utility tugs?

while I agree with the need for the new piloting skill heavy spacecraft it leaves a minor problem, suppose some newbie with piloting empowerment forgets to place a cappie back in orbit?, if there’s no pilots around at the time, you have an unprotected ship…

what I am suggesting is we make a special type of ship…with the ability to slowly pull capital ships back into orbit. these ships would be shield-less, no weapons, a very tiny hyperdrive, and overall only built for this purpose.
now the main problem with this is you could move around any ship while doing this…so perhaps some extra autopilot toggles could be added so the capital ships detect they are trying to be "tugged" and they open fire, this would only happen if the capital ship you were trying to tug had both the toggle on, AND wasn’t allied with yer own clan…

an example of this type of ship can be seen here
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Utility_Tug">http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Utility_Tug</a>&lt;!– m –>

I know it sounds stupid…why not just be more smart with who you give piloting empowerments to? but things happen…perhaps someone comes online drunk or etc….this would just be a nice feature to supplement an already great system

discuss…

Don’t give newbies piloting empowerment. Seems pretty straightforward.

Punish people who endanger lives within the clan.

You can’t know whether you’re giving the piloting empowerment to a newbie or a veteran sometimes. Punishing people is obvious, but nothing extreme. I’ve never played a piloting main, nor ever been a Naval pilot for any clan, but I like the idea. Just take it a step forward and remove hyperdrive completely, as it says in the description of the link you posted it has no hyperdrive. Then, just put in a check to see if the ship is in your clans or not. If it isn’t, you can’t tug it and you will be blown to pieces. If it is, move it to orbit. Easy enough. I like the idea.

yeah…I was thinking it needed a small hyperdrive in case the capital ship was too far away so you could quickly get over to it, of course, you’d still have to slowly tug it back to the planet anyways, so doesn’t really need hyper drive I guess then…it’d be a slow process either way…

I would think that it would just need to have an uberlarge hangar and tractorbeams and a small hyperdrive. This would be good for engineering companies to purchase for delivering cappies and satellites.

&quot;Deep Space Manufacturing Facility&quot;

no no you couldn’t, trying to tractor enemy ships would result in a explosion, remember these ships are unshielded with low hull…and a ship with an uberlarge hanger big enough to store capital ships would probably require heavy spacecraft to operate…which is the entire reason I suggested this idea, so people without that skill don’t have to wait for the piloting mains to be online to move ships back into orbit in local space ONLY

If you can fly clan ships(the tug) and use heavy spacecraft…why not move the ships back into orbit yourself?

<!– s:evil: –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_evil.gif" alt=":evil:" title="Evil or Very Mad" /><!– s:evil: –> I give up

I might be a little late but just chiming in to say I like this idea.

alright..for those of you confused, I’ll give this one more shot, in simpler terms here is what I want:

a small ship capable of tractoring capital ships back into orbit, that’s it, not a deep space manufacturing facility, just a small ship that can tractor capital ships, this ship would have no shields and no hyperdrive, and when it tries to tractor a non-clan capital ship with autopilot on, it will get fired upon.

It’s a good idea (tugs in general), but doesn’t really solve the problem. It band-aids one and opens up an entirely new booboo. What’s to stop the same kind of people who leave ships out of orbit from taking a tug and pulling one of their clanships out of orbit?