The strike craft requirement means refitting our existing ships into carriers loses most of the value of refitting (because we don't get an immediately functional ship out of the deal) and gets us seriously inferior carriers.
Making proper carriers pretty much requires a properly designed and militarized hull.
We have over 69 Caravels (Scout fleet numbers appear to be missing and I know we had a few there), if instead of a dedicated carrier we instead went for a hybrid cruiser like Zahr-Tann's but with 2 hangars instead of 1 we'd be able to increase our strikecraft count significantly without compromising too much of the Caravel hulls advantages.
We currently have a total of 48 strikecraft squadrons across our entire fleet with 3 each from our 16 Combat Brigs.
To put it into perspective a single one of Zahr-Tann's 2 loaned Heavy fleets has 88 strikecraft minus shuttles which is nearly twice as many as what we have in total, one of the 3 loaned line fleets has 28 each (more than half) while one of the 7 loaned scout fleets has 16 each (1/4).
A hybrid Caravel with a few hangars that still has it's entire armament and a full suite of active defenses compliments both our small and large fleets as it brings much needed strikecraft support the otherwise unsupported escort squadrons that make up our small fleets while majorly beefing up our strikecraft counts in big fleets by holding double the strikecraft per hull as a Combat Brig.
[] Atropa class Light Cruiser (8 System | 4 Weapon Batteries | 1 Heavy Weapon Battery)
-[] 1x Heavy Las-Lance -1 Heavy Weapon Slot
-[] 4x Suncannon Weapon Batteries - 4 Weapon Slot
-[] 3x Æthersail - 3 System slot
-[] Holo-Field -1 System Slot
-[] Grav-Shield - 2 system Slots
-[] 2x Hanger - 2 System Slots
Suncannons should have decent range since we chose improved range as one of the bonuses for our plasma weapons, the Heavy Las-Lance can be swapped out for Heavy Grav-Thruster if people think that would be more worthwhile.
No plasma thrusters because this thing should be sitting near the center or rear of a fleet since all it's weapons are long ranged and it has hangars.
No PD since the 2 hangars of strikecraft should be able to cover for the lack of it plus whatever PD it's escorts have.
We will need to design a new fighter to compliment this carrier though as our current strikecraft isn't the best. The Bright Eagle is really expensive due to it's twin Starlances and lacks any active defenses to leverage their insane firepower.
Edit:
If we converted all our Caravels into something like the above example we'd have over 414 squadrons of strikecraft capacity for our fleets and each ship would still be a respectable combatant.
That's nearly 10 times our current strikecraft capacity.
