I would like to suggest that carriers have the ability to launch a combat air patrol... Something small, one launch per bay or something.

you prob don't relise this but it was changed from that for BoP's of 1 per bay to 1 per bay @ 3 squadrans = 6 BoP's, same for the small fighters, siphons and sheild drones.

As I said in general... no. Right now, the disadvantage to a carrier is that is has to survive to get DPS up, this cuts 30 seconds off of that time and WILL shift battles.

Something needs to happen though as a couple of carriers in a game and your facing a huge number of NPC aircraft, that seem to do a lot more damage than they did before. However, im not overly fussed about that. my concern with carriers is the effect it has on trying to play the game. With big orange boxes around every ship and every mine you can have a massive cluster of over 100 objects on the screen and you just can't see whats going on.

Let us have a toggle that turns that damn orange box off for mines and non targetted ships. Both sides would benefit from that. However, klinks wont want it because it causes a targetting problem for federation ships. (queue the uber players to say it doesnt effect them cos their so uber) Might even be good for mines as ships will have a much tougher time avoiding them.

I might be wrong, but I believe there are options in the HUD section of the Options window to change when you see reticles on enemy ships.

While it may not be a toggle you can at least turn it off so you have to manually target it, a mine or asteroid, to shoot it. esc> options> Controls> never auto target objects = off & target threatening enemies first = on

I still have a hard time when enemies mine spam....but good things to know is:
** mines can be taken out with
--photonic shockwave
--scatter volly
--fire at will
--torp spread
** players that drop more than one type of mine have less dps in the aft of their ship, so it makes it the best area to fight from and a 20 sec CD on mines makes it easy to counter with a level 1 skill from the afore mentioned abilities.
** mine fields that are larger than the noraml amount also imply that they have a dispersal pattern in play and thus have less dps/CC role. i.e. they dont have AP- Delta, HYT, BO, BFAW slotted due to mine patterns taking up the LT and LTC spots.

so the plus side has the weak side too and should mean to focus fire and be in the aft on a hsip that does deploy mines regularly.

A couple carriers can really put out quite a few NPCs.

The friggin' litterbugs !! They should be charged an energy tax for all the litter they leave around !!