to carry this out further the tech would have to be researched and increase with further research.

you would need to modules one for the command ship. and one for the receiving ships.

Meh... that last proposal looked largely complicated. One question(to Kryo): Why do we not have carriers(Star-Destroyer type), yet we have Terror Stars? What do Terror Stars add to the game other than the ability to go on a very slow(1pc/wk slow) genocide-followed-by-asteroid-eating session?

What you talk'en 'bout Willis? Now if that isn't the dumbest thing I have ever herd of.
How can you say that with a straight face? I must admit a ture carrier "might" not be feasible in the future, but some sort of hybrid ship would be. At the very least some ships will have larger than normal boat bays to support a wing of fighters, to support ground pounders when the use of a ships guns are not feasible or as a force multipler in a battle.

I hate that bias of only allowing effing Plasma and above beam weapons to have special abilities. The damn things can't get past a simple energy shields, how do you expect them to penetrate an atmosphere and melt a whole planet? If they do, the planet should crumble and solidify into mine-able asteroids, so that the player gets some gain from them. Missiles from Harpoon and above should therefore be able to nuke a planet and crush it to asteroids, and Mass Drivers above Singularity Driver should repeatedly crack it up until it breaks into asteroids on its own.

This is sounding ridiculous, however, since only top of the line shipboard weaponry sound remotely powerful enough to destroy a whole planet. Plasma, Harpoon and Singularity Driver are merely second-generation equipment. It would take Doom Rays, Black Hole Eruptors or Black Hole Generators to bombard a planet.
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Carriers in reality are so powerful because they have squadrons of planes on them, which are much faster than any ship, can travel farther than a shell and hit deeper inland. In the GalCiv universe, ships are as fast or faster than small fighters and pack more of a punch over the same range, thus defeating the purpose of why carriers would be powerful.
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A true GalCiv carrier would have to be an extraordinarily expensive, enormous ship that uses 40 logistics points, has pathetic weapons, tons of defenses, and the ability to carry up to 70 small fighters. It's strength would lie in the fact that it has unlimited range and can deploy giant fleets irrespective of logistics ability. It would be larger-than-huge hull size auto-fitted with hangars, with 100 base hp, but with a sensor range of 4 pc. It would have 48 space left over for the player to put whatever extra stuff they want on it such as engines, extra weapons, more defense, sensors, etc. Such a ship would have devastating offensive power, but would be extremely expensive concerning the price of the carrier, it's huge battle fleet and all that combined maintainance. Battle fleets would only be replenished or upgraded at planets or military starbases. Only tiny or small hulls would be carried.

And... if a player sends their entire battle fleet of small fighters to fight two fleets each containing 5 dreadnoughts, and the little fighters get destroyed, it would be useful to have some large escorts or else say bye to the carrier. So in the end, the poor player must fund a battle force of one carrier, 70 small fighters, 2 battleship escorts and invasion fleets containing transports, spore ships or even a Terror Star. A largely unwieldy strategy with loads of cool factor and a military rating so high that no normal force would even dare a war with you. Yet, a carrier vs carrier battle would be purely awesome. Throw in starbases, Terror Stars and dreadnoughts, and you have an epic, time-consuming, memory-consuming, slightly maddening space war.

I have an idea to make this rather easy.

Players, at any time, should have the ability distribute the population of one of their planets around the tiles on that planet. New population gets randomly allotted to random tiles, meaning that it would be useful for the player to do this only when an invasion is inevitable. Distributing population would, however, have no effect on production.

When a planetary invasion is initiated, the invader chooses which tiles to start off from and how many troops to allocate to each one of those tiles, and the invasion then progresses from there outward until all the improvable tiles of the planet have been captured.

Citizens(if any) inhabiting non-improvable tiles(tiles that don't contribute to PQ) would still be alive, and then the player would be faced with 3 options:

Good: Convince them to join your civ and make them equal citizens.(BC lost, population gained)
Neutral: Let them do whatever they want.(No change)
Evil: Enslave them!(Big military & social production bonus)

Now, here's how Orbital Bombardment comes into this picture of an improved Planetary Invasion:

You can attach Bombardment Modules to any ship, but they take up a lot of space and cost a bit. These Bombardment Modules allow for that ship's weaponry to be used for Orbital Bombardment. When one of these 'bomber' ships arrive in orbit around a foreign planet with no defending ships in orbit, a screen comes up with the planet map showing improvements and population allotted to each tile. The player then chooses one tile to attack, and the ship rolls and attacks. The attack strength removes a number of citizens from that tile by either killing them or causing them to flee to a neighboring tile on their own. The formula for damage done is:

ShipAttack * 20000 taxpayers

where ShipAttack is the total number of attack points for any kind of weapon on the ship. For each point of damage, 15000 citizens would flee and 5000 citizens would be killed. However, the ship would:

1. Need at least one Bombardment Module in order to bomb a tile at all.
2. Only be able to bomb as many tiles per turn as it has Bombardment Modules.
3. Lose 10% of total HP for every bombing run due to atmospheric entrance.
4. Have to bomb the planet upon entering an undefended orbit, so that this isn't used as a form of espionage.

Once a tile has no population left on it, any improvement built there gets destroyed and the tile must be terraformed for further use. A bombing raid would also disable the defenders ability to shift it's population for the next turn due to shock.

This way, the population would take a long time and a very powerful ship to totally get destroyed, and thus causing bombardment to be method of merely reducing the difficulty of an invasion and not being a 'genocide run'. Also, if any new defending ship enters orbit while the bomber is still there, the invasion fleet must fight another battle to maintain space superiority.

This would result in some nice strategies, like taking down planetary defense improvements and then going after those chunky Galactic Achievements and Hyperion super-projects to strategically cripple an opponent. If the enemy depends on their 4 Hyperion Shrinkers to make immensely powerful warships while you have only 1 Shrinker, you could bomb those enemy Shrinkers into dust to permanently weaken their military power.

space fighters would equal reusable drones.

Yes. In Twilight of the Arnor, you have:

Atlas - Gives a 10% attack bonus to all ships in fleet except for the ship carrying it.
Fortitude - Increases HP of all ships in fleet except for the ship carrying it.
Driver - Increases speed of fleet.

just put two such ships in each fleet

Hm, so by adding all three modules to a ship a player will be able to get something very much like a carrier. Sounds good.

Although, it would be cool if the size of the ships played a role, as well as the stats of this "carrier". I like meaningful bonuses much more than generic "+x to something" stuff. It make sense that only smaller ships can benefit from speed and defense bonus. It also makes sense that a carrier doesn't just give a bonus to speed, but makes the speed and range of smaller ships equal to it's own.

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see how those modules are implemented.

so what this game needs is not a carrier. but combat engines. these would work on number of engines compared to size of ship.

yes in fact i will start a new thread to get some feed back from those who have stopped reading this thread. like kyro, froggie boy, and other devs.

i made that observation here in this thread.

not for the reasons you did. i thought missiles would have guidence to target. energy weapons would be speed of light. and gun shots lose guidence once the shot leaves the barrel.

WWW Link

maybe this belongs here I don't know but, is there any way for a ship to add logistics to a fleet? and if so boom Carrier!