People have always felt the tug was useless. Just a low end combat ship. But it would make a cool replacement for the pod hauling SNRV.
While testing crashing into asteroid issues I modified a player tug to haul 3 pods of cargo. Basically, it hauls them in a long chain behind the tug. It can handle 3 just fine.
It might be possible to have it haul 4-6 if it has corvette level acceleration rates (when empty).
And if we put a cargo dock on the nose, it could dock up to station pod spewers and then load and unload cargo. It would make a great player courier ship. You could run just a few pods of high value goods. Not need wingmen, and ditch the cargo if you needed to fight.
It gives the starting player a way to earn some cash. Tugs could be made pretty fuel efficient compared to freighters to help out that starting player.
There is only one drawback, and that is graphical. The pods can be docked and sold in any order, so you can end up with gaps in the line of pods. But we can explain that away as saying that cables link the pods to the tug.