I agree with Omicron and Mimir here. Such nerf to snub's speed may do realy great strike.
And... well, it's probably never ending competition here, between snubs and caps, but let's just face it. Snubs will always > Caps, because game is made for snubs, at first place. Caps here, just oversized snubs, with changed characteristicks of speed, turning, strafing, armor, and poweroutput.
This suggestion aside though, I do think caps need a little love.
What if bats/bots were removed from caps, but hull significantly buffed (especially for battleships) to give capital ships drastically improved lasting power (along with a turret/equipment hit point buff of course)? And at the same turn increase damage output on anti-cap capital ship weaponry (mortar, cerb, prims) while maybe lowering anti-snub capabilities?
It will make caps a little less of a nuisance for snubs (at least there'd be no feeding), make caps the best choice against other caps and give the feeling of a "heavier" ship that can withstand far more snub fire (while not being a snub-killer itself).
God have mercy with our souls...buffing caps, nerfing snubs, making the gap between snubs and caps even bigger than it already is, those are the horrors I was always scared of.
Good old days when caps had to aim by themselves and when it was possible to solo a gunboat with a bomber.
While it's agreeable how caps become more obsolete with each update, they are still perceived as overpowered in majority of the circumstances, especially in small scale fights. It's harder to come around large scale fights nowadays with the given online population. It's rare to see any sizable swarm and even rarer to see their opponents log in to fight.
Well the thing is, whenever I am in a snub I just fly away from caps unless I am in a position to totally gank them for a pretty explosion with little to no risk of failure. If I see some pretty snubs that are hauling along a cap with regens, I fly away as well. It's pretty crappy gameplay for both sides, it leads to non-interaction or ganks.
The same when I am in a cap, I get frustrated by swarms of snubs crashing into me, wonky steering, target selection, shieldrunning and whatnot. Again, pretty bad gameplay.
When I am in a snub against another snubs, there is a sense of fairness in the challenge, even when outnumbered. If you only got a little bit better, you could have won that fight etc. I've seen what some of the aces can do. For me, snub PVP is the supreme challenge of Disco, once discovered.
When in caps, I prefer nice big targets of similar class to my ship where I have to focus on things like range and other more slow-paced strategic elements. It's a very different game, you have to listen and respond to commands, keep track of fleet formation and so on. A very different style of game that I also happen to enjoy, although pretty bad at it.
Instead we have this mixed situation where designated capwhores want - in terms of gameplay - pretty drastic advantages, and designated snubwhores want to be able to solo caps in bombers on the other hand, and we end up with a little bit of both worlds.
tl;dr: it should be so that balance encouraged players to log a cap to counter caps, and snubs to counter snubs - that's the optimal situation in terms of what the gameplay can provide.
Throw bombers in the trash. Reduce Fighter speeds and rebalance the fighter/cap guns. There. Caps needed to take out other caps. Fighters escort said caps. And not a single gunboat able to drop a Cap 8 dreadnought or say a group of VHFs, dropping a dreadnought. For example. Either way, despite the above being a five second thought process. Rebalance is kinda the main stake needing driven in here.
Except I don't want to have to grind credits for hours on end just to be able to fight other caps.
I want to fight caps in, y'know, something cheap.
Like a bomber.
As a self-professed snubwhore, capital ships are already a huge pain to get rid of. You'll hear cap pilots whinge and cry about how "waaa there's literally nothing I can do" - and when they're fighting competent snubs, you might actually be right.
The problem is that most of the snub pilots on Disco absolutely suck, for want of a better word. Certainly, the skill floor for cap vs snub combat is a lot, LOT lower for the cap pilot - all he has to do is aim secondaries/Solaris/whatever at the crosshair while zoomed all the way out, and he's being as effective as he possibly can be. Meanwhile, Baddy McGee in his bomber only has to glance away from the screen for one second to instantly be turned into much by two cruiser Cerbs blasting his poor little Upholder into bits.
And then Baddy McGee goes and grinds himself a CAU8 Lib Dread.
The problem is that capital ships need a less binary way to do damage to snubs - there's only three states you can possibly be in when fighting caps in a snub, and that's full hull and shields, deshielded, or dead, because it takes exactly two volleys to kill - one for the shields, and one to wipe out your hull. Therefore, caps need some way of doing constant, semi-reliable DPS to a snub, rather than just outright deleting it. Some kind of really low damage, really high projectile speed (like 5000m/s or something, I dunno), so that point-defences are more of a constant drain on a snub's shields/hull rather than either "blap" or "no blap ever".
In return, fighter damage towards caps should be gutted unless in extreme numbers, and bombers should have a massive, massive increase in damage. Have you seen how pathetic a single SNAC is against even light BSes with good armour? It's mind-numbingly boring.
Basically, make bombers and caps able to actually fight each other, given that that's what they're meant to do, all ideas of this fairytale-like combined-arms fleet battle world aside. Spoiler alert: 90% of the time there's not enough people around to have an amazing, well-balanced fleet composition brawl and all that other good stuff where everything works ideally - and even if there were, the server would just die anyway.
Bombers need to shred capital ships apart, and in return caps should be able to do something to bombers that aren't complete garbage. As it stands, any decent pair/trio of bombers will never die to a lone cap, but will have to spend ten thousand hours of their life slowly grinding the damn thing down. It's boring to lob SNACs for 30 minutes, and it's also boring for the cap ship who has to basically hold down RMB the entire time and pray his opponents are baddies.
Strip cap shields, buff cap hulls through the roof, buff cap vs cap guns...possibly slightly less than the amount hulls go up by, SNACs too, much win.
Now, VHFs can be used to actually suppress caps' guns (by sub-targeting them), and to wear away a battleship's hull over time, but for a straight up kill, you need the heavier guns of bombers and other caps. Fighter torpedoes and razors come back as something other than joust-to-kill weapons. Plus, mines become effective against big things. Oh, and we can finally remove/repurpose the useless EMP torpedoes that currently do nothing but waste space in the download.
Downsides: caps will lose hull slowly to NPCs (faster to the tougher cap patrols...but they hurt ATM, anyways), flying a cap in an asteroid field will hurt more than just requiring /stuck /stuck /stuck. Oh, and caps will get hurt by parking themselves in gas pockets and trolling the GMG...oh, wait...that'd give the GMG an advantage to using bombers in the Crow...
Then again, caps won't change, because disco's cap philosophy is "With this mod, you can fly CAPS! YAY!...
...ps: They are not worth flying. BUT YOU CAN! Ignore the suckage! Look, pretty!"