Yes. But at the current rates, whether this is reasonable depends heavily on what you find fun.
Obviously, if you find mining enjoyable rather than grindy, it's not hard to generate vast wealth. And a FC offers an equally obvious enhancement to your ability to pursue that activity. If nothing else, it makes mining pristine rings outside the bubble entirely feasible. Moreover, there are some truly new options available through FCs. For example, one could literally become a capitalist: park at a good LTD hotspot convergence outside the bubble, and buy high bubble-normal prices (say 950k-1.1M/ton), then once full jump back to a price-spiking system and sell at 100k/ton below the local prices (say, 1.3M/ton or more). If we find a few good hotspot overlaps within a few hundred LY of the bubble, miners will make a good profit with easier mining (due to the hotspots) and no long runs back to a sell station; truckers will run a good profit unloading at the sell system (tens of MCr per round trip); and the carrier owner will make a mint on the spread without doing any mining at all.
If you enjoy exploration, it won't be hard to maintain a carrier now that they can offer UC services. The weekly upkeep represents only a handful of high-value scans. Buying one from scratch purely on exploration earnings will take longer, but an effort on the order of months should make it possible. For reference, my alt (with only Farseer unlocked) recently completed a 4-week ramble about the galaxy--that bit was Colonia to Semotus/Beagle to Sag A*--and turned in something like 650 MCr in scans. Ten months or so of that type of activity would buy an exploration FC and another month or two nets a year of maintenance on top. Admittedly, that's a lot of flying for a casual gamer (those 650 MCr represented FSS scans of something like 700-800 undiscovered systems, plus maps of most of the high-value planets). And again, a FC offers some new and interesting capabilities to an explorer, starting with the ability to use fun-to-fly ships as primary explorers, even if they're fragile, low-jumprange, or lacking internals for endurance-exploration gear. If you enjoy mining (or hooning) from time to time, you can bring specialized vehicles along for that, rather than having to return to the bubble periodically. And if you want to indulge in a run back to civilization for something (combat, a module you want to engineer, whatever), you can have a buckyballing Anaconda handy without being stuck in the thing for the entire trip.
I haven't looked at the earnings rates on other activities--bounty hunting, combat bond farming, trading, PvP etc. But I suspect they're in the 5-15 MCr/hr range at best. That's a long road to buying a carrier, and an annoying burden even to maintain one. Plus, I haven't quite figured out how a FC enhances those activities, except possibly for true bulk trading. In general, it seems like FCs might be slightly more convenient than a standard station, if positioned correctly. But that's a hefty price tag to avoid a jump or two once in a while.
All that said, exploration and mining are my favorites, so I guess that I'm the target audience for FCs. I have the money to buy one (and a couple years of maintenance) already, and I still like it after that time, maintaining it shouldn't be a chore based on the things I already do.
![Ed [FCOC]](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/144/144754.jpg?1583440657){kind=avatar}
