I have a suggestion on how to make tractor beams more realistic than the current model.
Instead of using an ability, they would function much like ion cannons, launching projectiles that disable the target's engines for a period of time, and fire fast enough that the engines are constantly disabled, or nearly so. Multiple projectors would reduce the time gap, stopping the target, and targeting or effect could be restricted to units smaller than the launching ship. I'm not sure it'll work, but when a Venator was able to keep moving under an Mc120s tractor, it annoyed me enough to think of this.

As a related topic, I was playing last night and noticed 3 tractor beams on a Nebulon-B from 3 diff ships, and the little runt kept moving!

Something with EaW's tractor beam code is bugged... if you don't issue new orders to a tractored ship, sometimes it keeps moving.

Anyways, yes, you could turn all of the tractor beams into projectiles. I was going to do this some time ago, but decided against it due to the glut of projectiles it would create. Using fire-linked lasers and such noticeably increased performance, so why go back? I think I'd rather have half-working abilities in this case.

You could just make the disable time proportional to the number of tractor beams on a ship or something.