Tethering

While tethered, you'll see this icon on top of your HUD.

You'll also see a faint cyan-coloured effect coming from the citadel, while you're tethered.

Tethering is a mechanic that allows pilots with docking permission to stay close to an upwell structure without being targetable and without taking damage from area of effect weapons. Note that you can still be bumbed until you are out of tethering range thus breaking the tether.

In addition to making your ship safe, tethering will also repair your ship shield, armor and hull while also repleshining your capacitor. Tethering will also repair damaged modules fitted on the ship and damaged drones in drone bay. Modules and drones in cargo or in space are unaffected.

Tethering occurs when the ship is inside the docking ring. The docking ring is indicated by a dotted line around the structure, in this case a medium Astrahus citadel.

The following actions do not break tether:

• Move around in space as long as you remain close to the structure.
• Use the directional scanner.
• Launch probes, use the probe scanner and recall probes.

The following actions or conditions will break tether:

• Locking a target – will break immediately as lock starts, and won't refresh until target unlocked.
• Moving outside the tethering range (see range below).
• Activating specific modules, as below:
  • Burst Jammer module.
  • Command Burst module.
  • Cynosural Field Generator.
  • Siege module.
  • Triage module.

The following actions or conditions will prevent tethering:

• Having an active weapon timer.
• If you're warp disrupted or scrambled so that the offensive strength overcomes your defensive warp core strength (see warp disruption for more information).
• If you do not have docking rights at the structure.
• A ship that has been ejected from and is unpiloted will not be tethered. Your pod however, will be immediately tethered.

While tethered you're unable to take certain actions:

• Cannot activate smartbombs.
• Cannot launch bombs from a bomb launcher.