Re tractor-beam...
Should be possible, with a carefully scripted mission. Some relevant points imho:
- Targetting the object: should be possible if the object is built as a fighter. If you need to know which object the player is targetting, a new mission command could be arranged
- Activating the tractor-beam: a modification to the gun's patch along with a new mission command could let the mission script know when the player activated the beam (assuming the tractor beam is defined as a gun, much in the same way as the cloak was defined as a gun in Armada).
- Once the tractor-beam is considered "activated", moving the object towards the player's ship and making it disappear when it's close enough (ie, when it's been tractored into the fighter): there should be functions able to do this already implemented (either by changing directly the object world coordinates or making it face the player's ship and accelerate towards it...)
All that's missing is some kind of tractor-sphere-effect (like the one in Priv), but maybe that could be solved with some creative moddeling.
Pedro: let us know about your idea regarding the integrated fiction viewer. I haven't started work on that text function we discussed and probably won't have the opportunity of doing so in the next few months... so if you have an alternative i'll take it off the to-do list