Carrier Design Flaw

[Unforeseen]

I can't give you the exact specs atm, but i played around with early game carrier designs and so far I've had zero luck getting an Escort Role Ship to carry star fighters. Even when i give the ship energy collectors it inevitably runs out of energy and gets perma-stranded.

I want/have been trying to create an "Escort Carrier" for pre-Carrier Role fleet support since i dont use the Escort for anything else. (I build thousands of small and inexpensive frigates that handle all of the patrolling and escort duties any enemy ships that enter my systems or attack my ships are shortly swarmed by hundreds of em; don't last long generally but its long enough for my strike squadrons to respond)

[Avarice0107]

Since it sounds like you design your own ships I'm going to assume you know the basics. If they are running out of energy then this has little do do with being a carrier. First make sure that they have enough fuel cells, I usually run with ATLEAST 10 on all my designs more on my independent operations ships like my escorts which are similar to yours; escort carrier. Second make sure that your ship has enough reactors; on the right side of the ship design screen you need to add up static power usage, cruise speed power usage and along the bottom the weapons energy consumption. Then make sure your reactor energy output is more than those combined and you should never have an energy crisis(and it may be slightly sub-optimal but oh well ). As a tip for the design itself I would recommend only torpedo launchers and/or missile launchers and no close range weapons. Then you can set the ship stance to "stand off" and even a couple of mine can keep pirates and lone enemy ships busy for long enough for help to arrive.

Edit: Energy collectors only work while in an actual star system modified by the brightness of the star... or something like that. I only put enough on ships to cover static energy use so can't comment on how to use them effectively but if your relying on them as your primary source of power that could also be your problem.

[Seath]

Well i dont know why you want escort carriers in the early game. In my opinion just going for a missle based fleet of Frigates set to Stand of does a good job in defending and attacking Pirates and or other Empires in the early game. It is cheap deals a lot of dmg and destroys on long range. Also for fighters you need 50 free space for each ship! In this space you can easly fit in 6 or more missle weapons.
I normally have fleets of 6-10 of those missle friggates with Defend system posture tagged to each colony by setting there homebase there. And 2 Fleets with 20-30 of those friggates for war and pirat hunting. It is cheap and very effective.
Also cause pirates use Railguns very heavy you should consider only adding 1-2 schields on each ship and research armor to the second lvl asap.
Thisway you get a very robust anti pirat ships which dont get instand railgunned to death and the Hyperspace Generator dosent get always destroyed just by a few pirat hits. So after a battle you dont have 10 ships to scrap cause they lack hyperdrive ability and maybe only 1-2 of them for each pirat base.

[elanaagain]

BTW, the energy collectors also only work when the ship is stationary. Any movement at all nullifies the energy collecting functionality.