Tether Anchor Kit

On a rock a few kilometres across, gravity is so weak that a hard sneeze can send you into orbit. Everything a prospecting crew uses, from a single drill to a full field refinery, needs to be pinned down. The Tether Anchor Kit has been doing that job since it entered service on 25 April 2174.

Each kit is a four-metre case containing a gas-driven penetrator that drives a barbed, expanding anchor up to 18 metres into regolith, ice or fractured rock, a 300-metre braided tether and a supercapacitor winch. The supercapacitor bank delivers 6.5 kW bursts for winching and tensioning. A single anchor is rated to hold 3,200 kg, and crews typically set rings of six to twelve around anything heavy.

Two operators set and test an anchor in about forty minutes. Anchoring Rigger Tavita Fale wrote the guild's rubble-pile procedure: probe cohesion first, then set anchors in a triangle and load-test each to 150 per cent before trusting it. The open TetherPlan Anchoring Calculator suggests anchor placement and load for bodies under 50 km across.

Tether kits work hand in glove with the Basilisk Salvage Tug. On fast-spinning rubble piles, a Basilisk hooks onto a ring of tethers and gently despins the rock so drills can work. That technique opened up the Hollow Sister PGM Rubble Pile, which was spinning once every 2.4 hours when the guild first arrived.

A kit costs 0.48 million credits. The Ceres Free Claimholders' Mutual holds 44 and Rhodium Reach Salvage Co. uses 20 to stabilise derelict hulls before stripping them.