could tractor beams be used to make extremely powerful capital ships?

[Godfish]

I was just playing around in the designer and I noticed that if a tractor beam was placed on a single wooden block and set to hold a huge heavy armour cube the collective would behave as a single wooden block as opposed to a wooden block and a heavy armour cube.

couldn't you theoretically make a small hover with enough stuff to stay stable with a tractor and build a huge capital ship around it, so that the capital ship doesn't have to worry about drag or weight? obviously, it couldn't move faster than 40m/s since that's the speed at which tractors move objects and you might have trouble pulling it into larger campaign battles because the game would let you pull in one ship but not the other.

I guess this would also work around the limit on putting repair tentacles on docked subvehicles since you could put them on the smaller object which is technically the parent.

[luxon001]

Originally posted by Godfish:

I was just playing around in the designer and I noticed that if a tractor beam was placed on a single wooden block and set to hold a huge heavy armour cube the collective would behave as a single wooden block as opposed to a wooden block and a heavy armour cube.

couldn't you theoretically make a small hover with enough stuff to stay stable with a tractor and build a huge capital ship around it, so that the capital ship doesn't have to worry about drag or weight? obviously, it couldn't move faster than 40m/s since that's the speed at which tractors move objects and you might have trouble pulling it into larger campaign battles because the game would let you pull in one ship but not the other.

I guess this would also work around the limit on putting repair tentacles on docked subvehicles since you could put them on the smaller object which is technically the parent.

That could work...
It also comes with invincibility to melee since docked vehicles dont take or dish out collision damage.

But beware...
You will an explosion hitting the docked armor would to the vehicle itself as well...

[Godfish]

Originally posted by luxon001:

But beware...
You will an explosion hitting the docked armor would to the vehicle itself as well...

not necessarily... you wouldn't put it near any sensitive / high priority components and enemy AI would see a tiny, weaponless vehicle and decide not to target it. missiles that target random blocks might be a problem, since they might target a block near it but apart from that I can't see that being an issue.

[Nobsniper]

you could even use batteries on the larger vessel to power the smaller one