Elite Dangerous: Are fleet carriers worth it?

I love my giant flying man purse.

Cam in the Dvorsi System
Cam on a mining mission
En route to Colonia
FSV Franklin on approach
View from the bridge
My CMDRs aboard Cam

That’s really no surprise given my obsessions with Timbuk2 backpacks and The Container Store–a place full of things to put other things in and organize them. I can’t imagine playing Elite without one–two, actually–despite my initial skepticism of carriers, their 5B credit base price, and the ongoing expense of operating one.

So what’s so great about carriers, and how do you control their biggest downside?

Storage, Storage, Storage!

There’s no bank or vault in Elite Dangerous: a fleet carrier is the only cargo space you can get beyond your current ship’s hold. I like to keep commodities on hand to help with faction-state missions as well as more exotic things like rare commodities for unlocks, Thargoid “pieces”, and Guardian relics; I don’t have to forage for them when a CG requires them. This is also makes trading and wing delivery missions much faster: load up thousands of tons, jump, and unload them rather than going all the way back and forth with just a few hundred tons at a time.

A carrier also doubles your Odyssey materials capacity even without the bartender service installed. (Yes, it’s weird that your bartender manages your Oddie market and your bar is more expensive than a stock Anaconda.) It also provides a way to help friends level up some engineers faster: selling items to friends and buying them back satisfies “sell X things to a station” requirements without consuming the materials.

Ships and modules can be stored at stations and shipped between them, so a carrier isn’t necessary to manage or outfit your entire fleet. Moving around ships and modules is definitely more convenient with a carrier especially when I’m operating in an area where I want ships for different roles. Transfers take time and can be very expensive depending on distances: Transferring a ship from the core systems to Colonia is 1.5 times the total cost of the ship: transferring a well-outfitted cutter or corvette’s 1B credits–a big chunk of a carrier down payment!

So is it cheaper to send for your giant flying purse or drop shop every little thing? I haven’t crunched the numbers, so I cannot say if it saves me much money: the costs of jump maintenance and tritium versus shipping costs is probably only close when transferring large ships over long distances. I’m probably making much more than fuel money any place I’d bring my carrier, so I don’t sweat it.

Miner’s Little Helper

Mining with a carrier on hand is easier and more efficient. I can deploy the carrier to a system for mining, just round trip from rock to carrier until I’ve had my fill, then jump to the best market. Or I can mine now and sell later if I just feel like mining regardless of where the market is right now.

With laser mining in particular, I always pick up any minerals that cannot be bought from markets. Mining missions require them, so I compare the mission board with my carrier inventory, pick up any missions that match, and do a quick round-trip. That’s much better than taking the mission, going out and mining for them, and coming back to turn it in.

Forward Operating Base

Particularly for combat-style activities, it handy to have the 3R’s (repair, refuel, rearm) as close as possible. Combat and RES zones don’t always appear right next to stations with large landing pads, but a carrier can fix that.

It can also provide services to sell combat bonds and turn in cartographic data when doing so locally would disturb BGS goals by giving influence to the wrong factions. Unfortunately carriers won’t do more than shoot at the occasional pirate. Battlestars they are not!

I usually only do this for myself. Even when I was in a BGS squadron, enough players had their own carriers that we’d end up with multiple carriers per system. It’s a good idea to secure your services when opposing another player faction since you don’t want to give THEM a forward base as well.

When you’re out in The Black, home is where the hangar is. I took my carrier out to Colonia and back; it was handy to have all my ships with me while unlocking the Colonia engineers, but it was essential having carto (and now genomics) services to keep making back while away from civilization. Not losing all that potential income due to a misstep? Priceless.

I Alt Therefore We Are

Commanders quickly started transferring money and materials via carriers: The Elite Dangerous version of Venmo is to sell a high-priced commodity to a commander at the minimum price and buy it back at the maximum price. As mentioned above, this also works to help commanders unlock some Odyssey engineers. This is one of those things that feels like an exploit but it’s more a somewhat-clever workaround to add auction and player transfer features the game initially lacked.

This has saved me so much time when setting up my second commander. When Epic Games launched, they gave a way a free Elite Dangerous license. Given the travel times in this game, having one commander stick around the core systems while the other goes into The Black or Colonia or where-ever lets me enjoy various playstyles without being too far out for events or core system goings-on. Thanks to the LTD/Void Opal boom, I actually funded my second commander’s initial fleet and carrier via GalVenmo from my first. Oh, those were the days to be a miner!

Upkeep: The Downside of Carriers

Carriers themselves are a big investment, 5 billion credits for the base model. A full set of carrier services is another 1.725 billion credits. Buying ships and ship modules to sell adds even more. If you’re working towards buying a carrier, you need a good 6-7 billion credits to install just the essentials and much more to have it all.

And then comes the weekly upkeep on top of all that. Installed services increase upkeep, and suspending services only cuts their upkeep costs in half–helpful but still OUCH! A carrier with no additional modules costs 5M/week plus fuel and 100K per jump. With all modules installed and active, upkeep is ~ 35M/week. With all modules installed and suspended, it’s ~ 17M/week. Not cheap, especially if you aren’t playing Elite Dangerous all the time.

The first thing to remember when managing upkeep costs is that the costs are pro-rated based on how much you use them (not installed < suspended < active). I’m not sure of the granularity, maybe minutes or hours, but it’s enough to put a sticky on your cockpit to suspend or uninstall services when you or others don’t need them. Spendthrifts can activate and suspend services each time they log in and out; I tend to do it more based on playstyle change–travel out, combat, exploration, travel back, etc.

The second thing to remember is that you get the full purchase price back when uninstalling carrier services. I park my carrier in nearby systems with Fleet Carrier Administration services and uninstall services when I don’t need them. That keeps the transfer costs low if I’m working a cluster of systems. I install services when needed remotely (Panel 4 / Home), jump the carrier remotely, and rendezvous with it. Most weeks my upkeep is 5M, and it’s usually only much more when I’m using the carrier to generate income (vouchers, bonds, carto, etc.)

The End

Carriers aren’t cheap, but they can change how you play Elite and what you get out of it. Cost is the biggest drawback, up front and over time, but in my book it’s been well worth the investment.

Elite Dangerous FAQ: How do I use the corrosive shell experimental effect?

As new Elite Dangerous players delve deeper into starship engineering, questions about the corrosive shell effect always come up. It’s one of the best weapon effects, but it’s not as obvious to use as “increase damage/range by X%” modifications. Here’s what the wiki has to say about it:

Corrosive Shell is an Experimental Effect that can be applied to a weapon through Engineering. It consists of experimental rounds that temporarily weaken Armour Hardness and increase all damage taken, at the cost of a 20% reduction in ammo capacity. While the effect is active, incoming damage from all sources is increased by 25%, and all attacks receive a +20 bonus to their armour piercing value.

The effects of Corrosive Shell do not stack on a single target, and therefore it is most efficient and cost-effective to only apply it to one weapon per ship. Furthermore, the type and size of the chosen weapon does not alter how the effect is applied or its duration.

https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Corrosive_Shell

The corrosive shell effect reduces armor hardness which improves the damage smaller weapons have on larger ships. AND it increases ALL incoming damage by a hefty amount. Good to know, but there are a few finer points to consider beyond this conventional wisdom.

First, I don’t agree with “one weapon per ship”: you need one weapon with the effect that can hit the target reliably. I often put it on a ship’s two smallest hardpoints, particularly for ships where I cannot always guarantee that a single corrosified hardpoint will completely cover my main weapons’ firing arcs–I’m looking at you Imperial Cutter wingtip hardpoints! OK, and I also have an obsession with symmetry and knowing mirror hard points have different engineering or even–gasp!–different weapons in them drives me to distraction.

Second, the effect has a duration, so you only need to tap the target to apply the corrosive effect. You can see if it’s applied along the bottom of your target in the Ship Status Indicator. (I did see a mention on reddit that the bottom bars might be progress indicators which would be very helpful, but I haven’t confirmed this.)

If the target doesn’t have the corrosion icon above, shoot it with at least one Corrosive Shell cannon until it does, then fire everything else you got while the corrosion effect is up. Also maybe stating the obvious, but the corrosive effect only works on an unshielded target unlike the Keelback pictured here.

Third, pay attention to your ammo levels. The High Capacity Modification is the best engineering modification to put corrosive shell on top of; it will more-than-compensate for the 20% decrease in ammo from adding the effect to a weapon. Even so, be careful not to burn through your corrosive ammunition too quickly. If they’re running dry before your main weapons–or if you’re supplementing a laser build–then you may want to keep corrosive weapons on a separate trigger and only use them when the target doesn’t have the effect and is shieldless. I usually group them with other cannons or hull-based weapons, then alternate fire with my non-hull weapons since they also benefit from the corrosive effect on the target.

Corrosive Shell is a great experimental effect overall, and it’s particularly handy for smaller ships or smaller hardpoints attacking larger targets. I hope this helps you get the most out of this trip to the engineer since it can only be applied in person, not pinned. Maybe the fourth point is to engineer a few extra class 1 and 2 weapons when you’re there so you don’t have to keep going back to “The Blaster“.

Fly corrosively, commanders!

If I could live inside a video game, it would be…

Once again, one of my favorite pandemic activities is answering questions on OK Cupid to feed the algorithm. So today it asked me if I could live inside a video game, what would it be? Here’s what I said to the algo and to my potential future husbands:

Elite Dangerous. From the excitement of discovering new star systems to the routine of being a space trucker, I can’t get enough of the unmaterialized future that growing up in the Space Age promised me.

And all I ask is a tall ship and a supermassive black hole to steer her by.