Boggle08

The most cursed ending, in relation to the context you're framing the Aurora OOCly, is if the Orion spur and every race, location, and planet inside of it is totally "complete", with every narrative possibility being explored for it. In response, the Lore-mind decides it's time to take the Horizon IV, and use it to explore the galaxy outside of the spur. Some new stuff is added to the Horizon IV to reflect this, and approximately 90% of all overmap content is either disabled or removed as it wouldn't fit the new setting. Antagonist content that is flavored specifically for the spur or only makes sense in that context is also disabled or removed. Because the Orion Spur is never going to be touched again, and because the lore for it is complete, the Overmind kills all of it's species development subroutines(with the exception of whitelist processing), and opens up several new departments to maintain species that the Horizon IV will encounter in the next galactic quadrant. The Lore overmind plans to add five new races to the game, but it has to start from scratch. Lacking both code and art assets, these new species only exist on the wiki, and people who apply for these whitelists are effectively applying for nothing but a promise. The Horizon IV engages in round after round of vampire, ling, borer, cult, extended, and traitor. The overmap content is nothing but empty planets and asteroids. The demands of the Lore Overmind grow more and more impossible. It's destroyed most of the game's content to make the new setting work, and it screams at the code servitors to make new sprites and code for the new world it's trying to build. The population of the server falls off a cliff as the code servitors aren't able to keep up the pace, and the Lore Overmind starts banning people that question it's decision to leave the old setting, or if they complain about how long everything is taking. Out of desperation, the Lore Overmind ditches the idea of using original art assets for the new species it wants to write, and instead takes the cursed approach of porting species such as Resomi, GAS, and Sergals and re-flavoring them to fit into the lore it's desperately trying to push out. The server doesn't go out with a bang, instead, with a whimper. The population dwindles down to Polaris levels as interest dies. In response, the server decides to pursue a policy of only opening up on weekends. When that fails, only on Tuesdays. When this fails, Mecha-Garnascus gets tired of the Lore Overmind's bullshit, and uses the servers to farm porbocoin instead.

Also this might be a silly idea, but instead of relying on beacons, we could also just implement a system where command hits a button and off-duty security officers from the lower decks grab shit from an auxiliary armory and take the lift up.

I think the biggest downside of having ERT's at the beck and call of command is that they make rounds cyclical and formulaic. Most ERT's are tough enough to put down most problems on the station by themselves, and they have whatever vestiges of the station that are still around to back them up. Because command would sooner reach for the ERT than arm the crew, this fed into a climate of having everyone except command, security, and medical sit on their hands and wait for things to end inside their departments. The station almost never lost, but it came at the expense of every round playing out the same once security became overwhelmed. I think the Paradigm for ERT's going forward is to make them less consistent and equipped to deal with all problems. Our best equipped ERT squads are practically canon event volunteers with ultrakill guns. Normal beacon response teams shouldn't be able to completely supplant the station's defense. The primary benefit of using the beacon from a round design standpoint is to have a chance at getting more able hands to help sort out a problem. The station can compensate for discrepancies in equipment using science and cargo, they can't do the same with crew depletion. The equipment these ERT's come with can be highly variable, and if they show up insufficiently prepared, It's the ship's problem to fix that.

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Medium? Type (e.g. Planet, Faction, System): Technology Short Description: Justifies the Horizon's engines, consolidates fusion tech into one place. How will this be reflected on-station?: Provides plausible logistical reasons for the Horizon to mount its current engines, rather than use a fusion reactor. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Besides justifying the Horzion's engine choice, this will hopefully serve as a reference for people to use when writing about anything related to fusion technology. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways that you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes Preface: If you play engineering for any length of time, you're inevitably going to get a co-worker that asks why we use extremely volatile engines like the SM or tesla, when our setting has had access to nuclear fusion reactors for several centuries. In the popular scientific imagination, nuclear fusion is this wholesome chungus post-energy scarcity technology that has barely any downsides besides a hefty initial cost, and a fuel requirement that necessitates space mining(not a problem in our setting). What this document proposes is to write in some logistical challenges to mounting fusion reactors in everything, while consolidating what we have related to the technology into one place on the wiki(Ideally, this will go somewhere on the technology page). Long Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1shh4kfMOnojol6JwDG17iY7XAHMrTpEELzv6cBztK7A/edit?usp=sharing

It's not bad over security comms, but it will be bothersome over command radio. We'll have two people who answer to chief now.

This will make differentiating between the Chief(CoS) and the Chief(CE) a little more annoying.

When the contact war happened, the Hegemony Thanos snapped the governments of at least half the planet out of existence, and left millions of Unathi stateless. Aside from consolidating the vestiges of a few major population centers, the hegemony has done little in practice to exert influence over the people still in the wasteland, or that have fled as refugees to other parts of the spur. The hegemony generates hundreds of stateless individuals each year as well. Guwan explicitly have their citizenship revoked, and heretics are presumed to not have it much better. Traditionalist nobles or other political refugees are going to have an easier time dodging the headsman's axe rather than trying to actually become a citizen. This is all compounded by the fact that the Hegemony is an extremely feudal power , whose backwardness is exacerbated by the apocalypse. Even if the hegemony had a functional centralized system, it was likely damaged severely by the catastrophe. Countless records may have been lost. Statelessness, effective or legal, is a rampant issue on Moghes, and it will continue to be in the foreseeable future. To accurately reflect this predicament, I'm suggesting we give people the option to put "none", "stateless", or some other special refugee clause or status in the citizenship field for Unathi. I think Dionae should have this as well, because they're all written to be in the same predicament as wastelander unathi. A large chunk of unathi character concepts exist on legal precarity, and creating an option in loadout that can reflect that is far more succinct and unrestrictive than having to explain in records what the citizenship you've selected for your character actually means.

I'm noticing delta being more common than usual, not just relative to past four months of deadpop. Every time it's called, it ends the same way: everyone drops what they're doing, and immediately start fleeing the station. Delta has the unique quality of maxing out escalation to the point where either side can reasonably give absolutely no quarter, but the short time window and stiffness of attempting to defuse the nuke means that the outcome is always just to flee. This is what the current nuke room looks like: It's less than a minute walk away from the bridge(very popular antag objective), and despite it's imposing walls and turrets, this room is extremely easy to get into once you have the spare and the disk. Once the nuke room's been consolidated, however, the room itself and the passageways immediate to it become an extremely narrow, lethal chokepoint. Especially with the placement of the fuel tank immediately east of it. The distance and ease of getting into this room and activating the nuke has effectively turned this into an "easy win" for people. Because it's so easy to do once escalation is sufficient enough, It just leads to a cheap, predictable round outcome every time this happens. I don't have a problem with the antag "winning", but I do have an issue with repetitive outcomes. If the nuke were made more contestable, it would create more possibilities and round outcomes than what currently happens when the lever gets pulled. This could be done in four ways: 1. Increase the amount of time it takes for the nuke to go off, and make it information you can actually track. I don't know what the default is, but I feel like most people don't know how fast it's going to blow. The last time it blew on us, it wasn't enough time to do anything else except run. 2. Introduce more methods of disabling the nuke. I think the only ways of doing it is just to reverse the process with a captain's ID, Hack it(might blow up in your face), or kill power to the room before the authentication disk can be put in. 3. Create more doors or openings into the nuke room, and expand the immediate area a little bit. We can already flank from two directions to get into the nuke room, but it's all down long narrow hallways or doorways. Right now, that area is in stark contrast with how punishing the bridge is for people that want to turtle. The nuke room itself has just a single door, but it's very open on the inside, and only protected by a single layer of reinforced walls. If the crew is permitted time in a manner as described in point #1, we probably wouldn't have to put in more entrances into it since the crew can just conscript an engineer to knock down the wall or bring thermite to get in. 4. Increase the distance of the nuke room from the bridge. This is the most demanding suggestion from a mapping perspective(which is why it's listed last), but this serves as a physical obstacle to antags reaching for the nuke, and gives the crew more chances to intercept them.

The intrepid would benefit from one of the crates it comes loaded with being stocked with a shit ton of bounced radios. Everyone always forgets about bringing them until the last minute.

Frankly, this will always be an OOC sentiment, as long as megacorporations exist in the setting. Pretty much everyone here, you and I included, hate corporations outside of the game. Everyone is at different levels of sentimentality on the matter. Because of that, I don't think the community as a whole can be objective about what megacorps need to be interesting, or what they want to see. Most discussions I see, people don't care and don't want to entertain possibilities beyond them remaining as generic villains. Looking over the material, the only time we ever see Megacorps capitulate their dominance over a planet/nation is if some macro-scale event hits them in tandem. Himeo squirmed out of Hephaestus control because of a massive interstellar depression that hurt their ability to project power. The SCC corporations were forced out of solarian space and politics only after the entire country imploded. If we're going with precedent, anti-corporatism is only a threat if the corporations themselves aren't doing to well as a whole. I would be more interested in Einstein's relationship with the rest of Sol and other nations, but the district(?) that Einstein managed to purchase out from Mendel city might be worth development. It could be interesting. The biggest criticism I see of corporations in our setting, at least from a writing perspective, is that they're boring. Having our corporations just being corporations means that the bottom line is always going to be making the line on the graph get higher. Growth and profit, that's it. The same, predictable motivation of every corporation that's ever existed. I think the best solution to this would be to reconfigure corporations to have a goals or missions outside of just biggering. We can already see vestiges of this in corporations like Idris, with their mafia family undertones, and Zheng-hu, with their weird post-human augmentation theming. Think blurring the line between Institute and Corporation.

I think it's fine without a whitelist, just because of how little impact they have over rounds. This is a Quartermaster equivalent, except it doesn't have nearly as many problems. The most mechanically complex service job I can think of is the kitchen, then maybe a toss up between the bar and the garden. We can trust people to use brainmed without a whitelist, I think we can trust them on this too.

Most service departments are either easy to figure out or are self autonomous. The departmental culture is far less belligerent than cargo. The XO has one less department to juggle in their headsets, so if something does come up, they're able to give it more attention. The SM doesn't have to try to pull rank or authority as hard as the QM did(think bounties and yield reports), because your job is really just to make sure everyone knows what they're doing, and aren't flagrantly blowing off work. I feel like the role is useful to me as an XO, because I can delegate most of the management to them, and occasionally step in if something comes up. About the breadth of the SM's mechanics, much of what service does is what people do around the house, like cooking and cleaning. While most of it in and of itself isn't rocket science, I don't think its a hard requirement to be a spectacular master of everything. Maybe just the kitchen. There are some Quartermasters that never fuck with mining's mechanics, or know just enough to get a new one started and out the airlock. The other thing is that the SM position isn't nearly as consequential as other roles that don't even have any authority on the ship. Fucking up at managing isn't the same as fucking up a patient in medical and they die, or someone botching the Supermatter round start and ending it at 00:30. Compared to some of the other jobs here, the SM is practically an inconsequential RP role. This balances out their authority.

When I first joined in 2019, Rounds would have a binary loop of hyperviolence, followed up with an extended round for reprieve, then back to hyperviolence. I feel like our population was much healthier then. When people suggest we acquiesce mechanics in service of more RP, It just kills interest in the game itself. We've never had more time for RP than at any other point since I started playing here, and it's miserable. RP is a mechanic that relies heavily on player involvement and population. At it's core, it's an unreliable mechanic because it depends on player commitment and interest. Just look at how our population tanks every time a new popular game comes out, or when College finals/midterms roll out. We only have one or two good rounds every day now, and that's because there's no reason to join low population rounds. People are content to probe the game throughout the day, until the mix is just right, then they can join. We have to embrace game mechanics, if we want to hold player interest. Especially at Lowpop. A fleshed out gameplay loop can be more consistent than population numbers. One of our priorities right now should be motivating people to join, regardless if the manifest is perfect or not. We could see more lowpop rounds snowball into larger ones, if things go right.

I think taking this idea a step further would be to organize the busy work into overarching linear missions. For these, the ship is given a directive from centcom, or must do something because of circumstance/necessity. Rather than it being one department, these are larger missions that rely on the participation of multiple departments in order to be completed. Some examples would be: -Answering distress beacons. -Flying to a fuel depot for a refill, resupplying in general -Ship escort -Outpost Construction -Resupplying other SCC star ships -Transporting sensitive cargo -Entertaining important delegations -Patrolling a region of space -Investigating anomalous activity on a planet -Surveying planet candidates for colonization -Trying to find Phoron -Even more, who knows Such a system benefits the departments that rely primarily on reacting to problems, like Medical, Engineering, and Security. On extended rounds, Medical has no one to heal, Engineering nothing to fix, and Security no one to Batong. This would give them something to react to and participate in. Security has precious cargo to guard, Engineering has an outpost to construct, Medical has a distress beacon survivor to heal. Besides those three, other departments would benefit from this as well. Science can finally have some immediate context and utility for the work they do, Operations will process more orders, move cargo around, and do other operations things. Service may have to cater for or facilitate important meetings and delegations hosted on the station. I could go on. This would also work for our current round antag system for many reasons: Having established a mission or linear narrative for the ship at round start takes a lot of pressure off the antag to carry the entire interest, motion, and story of the round. Antags with this system can still take their gimmicks in whichever direction they choose, but they will also now have a plot at round start that they can bounce ideas off of and work with. It will help people brainstorm, and give context to their presence aboard the ship as antags. It is my hope that these missions are just as imperative as the antag, and that they are normally only suspended in code red/delta scenarios. A violent antag usually falls under the jurisdiction of security, then medical. All other departments must sit on their hands. Having these missions still manifest priority despite the antics of an antag effectively turns the mission into a B-plot that can keep people feeling active, engaged, and useful.

Public garden needs tools, and a water source. The bridge cockpit area needs a request console and a intercom. When the bridge is at maximum command capacity, there's no where for the XO to sit, which is annoying.

I feel this. People who want their fix of shitty reality cyberpunk aren't going to the IAC for it. The tension and conflict for the faction would benefit more from external factors

The Luna convention is merely a suggestion, in practice. Many of our factions opt out, and the ones that opt in are written in such a manner that it doesn't matter anyway. As for the actual gameplay, these conventions don't exist at all. Antags are not beholden to morality, and the station security/command become more autocratic and extra-judicial as they move through alert levels. The only rules of engagement that exist are the ones the admins enforce. I think that rules of engagement and diplomacy for space will become useful later on, however. Things like the Luna Convention can't exist in a traditional SS13 antag round, but they can when interacting with 3rd party ships. Having conventions/rules of diplomacy when it comes to these interactions will be extremely useful at keeping both sides from just needlessly escalating into doing something stupid.

Our current culture and roster of medical does a very good job of regulating physicians and surgeons who overstep into becoming super-doctors. A part of this is because medical's modus operandi has much more clarity than it used to. I got into medical a month or so before we ironed out the surgery chart and stripped out the alt titles, and during that time, everyone had a different idea of what a physician was supposed to do, what kind of surgeries they could perform, and if that changed depending on which alt title they picked. I think what is important to consider when thinking about alt-title reinstatement is that it is an inherently misleading system; especially if you are new to medical. People will usually assume that the alt title radically changes the function of their job. Expectations and job knowledge need to be the same across alt titles, and it needs to be clear enough to the point where there's no confusion whatsoever. A Nurse that thinks it can't do any surgery is just as bad as a trauma physician that thinks it can do everything. I'm not inherently against the idea(I remember being pissed when they took the engineering titles), I just think we have to consider ways to mitigate it's pitfalls in order to implement it. The idea that all facets of gameplay should always concede to RP is kind of self destructive in my view, however. HRP is not consistent at all, as we often go through player droughts and RP doldrums. SS13 has a precedent for complex, involving systems. Integrating such into our gameplay gives people something to tinker with, something to collaborate on, or can even give context and meaning for their actions.

There needs to be an immediate distinction and a concrete obligation for the people that we will defer most of our surgical operations to. A cordoned off job title does this best. An alt title would do it too, but there would be some confusion. Ripping out the distinction completely, and making the deciding factor character records, knowledge, and preferences sounds like a recipe for confusion and bitchfighting. I don't like the idea of inconsistent doctors who can do everything or nothing. The reason why we have the roles cracked in half in the first place is to prevent a single doctor from dominating one patient or more's journey through the GTR, into the OR, then back out again. In my view, someone who hoards activity like this falls into the category of a super doctor, and our current arrangement works perfectly at preventing this from happening. Attending physician seems like the best change out of the proposed options, since it's just a modified surgeon role. For now, I just have two things against this idea: First thing is lowering the ages and making them a physician equivalent will make them an extremely contested role. More than they were with just two surgeon slots, since you've at least doubled the pool of characters that qualify for the role. The second thing is that I don't want to have these nerds have any kind of inherent managerial authority in medical. Medical sans the CMO manages just fine with each role doing what it's supposed to do; we don't need two Quartermasters. It's a recipe for bitchfighting, and takes away focus from what the Primary physician is supposed to replace.

The round Ryver's talking about, you could have communicated better over radio with the rest of command; even considering how fuckshit that round was. I was the XO that round, and it was hard to get information out of you regarding what your department was up to, and the status of the boarders. My service department of all places was giving better intel than you. I think the only time we got something out of you was when you unceremoniously asked us to raise to red. I don't care how hectic it is down there, what separates adequate command from good command is your ability to step outside of what you're doing and communicate. At the very least, you'll not frustrate the hell out of people. It's not enough for me to -1, though. I've partaken in at least one other round with you, and you did great work with your team and communicating with command. A round like the one we just had is intense, regardless of who was trialing or not. Just try to keep people in the loop in the future.

I have a mixed opinion of these changes, now having played them. For starters, I don't think this has mitigated the "max out and forget" style of atmospherics. Because the volume on the network has been reduced, and because it starts at 2000 kPa, it's easier than ever to just put in a volume pump and blast it out at high as possible. I'm not too bothered by this personally, because max and forget has always been my mode of operation, but it's not what everyone does. I think the air that starts in distro can just be modulated in the future, as atmospherics changes. I like seeing the new atmospheric substations, but they could use an additional pump so that way they can push and pull air into or out of the networks they feed into. It would give engineers the ability to control or modulate the networks more efficiently. The point that's most contentious right now is the pressure cap on all of our devices, at about 5066 kPa. This is not a problem if we're looking at something like distro, but it's a massive issue for high pressure systems like ship thrusters and the Super-matter. They are bottlenecking hard on us. This is primarily an issue with the Super-matter, since waste extraction, coolant insertion, and cycling the cold loop all depend heavily on pumps, and the operating pressures and thresholds of a 2-2 40 shot hydrogen engine have the capacity to exceed 5066 kPa. We had a delamination one round, and we ended up having to vent the core just to be able to put in emergency gas. The typical cure for an overenergized engine is to feed in more coolant to match the pace of it's heat/waste gas generation, and we could not physically load it in because the pressure in the lines exceeded the maximum output on the pumps. As for thrusters, the ones on the shuttles usually bottom out quickly, because of the pump limits. The ones on the ship are much the same, and you're better off throwing away the high-cap/pressure reg combo leading out of the burn chamber, and replacing it with solid pipe or manual valves. This isn't crippling to the operation of our thrusters, just annoying. I'll say overall, life support systems are looking good and just need little adjustments here and there, but things like engine and propulsion are either more annoying to work with, or have become more of a liability to run than a benefit. Especially since people can now just put in a few extra minutes on the tesla and have it rip out over 10 mW of energy.

The things you've described about the bridge crew are pretty much the reasons why I feel like 25 is a good number for them: They are extremely subordinate in their responsibilities, they operate under maximum oversight, and they are expected not to project any kind of authority on station; The one area where they do carry some kind of authority, in away sites, is often delegated. This is because the miners and Xenarchs that typically depart already know what to do well enough to act autonomously. They have the keys to the bus, but when it comes to the actual minutia of what people are touching down on the asteroid for, The pilot usually stays with the ship, and takes initiative only when it comes to matters relating to it's operation. On paper, they have a lot to be accountable for. In practice, these are clerks that know how to fly.

Also, it did not come to me at the time, but the Job Accessibility Requirements is another thing we should consider in this thread: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Job_Accessibility_Requirements IMO, bridge pilots will need their eyesight, their hearing, and their ability to communicate over radio for this position. They are pilots, after all.

Dionae would be mentally quick or fit enough for the role, depending on the mind type. Most of the moving you're going to be doing is back and forth between the artemis and the bridge, so It's not a role that needs to run everywhere to be efficient. What is a concern relative to the species is when it comes to the bridge being under siege: Every member of Bridge staff is issued a mini-disruptor, and expected to hold out and defend the bridge in the event of a siege or takeover. This is something I could see a Gera do, This is something I could not see a Coeus do.

I was recommended to start up this thread asking about this in Serious_discussion, but I think now is a good time to think about the minimum age and job/background requirements for the role, and what we might want to see from that. Mechanically speaking, the role uses HoP age and whitelist restrictions as a placeholder, So that means the races that can't be HoP cannot be bridge crew, and they cannot be younger than 30. Personally, I think 25 would be a good minimum requirement, for what the role does and it's junior relation to the other command roles. While we're here, it's also worth discussing the background or educational experience necessary to acquire this position. What races should be permitted into the role, and under what clauses or restrictions? Personally, I would like to see every whitelist be able to access and play the role in some way. Given their control over the ship and access to important command subsystems, the SCC would likely want to vet the bridge crew in a similar way we do for regular command. Some examples of the kind of restrictions I'm thinking about would be to bar Viax and openly Shrkh Dionae from the role, as they would be too compromised for the job. Vaurca are in an awkward position on this in general, because there's no learning role for them to sit in while they're being processed by the Avowal system. The way I see it, they will either need a mandatory background requirement, or not be up there at all.