Why is it best to drop ships when defending?

The codex says this about star combat:

It’s best to drop all ships when carriers jump to a star for defense.

But why? Is it just talking about a situation with several weak carriers (say, 3 carriers with 10 ships each defending against an attacker with 20 ships)? In that case, I see that dropping ships would mean no carriers get destroyed.

Are there other benefits I’m missing?

Yeah, thats all I was thinking.

Also welcome to the forum and thanks again for all the feedback to my inbox!

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

Might want to reword this as:

You can potentially save carriers from destruction by dropping their ships before battle commences.