Walt
Walt I don't believe this is true with the current tractor beam balance numbers. Engines are far more cost and power efficient per unit of thrust than tractor beams. So for a similar cost ship to trap a kiter, it's going to have to spend an enormous amount of money on tractor beams, crew, and power, leaving much less money for weapons and defenses.
The thing is engines either require external surface area (which may need protection) or a massive internal area size, while you can just stack the tractor beams internally wherever you want. And for larger ships, you can even have them on the other side of the ship to have increased pull strength. A ship with sufficient tractor beams doesn't need much engine power, and you can eventually end up with a tractor beam satellite basically. External surface area is exponentially expensive while internal volume is exponentially cheaper, so as it scales up it can become overpowered for its relative cost.
Walt The problem with this is that it leads to a black hole style "event horizon" where there's some distance at which you don't have enough thrust and you just get sucked in all the way with no possibility of escape or improving your situation, rendering your thrusters useless.
Exactly as intended. However, since it would be surface mounted, having enough tractor beams to do so would mean that they are giving up valuable surface area for weapons, so in which case the ship would lose out in terms of frontal firepower, which imo would be a good tradeoff. Alternatively if manually piloted, the player could go for a ram and hopefully the rotational inertia from it would be sufficient to break free, like a slingshot. Also with the tractor beam able to push, there is no reason why the other ship would never have their own tractor beams to help maintain their distance either. Thus this opens a much wider range of options for ship design.
