Never actually used tugs at all. Just curious, does the speed of a ship tugging something scale down by a proportionate manner to the added mass?
It calculates the speed as if it was one ship using the fastest engines of the grouping (not combined).
ie. Could you build say a "stealth" ship made up of a engine/tractor main section thats fairly small. Tow a fuel tank section, a weapons section, maybe even some active sensor "sonar buoys". Whereby the ship would be fairly slow but also small and built up of several 1000t (save on the bridge and all) sections (each has its own small cross-section rather than 1 big 1 for the whole ship).
Then if coming under attack you could dump spent missile launcher sections to lighten the load (a la stark jegan gundam unicorn ep 1)
I guess it would work, but that kind of ship would be inefficient.
heck the dumbest thought of all. Tote around 2 engine/tractor sections. 1 loaded with efficient "long range" engines. And another with high power factor combat engines.
It would only factor one of the engine groupings/section. Adding more will do nothing but add available fuel. As I said earlier, it will only use the section that will make the ship the fastest. So If you would want to do that, you would have to pull the other "mode" in a hangar and switch out the engine sections. That actually doesn't sound all that bad, doing that might work. However, I think doing this would be mainly for RP purposes at low tech level.