spacewalking tethers

[warcrimes]

so what, you may ask, is the singular most dangerous aspect of being an astronaut on space station 13? 
it goes without saying, nanotrasen has neglected to provide you with a carabiner and rope. 
no longer.

the Space Tether is a belt slot item! while wearing it, click on the tether to grab the free end, then click on a lattice, pod, or catwalk to clip on! now youre bound to within 5 tiles of that thing. 

use it to work on the singulo, to fix breaches, to rescue floating bodies. 

space OSHA thanks you

[Kovirii]

Not sure if it would be worth differentiating from the lattice, but you could add "rails" along the outer station walls.

Either swinging out on an arc or getting snapped-back sound like fun.

[Spoodle]

This actually sounds like a REALLY cool idea.

[NateTheSquid]

this does sound really cool but i'm worried about how things like the 'swinging on an arc' would work code wise. im sure this could be added simply using an invisible force-field that only affects the tethered player, but it wouldn't really do rope-like things

[Wisecrack34]

I like it

[The Gorog]

Sounds like a great idea, especially with the lack of jetpacks for the engineering department.

[qwertyquerty]

This isn't a very easy patch, especially because we don't want the tether passing through walls

[Wisecrack34]

Maybe just give you a walk distance limit, perhaps have it place wire behind you for every step then once you run out of "rope" you can't move in a direction that doesn't have rope, along with making rope act as a "flooring" so you can walk on it.

[warcrimes]

This isn't a very easy patch, especially because we don't want the tether passing through walls

Honestly im willing to suspend disbelief for some kind of "laser tether" that ignores tiles. 
Here's what I envision: 
 
The gray tiles represent the walls.
In this scenario, the player (green) places their tether on the orange tile. The yellow ring (and red outline) show the maximum distance. . The player moves off north. once they reach an identified limit tile, you check if they hit it perpendicularly (i.e. left from the orange tile) or some other secant. Being offset here, they start to swing along the yellow tiles until they hit an obstacle, and stop on the red tile.

it's jank movement but it's simple

[Lady Birb]

Idea that might make this even harder to code but would be hilarious: Let us tether people to the back of moving pods and drag them along, or even better, let us tether people to the back of minisubs so we can have traitors drawn and quartered.

[Wisecrack34]

A separate system for attaching them to non floors/walls that pulls them behind an object along the path the original object took.