You're both misconstruing my argument *and* ignoring the evidence I posted, while posting no evidence at all. It's not that real carriers can avoid enemy airstrikes, it's that real carriers can use the combination of long-range interceptors, CAP, and their escorting guided missile cruisers to -- exactly as I said -- reliably intercept and deter fighters at extreme standoff ranges.
In strategic situations where this was not true -- like in the relatively confined waters of the Atlantic in WWII -- real life navies built well-armed, armored carriers, and that's exactly what the Microraptor emulates.
"True" cruiser-carrier hybrids don't have a good record in real life, but a) that's Velociraptor, not Microraptor, and b) they do have a record of success in the technological paradigm of Battletech, and for good reason. ASFs are stupendously fast, carry weapons which cannot be intercepted by active defenses, and yet are extremely short range (they are capable of tactical movement only and not strategic movement), which completely nullifies the extended-range intercept and deterrence paradigm.
Dive bombs and torpedoes could not be intercepted by active defenses in the 1940s and that is when the world learned that guns on carriers were a waste of space. Carrier launched aircraft had extremely short ranges compared to carriers. England built armored carriers for use within range of hostile land airbases. It did not put large guns on them.
Beyond the ASF complements, 2 people decided to make designs, working from different directions. My "Near Combatant Carrier Dropship" was built on the idea of maximizing armor. Adding any more was impossible, so I then filled the rest of the room with weapons. The Microraptor started with weapons, and tried to optimize combat ability. If you wanted a cheap as possible squadron-sized carrier, you could have made an entry yourself reducing size down to the minimum needed to carry the ASFs. At that point, we'd have a third option to vote for here, deciding what we actually wanted to prioritize (which I expect to still be the Microraptor, we have been demanding something like it forever).
There was a BV floor on the contract. This was a critical flaw in the contract itself that prevented a dedicated carrier (fighters, cargo, and armor only with maybe some rear facing light AA) proposal. The NCCD was closer to what I wanted and I voted for it. The Aerodyne requirement prevents the fast carrier I actually want given our current shipbuilding technology, and I would have preferred to wait or build a spheroid.
The LB-20X is not an AA gun. ASFs do not have that sort of armor threshold and in cluster mode it doesn't threshold well. anti-fighter work at that range you want ERML banks. The LB-20X is in this quest an anti-dropship gun. That's Carrier with 8 inch guns territory. One of the battlecruiser conversions did that. They weren't useful and subsequent carriers didn't waste displacement on such silliness.
One thing that you might not be taking into account - ASFs are not that significantly faster than dropships. I built a few 12/18 ones faster than most interceptors to see if I could, and got something surprisingly reasonable. In some ways, dropships are more comparable to heavy bombers than modern warships. ASFs should be the primary weapons system for carriers, but that doesn't mean they should be the only weapons system.
This may be where you went so wrong. No dropships faster than 8/12 exist. Only one 9/14 dropship has ever been published and it is not developed until 3065. Nothing faster has ever been published. We will probably not see more than one 8/12 dropship any time soon unless we build them ourselves. The Combine does have Achilleses, but isn't likely to deploy one away from the main fronts with other great houses because they're in short supply. We probably won't see a foreign 7/11 dropship either. The Combine does not domestically produce Avengers. There's a 6/9 dropship, but it's an infantry transport with insignificant firepower. The only 5/8 combat dropship was an SLDF design swept up by Kerensky's exodus. 5/8 transports were a thing during the age of war, but any left are rare relics. We might see a Vengeance because they are drop collar efficient, but normally we'd expect to see Leopard CVs or the fighters on military transports. Those are 4/6 for the carriers or 3/5 for most of the transports.
So the dropships we're actually likely to face are 4/6s and 3/5s. And the dropships we've seen deployed are 4/6s and 3/5s. We might be aware that Achilleses existed at the time of the Exodus and had factories survive the Amaris Civil War, but they are best dealt with by having armor and investing more in fighters because even the fastest dropships can be outmaneuvered by the slowest fighters if they let them match velocity, which they must do to attack a carrier that isn't running away faster than its fighters can follow.
If we build fast dropships we'll have a near monopoly on them. Doing so isn't a bad idea, but we don't need to build our forces around facing them. We might see one when they break the treaty. I'd be shocked if we saw two.
There is a space combat doctrine that leverages fast dropships to exhaust enemy ASF defenses on long chases and then pounce when they RTB, but no one has the ships for it. It's one of those things where if you ever tried it on the tabletop you'd get the table thrown at you like showing up to a game on rolling mapsheets with nothing but H-7s except that unlike H-7s they're only practical when used in such a fashion as would induce table flipping.
Sub-Capital weapons are optimal as primary weapons on even larger DropShips that can carry entire batteries of them, and as secondary weapons on light to medium sized WarShips that aren't big enough to fully saturate their fire control slots with efficient loads of capital-scale weapons.
That might be true in their original context, but there are no warships and fighters are much less threatening without advanced tech. In the current era 10,000 tons of Sphereoid are more than enough to max out the free fire control on one arc with LSCCs with dogfighter avoiding acceleration and adequate armor for the era (where adequate armor is over twice what any other dropship mounts, but not over a thousand points average per facing).
The Warrior is not a ship I want. It's not only confused, it's slow. The factory is very good news if it can handle larger transit drives, but it'll take time in universe to get a design ready. If they were gambling on military contracts I'd buy some to keep the company solvent while a faster design is developed, but it sounds like they have civilian contracts lined up.
[X] Disagree
[X] Do not intervene.
[X] Approve.