(Old) Tractor Beam - LSFN/Design GitHub Wiki

=Description= A tractor beam holds a ship's position relative to another entity. Tractor beams are able to manoeuvre the other entity into a more desirable position relative to the ship, e.g. if the other entity was a hostile ship, you would use a tractor beam to directly dock the ships for Boarding. A tractor beam is only able to operate up to a certain force limit, if the limit is exceeded then the tractor beam performs a safety cut-off and the entity is released. This means that if a ship's engines can supply sufficient acceleration, the ship can break free of tractor beams. This is usually not possible for larger ships. It is important to note that using a tractor beam on another entity merely fixes the relative positions of ship and entity; whilst a tractor beam can alter the relative entity and ship positions, the movement done by both entities is determined by their mass. This ensures that a light cruiser with a tractor beam cannot swing a capital ship about as if it were massless. The use of tractor beams is not necessarily hostile, they may be used to assist in docking and for the collection of entities floating in space such as debris and jettisoned cargo.

==Some thoughts on this== Alternative suggestion: tractor beam provides a constant force in a limited range. Thus a ship with powerful engines may still be slowed, while one with moderately powerful engines might be slowly dragged in.

I think your idea of fixing the relative position of the ships (applying equal and opposite forces) has really cool implications:

• Used on a larger ship, you'll be dragged to them rather than them to you.
• Used on a faster ship, you're effectively stealing some of their speed for yourself. As long as you can stay in range you'd be getting a tow.
• Used on very light objects, you could fling them about. Smash fighters into each other etc.

You don't quite clarify manoeuvre. Can it push as well as pull? If so, you could try to use them to shield yourself from physical objects like missiles.

• ‍The idea here is that the tractor beam can pretty much rotate and translate any object within it's field of influence. So yes, it can push as well as pull. With missiles you would be able to push them away but it would only really be effective against so called "dumbfire" missiles (those without a tracking mechanism); other missiles would, once un-tractor-beamed, head for the ship. This would be useful for holding an anti-matter missile at "arm's length" so to speak. However, all missiles will probably be programmed to detonate when they run out of fuel and catching more than one missile will probably cause the two you've caught to collide prompting an explosion. Additionally, in order to catch the missile, you need to have tractor beam force greater than that of the missile's propulsion unit.

Does the tractor beam affect only the first object it encounters? What if that object is very small?

• I think that everything within the area of effect should become caught, this eliminates the frustration of trying to grapple a fighter but failing because there's a pebble in the way. I also think that any action applied to the objects in the tractor beam by the tractor beam is the same; e.g. rotating one object rotates all objects similarly and translation is actually scaling movement with the tractor beam turret as the centre of the transformation (i.e. an object at distance 1 moved to 0.5 will cause another object at 0.5 to move to 0.25).

On a large ship with a slow turning rate, it is potentially quite interesting to combine one or more tractor beams with a weapon which has poor accuracy or a narrow firing arc (maybe some massive spirally mounted cannon). You could attempt to pull enemy ships into the path of your weapons.

Luke suggested that a ship with 2 or more tractor beams could attempt to physically pull an adversary apart.

New game mode: tractor beam sumo.

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