My question is if anyone thinks it might be a good idea to upgrade the Carrack to the Perseus, which would give me warship capabilities that I don't have. Not having the Carrack would be painful, since it is my dream ship, but the change does make logical sense to me.
In my opinion you would loose a lot trading the Carrack for the Perseus. So far we do not know the ship details, but I doubt it will have the same features making it an independent ship able to sustain long travel, with hangar (you can put up to 3 razors or 2 m50 or 2 MPUV or one Buccaneer in the carrack), med bay, repair bay, big cargo hold which are actually MODULES! So future modules incoming
We now know that there will be Warbond CCU to Polaris 10 years insurance sold this IAE thanks to SC Leaks. So I suggest you take a Hammerhead to Polaris CCU, it will probably cost just 15$. And you could work on making that CCUed Polaris the coming years.
The Polaris has a med bay, hangar able to fit a Sabre if not more ships, potentially even a Mantis. It is a large ship and capital ship killer, has enough power to defend itself against fighters and other mosquitoes. Also quite decent cargo, potentially nice speed and able to go on duty for a long time.
The Perseus won't be even half of that I bet. No med bay for sure, no hangar, almost no guns for defense against fighters, probably small cargobay. It is just a large ship killer, we don't know yet if it is a cap ship killer, will depend on its main guns size.
Edit : if Perseus has S7 guns, by comparison to the Ares Ion, we know this is around 10k DPS at 8km+ for 4*S7 laser cannons. It is good, but it is probably no turrets meant for tracking fighters, so far I see just one or 2 smaller turrets and no missile pods unless hidden. Any fighter group will shred a Perseus without any issue. Won't be the same with a Polaris.
The Polaris has 28 S10 Torps, we don't know damage yet but a single S9 is 65k damage. Over 1.8 million damage at least, enough to shred an Idris. And it has 7 dual turrets S4 and S5, and 32 missiles (if S3 size i dont recall, that also makes 64 S2 missiles), enough to repel any fighter attack.
Perseus by comparison would need around 4 minutes of continuous fire and 100% hits to do the same amount of damage on an Idris