I guess this would work for a Star Trek Mod, but I'll just talk of B5 here. I was tying to think of how to simulate a tractor beam effect, seen on Centauri, Minbari, and ships from a few other more advanced races. At first I was thinking of a beam weapon with no dammage, but that wouldn't allow one ship to be tugged by another. Also the beam would terminate after its duration runs out. It then occured to me that the duration problem could be sorted out by a beam-fire-continuous sexp, which would need to be toggleable so it can be disabled later. This still leaves the problem of how to tug a ship, so then I thought of using dockpoints. Basically, any ship with tractor-beam capabilities, would have another dockpoint some distance out from its hull. When it needs to graple a ship, it would be given a docking order to align its tractor beam dockpoint up with any regular dockpoint on the target ship. The FREDer would then make use of the proposed beam-fire-continuous sexp to simulate the visual effect, and likey give a do-nothing, play dead, or lay still order to the target ship. Problems would include needing additional turrets on all vessels mounting tractor beams, possibly embeding them within the hull so they won't get dammaged. This could be improved even more by a once-proposed change-turret-weapon sexp, so said turrets would have no weapon loaded at the beginning of the mission, so then AI wouldn't try to fire at them. Then the change-turret-weapon sexp would load tractor-beams to the ship just as its ligning up for tractor docking. So, what do ya think?
