The Dreadnought Dilemma - the ideal role of heavy caps in disco

[Haste]

Heavy Battleships are currently hands down the strongest ship you can bring to a fight. Can a side with nothing but Heavy Battleships be whittled down by smaller classes? Probably, because they can disengage, restock and return at will. A force with a half dozen Heavy Battleships and then a decent group of smaller ships is currently insurmountable without Heavy Battleships of your own.

This is mostly a technical issue. Even selecting the frontal dummy groups of something like an Ishtar you don't get a crosshair until you're basically bumping into it (literally a couple hundred meters on the range readout). Even though in theory you can blindfire from further away, an Ishtar can just laser you down before you ever get to shoot back in Cruisers and below. Properly used BS flaks and secondaries are also stronger than anything smaller caps can use, and a clump of Battleships covering one another is unapproachable.

I think the ship has sailed on restricting Battleships, though, and it sailed well over a decade ago. We have to live with the fact that everyone and their mother can and will log one in. This means that, unfortunately, the reality is that they will always be a "compromise". They can't be the huge power fantasy megacaps we all want because you can have 16 of them logged in at once on the same side in a fleet (and, possibly more importantly, a lot of factions simply don't and shouldn't have Battleships). It's a little-known fact that there are another dozen or so combat (sub)classes in the game that aren't Battleships that would love to be able to do something in a fleet setting, and for that to be the case there's an upper limit to the firepower and, arguably more importantly, time-to-kill Battleships bring to the table.

I've jokingly said before that maybe Battleship powercores should all draw from some sort of collective pool in the same system, so the second there's more than two of them in the same system they just never get to fire, but extremely dumb solutions like those seem more sensible with every passing day.

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