Tractor Beam

Here's a block I banged together, to make rounding up those annoying AI a little easier. In the grand tradition of Sci-Fi, it's an energy-driven "tractor beam" generator that basically drags in other grids.

Just build it and turn it on and you should see a nice yellow beam fly out about 1km. If the beam hits something it won't drag in (for example, asteroids or floating objects) the beam will turn orange. Once you hit another grid, and you have sufficient energy, it will turn red and begin to drag the grid towards yours.

Speaking of energy: this can be a thirsty bugger. It'll pull 30MW just searching, and depending on the size of any grids you try to winch in, that will go up fairly quickly. If you don't have enough power to tractor in a grid you're pointing it at, the beam will go out.

Any attracted grids will come in at around 25m/s, and automatically stop 50m from the block itself. I would recommend putting landing gears to protect your block in case you pull in very big grids... the grid's centre of gravity is the "attachment point."

Also, your grid will be attracted to the other grid, obeying Mr Newton's third law (kinda.. the attraction is dampened for your grid.) This is how the physics works: the overall force of attraction is based on the sum of both grids' mass, so using a fairly small tractor grid and pointing it at a very large grid will mean your grid gets pulled much faster than the other one. This is quite deliberate; I think the tractor beam should be used on large vessels to pull in small ones.

In terms of PvP, the beam is not a magic disable-your-enemies-instantly device. It applies a force over time, which will slow down targets and drag them in at that magic 25m/s. If you have sufficient thrust you can escape the beam, and "clipping" it when going past at a decent speed won't stop you in your tracks. It's a fixed block, not a turret (now that would be OP!) and as I mentioned, pretty power-hungry, to give some kind of balance. Also it does nothing to disable a tractored grid, so its guns will continue to shoot you. It will also only grab the closest grid along its axis, which should give clues to effective countermeasures :)

Enjoy!

UPDATE 23rd April: Added "detect friendly grids" option in terminal. Turning this off will allow use on pistons, improve use in combat situations with lots of friendlies, etc, etc. Added "holding distance" slider in terminal. This should help avoid those situations when you tractor in a grid that's too big and smash yourself to pieces. Limits are 5m-100m.

MAINTENANCE NOTE: The 1.181 update which brought multithreaded physics to the game, also brought massive performance drops on my systems. The continuous stream of minor updates and hotfixes since has done nothing to improve performance over 1.180.600, and have solved less issues than they have caused. My own server has been reverted (via subscribing to the 1.180 Beta) to the stable, smooth and enjoyable experience SE gave me back then, and as this mod works well with this reversion I have no plans to keep it maintained for broken later versions. Please don't use comments below to engage in criticism of the game, and the best of luck to the Keen developers who hopefully will eventually give us the SE experience we all hope for. I'll continue to read comments and respond when I can. Apologies if this decision affects your enjoyment of the game.