The big downside is that tow vehicles in their current impl. are way overpowered and make no sense. If players were given tow vehicles, every vehicle would be towed away on the street and chopped up.
I don't believe anyone (aside from the people with tow trucks) want that style of gameplay. What are some possible solutions, and what are the drawbacks/pros to your solutions?
In the illegitimate case, if a character wants to salvage a car abandoned on the street or steal someone else's, they would have to disable the vehicle's security system somehow first. This would carry the same risks it already does. You're just using a tow truck now instead of driving it away, but the same form of balance would apply.
In my experience the situations where towing is necessary are few and far between, and if the vehicle is already authorized to the tower, it's just as easy to deal with it through other means.
A "neutral" setting on vehicles that allows the tow. This will require authorization on the security system. Obviously, if you hotwire a car, with a kit, you will have access to this command. If you do not, and merely break into it, you will not.
This allows would-be thieves with a tow the ability to steal a vehicle that is otherwise immobilized and cannot be driven away, while preventing them from just grabbing whatever they want.
For legitimate purposes, it allows the owners of the vehicle to set the vehicle in neutral and tow at leisure.
1) The vehicle operator is not necessarily (or even usually) the vehicle owner, who may be an inactive PC, or be an NPC who can't access the vehicle.
2) Towing may be required when a vehicle is inaccessible or in locations dangerous to characters on foot that would prevent coordinating authorizations, for instance middle of the express tubes, or in the middle of the desert, or in mid-air.
3) Unfinished vehicles may not have security systems installed at all.
Reason being that there really needs to be a NPC response and likely palms greased to avoid a confrontation with the local street authorities. Players can't reasonably be expected to respond to their ride getting jacked when it's pretty easy to figure out (AKA smallworld) who owns what vehicle and simply avoid them. Otherwise it'll be handled like pretty much all other high-risk crime is, when it's 4:17AM in the morning and there's all of zero people available to react to having their shit stolen.
Part of the solution we are looking for here is a way we can remove that requirement and make it more accessible. As more and more vehicle combat and damage enters the game, this becomes a more pressing thing to not have gm approval be a bottleneck for.
It could generate a log staff side to see who's towed what if there were concerns about abuse.
I.E. A wreck spawns -somewhere-, most likely in Red, takes from a few hours (in say green) to a few days (in red) until the orders come down to remove it, and then the player is able to tow it back in to the service area. If they can scan it and determine that it's a player owned vehicle, they can impound it until the owner pays to get the wreck released to another garage or repaired, and if it's a NPC wreck, they might say something along the lines of 'This isn't salvageable, take it down to the crusher and get it recycled.'
Spawn one or two wrecks a week on an automated manner so that tow truck drivers have intermittent work to do if there's not much vehicle combat going on (or until it's fully implemented) and then use the flagging system on all wrecks on public streets from there, including system-generated wrecks, as well as wrecks generated as a result of vehicular combat.
So any vehicle towed will always be a viable vehicle in some capacity. And the goal here is to make it so players can retrieve their viable vehicles and return them to shops.
