FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

I disagree. Modern day carriers are lumbering hulks compared to jet planes. However, modern day carriers are not meant to be front line vessels, they are meant to serve as a base of operation for the much faster fighters, a place where the pilots can take their fighters to rest, refuel, rearm, and repair.

A modern carrier is as frontline as any ship in a carrier group. Either the whole group is out of reach of the enemy, or it is not.

I see nothing about the proposed setup that would change that, though it does open the door for a different class of medium-occupancy "corsair" fighter which has limited fuel, repair/maintenance capabilities, and extremely cramped living space but is based out of a carrier allowing the crew to rotate and any necessary repair/maintenance to be done back on board the carrier. These would be larger than your typical fighter, capable of operating on their own for a few weeks, but smaller than your typical independent ship. Given the background description such vessels could dart around ahead of the larger fleet, performing reconnaissance or hit-and-run operations.

The OP is proposing an FTL system that makes large ships noticeably slower in FTL than small ships. Thus a carrier with a fighter wing is slower strategically than a fleet of FTL gunships. As missiles tend to make large ships a liability anyway, it works against carriers quite strongly, because they have to carry the fighters right into any system there's combat in (and may have to recover them directly from combat). A gunship fleet's support vessels, if they're operating very far from a base, may be no faster than a carrier, but they don't have to come into a hostile system - they can be non-combat vessels in a way that a carrier can't.