reserved (I don't know why many mods do this, can someone please clarify?)
As far as I'm aware it's generally done to avoid hitting character limits, edit limits, etc. I've seen people doing it for 16 years and I've seen it matter maybe three times in total. Better safe than sorry I suppose.
Anyway, as someone who prefers vanilla-spirited mods I'm interested to see where this goes. I had been catching up on one of your VODs on my lunch break a couple days ago when I first saw this posted, and I started a new run to eventually see how it feels. I don't have too much experience with outfitting carriers, but with my Herons taking a beating I thought I'd give a few of these a try, as I can easily slot in four and just hit the fighter bay cap for skills. Trying a variant of your Support autofit for now: HILs & Gravitons in the hardpoints, Paladin in the turret, Harpoons in the small missiles, and Broadswords & Daggers for fighters. I've only just brought them into the fleet so I'm unsure how effective they'll be in the long run, but results from their first battle are promising. Brought four of them into a 250k Hegemony deserter bounty, alongside four Omens and a flagship Retribution. Here's a shot of one Cyclops inexplicably embarrassing an admittedly-rather-crummy Legion that has a level 7 officer in it, pressuring it enough that it can't enter the greater fight while my Retribution & other Cyclopes mopped up the rest of the fleet:
With their pretty atrocious mobility I felt s-mod Auxiliary Thrusters are a must, especially with hardpoint beams. For similar reasons I'll be prioritizing Helmsmanship & Impact Mitigation as elite skills for the officers here, maybe something like this late-game:
My main critique, on paper at least, would be that I don't like the idea of having Missile Autoloader for free. With two slots on a cruiser it's a very powerful hullmod, and I feel if players want to have it on a carrier that's already pretty starved for OP with two large energy slots, they should have to consider taking the penalty from building it in themselves. As a way to incentivize running missiles, I'd be curious to see ECCM on this thing instead. As a free hullmod it does a better job of incentivizing a missile-heavy loadout than Missile Autoloader, and it's still able to provide some marginal benefit even when the missiles are all gone. It also makes it easier to justify lower-impact missiles in the small slots, like Swarmers or Salamanders, which would just waste the Missile Autoloader if you ran them. It also gives you the option to spend a story point to get the built-in effect without using an s-mod slot, and makes it fit in better with the rest of the high tech lineup, as there are already a few high tech ships that come with free ECCM.
