Is it possible to allow existing carriers to equip combat pets in the ship's weapon slots and give carrier pilots the flexibility of choosing whether they want their ship to be a true carrier (using pets as their damage output or be able to field lots of support drones and truly be a support ship)?

This would significantly enhance playability of carrier craft as one could then control the role and capability of the ships.

Oh god, no. No more spam.

Though, yes, it is technically possible I suppose. Mine launchers already launch NPCs. They could probably copy those and change which NPC is spawned, in your case, the carrier pet you're looking to send out.

That said, from my experience, carrier pets do so little damage you'd be a liability. The only carrier pets that seem to do any respectable damage are the Klingon Bird of Prey pets.

Give Quantum Mines to Type 10 Shuttles. they are useless with Polarize Hull 1.

One of my toons flies a Vo'Quv, and even I don't like this idea. Too much spam already.

I love the term spam. Would you prefer carriers just going into battle, sitting there and not launching? It's not spam, it's called using your ship the way it was meant to be used

However I do see your point and would have to agree with you, It can get to a point very quickly where there is just too much going on with Carriers and their equipment...

There is no such thing as carrier spam when the pets ARE the carrier's weapon system.

As for beyond-range use of the pets: It does not give the carrier any superior ability to what it currently has now. An NPC ship that is mobile will either close in with the carrier on its own or it dies to the carrier or its pets as it blindly follows a scripted flight path.

non-mobile targets like gates and such actively target the pets and destroy them very quickly...and currently I can take my time and kill the gate without danger to my carrier simply by flying to 9.9km, ordering pets to attack and backing out to 10.1km and just watch. Takes a long time though.

So it does not change anything other than the fact that the carrier would be a CARRIER not a heavily armed cruiser with 2 flight decks and 4000 crew who'se pastime is to die by the thousands the moment a single torpedo hits the shields.

It would be far more sensible to design a new ship which foregoes weapon slots for additional hangar bays and or other utility / abilities / passives / effects / whatever.

3-6 hangar bay carrier would be quite the spam however, they really need to reduce the nametags of the pets to just their initial letters instead of the full names.

One to two hangers of fighters is more than enough. This notion that you could launch up to 36 fighters while you sit back out of weapons range and they do all your DPS risk free is pretty much a non-starter. A ship with no weapons and no pets deployed is useless. With 36 six fighters deployed, it is OP.

You should be playing the game, not having pets do all your work for you.

Or you just switch them off in Options-HUD.

If they did that, they could as well change the existing hangars to weapon bays. so that the Atrox and the Vo'Quv have 8 weapon bays. The Armitage and the Kar'fi would have to have one fewer weapon bay than they currently have in weapons + hangars, though: 7 for the Armitage, 8 for the Kar'fi.