I know people will say “USE A MTU” or “USE TRACTOR BEAM” well.. some times you dont wanna use a HS for Tractor beam or want to use a MTU isnt worth it due to price or space. Also this is good for ships that can’t hold tractor beams (mining barges)
How about Tractor Drone?
These drones will go out and bring back 1 cargo container/wreck at half of the drones movement speed. So if the drones default is 400m3/s and you can get it to 600m3/s then it will move at 200->300 respectfully.
A T1 Drone should be slower than T1 Tractor beam and a T2 drone should be about as fast as a t1 tractor beam.
Each drone can be told to bring 1 wreck/cargo back or like salvage drones if you tell them engage with no target it will just attempt to pull anything back to you, starting the closest item to the furthest item.
Could also make a Medium Size one that is T1 Salvage drone and T1 Tractor so it will salvage as it drags it back to the ship. Not as effective as the individual version.
The ship you have to balance this around is the Vexor and its variants, already extremely widely used for botting and AFK gameplay, which have fairly large drone bays. 10m³ really isn’t unreasonable for something that replaces a 100m³ MTU and multiple (five for the only tractor version, ten for the tractor and salvage version) high slots. If anything it should be more.
Then by all means, try using a tugboat on land. Replace the propeller with wheels and you are still using a medium for leverage. Friction force with the ground. Again, that does not exist in space…
Imagine you are an astronaut in deep space. You come across the wreckage of a battleship. You’ve got a handy dandy tractor beam in your little shuttle. Are you going to be able to tractor in that battleship? No. It’s going to pull you towards that battleship because it has more mass. You need to have mass or thrust equal to or larger than what you are trying to tractor in.
Fortunately this isn’t a space sim and such things aren’t taken into consideration, else this would be a very different game. Just think Kerbal Space Program…with sociopaths.
I think 5m3 is fine for a tractor drone (we really only need one size). Since these will often be combined with a MTU, it shouldn’t really matter. Each drone could pull a wreck at 200m/sec so it won’t be an improvement over a designated tractor beam or MTU.
A battleship tractoring a drone is going to be pulled toward the drone. A drone tractoring a battleship is going to be pulled toward the battleship. The force acts on both of them, what’s actually happening is that they’re being pulled toward each other. As the battleship is orders of magnitude more massive, it’s going to be moved much less than the drone, but it will be moved.
Anyway, you can fit tractors on a frigate and pull battleships around like they weight nothing. EVE is not a physics simulator.
In terms of realism I actually prefer “tractor drones” over “tractor beams”, because rather than space magic I can imagine the drone is actually clamping onto the wreck and pushing it around with its thrusters.
