You mentioned the ship has to be willing. If an Argo locks onto a ship that's fully powered and capable, crewed, with power and shields on, what do we expect to happen?
TL;DRCapturing a powered, shielded, crewed ship should be very hard but not impossible, since the target must be fairly immobile and shields might reduce the beam's effectiveness, though that isn't confirmed.
It's going to be very hard for that Argo to capture it. When we were coming up with this ship, we were very aware of the trolling potential of it. It's got a huge amount, and we want to not make that impossible, but make it very hard to achieve against people that don't want that to happen. If you just close the door on everything, it becomes a not particularly fun thing, but that's not what it's for.
So difficult but not impossible?
Not completely impossible. So a ship or the target of the tractor beam needs to be relatively immobile. So if you're flying along in your ship and I come along with my SRV and I try and tractor you, if you start jinking or wildly maneuvering, I have to, A, keep up with you doing that, and my ship is not particularly maneuverable. My tractor beam is not particularly quick to move around. And then the amount of power required to hold you whilst you're doing those mechanics might be too much for my tractor beam to even keep on top of. And another layer we're proposing at this point, it's not confirmed, is that shields mitigate that somewhat. So if your shields are up, then that's like a modifier on the effectiveness. So if you're damaged and you're out of power, your shields are going to be down. So you've got very little room for maneuver. If you want to be tractored somewhere, you have to lower your shields, which makes you vulnerable to that. But if you don't want to be, put your shields up; that gives you an extra layer of protection. If you land on a planet and you're concerned about me coming along in my SRV and just picking all your ships off the planet's surface and taking them away to be salvaged somewhere, you've got to do that risk-reward of: I can leave my ship powered on with my shields on, which protects me against people like John coming along with his SRV, protects me against people trying to shoot my ship, but the downside is I'm using power. I'm using fuel. My signatures are higher, so I'm easier to find. I could turn it all off. That goes away. But then perhaps I need to stay closer to my ship and guard against that. We don't want it to be too easy on either end. It's risk-reward.