ShakyJake

Ckey/BYOND Username: ShakyJake Discord Name: shaky.jake (ShakyJake) Position Being Applied For: (coder, mapper, spriter) Mapper Past Experiences/Knowledge: I have no past experience working on developer teams for any server or online community, but I've always enjoyed designing ships through other games too, like Space Engineers. I just enjoy making maps, so that's what I'm here for. Examples of Past Work: (list of pull requests you made to the Aurora repository or other relevant work) IPC Refugee Ship (https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17905) Elyran Corvette (https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17984) KASF Corvette (https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17880) Unified Sadar Fleet Ship (https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17970) I also did the mapping for the INDRA reactor, and am in the finishing stages of a new Ti'rakqi smuggler ship which I've posted WIP screenshots of in the main discord. Additional Comments: Currently I'm studying mechanical engineering at university, so obviously that's my main obligation above anything else. I can't predict exactly what my workload will look like for any given quarter, but if past quarters are anything to measure by, I should still have enough free time available that I can dedicate to working on things here fairly consistently.

I've noticed recently that for some reason ship weapons seem to not do as much damage as they should on live. No idea why its buggy like that, but this is what a single shot from the mining blaster is capable of in a test server.

I've seen this movement style elsewhere and I'm just not a fan of it personally, it looks wrong and uncanny to me. With the way we currently have it, it at least sort of gives the feel that you're stepping around instead of gliding or floating because there's a cadence to it that this just doesn't have.

Right now we have a lot of buggy things with the new changes, but I wanted to comment on some of the sprites themselves. I'd like to start by saying that I think most of the sprites are pretty good! It's definitely a style I'll have to get used to, but I think most of it is nice, and I appreciate all the hard work that's been done to give the server it's own distinct style. The main thing I'm not as much a fan of, and I know a few others aren't either, are some of the door/airlock sprites. In particular, the two tile wide doors and external airlock doors feel out of place. The two tile wide doors feels and looks weird being pulled fully into just one side. When I first saw it, I thought that it was unfinished, or that there was a visual glitch where one side was missing the non-glass part. I strongly feel that it would fit in better if it followed the normal split-down-the-middle style that most doors use. The red external airlock doors don't really feel like airlock doors, but more like big cargo container doors. It's not that it's a bad sprite per se, but to me it just feels ill fitting for airtight doors on a spaceship that separate us from a vacuum. It'd be nice to see something a bit more secure looking, like maybe with a interlocking jagged teeth kind of thing. I agree here in regards to glass airlocks and depth, as well. I'd also like to mention that the transition from door to the adjacent walls feels too sudden or abrupt when the door's front/back is facing west/east. In some cases it looks like it may just be the bright colors of the doors compared to the darker walls, but in other cases it looks like there's a mismatch between the edge of the door sprite and the edge of the wall sprite. I think they could do with being smoothed out a bit in that regard.

XO is definitely a very misleading title for a role that isn't intended to be second in command, so I'd support that being changed. However, function wise, it seems that the XO is responsible for ID access changes as well as managing ship funds. They're given all the equipment and programs to do this mechanically, and are the ones these tasks often get delegated to in round whenever relevant. The wiki also seems to say these are the XO's responsibilities. With this change, would these responsibilities still fall under the Flight / Crew Chief, or would they be reassigned to another command role, like OM?

I don't think it's fair to equate the environment of a huge spaceship in the future to be so similar to that of something like naval ships in the current day IRL. You're dealing with systems that are far more complex, with less room for error. There's a lot more challenges to keeping a ship in the vacuum of space operational, especially one so advanced as the Horizon. I feel like that kind of environment demands people that are both capable of the hands-on technical work, as well the more advanced theoretical knowledge behind what they're actually doing, so that they know how to actually fix and operate things in a way that doesn't screw everything up. You'd want these people to have a much more thorough knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes with what they're dealing with here, because there's really a lot going on, and a lot that can go wrong. I think the requirements of a minimum of a bachelors, or alternatively seven years of work experience is perfectly reasonable as is. IRL in the modern day we may keep engineers and technicians very separate because we can get away with that, but I don't think the same could be said for the environment we'd see on future spacecraft. There's good reason for the requirements we have on mission specialists even just on current day spacecraft and space stations, and I have a hard time imagining that changing in the future.

yes give us burzsian engineer i approve add now +1 On a more serious note, I've only really had good experiences roleplaying with Meep, and I think they have what it takes to do well on command. They're very enthusiastic about teaching new players things too, which I think is a great thing for chief engineer. They have a solid grasp on the mechanics of engineering too, with the nitty-gritty stuff of thrusters being really the only exception I can think of.

During the time I've played here, I've had a kinda mixed stance on this subject, but I've come to definitely lean on maintaining role differentiation. I pretty much play atmospheric technician exclusively here because I enjoy the mechanics of it, but a lot of people in engineering really don't care for it at all, which is totally fair. If you really want to dive into that stuff, it can get fairly complicated. I love messing with thrusters, so I pull out some kind of gigathruster stuff whenever I play. When I was at my most active, what I unfortunately started hearing about is some bridge crew would start pestering other engineers for similar levels of thrust and such when I'm not playing. Big thruster upgrades can take up a significant portion of the round, depending on how far you take them. Expecting most engineers to spend 30 minutes on thruster upgrades every round is obviously quite ridiculous, Ultimately, that all stems from how most people tend to look at atmos techs and regular engineers as essentially the same thing, and expecting the same things from them. It's a cultural problem more so than a direct mechanical one, but it's certainly encouraged by the mechanics. A firmer differentiation between the two roles would better draw a line in the sand on where expectations lie, so that engineering players can focus primarily on what they are here to do without worrying about taking on the full weight of mechanics that really aren't their role's focus. I feel that merging the roles together would be a step in the wrong direction in addressing these issues, and would only reinforce them if anything. I'm not opposed to adding more mechanical enforcement of the differentiation as well, since that'd be one of the most surefire ways of establishing where expectations lie. I think the ideas Sneakyranger brought up for differentiation are good, and I'd like to also add to the cold setup point. This is something that already exists, but is either commonly forgotten about, or commonly misunderstood. Thrusters don't have to be complicated if you don't want them to be. A cold phoron setup is a two step process, takes less than two minutes to set up both thrusters, and actually provides better thrust than your standard burn setup at the cost of some fuel efficiency. It's practically designed to be a quick and easy option for engineers if the ship needs to move in the absence of an atmos tech, and should really be the only setup method regular engineers should be expected to worry about.

As far as the placement of the CIC goes, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's location is irrelevant to its purpose. Preferably you'd want it to be the very last place that'd get hit by any shells or ship weaponry, so a more central positioning would lend itself better to that. Of course, the Horizon isn't a warship and is already poorly designed for combat survivability anyway, so its definitely not a pressing issue that would warrant it to need to take up premium space better used for more roleplay focused areas. Since the CIC and self destruct are so unimportant in your average day-to-day activities, and there's currently an issue of figuring out where to put them now, wouldn't it make sense to just put them where the rec wing used to be? A large swath of space was just cut off to get rid of it, could just repurpose it instead to hold the CIC and self destruct. This would probably require the locker room / showers to be reshuffled to make way for a path for those. (Maybe just shift it a bit diagonally up and to the left, and have a hall pass along the side of maints and engie break room?) Additionally, could wedge a maintenance path between the holodeck and restrooms to provide an avenue to medical from the elevator through maintenance. Not super important but I suppose it could be helpful in niche cases for FRs to reach medical quicker from the elevator there. Above is a sort of visualization of what I mean.

I second what Sneaky said about having some of the tank inputs start as off. Especially for phoron, as if you want to modify one of those lines in any way you need to drain it somewhere or otherwise risk a (relatively) small phoron fire tearing the pipes up. It takes no time at all to toggle a tanks output open once you're ready, and due to the high pressures the tanks are kept at, lines will tend to fill very quickly once set. As for the mapping side of the thrusters, more room is great. Only thing I'd change is to straighten out the phoron supply and mixer output lines, instead of having them bend to hug the wall. While that might seem a bit counter-intuitive for the purpose of more space for modifications, it would open up the option to overlap pipelines across each other which may be better for making the most of the given space.

Hello, local pipe gremlin here. I think it's already been established that automating the current engineering gameplay loop without replacing is not an option here, so I won't go over all the thoughts I had looking at the original post. I'd still like to make some comments around the set up of things for engineering, as somebody that plays the department exclusively. It's pretty quick and easy to set both power and thrusters up to an acceptable degree as it stands, but I think it should be made clear that having them on and running from the start eliminates most possibilities of trying something new or different with them. In most cases, modifications have to be done in the setup. This is especially the case when you're dealing with anything that largely involves pipes, (SM, thrusters). Once all the gas is in, its a bitch or almost impossible to take back out and start over. You've committed at this point for the whole round. Giving the option to make modifications can allow engineering to push things to a much higher performance than you'd typically see, which gives engineering means of making a notable positive impact on a round in comparison to others. For that reason, I'm not really in support of automating the setup of these systems to be replaced by something else to begin with. At least, definitely not the thrusters. Another note on the Horizon's thrusters, engineers don't actually need to have an extensive knowledge of atmospherics nor do they need to spend much time on them in order to get them working fine. This is why we have the cold phoron setup, and its an option that most disregard entirely. It is done in literally three steps and takes less than a minute while providing the Horizon with acceleration up to 1.38 Gm/h per burn. That's more than twice the acceleration your standard 80/20 burn setup gives for a fraction of the time. The only reason this isn't the standard way of doing things is because its very phoron inefficient and we're in a phoron crisis, not because its mechanically inferior. (The thruster guide is currently outdated, but all you have to do is set the phoron supply monitor's output pressure to 15,000kPa, turn the digital valve on the floor, and unlock the adjacent pressure regulator while maxing out its target pressure. Repeat for both thrusters. Done.) As for the round start setup of things impeding the crew's ability to carry out expeditions to Adhomai or elsewhere, I think engineering's part in this may be a little overblown here. While it certainly helps to have the Horizon move the ship around the sector, the Intrepid is capable of doing all of that on its own. The Intrepid starts off with a full SMES, a pressure tank of CO2, a full phoron tank for secondary thrust, its own sensors, its own air supply, its own stocked medbay, expedition weaponry--Everything. The fuel on the Intrepid is enough to travel the entire sector with efficient flying and fuel usage. How soon you leave more depends on you getting ready with your gear, not engineering setting up the ship. Additionally, as I understand it, whenever Adhomai spawns it does so within a couple grids of the Horizon so that the Intrepid can launch directly to it. (Fun fact, you only need to set the pumps to 2,000kPa in order to get an acceleration of 1.0 gm/h per burn with the Intrepid. Do that instead of maxing them out to 15,000kPa for more efficient fuel usage.) That aside, the fact that lowpop suffers from things like power outages without engineering staff available is definitely a problem, but there's a few potential ideas that immediately come to mind that could help alleviate it. 1. Charged SMESes. This was brought up in the original post, and is also actually something we already kind of do. Currently, the SM SMES starts at 75%, and the Tesla at 50%. Telecomm's substation also starts fully charged to ensure comms last as long as possible. Now, I wouldn't have the SM and Tesla SMESes start fully charged since engineers already have to wait a while for these to drain in order to upgrade them, but an SMES or two that acts as a reserve battery might help. Specifically, the port and starboard wing substations currently do absolutely nothing. The only APC on their grid is the APC of the substation room itself. If these substations started fully charged with maxed output and a disabled input, it would give the ship a bit more breath before the lights go out so long as the breakers aren't touched. 2. Disable shield substation charging being on by default. At roundstart, the shield substation starts with a little over 30% charge, and is set to draw 500kW until its full. If its a lowpop round and the ships not doing a lot, the shield subgrid is really the last thing you want to worry about sending power to, especially since the generator itself won't even be turned on without engineering staff. Making it so this substation starts with its input disabled would significantly prolong how long the ship's starting power lasts on lowpop. 3. Solars. This has already been brought up, but I'll reiterate it because its not a bad option. There's a lot of space on the roof of deck two that could potentially be used to lay out solar arrays. The Horizon's idle ship power usage can be as low as 400kW when you aren't trying to charge shields or its substations. Given that 1 solar panel produces 1.5kW, you could easily cover idle ship power usage with an array of 300 panels. That sounds like a lot, but for reference, that's exactly how many the sensor relay site has.

From what experiences I've had, Datru is a great roleplayer. I always enjoy the roleplay I have with Briar, and they definitely have their mechanics down too. I've seen Briar go out of their way a couple times to try and get a reign on loose engineers a couple times before, if that counts for anything on the command side of things. I think there's definitely good potential here, so +1