when one ship is tractoring another (grimming) the tractor may hold but the direction of the ships must be determined by the stronger of the two engines.

Thrust Strong - Thrust Weak = Thrust direction. Total weight must also be calculated in to determine acceleration.

A player in a an App Ward+ with a Rhino Charge weighing 1.2M should never be jerked about by a Loqution with a coalfurnace for an engine no matter how strong its tractor and tractoring aug setup. It especially shouldn't be jerked about at 2x its speed when its engines are thrusting in the opposite direction.

A tractor is nothing more that a rod and reel... you hook a small fish and real it in... hook a marlin and expect a fight... hook a whale either let go or go for a ride.

that kind of fails with the wale example since then theres a thing called gravity!:P

and SS doesnt have to make sence. i mean a SS is smaller then a emp behe but got alot more space?or docking a EFDN the size or 5 planets into a arcadian base?!

Actually tractors have a built in mechanic called "density enhancement". It's found on any tractor. Basically it is what allows a tiny ship to push or pull you around based on that factor and not just on mass alone. Reverse density enhancement is what allows a heavy ship to hitch a ride on a much lighter ship with other types of tractors.

You're not hooking a fish with a reel, you're using a sci-fi metamystical beam of energy to manipulate mass through a near or total vacuum in deep space. The rules of physics don't apply. Sure it's not realistic but it makes the game more interesting. There are great uses in game for density enhancement and tractoring, and counters to those abilities, so it's fine.

Ss might still be broken. Old old bug

Test this..

2 smidentical skill and setup ships. Old bug is last to initiate tractor had the dominant pull/thrust factor which never made any sense at all and was just shoddy code somewhere.

2 ships ie helge same tractor skill and subskill same engine watch mods and no zen of accel

Smidentical... Death to smartphones which always make 'atm' 'ATM' but can't autocorrect smidentical.

The idea here, is the relation between the weight and the thrust. Tractor ships are normally light weighted, and they use engines with high thrust stats, and then they use augmenters to boost their thrust so that they are able to resist tractor beams like this.

If you put a tractor ship and a really heavy target next to each other, and then engaged a tractor on the tractor ship without engaging any thrust, then you will see that the light weighted ship will be the first ship to hit the top speed.

So basically, you forgot the thrust as a factor, therefore this is not a bug.