> at least in terms of the carrier being sunk

You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.

If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.

> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks

To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.

Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.

When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.

Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?

I suppose there is an opportunity cost to saving up all your weapons. What is the enemy doing in that time where you stop throwing things at them?

Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...

Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.

A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.

I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.