Has anyone had cause or opportunity to test a true use of the carrier/drone combat model?
What I mean by this is that the true strength of the modern surface fleet (aka: IRL) is the aircraft carrier, and the fact that two ships can have a battle without having seen each other by line of sight.
To further frame the question I have already posed: in my opinion, the strength of the carrier design is that we can effectively engage a large direct battle type vessel because high numbers of drones effectively negate the strength of super-weapon based ships with massive damage and reload times. You shed this advantage by presenting your expensive carrier to the enemy battleship to fire on at their leisure.
This forum has succeeded in convincing us of the usefulness of drones, and the various modes of transport, delivery, and recovery of said drones. There is little talk of the most damaging use of drones. I submit that you could park a carrier on an asteroid in a system, use a cloaked 'scout' to find the enemy, return, launch your drones, and issue an attack on sector command. Follow your drones to the sight of battle, observe from a position of relative safety, and adjust tactics from there. Granted, you can do little but order a retreat or movement, but you could preserve the relative safety of your carrier while directing the majority or even the entirety of your combat power to a target.
With this sort of combat model, fast delivery systems become a matter of convenience. You can order your force of 100's of drones to launch and wait as long as you like for them all to do so, and attack en masse with no concern for the speed of their delivery. You could instead revert your efforts to a sort of system that could detect (using activation blocks) a system that detects missing blocks on a docking drone and diverts them to a repair bay or a counter for you to have an indicator of your combat power after each battle.