‘Teather’ is a misspelling. I did say it was a first draft and not yet edited.
When writing, I have mostly focused on the ship functions, rather than all the detail to explain all the physics that is going on. I feel going into that kind of depth, at this time, isn’t really needed and would not be of much benefit anyway. I am going for information that officers can then use to comment on. How the station compensates isn’t something we’d be too concerned with.
As for why specialised areas, I just thought it sounded cool. Undocked, I imagined the tethers to have been retracted into the hull and covered with hull plating. There would also be several tethers, so if one or two were inoperable, the others would still be of use. If you consider a tractor beam pulls a ship too, then you probably want it pulling at certain areas than randomly along the hull. That way, you can monitor those areas and the stress rather than having to have some way of monitoring the whole hull, or designing the hull to be able to cope with it. What happen if the tractor locks on to something like an aerial for a sensor array? It might just pull it off…
