Tug carries multiple pods?

People have always felt the tug was useless. Just a low end combat ship. But it would make a cool replacement for the pod hauling SNRV.

While testing crashing into asteroid issues I modified a player tug to haul 3 pods of cargo. Basically, it hauls them in a long chain behind the tug. It can handle 3 just fine.

It might be possible to have it haul 4-6 if it has corvette level acceleration rates (when empty).

And if we put a cargo dock on the nose, it could dock up to station pod spewers and then load and unload cargo. It would make a great player courier ship. You could run just a few pods of high value goods. Not need wingmen, and ditch the cargo if you needed to fight.

It gives the starting player a way to earn some cash. Tugs could be made pretty fuel efficient compared to freighters to help out that starting player.

There is only one drawback, and that is graphical. The pods can be docked and sold in any order, so you can end up with gaps in the line of pods. But we can explain that away as saying that cables link the pods to the tug.

Bear in mind that a tug has four main engines and is specifically designed to haul objects in space. I would wager that even a whopping 5 would make sense, if the acceleration rates were changed to compensate. That also brings up the possibility of Shingen's tug races again, too.

How does the SnRV dock 12 pods? Can't the same pod-to-pod link work for the tug, or does the game assume that you can only have 2 pods interconnected (most of the freighters, even the Venice, only dock 2 pods together)?

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How it works, in the game engine, is that there is one docking port on the ship for each pod that docks. So pods do not dock to one another. The 12 pod SNRV actually has two docking ports, one on top of the other. Because they load in order (and you never see Jaffs unload) it looks like the pods are docking to one another.

I like the idea a lot. I think I even proposed some kind of tug/pod hauling as a starting scenario some time back. I never thought of multiple pods, but it makes sense. Couldn't we (some coding wizard) script the unloading and loading of a multipod setup in a way that prevents 'gaps'?

It is doable. The loading is no trouble, because they will load in order. The unloading is trouble, because you could sell off the bottom most pod. The code would need a step just before leaving the pods spewer, that moved the furthest pods down into the gaps.

Heh, that brought up an image of a pirate team consisting of only tugs and making their escape with a bunch of cargo, each carrying a few pods and making a quick escape! Personally I think Its a pretty cool idea, as long as its not too hard to implement.

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