Carrier

Space Carriers

   In Earth's wet-navies, an Aircraft Carrier is a specialized warship dedicated to carrying a complement of small craft which serve as its main armament.  This concept translated directly to the Confederacy Navy's Space Carriers.  A Space Carrier exists to transport, maintain, launch, recover, repair, and rearm fighters, bombers, and other specialized strike craft, as well as command, reconnaissance, combat rescue, and other combat support craft.  A Carrier will also carry enough non-military small craft such as tenders and shuttles to help support the other starships in their fleet.
   Carriers tend to be very large and optimized for the maximum capacity while being fast.  Their ability to both strike at a distance and provide defensive fighters for to protect friendly ships makes them enormously useful in fleet operations.
   While some science fiction has tried to merge the carrier and battleship into a single platform that can operate independently and 'do it all', that notion is rather silly.  A Carrier is a very specialized platform that exists only to carry smaller, relatively short-range but inexpensive small craft.
   Any additional capabilities must come at the expense of either losing space for their primary role of carrying smaller craft, or increasing the ship's size and thus making it at the same time a larger target and a slower target.  It can be done, but for the same cost (in funding, materials, labor, and crew) of a huge battle-carrier, a navy can get both a fast, well-protected and well-armed battleship AND a fast, well-protected and agile carrier.

Strengths

   A Carrier's strength lies entirely in its strike craft, the fighter and bomber squadrons it can carry.  These small craft are relatively cheap weapons platforms compared to full-sized warships with equivalent combat power.  Further, a carrier can quickly swap out its embarked 'space wing' with another one that may be optimized for a different mission. 

Weaknesses

   Carriers are huge fat unstealthy targets that are extremely difficult to harden.  They must have large hanger and flight decks to accommodate fighters and bombers, carry stores of weapons, gases and fuels. They can carry armor, but nothing can be done to protect the huge openings the small craft need to enter and leave the hull.
   Superior damage capability is critical on a carrier as any damage received is likely to risk fires and loss of operational capabilities much more than more armored, compartmentalized vessels will.  While a Presidential class carrier has some defensive armament, receiving direct fire from strike aircraft or capital ships means that the strike and fighter complement has failed in their mission somehow.

Operations

Strike Operations

   A bomber strike makes like utterly miserable for any craft on the receiving end of the strike, particularly any smaller vessels that are more vulnerable to the weapons of a bomber.  During World War II more ships were sunk by aircraft strike than by surface action.

Reconnaissance

   Finding an enemy fleet first, while remaining undetected provides a massive tactical advantage and carrier-borne reconnaissance craft excel at providing this.  Even if both fleets are generally detected, any vessels that are hoping to remain undetected in order to fulfill their role will lose that ability quickly if reconnaissance, and to some degree other strike or fighter craft are operating.  Most World War II fleet engagements were significantly decided by scouting and reconnaissance operations that allowed one side to deliver a blow on the opposing fleet first, thus degrading the available combat power they could respond with.

Confederacy Carriers

The Confederacy operates the following carrier classes:

• Presidential - a CANON vessel appearing in Month 30 of the timeline, and the largest ship in the Confederacy fleet for several years
• Midway - a close support carrier similar in concept to a wet-navy amphibious assault ship
• Illustrious - a CANON class originally produced at Jutland
• Nagina - A NON-CANON ship identified in the "Cosca" series
• Lawrence - A small mobile base for patrol bombers, usually called "Larry", originally produced at Beerat

Sa'arm Carriers

The Sa'arm are only known to use one design of specialized small-craft carrier:

• Lares - a local-space-only structure described as "a bomber roost"

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