Tractors

[Aukel (OP)]

Howdy all,

OK so I have a ship that is supposed to be a tug.

I then design another ship, give it no engines but put a tractor on it.

How do I get the barge (ship with no tractors) to tractor the Tug?

[Hawkeye]

Ships screen (F6) --> select the ship with the tractor beam --> Miscellaneous tab --> "Tractor Link"

Note: I am a bit confused.

Is this sentence "How do I get the barge (ship with no tractors) to tractor the Tug?"

menat to read (ship with no engines)?

Anyway, the above should be true no matter which ship has the tractor beam.

[Aukel (OP)]

Hi Hawkeye,

Thanks, yeah it should have said no engines.

As this is a learning game, I designed the barge and the tug, then magiced them to appear.

When I go into the Ships window, and select the Barge (That which has no engines, but does have a tractor), I can see shipyards in the drop down but not the tug.

If I put the Tug and Barge in a task force and move them away from the shipyard (at 1km/s), I still can't see the Tug, in the Barge's Miscellaneous window.

Also and not wanting to expand this too much, most times when I open the F6 window I get a bunch of errors, sometimes 2 in  a row, sometimes 6, sometimes an infinite loops worth.
Could my tractors be related to a problem with my install of Aurora.
Similarly if I open the Galaxy Map view it gives me a bunch of errors about missing image files, where would I get all the ancilliary files to stop all these errors?

[Hawkeye]

Hm, not sure on this. Actually, I haven´t realy used tugs at all in all my games.

You could try to Fast OOB a tug WITH a tractor beam and not put one on the barge, perhaps this works.
Note: Steve recently changed the code re. tractor beams, to prevent a single tug _without_ tractor beam to pull multiple barges _with_ tractor beam, maybe this is related.

Re. the missing images, do you have folders named Flags, Medals, Planetjpeg, Races and Ships within the Aurora folder? Those should have been installed by the install program automaticly, but one never knows.

[Elouda]

This is a bug thats been reported in the latest version. Basically the change that prevent the behaviour above (chain tractoring) seems to have excluded everything except shipyards from getting tractored at all.

Hoping there will be an update at some point to fix this...

[Aukel (OP)]

Excellent!,  I would much rather it be the game than me at this point.  

I will move away from tractors and concentrate on an other area.

Thanks