Tractor beam as a Tie Avenger/Defender ability, now that's something what I'd like.
It'd be an intresting ability, to be sure, but it'd need to have a longer cooldown, to avoid being too over powered.
We've seen with ions and the poor way they're implemented ingame (albiet, PR takes the engine limitations and mitigates them fairly well), ions cause ships to be easy targets.
Send a wave of Y-Wings with ion turrets (or any ion equipped snubcraft) followed by conc missile equiped craft, and the enemy fighters will start dying fast.
Tractor beams for snubcraft would be quite similar.
I'm not against it, just saying it'd need balance.
As for capitols doing that........ just no.
And Skie as for compliments staying behind, that's just poor balance.
If anything, compliment capitols for stations should be the ones with more dated fighters.
Where does it make more sense to bulk your semi dated ships, on your frontline capitols (IE: ships you manually build) or in garrison protecting a world, be it launching from a station or a capitol defending the world.
Or thought of in real world terms: Capitols with compliments are like aircraft carriers.
IRL, carriers tend to get modern craft (IE: current models), with their attached squadrons rotating out every so often, with upgrade cycles marked by squadrons with new aircraft (or a new upgrade) being brought in.
Admitedly, currently the more advanced craft (the bug prone F-22 and joint strike fighter) are not being put on carriers regurally, but then in star wars those are the rare elite fighter craft which tend to be deployed separately, so the analogy still works.
Honestly, what we really need is to have an option to refit older capitol ships with newer compliments as well as weapons.
It's the same way some heros work, you build them, then they have several upgrades avalible later
IE: Luke goes from on his own, to Rogue Squadron, to commanding a mon cal cruiser.
So, a MC-40a could (when the per-requesitites are met) recieve a reletively cheap compliment upgrade (once the nessacary upgrades to the ships in the compliment are researched), followed by refit to MC-40b specs, so on so forth, applied to all capitols.
Indeed, independent snubcraft squadrons could also be upgraded in this manner.
This way, you could build your fleet (once again, for the example, MC-40a's) to a decent number, then you could rotate them to a upgrade world (perhaps add an upgrade station, using the space factory model I've only seen in skirmish) and have the snubcraft upgrade to a newer model for a lower cost.
The cost would be lower, and it'd balance well, for several reasons.
-The spaceframe allready exists, and is proven spaceworthy. All that needs be done is a change components by the units ground crew.
-The player (or AI) allready paid the cash for the unit, it's silly to have to go to the trouble (and indeed, it's a pain in the ass with the engine) to scrap item after item (dealing with random lag), when you could just upgrade said item into the newer one.
This would also reduce the varriety of units on maps (IE: You'd have more MC-40e's at endgame, rather than a mix of MC-40 models).
And while, yes, it would create a bit more work to add the upgrade method, once it is made it would make all such refits much easier.
Also, hero capitols and snubcraft are in desperate need of this as well, as many are utterly pointless because they're so damned slow once the newer stuff rolls around.