings of gathering grass out there is enough to cover carrier for 10 weeks. If you play / gather everyday you will have only 1 problem - tritium is rare to buy outside bubble.
It's super convenient to be able to unload cargo from ship. Changes all activities you do. If you like to do missions some day you will hit maximum of rewards, which you can just sell out too instead wasting. And so on.

 

[CMDR_A1R]

Giant bricks in space

 

[Shabine]

Yes, I don't fly more then 10 jumps on ship. I see many other people who don't do even 2 jumps without carrier. Last update brought boost to exo bio pay outs. 1-2 evenings of gathering grass out there is enough to cover carrier for 10 weeks. If you play / gather everyday you will have only 1 problem - tritium is rare to buy outside bubble.
It's super convenient to be able to unload cargo from ship. Changes all activities you do. If you like to do missions some day you will hit maximum of rewards, which you can just sell out too instead wasting. And so on.

I think I need to look into their overall functionality more. I'm not sure gathering grass is at the top of my gameplay loop list.

Giant bricks in space

Not the first time I've heard them described this way.

 

[GreySix]

My main playstyle is exploration, so I'm hoping to get one I can jump well outside the bubble to continue exploring far-flung reaches of space. Of course I'll have to learn the basics of mining, so I can mine tritium out in the sticks to keep my mobile base ... mobile.

Still a good way from being able to afford one though.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Fleet Carrier is really nice. I use mine primarly for exploration.

With credits so easy I highly recommend:
Refuel, Rearm, Repair, Redemption, Armory, Universal Cartographer, Vista Genomics, and Bartender.
The Bartender is great just for the visuals. This will cost 16mil per week.

Fill your carrier bank with +1yr maintenance so you don't need to worry about maintenance. Increase it to a few more years over time.

Here is a thread describing methods for an explorer to use the carrier:
Fleet Carrier Travel for Exploration

 

[William J Smith]

While not keen on the whole idea of fleet carriers, I have mine (currently parked up in one of the core systems)
Its use? mainly as a mobile base/shipyard as my 'vette has a 12 ly jump range , no fuel scoop and is a pain to move when the AXI target systems change.
With the carrier, I can schedule the jump as the last thing at night , and log into the game the next day knowing my carrier (and fleet) is ready to do more business with the bugs.
Oh and its storing all of my spare modules

Bill

 

[Riverside]

I'm currently in the bubble, and my carrier is parked in an unpopulated system roughly in the middle of the dozen or so systems I am currently interested in. I have most of my ships stored there & when I need to change ships will usually return to the carrier to swap, although sometimes I have used ship transfer to bring them to the station I am at, it only takes a few minutes because of the carrier's central location.

In the systems I have visited recently some have up to a dozen there, and their presence gives some indication of the amount of player traffic for faction support purposes or trade/mining. If there is a war in a system quite often carriers owned by players that are in a squadron that is aligned with one of the sides show up, again a handy indicator of faction support activity but also demonstrate just how convenient they are for rearm/repair during a war.

I have been to a few ship engineering systems in the last week, one that was 200 ly away I moved my carrier to a nearby system & flew the (short range combat ship) into the engineer system, one I just figured I'd try jumping the carrier straight in & it worked, then moved it back to the unpopulated system I'd been using when I was done. The last one was only 7 jumps (~60ly), I just flew the ship there, docking to refuel on the way & plotted an economical route back (12 jumps IIRC).

I think the 'hassle' of having to wait 15 minutes for a jump nicely balances the convenience of travelling by carrier while in the bubble, and mine has hardly moved in weeks (IIRC those engineers jumps were the only ones & didn't use a meaningful amount of trit).

However I have also taken my carrier (and travelled on other Cmdrs carriers) around the galaxy. According to my codex stats mine has travelled 475kLy and completed 1,089 jumps, most of those will have been close to 500ly while full of tritium so each jump consumed around 130t of trit fuel. Travelling this way with others is great because we can all share the trit mining, which is a bit of variety and closer to home, an opportunity to make some money with Platinum or whatever.

However Trit mining as an isolated activity, especially when travelling alone by carrier & doing all the mining alone is pretty frustrating and I wish trit was as quick to mine in icy trit hotspots as platinum in metallic plat hotspots is. I get a decent sense of progression from mining plat.

Carriers are great, being able to see the carriers of other Cmdrs is great too, except for the few system where there are so many it makes both the system map and nav panel hard to use. These are just UI issues though, and Odyssey has plenty of those so I don't hold it against other carrier owners, I consider it a failing of the user interface.

There is one situation where carriers & their owners create an unreasonable situation, and that's Rackham's Peak. I'd like to do the tourist thing & go there just to be able to say I did it, but the traffic jams put me off. I understand there is a community created traffic management system though so even for that I guess it's emergent content.

In general I think owning a carrier is great & has added to my game, but if someone just has one for a trophy it would be nice if they could be encouraged to move it away from the engineers & carrier service systems if they are not there for a specific activity so that others can park theirs there temporarily.

 

[metatheurgist]

Mine serves as a convenient place to park all my ships and move them all at once. The ability to hold certain cargo and items is also handy. The upkeep is trivial with the overinflated economy*. The original reason they came into being is something I've complained about enough, but I can't deny enjoying owning one and it does give one a sense of having a home.

*One of the very fun Ody ground CZs that you refuse to even consider pretty much covers it each week.

 

[GraphiteGB]

Got 3 of them... STRACZYNSKI 6 (Legacy) & STRACZYNSKI 7 (Legacy) & STRACZYNSKI 8 (Live) FLEET CARRIER SERIES.
Moving every ship in your fleet while the game's not even running is what they're for, that's what i use them to do...
Set the jump location for next play time shut down game.. next day the game booted the FC moved and so has all the ships and modules moved with it...
They move even with game shut down...

I don't have to run a high-powered tower PC to move them etier just boot geforce now or remote play and move them....
Management can be done at any location as you have access Pannal on right side of every personal ship.....

 

[varonica]

Yep, use mine all the time, extreme edge exploration, a convenient place to cash in hundreds of millions in bio and exploration data, a central base for exploring an area. How other people use them isn't my concern, however the convenience of having a local station to store all ships, a vast storage capability and a market that can be used to sell stuff means many Fleet Carriers will remain in a single location. Could they have predicted this before introducing them, maybe, but a lot of changes were made to Fleet Carriers due to player demands so I doubt there would be any major difference in the long run.

 

[Screemonster]

A lot of people are disappointed with fleet carriers because they're either explorers (and move at a faster pace than a carrier can) or else based out of a specific home system and don't move around (in which case they want their home system's mission boards and commodities markets). They rush to buying one as fast as possible because MUST HAVE BIGGEST SHIP TO BE ENDGAME and swiftly find that a fleet carrier is pretty much useless if your assets amount to a multirole python and whatever ship you did all your mining in, or else they end up just leaving it parked in their home system (or one system over if their home is permit locked) and never move it.

The best use of a fleet carrier is, funnily enough, right there in the name.

If you don't regularly find yourself in the position of wanting to carry a fleet, you will find little use for a fleet carrier.

 

[OrdinaryMan]

I started in June 2021 and became a FC owner about 6 months later. So what has changed in my life?

1- I suffer from a disease called "Space Madness". I wish I had a station in space. An FC is the closest thing to that for me.

2- I would like to personally own my Mobile Operations base. I don't mean just CGs. I have used it on my way to Guardian ruins, Thargoid ruins, visiting Black Holes, Colonia-SagA and Zurara and have no regrets. (I'm around Explorer's End right now.) I tried to go to Beagle Point once, but I came back from 40k ly to catch the last days of Salvation. )

3- As someone who mostly plays in Open, it is very practical to get paid from FC when I hunt a Thargoid or after a CZ. (It's important not to get caught by gankers.) Likewise, when I go on a SpaceMadness expedition alone, I get my exploration rewards in FC.

4- The FC I have gives me a feeling of home. Although this is similar to point 1, this is my home. Come on, let's have a drink at the bar. ) (I just bought water in the tank, everything else Tritium )
It is a comfort to have my modules together and not to call and call my ships at the stations in the bubble. If I need anything it's there: in my FC.

My only regret about FC is Tritium mining. I don't like mining but blacks have S.T.A.R initiative. Thank them here, they sell Tritium in the middle of nowhere!

FC bank had around 500m until GOLCONDA CG and I was able to transfer enough money to handle itself every week. It never went below 10b after GOLCONDA.

 

[Hooplah]

I recently returned to Elite with only one real pathway in mind; start from zero, get back into my Krait 2, engineer the hell out of it, and then proceed to do all the things with it. I've even been convinced by one of this forum's denizens, against all better judgement, to give Odyssey another go. Maybe I'll scan a plant or shoot a few faces. Might be fun. That said, one of the reasons both I and so many people I know left Elite a while back was the introduction of fleet carriers... which none of us could figure out the reason for. They're a pain to move, they cost a lot of money and they keep costing us money, and their functionality for someone like me was practically nonexistent.

Now, everywhere I go in the bubble, the system maps are full of these beasts. The lines stretch on for days in some places. So clearly, people own (and possibly even use) these monsters. I was hoping that some of the people who post here could give me some honest feedback on their experiences with carriers since they came out.

Has yours improved your life at all? Does the experience of owning and operating one provide you with more utility given your playstyle? As someone who prefers to pilot one very specific ship, they don't appeal much to me, but have any of you found ways to make them profitable or, at the very least, viable to support the activities of you and your friends? Are they simply a convenient place to store and move a massive fleet, or have you experienced buyer's remorse since you added it to your list of assets?

Greetings.

After other posts with players using fleet carriers they gave you some input. Yes, a player can make credits with a fleet carrier it but is a full time job. You in your engineered Krait Mk II maybe thinking about joining the Thargoid war won't be around to make credits with a fleet carrier. Then many local carriers will supply you taking out the Thargoids. One of many reasons carriers are useful in the current war. Don't want to join with others on Open mode in the war? Your decision. .Play the game your way. but until you buy a fleet carrier and see the possibilities of using one your opinions are about fear and other opimions who support that fear who never owned a fleet carrier.

Players can make billions of credits in a week so buy a carrier then decide, YouTube has videos. It is a game. Go for it and then move on past that fear kworing more about this silly game.

Regards

 

[Shabine]

Players can make billions of credits in a week so buy a carrier then decide, YouTube has videos. It is a game. Go for it and then move on past that fear kworing more about this silly game.

So far the input from the forum has been amazing. And very honest. My problem with the YouTube stuff is that it tends to have a negative bias, because negativity in reviews is generally more entertaining. The reason people watch Yamiks isn't because he's particularly optimistic about anything. My concern about the FC is that if I'm sailing around in just 1 boat, being an interstellar air boss might be a waste of all those billions.

 

[cheechoong]

i have a krait mk 2 i love that can explore, trade or combat in. i had ideas it'd be the ship i spend most time in due to its versatility. these days i hardly touch her despite being my most loved ship. part of the reason was my way of playing changed since getting an fc. more options meant broader, varied game play.

i held back on getting an fc for almost a year after they came out. though i had enough credits saved to buy 2, i reasoned i didn't like the weekly maintenance of it. didn't want to get stuck with recurring payments. felt like too much commitment to a game.

when i finally got an fc i asked myself why had i endured the pain of not having one for so long. there was this one community goal where i made tens of jumps per round trip to deliver goods. multiplied by tens of trips. so many hours that didn't need to be wasted. that was when i knew i had unnecessarily constrained myself.

an fc makes much easier 3 things that i frequently do in elite: community goals, trading & ax combat. the fc's storage and ability to bring an assortment of ships to any location was game changing to me. or just having it parked near jackson's lighthouse for easy jumping to any part of the bubble. the concern about the recurring costs of an fc is easily negated by the many opportunities (credits, access) and time saved from operating out of an fc. credit is not a bottleneck in this game. use of my time is.

 

[Alaska Sædelære]

So far the input from the forum has been amazing. And very honest. My problem with the YouTube stuff is that it tends to have a negative bias, because negativity in reviews is generally more entertaining. The reason people watch Yamiks isn't because he's particularly optimistic about anything. My concern about the FC is that if I'm sailing around in just 1 boat, being an interstellar air boss might be a waste of all those billions.

I agree with your concerns but I think it's an inevitable consequence of the abundance of a totally worthless currency. Just see the thread "What to do with the billions?" Fleet Carriers have their use cases, the war effort is a context where I see their best role currently. But they can be a burden as well. I don't see myself even aspiring for one, but who knows how your mind changes once you arrive at a state where there isn't much left to do. I like the ability to roam and explore far-flung regions, and that depends partly on the effort of reaching them. Overabundance of these things feels just like they're encroaching. Given the number of stars in the Milky Way, it probably takes more than a lifetime before we need another galaxy, but once the sinking feeling is there it doesn't go away. I'd prefer other means to achieve extra long jumps where the situation calls for it, they already exist but there is room for more ideas for tools you could carry yourself.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Has yours improved your life at all?

Considerably*

Does the experience of owning and operating one provide you with more utility given your playstyle?

Absolutely*

As someone who prefers to pilot one very specific ship, they don't appeal much to me, but have any of you found ways to make them profitable or, at the very least, viable to support the activities of you and your friends?

Without a shadow of a doubt*

Are they simply a convenient place to store and move a massive fleet,

Much more than that*

or have you experienced buyer's remorse since you added it to your list of assets?

Never!

* As a vagrant, within a small group of vagrants and galactic vermin, our FCs provide not only a base of operations, but a 'safe space' during those trying times when local security services have a burning desire to discuss some minor transgressions and the odd murder or two...

Funding the beasts, and fuelling them, is normally from the proceeds of crime... (yes, crime does pay, despite the old adage!) Plus, naturally, once the welcome is just a little too enthusiastic in the surrounding area, we can all 'up sticks' and find another pool of tranquility and calm for a day or two...

 

[Vernier]

Does Universal Cartographics on a carrier parked in Li Yong-Rui space pay the 200% bonus for exploration data? Just wondering...
O7
V

 

[Rat Catcher]

To get the bonus normally, does the player have to hand in carto at a LYR controlled installation?
If so, the answer will be no, as FCs are independent, even if the owner is pledged to a Superpower.