After messing around in an Abyssal site with two tractor beams fit to my Gila I thought it would interesting if not fun to have some new missions involving the use of ship based tractor beams.
In the Abyssal site I would approach the Bio cache first and take it out at 23 km, lock onto it with a TII tractor and then AB to the next cache, repeating the same technique over and over until I had the last cache and was on my way to the gate, all the while fighting the NPC’s.
In Normal, Sleeper, Drifter and Triglavian space there should be missions and or combat sites that would require you to tractor the correct item, after scanning it and even possibly defeating a mini-hack game to a collection point. At the collection point the NPC object would tractor your object or objects being towed to complete a certain part of the mission or combat site. As an example a large Triglavian container is full of explosives that after it had been hacked sets off the timer. After being tractored into the refinery and the timer expires the explosives detonate destroying the refinery and releasing several smaller containers that have loot in them.
Another cool thing to use the tractor beam for would be sling shotting large objects, such as asteroids, station and ship debris at Citadels from a distance outside of the Infinity Point scramble of the Citadel. Once slung the object would remain on its trajectory until it hits the Citadel, was captured or vanished off of the grid due to a timer.
Such objects, depending on size and type would generate x amount of damage. The objects could only be targeted by Citadel gunners. The objects in question could be randomly found in any mission type involving security and mining that would require a Freighter to haul the objects out of the site with once the site had been completed.
Well either way,
-1 to this idea
It literally only benefits gilas and ishtars for abyssal space, no sac or cerb pilot is going to waste a turret/launcher for a tractor beam.
Missions maybe, any buff to marauders is good but it seems like it’s just an easy way of getting even more easy loot. In order to keep the supply of faction/deadspace loot relatively stable, the overall drop rate would need to be nerfed to accomodate the increased supply.
Slingshotting stuff at citadels from outside the citadel scram range seems dumb, hey let me just get my 1 day old character that can fly a sub 2s align atron, allow a bunch of these to be blown up and slingshot them.
This could be a good idea if a new tractor beam, maybe heavy tractor beams, with battleship fitting requirements i.e 1500 PG and 30 CPU was introduced, so that only battleships and bigger ships could properly utilize this mechanic. Otherwise we’d see 1 day only characters in triple inertial atrons slinging debris and junk at citadels from outside scram range. If you wanted a perfectly safe way of killing undefended citadels, use bombers and recloak/warp away before the citadel can lock
Removed some off topic content. -ISD Dorrim Barstorlode
If you had read the full OP, you would have seen that he snuck in a PvE and a PvP topic. The only link between them being “tractor beams”. He suggested dragging around junk in missions. And then he suggested throwing junk at Citadels.
@OP,
I’m not sure the Mission aspect would work out as well as you’d hope. For one thing, I can see a lot of griefers running around tractoring the objective away from you and dragging it off into the distance. Besides, we have lots of missions where you pick something up at Point A and drop it off at Point B. But those missions involve opening a container (which can be locked to all but the mission runner) and dropping back into another container.
As for the Citadel attack stuff… There is no “collision damage” in Eve. Ramming into the Citadel with a high-velocity Freighter isn’t going to do anything more than bounce the Freighter off into the distance. So there is no way they would allow you to slingshot junk from outside the Citadel’s range and let it drift through to impact. They would have to make the object count as damaging the whole way there. So the defenders could try and stop it by parking ships in the path, or just blowing it up first. It doesn’t make sense to further say “it can only be targeted by Citadel guns”. Why would an asteroid on a collision course NOT be targeted by regular guns? Or by Strip Miners by that point. Could ward off the asteroid attack with some Exhumers or something. Chew up your attack before it gets there.
I think there could be something like this… but it isn’t this.
Mass Drivers would be a neat weapon for Capital and Citadel combat. Being able to literally shoot an asteroid at your target. But it would have to be a gun, and it would have to function like a gun. Meaning you need to be close enough to get a lock (and be locked). And it would fly through everything else, the same way magic bullets fly through fleets to hit the guy you targeted in the back.
Those I could see happening, and in fact, I have suggested before. But this tractor beam slingshot is not going to happen.
FYI - I did read the whole OP and like I said before, I don’t care about any PvP intention or application. This is the PvE Gameplay Center sub-forum for missions.
Wrong, once an object has been tractored it can’t be tractored by anyone else. The response is irrelevant, unlike this live grenade, because the ganker wouldn’t know what mission you were running until they were actually in the mission site with you.
A badly damaged ship needs to be towed to a repair station. Unfortunately in order to keep the hull from breaking up due to severe structure damage, multiple Tractor Beams must be used at the same time to tow the ship. Depending on the amount of Tractor Beams being used, parts of the ship may start falling off while it’s being towed. (The objective is to get the ship to the repair station without it breaking up. Using a ship with bonus to Tractor Beams is preferred)
A Convoy Fleet can’t proceed to their designated location due to multiple Mines placed around an Acceleration Gate. In order to protect the Acceleration Gate from being destroyed, each Mine has to be towed away one at a time without hitting any other Mines and then placed into a Mine Disposal Unit.
Could also have a combination of those 2 scenarios
Sure, if there’s only a single object to drag from (A) to (B). But if there is a relay race to run or something, going back and forth to get a bunch of objects, then a fast locking Interceptor can start tractoring before you, and then MWD off into the distance.
However, in either case… having a single object or a bunch of them… players could fit a Tractor or they could just pack an MTU and let it run the mission for them. They drop it on top of the goal, and let it drag all the objects over automatically.
I could see something like this working for more than 2 pilots. One could fly a salvaging dessie, or noctis depending on acct type, while the other fends off attackers. Combat ship would no doubt need a remote rep to keep other ship safe,
Some of the missions would be built around smaller ships, such as the interceptor, and larger ships such as a carrier, but most would center around using a Noctis or even possibly a new Triglavian Salvage ship that would be able to extract more salvage from Abyssal sites while being able to tractor or tow larger objects in normal space.
MTU’s wouldn’t be able to be used on a tractor beam object in a mission.
How do you stop them? MTU are allowed to tractor anything you’re allowed to. Unless you start recoding all the underlying mechanics. And I really don’t think CCP is interested in digging too deep into any of the old code, especially just to make a weird gimmick like this. They don’t look back, they just keep pressing forward. =)
The objects in a Tractor Beam mission would be fresh builds and would therefore be coded to allow a ship based tractor beam but not an MTU tractor beam to be used on the object.
A ship based tractor beam has different ID number than an MTU has. The MTU scans objects before tractoring it based on the ID number of the object having a yes or no value in the instantiate portion of the script.
If yes the object is tractored. If no then the object isn’t tractored.