stev

There isn't a unique PMCG sec vest/jacket, all Officers get the same one that annoyingly matches the PMCG colour scheme.

These hazard vests are suit slot items that spawn on all Security Officers regardless of faction, you can't see the uniforms in char preview since the jackets spawn on top of them.

I know I'm a little late to the party here but I just wanted to add, the "fix" PR swapped around the Officer and Warden uniforms for most factions, except Idris which didn't swap but then had the Warden uniform tweaked to no longer be consistent with either the other factions' uniforms or even a lot of other Idris uniforms. I think this is a pointless change that doesn't really add anything positive and reduces the overall visual cohesiveness of Security's uniforms.

Thanks for the fast reply! 1. That's an interesting question, I hadn't considered their quya that much. They grew up in Eriuyushi, born roughly 150 years ago, so their quya was likely composed mainly of ranchers and farmers before or during the start of state enterprise encroachment. As manual labourers are generally kept with good conditions and benefits to promote work ethic, plus being on the homeworld, I think they'd range through mid Secondaries to low Primaries (SCS 5.00-7.50) - Lwmbliq getting out of agriculture and into high-minded academic pursuits would be a point of pride for the quya. Lwmbliq's own early circumstances weren't ideal, being low on the Receiver band and probably widely expected to just go into ranching, and that played into their lack of drive and work ethic until first contact with humanity came around. 2. Leaving Jargon for the first time was probably some combination of terror and enraptured excitement - they'd been studying human cultures for a good decade or two by the point they got to leave and see it all for themselves, so broadly knew what to expect, both the good and the bad. They were continually fascinated by these peoples, going out on extended field trips for a few years at a time before travelling back to the Federation to write/edit, debate their work and findings, and take the opportunity to de-stress. 3. These psionic interviews would usually be initially negotiated through a TCB-speaking (or simply psionic-consenting) native guide, then conducted primarily via psionic communication to circumvent the language barrier. Sliuup found out the difficulties in filming this kind of interview from issues in their escapades on Adhomai, so they came to Moghes prepared - they used emotional/psionic reading devices similar to those used in the filming of Swimstars to record a facsimile of the actual psionic interview, with commentary dubbed in post where necessary. In particularly desperate straits, they used psionic communication to try and stop some starving Wastelander from literally eating them, which sometimes had the unfortunate side-effect of making them believe Sliuup'nuke to be some sort of spirit or lesser god; these segments were mostly cut or edited around for the theatrical release, though most of the follow-on interview segments were kept in if possible. 4. While Sliuup'nuke had seen some truly terrible things on Adhomai and holy war-era Moroz - not to mention the untold horrors of Detroit - the sheer scale of the devastation on Moghes affected them deeply. Cities they filmed mere months ago were blown to radioactive dust, entire cultures and peoples wiped off the face of the planet, some with only Lwmbliq's footage to prove that they ever existed. Subjects they interviewed could die in just weeks from now, along with the stories and cultures of their people; this was why it was so crucial to them to record every last thing, up to psionically interviewing the dying to give them a chance to make their story known in the timeless archives of the Jargon Federation, ever may it stand. 4.a. Their name add-on's Basic translation is a little harsher and less elegant than the Nral'Malic 'pointless devastation in nuclear fire', but they thought that getting across the horrors of weapons of mass destruction was more important than sounding elegant and refined; beside, the crude ugliness of the word gives it a certain weight that they think is fitting for such a thing. Finally, and most importantly, Sliuup'nuke loves The Professionals and has a half-decent Solarian cowboy costume lying around somewhere, as well as being a fan of a number of Cytherean art films; he's also a Swimstars fan but very specifically stans the Jaws, with an ongoing Lu'Pluux feud with a vocal critic of the Jaws - they've been trying to find ways to subtly snub them in their documentaries for a while now.

BYOND Key: Memescope McGee Character Names: Species you are applying to play: Skrell What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Dark purply-blue, probably? I’ll finalise once I have a chance to play around in char setup. Have you read our lore section's page on this species: A lot of them, yes. Why do you wish to play this specific race: To be honest, I’ve taken quite a while to warm up to the concept of Skrell, but with NBT (and the last year or two’s lore additions) I’ve been having some fun new concepts - I tend to not really get into a species or faction until I get a solid, fun character concept for it. As far as themes and specifics of the race, I particularly enjoy idols and the social credit system, the subtly smug, imperialistic culture & interventionist diplomacy of Jargon (especially with regards to WMDs), the literal thought-police level of oppressive control over Jargon citizens, and I’m always a sucker for a good long-lived sci-fi/fantasy race. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: Obviously there’s the mechanical aspects (psionics, no-slip, etc.) but that’s not really super important, at the end of the day. Big, immediate differences include the Skrell’s lack of a gender binary, predominantly polyamorous relationships, a lack of facial expression when expressing emotion (instead primarily using vocalisations and posturing of the headtails), the hyper-homogenous, authoritarian, oppressive, literal thought-police perfectly benevolent and universally-loved Jargon Federation, a culture based around scientific progress, the psionic echo chamber of the Nlom... There’s a lot, to be honest. I think trying to list it all straight is kind of pointless, so I’ve tried to write most of the important stuff into the backstory segment. Character Name: Lwmbliq Sliuup’nuke Lwmbliq Sliuup was born on Qerrbalak to a mostly Axiorii Quya; they proved to have promising psionic aptitude but with middling receptivity, just a little above the Listener threshold. Though they initially showed little interest in education in their early scuttle schooling, even being held back from progression to the Reefgardens for a time, that all changed in 2332 with the sudden public reveal of first contact with humanity. Possessed with a sudden, all-encompassing fascination with this strange new alien culture, they took up their studies with a strength of interest bordering on the obsessive. They rushed through their first depth college in a little under a decade, immediately applying for immersion studies across human space for their second degree, though was initially held back due to concerns of the young, unproven xenoanthropologist misrepresenting the Federation. Lwmbliq nevertheless toured around the known Spur for many years, filming a number of academic holo-studies across exotic, alien locations such as war-torn Moroz, resplendent Oran, and Detroit; as the decades went on, these holo-films slowly shifted from niche academic study toward a more general-audience documentary style, complete with personal commentary and extensive editing. Sliuup, putting faith in academic projections that contact would eventually be made with more sapient species in due time, devoted themselves to becoming a foremost expert in theoretical and practical xenoanthropology and xenoarchaeology. When first contact was made with the Tajara, Lwmbliq was among the first to travel to Adhomai to study their primitive, backwards feudal politics and regressive culture. They managed to record their first documentary to receive some mainstream success amidst the terrible upheaval of the Tajaran First Revolution, to moderate acclaim; critics were divided on their work’s style, with many calling their commentary over footage of horrific scenes of violence patronising, ghoulish, and disrespectful to the dead and their families, though others praised their even-handed objectivity, poignant observations, and offbeat, moist wit. However, what has most defined their career—and in many ways, their life—was their coverage of the Moghesian Contact War. Eager to capture another first contact on film, Lwmbliq was among some of the first non-diplomatic citizens to be approved for cultural research on Moghes. Quickly becoming fascinated with the native peoples and customs, they spent as much time as they could travelling the land, filming and interviewing all the while. Determined to stick out the seemingly inevitable war between Izweski and Traditionalists—they’d seen and filmed plenty of wars, of course—they decided to keep documenting the rising tensions. They were not prepared for the bombs to drop. One memorable scene from their Contact War documentary depicts Sliuup calmly interviewing a local shaman via psionic dialogue when, in the far distance, we see the plume of the first nuclear strike wiping out a city in the blink of an eye; neither of the two can process what’s just happened, at first, until the next bomb drops and the horror sets in. This concludes the first fifteen-hour instalment of the director’s cut of their landmark documentary, Warbling with the Wasters: An Observation of the Class-1.62 Planetary Societal Disruption of Moghes, the Governmental and Societal Collapse of the Sinta Traditionalist Coalition, and Its Consequences on the Way of Life of the Native Populace Thereof, with Commentary from Doctor of Xenoanthropological, Xenoarchaeological, and Xenopolitical Studies Lwmbliq Sliuup'nuke. The following instalments cover the following eleven years of the documentarian’s stay on Moghes, concluding once they were able to safely evacuate from what had come to be the Wasteland; highlights include a psionic interview of a Gawgaryn bandit that managed to capture Sliuup’nuke, teaching a stubborn group of peasant farmers about radiation poisoning, attempting to explain to a native tech-scavenger what parts they needed to keep their camera maintained, and one especially impassioned interview with small-scale religious leader Juzida Si’akh via native interpreter. Since their—or his and occasionally her, following their cultural enrichment on Moghes—breakout success of Warbling with the Wasters, aided by two clips managing to air on Chirp Till You Drop as part of a viral marketing ploy, they have finally managed to reach the lauded heights of an Iqi accreditation in recognition of popular contributions to his field. Aided by our benevolent Federation’s increasing interest in the newly-formed Stellar Corporate Conglomerate, Sliuup’nuke has managed to get themselves onto the SCCV Horizon to document the historic human-led journey across the known Spur. What will the Conglomerate uncover? What dangers will Lwmbliq face? Watch out for the next Sliuup’nuke documentary minisode to find out, broadcasting from war-torn space beyond the Federation! What do you like about this character? Gonna be honest, I love the idea of playing this weird, aloof, imperialistic documentarian who thinks they know better than the people they’re interviewing about their own lives and cultures. I’m also a big fan of how Jargon and its citizens interact with people outside of its reach. How would you rate your role-playing ability? My main is an ENTP. Notes: Frogs are pretty neat.

Big agree on the age, 25 seems a lot more sensible to me. Wouldn't mind seeing it go even younger to be honest, since the only main duty is piloting and that doesn't seem like an especially 'senior' duty.

These are fair criticisms to be honest, I do have some difficulties with twigging when to disengage from debates and/or arguments. I am cognizant of this, however, and am trying to improve on that particular failing. I've been letting IRL stress bleed into interactions here way too much in the past month or two, though I should finally be mainly out of the woods within the next couple weeks. As for communication, I'll admit I'm not amazing with it as far as personal communication goes, but I'm a lot better with goal-oriented communication with a specific purpose and function in mind - like coordinating editorial work, for example. I'm aware that it sounds like a bit of a cop-out to simply say, "yep, I know it's a problem, I'm working on it," but there's not really much else I could say without misrepresenting my own skills and weaknesses. I fully understand if that isn't enough.

Yeah, I highkey agree with this. We already have an issue in Unathi lore of almost every playable faction being subservient to the Izweski Hegemony in some way despite the Hegemony also being one of the spiciest, most divisive things to Unathi as a whole. Making the whole pirate faction subservient to the big government was kind of a mistake from the beginning imo, it sorta loses the flavour of piracy and replaces it mostly with a stripped-back standard feudal system. I'd love to see Unathi pirates as a whole being expanded as their own thing, though, given it's such a big part of their reputation with other species yet has surprisingly little lore outside this legalised, state-sanctioned version of it. Tho if wider Unathi piracy got a lore expansion it would be quite cool to see the Compact as a foil to the truly independent pirates, perhaps being privateers (and pirate hunters) themselves.

I really like a lot of these! Some really good work here. I do have specific feedback with a few select sprites: The Investigator uniform's base shape looks a little odd with the coat thing extending down way between the legs. I think this looks a bit strange in and of itself, but also has the issue that it's large enough that you'd need an even larger suit-layer item to cover it up and look natural (though this comes with the assumption that these are purely uniform sprites without any jacket/coat/oversuit). The Zavod engineering uniforms as a whole have some issues with the design on the legs being very loud, I think there's a bit too much bright, attention-grabbing red close together in stripes over a dull backing (tan) which makes them look more like stripy tights than hazard gear. The red highlights (buttons?) on the Engineer overalls/waistcoat thing also seem very bright to me compared to the tan background, I think it comes off as a little garish. The Zavod Xenobio uniform also clashes quite a bit imo - the combination of bright green, bright red, and purple on brown is just a very busy palette. Could maybe fix that by just getting rid of the red collar/cravat and replacing that or another part of the sprite with tan? This one's extremely nitpicky and subjective, but I think the bridge crew could do with a liiiiiiittle less gold; they seem to use gold as their go-to highlight colour, but imo this ends up with them looking higher status than the actual Heads who all have seem to much less gold on their uniforms by comparison. The CMO uniform honestly looks incredibly cool, but lacks any blue on the sprite which makes it seem a little out of place among the other Medical uniforms whose unifying colour here seems to be blue across factions. Also a bit nitpicky and subjective, I know. I think this one's just a mistake, but the Idris (EDIT: it's actually both Idris and NT) bartender's side sprites are inconsistent with the back/front sprites - the sleeves are blue in the front/back sprites but white in the side sprites. EDIT: Missed a couple things in my first pass. The hydroponicist uniforms have some shading issues - all Idris hydro sprites except the front sprite have the NT colours on the overalls, and the NT version's overalls suffer a bit from lack of outline, leading to the overalls bleeding into the main uniform.

I agree with the goal overall, but I feel that a single year is a little short? Two years is definitely a long enough timespan, though.

Ckey/BYOND Username: Memescope McGee Position Being Applied For: Wiki Maintainer Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page? Yes. Past Experiences/Knowledge: I have experience with ss13 wiki maintenance. About four or five years ago (jesus) I was a wiki contributor/maintainer for Baystation under Skeeveo, the then-lead wiki developer; I contributed both as a writer, content editor, and semi-technical maintainer helping to reformat the wiki into a more acceptable state. I have real-world experience as a proofreader and copy-editor. I'm also currently a third-year university student on a book publishing/editorial course and should be well-equipped for article proofreading and editing. As a hobbyist writer, I have experience with formatting and editing for a number of formats, including wiki article style (see point 1). Examples of Past Work: Unfortunately, with the loss of the Baystation forums and wiki, most examples of my previous wiki work have been blasted from orbit, and I'm not comfortable with leaking personal work and information in an application for a funny space game. If some form of evidence is required, I'd have to get testimonies from some of the people involved with the Bay wiki project I was a part of, and I'd really rather not do that if unnecessary. Additional Comments: So, this is a funny one: My forum-linked wiki account has been hard locked up due to a bug with some of the appearance style preference options. I've been able to view the wiki without an account by clearing my cache, but any attempt at accessing my wiki account results in an error 520, rendering every single page on the wiki completely inaccessible until I manually clear the site data cache with devtools. As a result, I haven't been able to play around with editing or drafting on the wiki for a good few weeks. Really hoping this can be fixed, even if that simply involves deleting my wiki account in its entirety! Regarding the broader application, I aim to help the wiki and lore teams with quality assurance for articles and employ some basic editorial guidelines to keep our core, most important pages in the best state possible.

I might have missed a post in the flood here, but have any details regarding the available species/subspecies for the Operations Manager been released? I think opening some of the Tajaran subspecies (specifically Zhan-Khazan) to the role could be interesting, as it feels like a relatively low-prestige, "working class" flavour of Command role, especially with the new formation of the Orion Express.

Totally support this, really great idea. Only very minor implementation note, probly want to do a dchat notification as well as lobby to lure lurking ghosts.

Actually, I think this is something that's kinda been lacking recently imo. In the year or so since the end of KOTW and the continuing phoron scarcity since, I feel like we've seen surprisingly little development in the lore driven by these pressures and events. While there have been a few additions focusing on the Warlords and Wildlands (notably the new CRZ arc and additions like Mictlan and Visegrad), I feel like we're experiencing a bit of a drought with news and events stemming from the ongoing crisis pertaining to already-existing groups, particularly the COC and the Hegemony/Unathi at large. While I know there's been kind of little development from them in general, I feel like the ongoing crisis is a really great opportunity for driving these kinds of developments that's sort of being slept on. (Sorry for double-post, was originally gonna edit this into my initial post but realised it was way beefier a point.)

While that's true to an extent, I think it's important to keep the wider scope stuff changing if only to inform local affairs and act as a driving force for further developments.

In all fairness, I feel it's important to consider that while Elyra has access to a very crucial and rare resource, the Coalition covers, like, half of human space and is currently the largest and most populous human nation that isn't actively undergoing a warlord period. Even if a fair number of their worlds are pretty impoverished, that's still a hell of a lot of people to market to and contribute to the galactic economy.

To address the weirdness of Odin chars getting every station channel, we could easily just reduce the number of channel keys their headsets spawn with - Common and maybe Command for all of them, with maybe the key for their relevant department channel i.e. Sec frequency for checkpoint specialists, Service for bartenders/chefs, Medical for medical specialists, etc.

I love the Heph uniforms after the feedback, but I feel the Zavodskoi uniforms have got less recognisable with it; their uniforms share the same base colour as the Heph apprentice shirt and the Heph atmos arms under the jumpsuit, leading to minimal identifiability within Zavod engineering in part because the new Zavod colour scheme seems to be almost identical to the "baseline" Engineering oranges & yellows. As with other companies' palettes, I really feel it could do with a secondary colour to make it more visually identifiable (perhaps red highlights?), especially since their main colour is so similar to the standard Engineering colours.

I really love the pirate lore! I think this approach of fleshing out parts of more sandboxy areas of the lore by giving examples of it rather than defining it explicitly is really good, as well as the pirate factions here just being really really cool in and of themselves. I think it's a real strong point for you that you're approaching this with the angle of "what part of the lore is currently addressed but is sparse in its current form?" rather than writing cool lore for the sake of writing something you're just excited about without thinking critically about what's really needed. +1.

Quick disclaimer: I've been inactive for a month or two, I'm not 100% up to date on specific current values and stuff, but these complaints seem to be identical to ones I made when I was last active so, like, whatever. I think some of the perceived issue with burn damage being overwhelmingly powerful is in large part due to laser rifles being overwhelmingly powerful. Laser rifles fill almost every conceivable niche that you'll need as Security (or any other combat-oriented role/antag, for that matter), bar non-lethal capabilities, though even that is somewhat mitigated by the fact that situations frequently escalate right from standard green alert to full lethals with little in-between. The laser rifle, in comparison to the rest of the armoury, is: The weapon with the highest (read: best) shot capacity and ammo availability; at around 15 shots its shot capacity outclasses everything else in the armoury except .45s and shotguns, but that carries the extra difficulties of managing magazines or boxes/piles of shells. The weapon with the highest straight damage output; its pure damage value is by far the highest of anything in the armoury, as well as being of a particularly potent damage type (see the rest of the thread). You could argue that shotgun slugs are equivalent or even better in this regard, but this requires printing from outside the armoury and is generally hard to get in many situations. The weapon with the best armour penetration in the game, bar hyper-specific rare examples like x-ray rifles or literal anti-tank guns. It can pierce through almost any armour in the game and, given its already extremely potent damage, renders most armour kind of useless against it. One of the better choices for tactical flexibility, i.e. its ability to shoot through windows safe from retaliation unless the enemy also has a laser weapon; this is the rare case that the laser rifle is equivalent to something else stocked in the armoury on any level, as the laser carbine can also shoot through windows with its lethal mode. While this can encourage clever tactics on the part of Security to take advantage of this, this also sometimes leads to one-sided engagements where a poorly-equipped antag or team of antags is unable to fire back through windows, rendering them largely helpless. Other specialised weapons (mainly snipers of various types) have some tactical advantage over laser rifles, primarily through cross-screen range or explosives, but these are either rare, expensive, highly specialised into one function, or a combination thereof. Now any of these advantages would be fine in and of themselves, if they were a particular advantage of a specialised weapon designed for a specific task. The laser rifle, however, is either the single best in the armoury or a shared best with another armoury weapon, not to mention that it's often equivalent to some of the best weapons in the game in many areas, full stop. It is also good for some of these niches to be filled by armoury equipment, as that gives Security some options and flexibility. This leads to it being the weapon of choice for almost any scenario outside of non-lethals, meaning it gets deployed in almost every situation. The laser rifle is both a jack of all trades all-rounder weapon and also one of the strongest weapons around in almost every metric by which we can judge weapons. I've often heard the argument that the laser rifle's power is necessary because Security needs something to pierce heavy armour, otherwise a heavily-armoured antag can just run roughshod over everything with barely a fight. My suggestion to fix this, then, is to lean into that niche: Make the laser rifle a specialised anti-armour weapon for dealing with heavily-armoured antags, but make it less overwhelmingly strong in other areas to compensate - for example, keep its high armour penetration and high per-shot damage but heavily reduce shot capacity and maybe shot speed, making it inefficient for fighting less-armoured antags but still very good for its particular niche, allowing the laser carbine or .45 ballistic pistol to fill that medium armour lethal role. As well as making burns in general and the laser rifle in particular less horrible to deal with as an antag, this would also give other armoury weapons a chance to shine in their respective roles and encourages more interesting, flexible combat gameplay for Security. Tl;dr: laser rifle op nerf pls noob wepon

Gonna echo some other comments and say the green seems quite dark on the uniforms; I have a couple more specific points of critique, though. I think these uniforms suffer from broadly sticking to a single colour from the Idris palette - if we look at the current uniforms, most use a base of (lighter) cyan and white with yellow highlights, which I think is quite a bit nicer than this version of the new sprites. This combined with the dark grey colouring, as opposed to the lighter/white base of the old sprites, makes the new ones seem quite muted and dark. For the Idris service manager uniform, I think it's an odd choice to include the jacket/cardigan thing on the uniform sprite itself, as this kind of thing is usually reserved for suit slot items and could look very odd when combined with stuff on other layers; this could be worsened by the fact that the jacket on the uniform extends below the waistline and onto the trousers, as this will cause any suit slot items or accessories to look odd when there's clearly another layer of clothing under whatever jacket or shirt they put on top. For the Idris bartender specifically, I think the lack of lighter highlights looks especially rough, as both the trousers and vest/waistcoat being the same colour makes it look unpleasantly monotone.

Not going to lie, I'm a little confused about whether this is supposed to focus on being a COC PMC or a Solarian one - while based (in Crosk), it has very little link to the Coalition outside of that; if anything, it has a more solid link to Sol with Maroon Squadron's noted Solarian military presence. It's also a little concerning to me that there's such potential for massive internal conflict purely within this subfaction with the split focus between Solarian and COC military personnel.

If this is the case, could we get it on the wiki somewhere? There's a lot on the surgery chart that depends on a very specific interpretation of the writing, and I feel like this particular case is pretty unobvious (is that a word? who knows) with just the current information regarding the chart.

You can't actually set custom citizenship or faction, don't think that's been an option for a good while.

Not gonna make a big response post or anything but I'd just like to point out that every company, including NT, has done/actively does/is complicit in doing some real heinous shit. It's just an inherent part of the setting that our characters are lowkey working under pretty awful organisations by necessity, since they're the only real options out there. To list a few examples: NanoTrasen actively leans on the Republic of Biesel to make cyborgification legal as a loophole around execution to make examples of their enemies; incited (at least one) war on Adhomai to get exploitative mineral rights, get hard menial labour done for cheap, and supported (or at least was complicit in allowing) forced labour and re-education camps for social deviants and ethnic minorities; and very recently had horrifically devastating phoron-enriched nuclear missiles developed and built on the Aurora with the help of station characters. Characters are, of course, perfectly within their rights to rationalise and compartmentalise away as much of this as they want with regards to NanoTrasen; but that poses the question, why can't this be done with the other corporations?