Shipwright Archive

We need another tractor beam that is craftable by shipwrights, the "Tractor Beam (Y-8 only)". This beam will havea slightly longer range and will have a cone effect for pulling in asteroid chunks. The cone effect not only makes is easier to target and pull in chunks, but a conical beam will help to mitigate the difficulty in targeting items froma moving ship.

This will really bring the Y-8 into it's own as a heavy duty mining vessel. It would give us shipwrights a fairly valuable item to craft (to help offset the fact that so many new ships are given as deeds) and leaves plenty of options open for Y-8 configuration. With a pilot controlled mining laser and two Y-8 tractor beams, we'd mine resources at an astronomical rate, and the lack of defenses with this config would promote teamwork (a buddy or two in a starfighter to defend). Alternatively, we could sacrifice one of the tractor positions to equip a defensive laser.

The main thing that would need to change with this config would be that the "Toggle Tractor Beam" command would have to be disabled for beams not under the pilot's control (it currently operates on turret beams, too).

What do you guys think? It seems like a relatively simple and easy solution to making the Y-8 do what it was intended to.

J'Asper

Corbantis