We all know that now carriers are just a fancy word for the usual capship, nothing more, nothing less. Cannon's post got my hopes high that one day we might see the player ship doking thus making it a bit uselful, but it's not here now and i don't know when it can possibly come.
So. The one way to make carriers - carriers, and also deal a bit with some other problems, is removing bots from capships while bumping their hull accordignly but leaving some bots for carriers to ressupply fighters and bombers around.
And here's another - what if we could have a command for carrier spawning good npcs, some fighters with 9 guns or some bombers (yeah yeah with snac and infinite core) every n seconds/minutes? NPCs are not really hard to deal with but they'd give immersion and could possibly change the tide of battle if used in the right time. To prevent abuse, spawn them without bots.