I am not sure if this has been brought up but have you or your players come up with any cool uses of Tractor Beams? I just finished Aftermath - Empire's End and it has given me a few ideas. Can tractor beams be used with the barrage capital ship options? I thought coming up with some more combat uses may be good. I personally have wondered why the rebellion brings cargo ships to naval battles but I imagine they would have strong tractor beams and could maybe be used to catch fighters and make them easy targets.
Tractor Beams
Some uses I've seen before include:
Dragging asteroids into hyperlanes to drag ships out of hyperspace as a crude interdictor.
Grabbing larger, more dangerous ships and dragging them down with you as you crash.
Breaking a tractor beam by flying into the path of it, being caught instead.
A bunch of smaller ships teaming up to keep one larger one in place.
In an engagement with a pirate ship we scanned the enemy ship, noticed it had no weapons on aft, flew past them still on our initiative slots and engaged our ventral tractor beam to prevent them moving. As both ships were sil 5, the pirate had to first use his action to break the beam with a pilot check, actually failed even and was blasted with the ion cannons before he could do anything.
Catching fighters to prevent them from using GtA would be another useful, even when maybe not as cool action, while catching a falling crewmen is more of a narrative tool, but certainly cool.
The Lancer-class Pursuit craft can use the tractor beam while firing at its target, making sure to stay forever on its tail, which is sounds rather useful, but I guess I already mentioned the usefulness when combined with gain the advantage. ![]()