hazelmouse

I share this sentiment. Security in expeditions is tasked with keeping the crew safe, and the non-emergency crew in a hostile situation would presumably be staying on or adjacent to the Intrepid. If security has the situation under control and the Intrepid is secure, I don't see a reason for non-emergency crew to not be allowed to stick on the Intrepid occupying themselves with assorted busywork. If security doesn't have the situation under control and the Intrepid isn't secure, I assume the entire crew would be in the process of evacuation anyways? The priority is to allow participation. I don't expect all of the crew to be at the very forefront of the scenario and I certainly don't want to put pressure on storytellers and command to find a bespoke spot for absolutely everyone - just being able to reliably be permitted to leave on the expedition at all and find something to do independently is plenty for me. Otherwise, I can parrot this. For a note, I made mention of administrative action here rather than ahelping it in the round exactly because Odyssey is such a new gamemode and the rules really aren't written yet. It would've been wildly unfair to try to pin that on the particular players in that round because there seriously just isn't a consensus on this topic right now, a precedent needs to be set in order to be broken.

If these numbers are to be understood as canonically binding, how will this interact with synthetic wages? I understand self-owned synthetics are meant to be paid substantially less than human peers. I could see it becoming hard to justify an IPC having financial difficulties at all if they're canonically paid equal to humans per the numbers on the page, especially in some of the higher paying jobs.

I actually really like the idea of an SoP for away missions, I think it would move things in a good direction. I agree it would need to be soft recommendations, not hard rules - something you can point to for a reliable reason to involve people that are volunteering.

I'll keep this brief, but I think there's a serious cultural issue with how command players are approaching the new game mode that I think needs to be addressed. Odyssey is meant to involve service, operations, and research, in addition to the usual roster of security, medical, and engineering that already gets the overwhelming majority of gameplay in Secret. That is why we have been putting so much effort into the game mode, practically the entire crew should be able to volunteer to participate on a consistent basis. There will inevitably be gimmicks that are too high-intensity for full participation, but the standards for exclusion should be extremely high. However, right now, I'm seeing a lot of command rosters denying participation to entire departments on a whim. Often, departments like service, operations, and research aren't even notified or given an opportunity to volunteer, and it's also becoming distressingly frequent for command members to outright refuse to allow their participation at the slightest hint of danger in the Odyssey gimmick. Not just ignoring them, but refusing them to their faces after they've communicated they want to engage. These departments are then left on a virtually empty ship, completely excluded from the round. This is even worse than the exclusion these departments see in antagonist rounds, since the action isn't even accessible to them on the Horizon. It's frustrating, it goes completely against the ethos of what Odyssey is meant to achieve, and I don't think it's acceptable or healthy for the server. I have two thoughts: Unjustifiably barring participation in Odyssey rounds should be a command whitelist issue. It should be ahelpable, and it should get your whitelist stripped on repeated offences. From what I can tell, this is already enforced by moderation, which leads me onto my second point. Command staff should not be barring departments unless it is for extremely good reasons. If it is at all possible for you to involve service, operations, or research, you should try to do it. If they volunteer, you should try your hardest to allow their participation unless it is absolutely infeasible to do so. Service, operations, and research staff should be understood as accepting the potential danger of the expedition by volunteering, and they should not be excluded from doing so except for absolutely remarkable circumstances. If you do bar participation short of those circumstances, you should be in rights to be ahelped and have your whitelist stripped. Right now, I'm seeing a trend of departments being excluded for reasons so petty that they're practically excluded from non-canon odysseys period, since almost all non-canon odysseys have a degree of danger. Roleplay is a long process of finding a way to say 'yes, and', not 'no, because'. I have plans lined up for how to better encourage more departmental involvement in Odyssey, but all of that is going to fall flat on its face if command staff keeps actively going out of their way to exclude large portions of the crew from participation. I'm making a public thread out of this rather than keeping it private because this isn't really a moderation issue, this is an issue with server culture and how we're approaching this new game mode as a community.

One challenge for this would be that, currently, storytellers aren't obligatory for Odyssey. For them to be able to choose the map, I assume we'd have to set up a role preference for it and have them pick the map before the round properly starts? Matt would know better than me how feasible that'd be. Odysseys being entirely RNG-based is something on my mind, but I'm not sure what system would be best to replace it. I don't know if I'd honestly mind a vote system - I understand how CM does it is they hold those votes at the end of the prior round, using a randomised list of seven or so options, so theoretically every map can have time to shine.

Putting this up for review.

My hope is for there to be enough convenient storage to either side that people are discouraged from leaving stuff in the central hall, or to move stuff over to the sides of someone does discard an object there. Otherwise, I don't really have the will to push for atmos-to-vacuum shutters here - the walk to the nearest airlock from the cargo bay isn't too egregiously far, imo.

I do think the shutter idea for the cargo bay is interesting, and I'd probably give a shot at implementing it if I thought it'd be accepted, but I believe that atmosphere to external accesses are going to be held to being airlocks right now and I don't think I can cram an airlock in that space. A field kitchen is going to either be a stall outside with deliveries in and out of the Intrepid, or you can set up a small counter by the two emergency shutters, I think we'll just have to see if players actually engage with it in that capacity. The shutters are in, however! I'll probably implement it so they also cover the two airlocks to either side as well as the one at the aft.

This is the feedback thread for an Intrepid remap I've been working on for the last few hours. The PR will be WIP until I'm happy with the amount of feedback I've gotten, see here. Why do we need to remap the Intrepid? The Intrepid we have right now has two problems: it isn't well-suited to the Odyssey gamemode, and it can't really be properly edited to fit the gamemode due to the custom sprites of its hull. For those not aware, those fancy sprites essentially compose a completely immovable skeleton - we can't edit what it looks like outside of the internals. What problems does the Intrepid have with Odyssey, exactly? Capacity, and layout. The Intrepid was designed with traditional overmap expeditions in mind - these usually didn't eclipse half a dozen people - so it isn't designed for the 15+ people we want to be ferrying for Odyssey whatsoever. It doesn't make good use of its space - it's difficult to hold cargo without it becoming disruptive to navigate the ship, and seating is limited enough you'll occasionally see paramedics strapping themselves to a roller bed instead. Even when there aren't objects blocking your path, there's a lot of 1 or 2 tile chokepoints that lead to a hell of a lot of awkward shuffling when there's a lot of crew aboard. Handrails theoretically increase the number of viable seats, but this means climbing on top of racks and blocking entry to the cockpit. This produces a pretty frustrating experience for all involved, and discourages the large-scale expeditions we want to encourage in Odyssey. To be clear, the ideal for Odyssey is to involve as much of the crew as possible. How does this improve anything? The redesign is intended to allow as much of the crew to use the shuttle as possible without stepping on each others' toes. Seats and handrails are segregated into departmentally colour coded segments with separate viewports, so you should be able to stick with your department without everything getting mixed up. There shouldn't be any instance where a buckled character, either to a seat or a handrail, would block the path of another character. I've tried to avoid there being any awkward choke points - this is meant to be able to get dozens of people off the Horizon and onto an offsite without any hiccups, which the current design can't really do. Hopefully there would be less shuffling. The two airlocks to either side are incapable of docking, and are primarily there to be forced open when the shuttle docks with an exoplanet. The main airlock is now 9 turfs in total - it still has decent vent coverage, though I'll have to test if this slows it down much. The cargo bay is left mostly empty with the intention that it can be repurposed by the crew - for instance, if service asks engineering to set a kitchen up there. The intention is for this to still be a viable shuttle for use by BCs and Xenoarchaeologists outside of Odyssey. It should be able to function for huge Odysey expeditions, but it should also be easy and intuitive to use for smaller overmap ones. I don't intend to remove xenoarch access from the cockpit. What about the custom sprites? Personally, I concur that custom sprites of the kind the Intrepid uses were a mistake. They trap us into a pre-mapped layout that we can't really change much. I'll be very excited if any spriters come up to design new custom sprites for our shuttles, but I'd want them to either work off wall smoothing or to be modular enough that we can change the layout without totally scrapping the sprites, like I had to do here. What's this thread for? Anything you want! If you have a concern, if you think this is the wrong direction, or if you see something I've missed from the design that you'd like to see implemented, throw it in here. Current mapping:

I agree on all points. SS13 is a shenanigans simulator, I think it'll always give itself best to the workplace it's set on being second-rate rather than the top of its class. It'd make more origins believable and it'd remove the awkward dissonance of trying to play a character down on their luck while they're on a ship that, presumably, would be the apex of their career. I don't think making the Horizon one of many ships would be particularly difficult on the lore side, either. It unmoored several years ago, that's plenty of time for the SCC to have prepared several more Venator-class Cruisers alongside the Horizon. Perhaps the Horizon is the prototype that is recently surpassed in the Chainlink's favour by newer shinier ships in the same class?

Karivamyrr is a very lively and active XO that leaves a footprint in every round she's in, and goes to lengths to support and pay attention to the service department in a way I wish more XOs did. I like her character and I enjoy seeing her on the manifest. +1

I quite like this idea, particularly giving atmospherics similarly broad access as paramedics. It's very awkward how atmospherics technicians are meant to be emergency responders while lacking the skeleton key engineers have to actually get to emergencies.

This all looks extremely promising, but my thought is that it also seems to cover an ambitious amount of ground. From what I can tell the core of this rework seems to be an expansion to IPC organs. I think I'd like to see a very singular focus on making the new organs work and getting them coded first, before anything else. I'll focus on them. I like the idea of EMPs triggering emergency power rather than immediately downing you. It'd force synthetics to disengage rather than flooring them outright, and an inability to really get synthetics to disengage without killing them is a problem right now. I really like the voice box and internal diagnostic suite organs. Losing the ability to coherently speak and losing the warnings of your current damage are both excellent reasons for you to disengage, similar to an organic receiving fractures or bleeds, that don't involve dying. I think it'd be beneficial if the loss of any organ were very clearly communicated - maybe in large red text in the chat, so you can notice it while in combat. I'm sceptical of the hydraulics and actuator organs in the lower body and arms. Targeting synthetic limbs is already common to slow them down just from how damaged prosthetic limbs already work, this feels as if it'd awkwardly perform the same function simultaneously. The power and cooling organs look interesting. I like the trade-off of water cooling allowing you for run for longer but requiring replacement coolant, against air cooling not requiring any coolant but limiting your sprint time. It'd also be extremely funny if you could burn yourself by taking the heat sinks out without gloves. I assume that, if damaged, the power organ would obstruct or prevent recharging, and the coolant organ would reduce your ability to sprint - both seem like good reasons to disengage.

If you just want to look at the map without loading it ingame, you could also install StrongDMM and load the .dmm files for the Aurora in there. It'd be a bit closer to using the webmap than just ghosting around, and it's pretty easy to use! It also allows you to take a screenshot of the entire map. https://github.com/SpaiR/StrongDMM

Lore Impact: Small to Medium Species: Human & Synth Short Description: This introduces an additional encoded language to the setting named Encoded Broad Spectrum Language (or EBSL), a communications standard similar to EAL that sacrifices a great deal of efficiency in its encoding in return for a limited degree of compatibility with appropriately augmented organics. Developed in its oldest forms by Eridanian dregs to help evade the law and competing groups with efficient, encoded transmissions, the modern augment and encoding standard has been developed and released by Orion Express to be sold to just about anyone with enough credits to buy it. As a result, it has quickly garnered a reputation as a tool for criminals and the destitute due to its usefulness for illicit activities, associated with financial uncertainty and desperate circumstances - but for those streetwise souls that do choose to adopt it, it comes with definite advantages, especially if one deals with low-income synthetics on the regular. How will this be reflected on-station? This application corresponds with a PR to add EBSL and the corresponding augment to the game, see here. Mechanically it's a new language, sounding if you don't understand it like a lower, slower variant of EAL. By taking the augment, synthetics would be able to use it as a traditional language, while organics would only be able to receive transmissions and send out any of a number of pre-set messages, similarly to the Ve'katak receiver. As this is a civilian augment rather than a paramilitary one, the pre-set messages would be less oriented around combat. Only organics with SBS would be able to take the augment, as a way to bar EBSL use only to the heavily augmented. This is a new language rather than an EAL receiver to keep EAL synthetic-exclusive, with the IC explanation that EAL is simply too heavily compressed for even an augmented organic brain to parse. It's purely local - it can only be heard within line-of-sight. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists? It's intended to function as a bridge between synthetics and heavily augmented organics - yet another tool the augmented use to gain an edge - while also functioning as a lingua franca of dispossessed synthetics. It's should open the way for some classism between both synthetics and organics, being as it's a language associated with scrappers and dregs rather than something you'd expect a corporate synthetic or an organic corporate stickler to involve themselves with, or approve of their co-workers involving themselves with. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team? Of course! Long Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tR9f-QhZUkw6dhYCdkBiMnhK8BjBMQyMqGFvUXi3Pxc/edit?usp=sharing