New Carriers and Supercarriers

Carrier thread
Supercarrier Thread

The TL;DR
So, some interesting things here

Lock ranges
Yeah, so carriers and supers will be Slowtard - a kind of mash-up between Slowcats and ishtars. The Carrier's job will be purely DPS and EWAR at range, and it's going to be extreme range compared to what we are used to - 3,600 to 4,600 before skills for Carriers, and 50% more for Supers.

POS's are going to be in for a rude, rude shock when these hit, since you can now park Carriers at around 5,000km off the POS and drive your fighters in to mess up the defences. With proper aligning of your carriers to a rolling safe, you can keep safe enough from casual tackle.

There's precious little to recommend a dread now, and even Titans will be....lets say kited, by carriers who can shoot from 50x the range of a doomsday / superweapon. Lets say, kinda like Ishtars used to out-range and outmaneuver their slower everything else.

Mobility
Bear in mind that dreads need to be static and carriers assuredly do not want to be static. Capital Ab's and MWD's with 75-85m base speeds (so, 100-120m/s) will see speeds of 250-750m/s, assuming you don't get scrammed and webbed. Nevertheless, this will allow a carrier group to sidle out of range of dreads and maybe even get into a passable close orbit around dreads, which is a further downvote for those ships.

But...look at those base align times. One minute. That's...unacceptable.

Income Generation
So, you can lock out to about 5,000km without sensor boosters. This is good news for nullsec ratters, really. No longer are you restricted to sentry drones at 70km from the warp-in point of a Sanctum - you can just ping off an alt at 2,500km or whatever and, slowly I guess, drive your fighters in to make bank.

Similarly, there's a chance that carriers will become a common C3 and C4 ratting tool with the fighter range abilities, depending on how badly sleepers chew on them. Escalations are up for review but there would be a greater risk to fighters here than would be economical - basically just like now, where dreads are used and carriers use, at best, T1 sentries if anything.

Tank
Waaaay less tank, but you get capital plates and Capital Shield Extenders (CSE's). So who knows what the EHP is going to be except way less. It's possible that carriers could get volleyed off field by large enough subcap fleets, even with CSE's and plates. So, as per Ishtars, the idea is to not get caught in the first place.

The issue for larger battles is of course going to be Force Auxilliaries, which at this stage will be tied down to immobility with Triage. So if you want to get dank reps, you need a ship which gets dank dunked by dreads assuming the dreads can get into position.

The current nullsec meta of preponderance of Archons might be up for review here, to some degree, but I think the capital meta for tank will still be armour biased.

Gank
The real buff is to Minmatar, who now get the same gank factor as Gallente, but more mobility and more mobile fighters. Especially light fighters, which can already with Archons hunt down and gank frigates, a Nidhoggur's light fighters will be a dangerous thing. Plus, 12.5% more velocity on fighters is a significant DPS advantage if your fighters have to slowboat many kilometres to an enemy.

DPS levels? Who knows. Depends on the fighter statistics.

EWAR
The new Suport Fighters will be interesting. Whilst any carrier can obviously use any type of Support Fighters, the racial bonus to racially appropriate fighters might be a determining factor of whether an armour carrier meta develops around Archons or Thannies. Cenobites are obviously neuting fighters and Sirens are scrammers, so for most capital warfare the neuting would be way more useful in anything except small brawls.

Ratting wise, the Chimera might find a niche with the Scarab ECM fighters for better GTFO ability, and unlucky last is going to be the Nidhoggur and its basically useless webbers.

If Valkyrie SW-600's aren't able to catch anything that your ship can't catch itself and don't web anything properly, why the fuck does anyone think a squadron of Dromi will be worthwhile? Yeah, i'm calling it now - web fighters will be as fucking useless as web drones are now.

The New Meta
Slowtars.