Boggle08

We have these threads every five weeks or so now. Nothing ever comes of them, we just debate in circles and then do it again another time. At this point, there's no way to make a proposition without severely compromising the play-styles of at least several people. We need to start trying shit. Playtesting, test merges. Even if it turns out to be a bad idea it puts us closer to finding the right idea. If half the bay can self supply, it wouldn't be unprecedented to have the fridge stocked roundstart with a small reserve of the tedious medicines that need to be made in bulk(mortaphentyl, saline, dermaline, etc) If medical bay is well staffed and functional, the physician isn't even supposed to be touching the OR. This makes them better suited to their home environment: The GTR.

I should also add, it makes it more straightforward to design features/challenges between the two roles. Rather than having to think about medical as a quasi-political balance of power, it becomes a binary between chemical/GTR problems, and Surgery/OR problems. It will make it easy to conceive of design for the department going forward.

A pharmacist that finishes their 30 minutes of work + surplus can just cryo, wait, and respawn as something that is supposed to be using their chems. A physician without chems is just a shittier surgeon. The wall lockers we added several months ago are a bandaid for a role that can't do much except scan people and pass them into the OR if they can't medicate. Current medical is a big, sloppy, inefficient compromise. It proliferates its existence because everyone is just comfortable with it. I think we feel good about it right now because medical is consistently staffed, but the next time we get hit with a pharmacist populations drought, we're gonna be right back in another thread asking for more chems to be put in the walls. In my view, the best way to merge and streamline these roles properly, is to knock out the pharmacist as a dedicated linecook role, and essentially turn the physician into a pharmacist with GTR responsibilities. With NO SURGERY. The surgeon becomes our dedicated meat technician. No charts. No bullshit. Clear division between responsibilities without redundant intermediaries. With this division, it makes a stronger case for the maintainers to allow alt titles again. No chart bullshit, no finagling over responsibilities, you either pick scalpel, or hypo. Having played a shit ton of solo pharm in the past. It's doable. More than doable. Outside of a handful of important fixes, there are many, many workarounds to problems using chems. And when there is a problem you can't fix yourself, or if it's quicker to do surgery, having one is all the more valuable and appreciated. It doesn't feel arbitrary. Pharmacy work is boring, and there is usually only ever one pharmacist at a time, because late joining as a second usually makes you honorary off-duty. With a more populated, merged role, you get more people to consistently staff both sides of the chem lab, and that leads to divvying up the tedium into something more manageable, and fast. Since physicians will now be able to self supply, they don't even need to make bulk orders like what the pharmacy has to put up with. On lowpop, they can use a mix of wallmeds and a few bottles here and there wherever they see fit.

Oh, just yesterday I saw a fellow meddoid chase after two traitor crew guys trying to heal them when they attempted to pass through medical. Even while security was in pursuit of them, and they were storming out of medical, he was right there between everybody chasing after them with his hypo Months earlier(which has to be my personal favorite for this behavior), The HoS got teleported into port maintenance, endured a torture session with a traitor, and ended up killing the guy at the expense of getting fucked up. I was with security as engineering, and we brought a responder with us. While the HoS was standing in place, shaking violently from the adrenaline, we nudged the EMT to stop staring and help, whereupon they hyperfocused on storing the body, ignoring the twitching bleeding HoS in front of us. I think the reason for this behavior is because more injuries = more gameplay. Because antagonists usually come out more fucked up than the crew does, the triage priority in their brains is biased towards antags. I think policy is the best solution, and it needs to be reinforced with central command announcements to imprint it into medical's brain.

After conferring with others, we've decided that we can accept you, but only on the condition you either rework the tourettes analog to have a more subtle tic, or design a different cognitive obstacle. We believe you did your research on both fronts, but a dionae that haphazardly tosses out profanity is not how we want to see the species represented. You can let us know what you rework it to in this thread.

We're close to a positive verdict. In retrospect, I have concerns about this part here. Could you go further about how this would look like ingame?

I see this as more of a springboard into raising the activity ceiling of engineering. If it is assumed RCON can be consistently turned on, we can consider features or obstacles designed around the subsystem in the future. I don't think concentrating all our effort on setup procedures is a long term plan, because they'll all get done before the first hour's up, and then engineering has not much to do except react. When we design events, we don't often have to think about how to design for medical or security. We just present a problem, and those two and command just do their thing. Mechanics inform the bulk of their involvement. Science has no gameplay to it, and not only is it consistently dead/uninvolved, but we kind of have to force them into our design. There are few problems that make sense from a mechanical perspective to defer to science, and if we were to put them front and center of an event, it would pretty much be the science team pretending to do sciencey things. Completely gutting the videogame of it's videogameness makes it a bad videogame.

This essentially is the primary basis for me making this thread. While I personally believe that safety is an arbitrary concern(outside of niche cases where someone is shocking doors), The use cases and niche versatility of the distributed substation network never get taken advantage of because of the tedium. I am one of those people that stopped setting RCON because of this, and this suggestion, in my mind, is what will get me to start doing it again during peak operation. Setting up the shield network is far more substantial than RCON, but it can be done in seconds compared to the latter. The time and effort spent on a subsystem needs to be proportional to its utility. TL;DR, these changes will make the RCON network more accessible to players interested in the technical aspects of engineering, while trivializing it for those that simply need to check off a box.

Why not merge the pharmacist into this new GTR intermediary role, then? You can achieve a lot of GTR work with just chems, and this new intermediary role will be completely useless without them. It'll also fix the pharmacist's issue of being fucking useless after completing the bay's spread.

I see RCON being done less every time I play, even during peak engineer population. The only utility RCON really has going for it is that ability to have a more flexible and resilient powergrid. Anything to streamline the process of configuring this subsystem, because the juice is not worth the tedious squeeze any more. I’ve had issues with brownouts during peak operations trying to max out the substations like that. I guess it doesn’t matter if you keep the bypasses on and let the substations dump their output directly back into master, but kind of defeats the point in a way. The point of my initial suggestion is to reduce the number of button presses, and therefore time spent on this subsystem. What other case is there to not have preset values in the system? If it’s as pointless as people are insisting, then it’s inconsequential if it gets done.

They’re going to change the RCON values either way, the point is that we agree upon values that won’t cause power issues during peak operation(outside of people trying to charge like, a bunch of fucking guns or hypercells). Having preset values means I can run up and down the list only having to worry about turning everything on. RCON has niche applications that don’t get taken advantage of because of the cancerous setup procedures, and it’s been my experience no one cares about it until a problem that could’ve been fixed by it comes up. Then people loudly bitch.

Does anyone actually like doing this? I don't think we stand to lose much if someone were to give RCON optimal roundstart values. This shit is about as enjoyable as organizing a 60 member crew roster alphabetically based on their ID's DNA hash.

Lanterns are too big to fit in pocket sized slots, and both them and flashlights need batteries in order to run. I wouldn't say this is an improvement on the overall experience, especially given that voidsuit and hardhat helmet lights are right there, being the superior option. The lantern change is especially painful, because that fucks with my miner's loadout economy.

It might be better, having the core be positioned as you have it. There isn't much incentive to interact with the AI normally. If the core is unrecoverable, or if the AI is in active danger of getting struck by other environmental hazards such as ordinance or meteors, it can throw open the doors and get someone to unbolt and move it.

Bless you and Read for those telecommunications changes. I was initially eager to see the devices spaced out, then I noticed it was all parked right next to engineering. Out of curiosity, what's under the AI core? We don't have to worry about people cheesing it by dropping rods from another sublevel, but I could probably take it out by detonating a single-tank halfcap directly underneath the core. Which might be too jank.

Competent and motivated are two extremely powerful things for a project like Aurora. I've seen both from you, even outside of this application, and that makes you very attractive as a candidate. Your ability to work with others is what concerns me: Even at the staff/developmental level, there are a lot of checks on how you can contribute. Both top down, bottom up, and sometimes even horizontally. Plenty of proposed projects have died in community feedback threads. Even in lore, our proposals will frequently get rejected internally; It's important to maintain a level of personal distance with your projects and move on or compromise when your ideas don't work out. How well you work with others is a big weigh on the decision, and your co-workers will not appreciate a long drawn out rhetorical slugging match over every feature you wish to propose/contest. No matter how well you defend your position compared to them. No matter what design paradigm you're using, you're gonna have to work with others, and be told no a lot. How do you plan to navigate that environment?

You were racing a Coeus. Dionae these days moved at a fixed movement speed, though sometimes less depending on the pain they intake. As for the battery thing, you can mitigate drain by staggering out your sprints and fingerbanging the APC's as you run past them. This was a tactic way back when, but it's way more sustainable now that your battery doesn't zero after running half the length of the holodeck going vertically. On the matter of heat, the threshold where you start to get temperature warnings/take damage is somewhere around 850 Kelvin. G2's do not overheat like shells. You can easily have human-tier endurance so long as you pace yourself and throttle your movement when you need to. I know this, because I have done this. As for the broader G2/Dionae comparison, honestly, their problems are different from what I think I see with G2's. The problem for G2's is that the game gives very little feedback/mechanical incentives for you to break off and fearRP with your wounds. Every species in the game can take a high threshold of punishment, it's just that they're going to be standing dead if they push it to the absolute limit. If their body will even allow them to. Dionae actually use a lite version of brainmed, and the fact they can't run away from situations they start, or that they slough off parts of themselves when they take too much damage is well enough to encourage people not to play foolhardy. I don't think adjusting statsticks around is a long term solution, if anything G2's can stay just as durable. They just need more debuffs when they take damage, an equivalent for the need to be stabilized, and more feedback via logs when they're horribly damaged.

This suggestion thread is asking if we should hold command-whitelistees to the same standard as event volunteers. I don't think just instituting another whitelist strip is going to cut it, because command don't know what we plan for events, and they have to make calls in the moment. I think the only way to achieve the level of simulated competency that this thread seems to be asking for is if we were to physically block in the command members to play these events like volunteers, and let them in on what will or might happen. This is a problem. One, because we really don't need anything whitelisted to be more exclusive than it already is. The second reason, and much more important in my view, is that it is going to strip a lot of agency from our player base during events. Going back to the whitelist strip, it won't change anything. An old out of touch command whitelistee is probably about as capable as a guy who just got his recently, and is still getting the hang of it. You're gonna have to tell that guy to sit on the bench if you want ultra competent people in command during event shit; it will be impolite to be new.

They wouldn't get the same priority in the queue as dedicated away mission roles. Unlike those, engineering still has an entire ship to upkeep. The salvage ops I'm thinking about are a low-intensity side activity that is achieved either by collaborating with other departments, or getting something like a CE to organize and authorize them. They will not be expected to fly their own shuttle, and the access restrictions on the intrepid will be the same. It can work both ways. We can have event maps where we expect engineering to use these things. In ones where it's counterproductive, I think it's fair for someone to fly in and world-edit the lockers out while everyone's in the lobby.

Simple as what the title says. Engineering gets special lockers containing equipment that can tear down and salvage derelicts within a reasonable time frame. The primary tool for this is a bulky, bright yellow chainsaw grip deconstructor with an operating end that kinda looks like a mess of grindy weldy drilly tools. The deconstructor needs to be wielded to use, and requires a power cell to operate on top of a welder fuel requirement, which it guzzles a shit ton of; enough to the point where there's an incentive for engineers to use those welder fluid backpacks that no one ever touches. In return, the deconstructor can chew through things like reinforced walls and airlocks in the fraction of the time they would take if one were to manually muddle through the steps. Because of this awesome power, however, these deconstructors come with firing pins similar to the expedition shotguns: they only work in their natural environment of away missions and salvage. In addition to structures, they should be capable of processing machines such as computers, SMES stations, autolathes, et cetera. They can either be set to break everything down into their constituent building components, or mash them up into scrap metal of varying qualities for reprocessing. With this, engineering can pair up with a shuttle pilot and go on dedicated salvage missions, or perform them concurrently with another survey party. In mixed groups where the focus isn't on salvage, the engineer can provide utility by being able to sap through almost anything using their deconstructor. Since they still have obligations to tend to in the ship, they should not be able to fly the shuttle on their own, however.

Yeah, you know, that's a pretty good take. Stabilizing people is a pretty huge deal for anything that uses brainmed. The longer you ignore your wounds, the worse you get until you either run out of blood, oxygen, or go into cascading necrosis. It's one thing being able to straight up ignore pain, it's another being your own stasis bed.

Perhaps as a by-product of the department being so light on activities, people’s reasons for playing are varied and broad. Some like the relative lack of interruptions post configuration, others are more technical, and explore deeper mechanics or subsystem configurations. Some even stick around for the seldom times we take damage, and make it a game to speedrun their way through breaches. One of my reasons for joining this server to begin with was to play atmos in peace, and my reasons for still playing are a combination of all of the above. Attempting to address one appeal, and one appeal only, of playing engineering is going to narrow down what kind of player we want back there, and alienate others. Ideally, we should maximize the number of ways you can play engineering “appropriately.” On the matter of altering or reducing setup times, this is something that should happen. Not today, not before we introduce features to supplant their absence, but it needs to happen. A full engineering staff can assemble the subsystems in 30 minutes(perhaps half if they’re on their A game coordinating). Doing it alone, especially if you’re trying to install optimal configs, or playing a slow species, it can take upwards of 40 minutes or more. Thruster modifications are especially time consuming. These setup times hold engineering and departments that are dependent on them hostage. What’s even worse, however, is that all of our subsystems are a solved game. Us technical players that we are, we have optimized the subsystem configurations that are virtually the best in every single scenario, and leagues better than the wiki default. What is also terrible is that almost all of our subsystems cannot be reconfigured on the fly, which further damages opportunities to experiment, or adjust for circumstances. Experimenting is also bad on time, and again, the rest of the station has needs that only engineering can meet with their time budget. Fixing our setup problem involves fixing our subsystem problems. Step one is making our subsystems easier to modify post start-up, whether that means being able to reset the entire subsystem or easily make modifications safely on the fly. Both engines come to mind on this. As an example, the SM could start the round at a low energy trickle, just enough to maintain homeostasis for a skeleton crew. The main SMES starts bypassed and set to not charge. An emergency power supply garage filled with portagens can serve as means for people to temporarily utilize machinery that would generate brownouts in the system. Ordinarily, this would cuck a joining engineer out of being able to setup, optimize, and experiment with the engine, but if the engineer can hit a reset button(or some mechanically appropriate equivalent), the concern is moot. In regards to the BC’s dependencies at lowpop, I could think of some ways to remedy this: - introduce a refueling station just outside atmos, with a single access restricted phoron tank(not a canister, a tank) for use. The port should feed directly from the Co2 line by default, but it should also have the pumps necessary to accept from mix line. - Give the intrepid its own shielding unit. During deadhour, it can function as a quicker and less time expensive alternative for general overmap exploration. Perhaps even give it more starting propellant. Thruster nacelles are something I have much to say on as well. Right now, they have little functionality, you put the fuel in and it goes. Modifying them for heated pure phoron configurations is practically a necessity at this point, and doing so is both drastic to the infrastructure and very time expensive. A solution to this, in my view, is to design a pipe network in our thruster compartments that is “universal”, incorporating as many design elements as we can to reduce setup times. Need a h/e assembly in the burn chamber? Already there. Want to experiment with other oxidizers, or try to burn H2 for propulsion like the wiki says? You don’t have to lay the pipeline, the pump is right there. I think it might be worth us having auxiliary thrusters that work differently, sort of like how we have an auxiliary reactor to power the ship in the form of the Tesla. Ion thrusters might do the trick. I don’t know shit about fuck how they work IRL, but apparently, they just use electricity to run. We could cram a bunch into the deck 2 wings and have a power intensive alternative to the main nacelles that come online when the main reactors do. What I hope in the long term, however, are more customizable engine and thruster configs. As I’ve said, it’s a solved game. There is no reason to install configurations into the engines or thrusters that don’t maximize power or thrust output, unless it is to save time. On servers that use TGcode, you are capable of synthesizing unique gasses using gas interactions inside of the supermatter, and fusion. Fusion is too wacky for us, but gas synthesis would be a welcome edition to our SM, simply because it would mean we would have reasons to configure the SM for purposes besides power generation. Good examples of what our SM could produce are better thruster propellant, or gas that makes cryo tubes more efficient. Configuring the engine for power generation won’t be the only right way to do things. Same principle can be applied to the shields and thrusters: avoid game design where we are able optimize subsystems to work in all use cases. The endgame of such a design principle being put into place is that engineering will get to customize the horizon every round. How it behaves in the overmap, her power budget, how and where the effort goes into the subsystems. And if they don’t want to do that, the infrastructure of the ship will allow them to rip through what they need to do and get right to the RP. About away mission stuff, I’m just gonna put a concept I’ve been mulling over into a new thread. This post is getting longer than it has any right to be. In summary, we should slowly reduce engineering’s setup obligations as we add more shit for them. I want to chair RP for four hours while putting oxygen into the SM, and the fact I have to hustle so some poor bastard BC can play the game is crimping my style.

I think my department is quite intent on having Dionae remain a selectable option in security, and we haven't had any balance issues or "outbreaks" from them being there.

It is frustrating to see more industrials in security than it is to see them actually do shit in engineering and operations. You know, the jobs they were built for. The G2's specifically might have the slowest walk speed on the station, but because they're able to actually sprint now, it's moot when they can maintain a steady pace that's only slightly slower than Unathi walk speed. It might not be enough to juke the way other playable species can, but it's certainly enough to rush to where the fighting is and get to work. Two years ago, when running for more than 8 tiles as a G2 would send your battery into critical and dump your ass on the floor, we did not have to consider G2's and other industrials for that matter a problem. Now that you can pick up that meatshield and move it somewhere at a reasonable pace, it is. A reasonable fix in my mind would be for us to go back to the way it was several years ago, with G2's being stuck at their dumpy walk speed. I wouldn't mind that, I enjoyed playing like that, but I know that I was really the only one who regularly played like that. I'd rather not give up my ability to do my job faster as an engineer or cargo tech so we can keep forklifts that insist they are combat vehicles in security.

We actually moved at a faster pace several years ago. Antagonists would escalate faster, escape shuttles were called, and rounds could end at or before the 1:30 mark. Malf was mostly to blame for this, but other gamemodes could hustle too. Rounds would be quick, fast, and explosive, and then people would immediately follow them up with an extended as a cleanser. In theory, we don't have to change anything but ourselves. The escape shuttle's been traded with an abandon ship button.