Let's ignore the Iron Duke and Overseer. Other than those (and their variants) the Hydran carriers do not use heavy weapons. Anything built on the heavy cruiser, war cruiser, medium cruiser, destroyer, and frigate hulls all have full carriers that don't use heavy weapons. Except for the war destroyer, for some odd reason. So, what would be cool are some new Hydran carriers.

(All of these are obvious. No one gets credit for these.)

The first one is making a variant of the Vampire Hunter that tosses the fusions and adds more fighters so that it has a fighter group larger than normally seen on the hull type. So, give it 12 to 16 fighters, instead of the 8 the Vampire Hunter has.

The others are variants of the CAV, MKV, COS, UH, and CVE. They trade their "excess" fighters to regain their fusion beams. I assume any heavy weapons on one of these armed carriers has to be fusions, as the power for hellbores just isn't there. (I skipped the NVL because it's trash.)

Note that I am in no way saying that, for example, pulling six fighters off of the COS to give it three fusions is a *good* deal. Just that it is a reasonable configuration that seems worth exploring.

But having a version of the Vampire Hunter with no fusions but at least 12 fighters is definitely worth doing. The fact that it exists in its current configuration is very odd and this version would actually fit into the fleet better than the current Vampire Hunter.

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Sunday, July 12, 2026 - 10:08 pm: Edit

Working on something in FC has made me wish the "three fusion beams and only 12 fighters" version of the COS existed ...

Just having a "normal" CMV would have been pretty useful.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, July 13, 2026 - 08:24 am: Edit

Not gonna lie: I actually like the Hydrans being different in this regard. They simply have a very different philosophy regarding fighter deployment.

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Tuesday, July 14, 2026 - 09:22 am: Edit

To be clear, i don't want the Cossack going anywhere. I just want the option.