How About Ropes?

@swope Heh, didn't know you're Cofibot cheif

I once did a sim study with some astronauts to see if we could tow Dream Chaser on a rope behind a C-17. The purpose was to get the DC on condition for a piloted approach and landing flight test. Fun project.

@Someonetotheleft and btw, open the crafts and you'll see it takes only the space of 1 piston, what you should do to decrease any performance hit and make it look cool is make them have no drag and no colisions, then push one into another and this way you can retract/deploy the "cable"

@Someonetotheleft yup, it happened to me with the BPS replica :(, but for ground crafts it works without causing too much frame drop

@pedro16797 I tried this as well however it takes up too much space since you cant curl them up. If you try, the physics go weird and cause any craft to become unstable.

@swope I wanted to say tethers originally but when I looked up the definition, it meant ropes that are specifically meant to tie down something. That or some kind of electrical wire.

If you link pistons they act as a rope
A whip
A crane cable
Another crane
Hinges work too

*This crafts were made in older versions, I don't know if they still work well

All the cool aerospace engineers call them "tethers".