Will we be able to tow other ships, even through jump points?
TL;DRTowing is wanted by everyone, but how far to allow it, especially through jump points, is still being argued, with treating a towed ship like cargo one idea.
There's a can of worms. Towing ships is kind of an active design discussion of exactly to what extent do we allow it.
Active design discussion is developer speak for people who are arguing about it.
We are butting heads over what's the right way to do this.
We all definitely agree that towing should be in the game. And this discussion actually came up when we were working on the Crucible. And we were all sat around talking about the tug, the tug version. And we're like, how is it going to be done? We can't really do tow lines, we can't really do this, we can't really do this. The dreaded words of tractor beams, and what that gameplay is, and whether we're going to have that, what we're going to do with it, what's going to go along with it. So there's so many different... it is a can of worms, just towing in general in normal space, and then even trying to go through a jump point, like, oh, well that's...
That's going to be deadly. The jump and quantum aspect of towing, I think, would be the dicier part, but something where, at least how I'd hope that we could get is, you could do that local space tow to something that could at least, for enough ships, enclose that ship completely. Kind of like if you get a Hornet or something smaller into the [unclear: 'scare part']. Yeah, because that can close off, so then, cool, this is closed off, now that's safe enough to jump and travel, so even if you don't have the parts on board to fix up that ship, you can move it around.
But at that point, we're treating it like cargo. So with it treating it like cargo, then it works perfectly fine, but then with an actual thing outside, it's like, yeah, I see the grin.
Yeah, we've got all these things that we're sort of trying to balance here, and we definitely would like to support it. The exact constraints that we're going to be putting on it to support it are a point of contention still. So we're working through that and getting it to a point where we're all happy with it.