Tractors and intent

[DirkSJ]

So I was thinking about this when thinking about tractors in another post. What is a tractor really intended to be?

The reason this question comes up is that in FC tractors are a far different thing than SFB and I don't know if they were made that way deliberately or if some of the changes were merely collateral damage to simplifying the system.

In SFB when two ships are tractored both ships still end up moving, turning and everything. You can't keep them stuck on a down shield. In FC the guy who spent less power is going to take it in the pants until the turn break. Even more odd is the same power case where both players are just going to pile damage into one shield facing of each other.

So it this an intended consequence of the FC tractor rules or did it just come about in the simplification process? Was it intended that the system become more deadly?

[mjwest]

The way tractors work in Federation Commander is deliberate; all of the consequences are not necessarily. The reason for how they work was to keep things as simple as possible. In the end, it is still more complicated than desired, but the intention was to keep them simple. (Of all the rules in Federation Commander, tractors have probably changed the most. Not that they have changed, per se, but rather they have grown significantly longer to handle all of the special cases.)

The idea that tractors are much more deadly is, however, a side effect of how they work in Federation Commander. There was no desire to make them more deadly, but that is an accepted side effect of the simplification process they were given.

[Kang]

I think they're much better in FC; we use them much more often than we ever did in SFB because of the lack of a pre-planned power commitment.

The great advantage in FC is that you can power and use them as required, rather than having to pay for something in advance that we just might not use.

The other consequential effects are just icing on the cake and far more realistic imo.