I use carriers in my fleet designs and this includes Survey Carriers - they launch survey fighters.
I have come across two problems with this:
#1: In VB6 Aurora, IIRC, I could set a superior formation which the sub-fleets would follow or land on. Alternatively, after I divided the ships with the move orders, I could reconstitute the fleet. As I cannot do this right now, once the fleet is divided the only way to reintegrate them is to manually do it, or land them on the assigned mothership, which removes all the conditional and primary orders. It takes me 10 minutes to set all these up individually.
#2: The ships that land on the mothership do not keep their sub-fleets, requiring me to reorganize them every time (2 to 3 minutes). Considering that you can't give standing orders to sub-fleets anyway, it's not a big loss.
I know it doesn't seem like much, but after 4 systems, I have put over an hour into managing organization, not counting the fact that they sometimes land on the MS to refuel.
Suggestion: I'd really like the functionality of VB6 Aurora where I could have a functional survey carrier fleet. Having sub-fleets keep their sub-fleet status when landing on motherships is a step in the right direction, but ultimately what is required is a way to create divisions within a task-force - groups which will follow the superior formation and have the ability to have standing orders, presumably when 'activated'.
For full 100% functionality, I imagine it would have the following features:
* Land on assigned MS as sub-fleet
* Activate Sub-Fleet: Instead of detaching from the main formation, it would become an on-map entity and retain its organization hierarchy
* Sub-fleet standing orders
An example of Naval Organization would look like this:
ADMCOM (Admin)
-> Survey Command (Admin)
-> Survey Fleet (Fleet)
-> Carrier (Sub-fleet)
-> Geosurvey Craft Fleet (Sub-fleet)
-> GC1 (Active Sub-fleet)
-> GC2 (Active Sub-fleet)
-> ...
-> Tanker (Sub-fleet)
Additionally, to make me really happy and fully automate this, there would also be an order to activate sub-fleets in the movement orders.
