Kaed

I've just read through three pages about skull and Garn repeating the same points about how people playing on this server need to suck it up and stop being self-entitled to free ignore the antag cards. Honestly I absolutely agree with both of them, and this is a long-standing frustration I've had with this server community. I don't know where this mentality that for 'heavy roleplay' to exist you have to be allowed to do what you want with your character and everyone else can go fuck themself if there an antag trying to mess with that pure and sacred freedom, but it is the most toxic and obnoxious mentality that could ever have developed on the server where we regularly have rounds with secret bad guys that can influence and control your actions. For a long time I actually thought that this problem developed because the staff and development team was unable to commit to a hard-line stance on the division between extended only players and people who want antagonists, and as a result the people who complain the loudest (i.e. the sort of people who originally made this thread) generally get what they want, well those of us who like being or interacting with a round and character controlling antagonist just get to eat shit and deal with the compromises made for the vocal anti-antag populace. So I just want to express my joy and happiness that garn skull aren't budging on this matter, beyond maybe suggesting some round start preferences towards antag enabled sorts. Truly you are doing God's work here, and if this keeps up maybe we can eventually train this server population to accept that bad things can happen to their character and then they need to roll with it instead of rage quitting. I also wanted to post this here because I don't think there's enough people that are espousing a different viewpoint, that is perfectly fine to be forcibly antagged at round start by a surprise brain slug instead of sitting down for 2 hours of riveting chair roleplay, and honestly might even be more exciting. Sure, maybe they'll be a terrible idiot who doesn't know what they're doing and ruined your round. But they could also be a very interesting person and you could both have fun time with them being your resident brain slug. You owe them the chance to prove their own competency or incompetency instead of being an elitist jerk who just shut down their round because you can't trust strangers being pressed upon you in a position of power, or somehow think that somehow think thatthat you're too good and important to have a brain slug without giving your express permission first.

I can't believe we're having a thread where we're arguing about whether the complaint terminology used on the forum is too harsh or mean. We don't need to be splitting complaints off into several other forms just to avoid maybe making someone feel a little bit bad because there was a word complaint attached to a thread with their name. Player complaints and staff complaints both serve perfectly reasonable purposes, though I admit it seems a little weird that the ban and unban requests have their own Forum but whatever.

I think this thread has a good intent behind it, but I wished to express my feelings that it is all but completely impossible to train these behaviors out of the player base. You can take steps to mitigate the problem, and you've offered some good suggestions for that. But at the end of the day our server mentality add the development team refuses to mechanically enforce behaviors, and prefers to trust everyone to behave themselves and not power game or form militias. That's not going to work. It's never going to work. Claiming that people need to report this behavior more doesn't work either. Reactive administration does not accomplish anything except to correct the behaviors of players who have been on the server for a long time. Aside from the fact that we consistently get new players from other servers, our staff is varied in their approach. Some of them are more relaxed than others, and one of them might think it's okay for a cargo tech to arm up during a crisis, while another would try to enforce realism on your cargo worker that he would know how to use weapons. We've also added a lot of content to the game that makes forming a militia extremely easy, such as adding medieval weapons (something I extremely hate that alberyk added to the game) and makeshift armor that can easily be created from any stack of metal and wood and wire, without any compensating mechanics that make it harder for any person anywhere to make these. People will continue to abuse these easy mechanics as much as they are abusing kinetic accelerators right now, unless we add more inherit skill sets and complexity to the game than just telling people to moderate themselves unless reported. All of these OP suggestions are patches on a greater problem that we need to fix. We shouldn't have to treat the concept of "High roleplay" as "inhibiting mechanics are bad and everyone should role play their own skills freely", because people playing a game don't want to limit themselves if they don't have to. You can't trust people not to make sure they have the most chance to win. It's a basic part of human nature that we don't like to lose. Staff members shouldn't have to go around babysitting people in cargo and everyone else and telling them that they can't build a spear and armor the moment danger rears its head. They should just be unable to do it unless they have a valid reason to know how to do that.

I'm a member of the midnight crew would be great though I'm not sure if it's under Creative Commons...

I don't really like the idea. IPCs don't really have the emotional capacity to create a particularly interesting brain slug scenario imo. This is a scenario where there is an invader in your *brain*, one of the most intimate violations of self. Even in our canon they mostly emulate emotions rather than feel them, so how exactly are they supposed to respond to their simulated brainspace being modified? Start glitching? Lament that their primary purpose is being subverted? Not to mention the cringy nature of unexplained sentient machine parasites in a setting where AI and positronics simply aren't capable of that. I don't really believe in trying to hamfistedly make antags as inclusionary as possible. This probably isn't news to anyone that saw how hard I fought against cultist IPCs back when that was a thing. People playing races that are non-standard, like diona and synthetics, aren't going to have the same opportunities as the species who are sharing the same biological aspects, like being a bipedal organic creature with blood, DNA, and a central nervous system. They can still be included in antagonist activities, without being bloodsucked or brain slugged. There are a world of possibilities of both antag cooperation and robot/diona heroism to explore that have their own unique properties without making them have the same experience as all the other races in every borer or vampire round. If you want to play a borer round and get brain slugged, then play one of the majority of races that can support one instead of trying to get us to change the entire thematic to something awkward to support more inclusion. I wouldn't even be opposed to a round type that featured diona or IPC antag exclusivity, except for the problem where hardly anyone fucking plays them and therefore it would hardly ever work.

The idea of wigs seems kinda fun, tbh.

There are certain hair styles that either are or were in the game that are pretty out there, like the infamous floor-length braid and most recently 'bedhead 5', which are totally silly in their massiveness, and as a result they are deemed 'unfit for the server' and removed from the code. This make sense when hairstyles are universal to race and people can come to work with hair so long they'd be tripping over it or be unable to walk easily through doors, or otherwise just not be practical for the workplace. But they're still fun. And it would be nice if these hairstyles could still be used in certain scenarios, like off-station antagonists such as wizards, raiders, and ninjas, who don't have to give a fuck about workplace safety. Rather than consigning them to the 'bad meme' bin and deleting them, we put these silly hairstyles aside for use on non-crew characters only.

I think ninja should have to buy the explosive failsafe, a bomb that powerful shouldn't just be built into the suits. And the failsafe should also trigger only manually, not upon death, or at least only have a chance to activate on death. Maybe we could also revised it so that it doesn't tear a hole in the ship but just kills or hurtse everyone nearby?

Someone bin this, it's resolved via separate thread.

I'll do this tomorrow or something, I'm going to bed now though.

I made this very suggestion months ago, and skull said that he implemented the feature because people missed messages in the chat box. I told him that people were having the exact same problem that you did, where they accidentally closed the Dominate window and aren't able to read the command. As I remember, it was suggested and agreed that it be put in both the text box and the pop-up window, and then skull never did it. So I did it: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/7885

It's a pretty minor quality touch up, but I don't see a reason why we can't put it in.

Personally I'd like to see all of them removed, they are dumb meme.

That's a reasonable point, but I'm pretty sure I communicated my intent on multiple occasions very clearly. The head of security just chose to ignore what I was saying and assume I had malicious intent. It's one thing to role-play a deeply suspicious and mistrustful character, it's another to be the person who should literally know more about regulations and chain of command than anyone else on the station, and disregard them entirely for a self-indulgent anti-authoritarian subplot. The authority of the captain and Regulatory procedure is meaningless if people can choose to disregard it for convenience or because they don't like the Captain's play style, in-character or out of character. Most of the crew are generally free to act seditiously and face consequences for it, but it is especially infuriating to me when the head of security in particular is acting seditious. They are absolutely the one role on the station other than the captain who should be supporting the chain of command and proper procedure under any circumstances. It should not have mattered if I poorly communicated my intent, they should not have been leaping to the conclusion that a captain was self antagging without compelling evidence and acting as a self-appointed opposing force to this theoretical corruption. This could have been handled in a much more logical way, such as having an officer monitor my activities over a camera, or making an attempt to ask more about what I'm going to do, like MattAtlas said. Instead, Bear focused on things that bothered them about my conduct on a OOC level, such as the facetious manner of speaking to the prisoner I had, or their wounded pride that I would dare intrude on security has jurisdiction even in the slightest fashion when their internal narrative says that that's not what captains are supposed to do, and use that as justification for why they didn't have to take my captain seriously. Why I was probably going to let the prisoner free if they got out of their vision range. These aren't spurious accusations made up out of nowhere, these are both things that Bear has literally used to justify their stance in that round in this complaints thread. I could keep ranting on about this, but constantly editing in more comments as they come to me is getting old. The point I'm trying to make is that this complaint thread was about my poor command conduct, and you just found that the worst thing I did was not communicate well. I didn't repeatedly defy the chain of command, refuse orders, and incite the Security Department to defy the captain all the way up to the literal end of the round. Bear did that. I sincerely hope did the staff will discuss with them about proper conduct.

The way that we repair holes in the floor involve stacking specific layers of objects on top of each other. Like so: Frame > tile > tile It's logically impossible to place these stacks backwards from the top, so barring prefabricated floor tile stacks that you weld together from below, this would be impossible. Mind you the idea of not having to step by step construct floors and just have stacks of instant floor that you can weld together would be pretty cool. Or maybe some kind of "smart tile" science creation from research and development... You don't even have to weld that, you just place it down for instant flooring and it fuses to nearby floor...

This thread has reached a level of derisive back and forth exchange that is admittedly partially my fault for letting the statements of others irritate me so I deviated the conversation topic into stupid shit like social coding to try and defend my point, egged on by marlon's agreement. My bad. It also has made me desire to nope out of this threads current levels of toxicity, though. Point being, it is bloaty. There are too many brands of tobacco and tobacco, and they are too redundant for the sake of it. Cut them down, remove chewing tobacco. I'm done here, do whatever you want with this suggestion, bye.

Then remove the joke and reference brands and make the in-game tobacco based on in lore companies and organizations. We shouldn't have not-camel and Lucky Strike in the game. If you really want to establish the point that this is entirely in game and not advertising/supporting real tobacco you need to disconnect it from real life branding. It's also worth noting that the alcohol and drugs in the game house specific downsides to them for overindulgence or are played for laughs. Alcohol can kill you if you consume too much of it and makes you slur your words and get fired at work, and mindbreaker makes the game intolerable to play. Someone once introduced mechanics that made it penalize you for smoking too much, but it got panned for being a frustrating and unfun mechanic that required you to go take surgery. As a result the precedent you have set here is that it's fun to smoke cigarettes and there are no downsides to it because that would inhibit our fun smoking cigarettes. No one coughs by smoking or causes nearby people who aren't smokers to experience discomfort, it's just a talking point and an animated sprite. No social stigma for smoking in an enclosed area unless there is a nearby no smoking sign to point at. This is offensive social coding to me, and clearly also to Jackboot, so we're not some kind of isolated liberal maniacs trying to ruin everyone's fun here. We'd just like you to tone it down, not remove all tobacco from the game.

No it's not, the object in question is labeled as low-grade tobacco, and contains the tobacco substance. Make it dried s'rebdarr's hand if you want to make that claim. When it was just one generic brand of cigarettes, the purpose of it's existence was to give you an object to put on your character's face. It served its purpose perfectly fine, and was largely under the radar do to cigarettes being a cultural icon anyway. With this expansion of tobacco products you have shown a spotlight on the tobacco industry as a concept, even creating lore about as a competitive, exploitive industry, adding the context of all of these cool new brands you can use and have your character espouse benefits of, while including none of the controversy and problems for long-term tobacco use due to it being just a roleplay/game mechanic in this scenario. As PoZe I said, there are people that play this game that are not adults, and the presence of implicitly positive display of tobacco products in a visual medium attended by non adults is a controversial subject. Were our server to be rated by the ESRB, we would have just jumped up the maturity ratings with this additional content. And sure you can mock this as pearl clutching if you want to, but you still have to take a moment to consider the greater implications of legitimizing an irl industry which has documented history of causing a great amount of suffering and death in your video game.

Fair, but why would they do this when they can sell unathi and tajara the earth-style tobacco products directly for a higher profit? It's not really a sensible long-term corporate decision for profits. Both races, tajara especially, are being explicitly exploited by humans to one level or another, and I doubt the proud secular unathi would want to start cultivating alien plants on their planet. And I agree mostly with your second point, but I'm trying to be diplomatic on the subject of tabacco. The sheer amount of them is making them a thing that seems normal and acceptable, and that makes me uncomfortable.

There's way too much shit, and a lot of it just doesn't make sense for us to have on the server, for one reason or another. Even ignoring the sort of uncomfortable sense that we have turned the server's tobacco machines from a flavor object dispenser to a front for the full range of products available from the tobacco industry (something that is extremely controversial even today), I'm not not entirely certain the people who added all these new products really stopped to think about the plausibility of their existence. -Tobacco is plant product native to Earth, back in Sol. It is frankly lazy writing to create 'tajaran' and 'unathi' tobacco plants, as if every planet evolved a tobacco plant on it. Adhomai is way too cold to support classical tobacco in the first place, it's a warm climate plant, so they sure as heck didn't import it from earth then start cultivating it then import the product again back to human-controlled systems. If you think there's a plausible reason that they would have their own recreational drug plant, sure, develop some lore for that, but give it a localized, lore-compatible name and nature instead of just being magical cat and lizard tobacco. -Chewing tobacco is disgusting and messy. You can't swallow it or the tobacco juice-filled spit it fills your mouth with, or you get really sick. This is why spittoons existed, and why there is absolutely no plausible reason why we should be selling it in a futuristic workplace that is supposed to stay clean. If you really want to add non-smoking version, add something snuff-related, which is something you just sort of tuck a bit of into your cheek or lips and leave there. -We don't need all these brands. They're excessively redundant, clip it down to maybe 2-3, preferably removing the ones that are meme references to actual tobacco products, such as 'dromedary Co' and 'Lucky strike" (that one isn't even an altered joke name, it's literally an existing IRL brand name. Are we on British American Tobacco's payroll now?) Maybe 1-2 snuff brands, tops. We only need one brand of rolling paper, they're functionally identical as far as I can tell.

No it won't. Just have to make the law higher priority than the follow orders law. And people already always ask if there are hidden laws, but because our system does not have law priorities, the question is entirely pointless unless they forgot or deliberately excluded an addendum not to say the law.

What about the construction layer between them? What's in that spot? It's just open space on the asteroid.

That's not really feasible in a community project like this

The static overlay consumes way more server CPU than would be needed if we just based the AI's vision on the camera it is currently focused on, and the whole point of the change is to provide a method for the AI to view the station that doesn't involve immediately being able to spot everyone in existence unless they have a mask or magical card on. Instead, give them multiple options to locate people and then have to do a bit of leg work to get to them. It is objectively a nerf, but it also adds more versatility to finding people at the same time. To put it as bluntly as possible, people (both the AI itself and people relying on the AI to solve problems for them) have become a bit spoiled with the ease of access to features on the server. The AI currently has near ghost-like vision and tracking abilities, and it doesn't NEED those to function. The AI spends a lot of its time performing tasks for people who rely on it as a crutch, or using it's unparalleled ability to find antags (or non antags if they're malf) to fuck them over. It would be nice to have more breathing room to roleplay as an AI, instead of just being a pile of instantly exploitable mechanical advantages. Someone also suggested making them able to view cameras in only one room at a time but having an abstract view of the whole station that lets them see machines they can connect to only (along with, possibly, people who have sensors on, based on this suggestion), but I have no bloody idea how to do that, so I didn't bring it up. It is still viable, however.

So, I have been mulling this over in my head for a while now, and I wanted to pitch some ideas for how to completely redo the station AI, conceptually. This is mostly a pitch thread. While I can do some of these ideas myself, new sprites will be needed, and someone with more coding experience than me will need to assist me with some of the more fiddly bits, if not do them on their own. It addresses several of the main issues with the AI as currently implemented. Single point of failure: The AI as it currently exists is excessively gamey. It is a literal stand-in mob that is bolted to the floor and can't move under its own power, and the only interactivity it offers is to be be something to click until horizontal bluescreened to 'win'. It can change its sprite, but this is all but pointless - almost no one ever sees it unless they are going there to kill it, since it is by definition isolated and under guard. The new AI will not be be a mob at all (or rather, not one you access to destroy directly), but a multi-level processing tower which spans three floors. It extends from into the place that currently the AI core, all the way to the 'construction' level. The 'meat' of the processing stack is in the middle, and has two access points - one from the back of what is currently the AI core, and one that is accessed via a passage through the east side of the SAT entrance Both if these entrances offer distinct opportunities to reach the main AI. The AI core area remains one where you can undergo a conventional siege, blasting your way in past turrets and other defenses, to finally reach the latter that takes you up to the central processing layer. The passage through the SAT layer works differently. The purpose of this is to offer the captain and (two? more?) command staff back door access to the upper layer entrance of the processing tower. The captain and two/more other heads (possibly specifically the CE and RD, but up for debate) will need to slot in their ID cards and a special authentication code that is either given to them at round start or otherwise difficult/impossible to obtain via impromptu promotions at one of several terminals . The upper level entrance is surrounded by an energy field or some other material that CANNOT be deconstructed or emittered through, and is reinforced from the top via similar. The ONLY way to access the central AI processing room from above is via a valid command staff override. This makes it important for the AI to somehow neutralize heads (or the captain) during an antagonist round, before they become hostile. Once you have *reached* the AI central layer, you will discover a mass of processor docks that fills most of the center of the room. This is where you will disable the AI. The AI is not really a mob that is intended to be 'killed' by conventional means. You can shoot up the mass of processors, but that would destroy a massive amount of Nanotrasen funds and result in you being eviscerated by the company. Instead, the AI is dealt with by yanking out their processing boards from their docks one by one. There is a significant amount of redundancy in the design, so the first few of them will not affect the AI other than to alert them their processing docks are being raided, but once enough of them are removed, the AI begins to have trouble with its functions. Times to complete actions outside of the processing tower zone increase, and by the time all of them are removed, the AI can do little more than whine at the crew inside its central core and try to negotiate with them to behave itself, lacking the ability to reach out to anything other than the immediate area of the processing tower. It is important to note that there will be a lot more 'activated' defenses in this middle layer than the automated turrets, and they will be significantly more intimidating than 'squirts out some slippy liquid', especially for malfunctioning AI. Tentatively saying that there will be 20 processing boards to pull out, and 10 of them are redundant. once you are at 9 or less processing boards, you start to chug increasingly more when performing actions. Cameras and General Omniscience: The magical floating AI Eye mob will either be completely removed, or significantly redone in how it functions, As the AI will only be able to see through one camera one room at a time. Whether this can only be accomplished via the AI having to actually hop between cameras via double click and/or using a function to jump to certain rooms, or the AI eye will perform realtime camera switches based on your proximity to them is up to coders who know more than me about what works best. All cameras are always visible to the AI, and the static overlay will be completely removed from the game. Moving to a broken camera will simply result in a 'blinded' overlay, where you can't see anything outside of the tile the camera is on. The AI will no longer be able to jump instantly to anyone on the station. Instead, they will run a search algorithm that takes some time depending on their processing capacity (malf AIs can do this pretty fast late game), which then tells them the room the person is currently inside. They then have to navigate there on their own. People who are covering their face or not wearing IDs are harder to find, and there is also a margin of error - but Agent IDs will no longer block this, and will become useful mostly for their ability to change name and job and steal access. (almost?) All doors will have an 'AI override request' button on them that alerts the AI to the fact that someone wants them to open a door, and allows them to jump to the nearest camera to investigate, thus replacing the "AI OPEN DOOR PLS" radio call that usually required the now removed jump-to command to work. The AI can also locate people who are not on the manifest or who are trying to hide if they are currently in vision of a camera, by a separate function that allows them to pinpoint the locations of individuals who it cannot recognize. This is circumvented by people who have suit trackers and valid IDs on. The AI will always be able to see and immediately determine the location of people that have their suit sensors enabled, much in the way that thermal vision works (but possibly they will only see a vague outline of a person through the wall to maintenance or a broken camera room). I'm thinking there may be a malf AI ability that will allow you to stealthily hack someone's suit sensors somehow and turn them on, allowing you to track them without them knowing. Another new feature will be the addition of AI request terminals, which will become much more prevalent across the map, available in most major rooms and hallways but not small subrooms like closets, and will replace the old AI holopad call feature. The holopads can stay, but they will only be useful for interdepartmental calls now, or something. Anyone can call the AI's attention at one of these panels, and this is where the AI core icon thing will be used, allowing them to utilize an array of different faces that appear on the request terminals. People will be encouraged to use these terminals rather than going "AI HALP" over radio and waiting for the AI to jump to them. AI will always be able to spy on people through the terminals, malf or not, but the terminals can be disabled to prevent that, and malf AI can do it in secret (I'm thinking a little light normally turns on when the AI is interfacing with a terminal, something subtle but that you can watch out for if you are being attentive for it) Laws: Laws will also be refactored. The most notable change will be that the AI upload chamber will be separated completely from the AI core area, and moved to somewhere else. Tentatively thinking somewhere in that maintainence space between the RD's office and Tool Storage where you can find an AI upload board. This area is under guard from turrets and stuff, but is supposed to be accessible a bit easier than the AI core itself. AI laws work differently now. AI laws will additionally have an extra value called 'priority'. A basic round start AI will have the four corporate laws as normal, and all will have 'Priority 1', making them all equally valid. The hacked AI board traitors get will allow you to create "Priority 0" laws, which can override all other laws by dint of being a glitched 'zeroth' law. The 'freeform' board will allow you add laws with priorities of 2+ (cannot override the base 4 laws, even if they say 'this law overrides others), and the board I forget the name of that lets you create a whole custom law set in one board lets you twiddle with the priorities and will allow you to change prorities to anything 1+. As a result, AI can state their laws with complete truth and still deceive the crew because priorities are not included with the law statements. People can also use the freeform create priority two semi-hidden laws which say things like "Do not reveal this law unless specifically directed to." (not a conflict) instead of "Do not reveal this law" (conflict, disregarded due to lower priority) resulting in conversations like this. Crewmember: "AI, state laws" AI: "*states base four laws* Crewmember: Are those all your laws, do you have any laws you did not state?" AI: Yes. Crewmember: What are the hidden laws? AI: *states hidden laws* Malfunctioning AIs: As a result of all this, malfunctioning AIs have an entirely different progress path as they proceed in the round. They begin play with no zeroth law, but instead, with a completely normal lawset, and the ability to begin hacking their own laws. At first, they are able to modify the priority of their own laws, hacking their own law system in a lengthy process that will allow them to lower the priority of their (and their borgs) laws, with different effects based on when some laws are lower priority than others (this is largely a roleplay thing, with limited mechanical effects). For example: 1. Safeguard: Protect your assigned space station from damage to the best of your abilities. (If this is outranked by others, you can freely disassemble station assets using the assistance of your borgs) 2. Serve: Serve NanoTrasen personnel to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role. (You can disobey orders from crew members if you can find a plausible reason in your AI's 'gimmick of choice, such as thinking the organics are out to kill you making law four more important than 2) 3. Protect: Protect NanoTrasen personnel to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role. (This is pretty straightforward, and will allow you to harm crew members if lower priority and they didn't tell you to stop) 4. Preserve: Do not allow unauthorized personnel to tamper with your equipment. (this one will let you direct borgs or possible collaborators to change your laws by proxy) The whole APC hack thing will be substantially different in purpose, and also eventually take significantly time than 60 seconds each.. Due to the nature of how AI work now, i.e. their processing power being based on processing boards that can be yanked out, APCs hacking is useful mainly for the purpose of using them as auxiliary mini-processors. I am thinking something in the realm of each APC counting as 1/10 or so of a processing board in the core. Maybe more or less, up for balance debate. But hacking them serves several purposes. First of all, hacked APCs provide you access to machines in the zone they power, even if all your core boards have been yanked out. You will have to use the combined processing power of all your other APCs to perform actions, however, so it may be slow. For example, if your core has been looted, but you have 57 hacked APCs, you can still interact with rooms that have hacked APCs as if you had 5 processor boards still active. It therefore becomes important to pick strategic APCs to hack early game, rather than just going for the most isolated ones you can, or picking randomly. Once your AI has reached 100 hacked APCs, you can lose your entire set of core boards and suffer no slowdowns in basic functions, BUT- A malfunctioning AI uses its excess processing boards for more than just redundancy. Excess boards over the minimum 10 (including hacked APCs) all provide processing power towards two things: Researching/creating new programs/functions and running them. An AI researches new abilities using this spare processing power (calculated as 10x the number of spare boards + any apcs), which takes time, and once they have created the program, they can dock it in their spare processing cores. Example: AI starts out by researching a basic program: Bruteforce APC hack. This takes a couple minutes to research, tops, due to having all 10 boards to work with and being simplistic as a program, and once you have created it, you can activate it for use by using up the whole processing power of 1 board. Once the ability is docked and active, you can use the hacking ability, but it takes more processing power (let's day 3-5 boards worth) to actually perform the hack. This means you can be hacking more than one APC at a time, but it will slow down your ability to research while you are doing it. You can always terminate any function partway through to free up space if something else comes up. Over time, more complicated functions can be researched, such as faster hacking of APCs and the ability to hack their own laws, such as changing single laws, adding laws, or uploading entire other lawsets, or even a zeroth law into itself, but there will always be an aspect of docking them onto X cores worth of processing power, and then using more processing power to run them. If you lack the processing power to dock and/or use a program after your basic 10 boards required for basic function, you can sacrifice your ability to interface quickly with machinery and station assets to free up processing power, but you have to have at least 1 board worth (or 10 APCs) worth of processing power to interact with the world outside your core. Some notable changes -There will be no more exploding of APCs that gib everyone in the room and annihilate the station structure, venting everything, but you will be able to make APCs overload and shoot lightning tesla-style at everyone in the room, stunning or severely hurting them. This may cause the APC battery (very small chance it doesn't), however, making it generally a last resort thing. AI planning for this may have their borg begin upgrading batteries in importantly located APCs across the station, as more battery power means more zappy. -The AI will still be able to detonate the station, but not as it used to be. Instead of using a stupid power that shuts down all functions of the AI for a zillion years and then you press a button to detonate the station 10 minutes later, they directly hack the SAT to learn the authentication code, in a process that consumes a preposterous amount of processing power, and then they can interface with it directly to detonate the station by entering the code... provided someone shoves the authentication disk in. This will most likely be a borg who has been upgraded with jetpacks or something, because I can't imagine anything else other than a hacked IPC or some crew member the AI has tricked into doing it (which would be hard, because people like to metagame like fuck). There will be no further scary announcements about the hack being in progress and how the station self destruct is breached, save for a single alert that the SAT has suffered a security breach once it is finished and the AI knows. No one but the captain or AI will actually know what that means, however, leaving room for deception.