Nikov

I looked into how civilian jobs at truly far-flung places work, and its not like what's being described at all. Is there a soul alive on Earth today who gets up, has breakfast, gets in his car, goes to an airport, gets on a jet, flies to another airport, goes through a customs line for his passport, gets on a helicopter, flies to his workplace, punches in, mops the floor for two or four hours or eight hours hours, gets back on a helicopter, flies back to the airport, turns in his passport at another customs line, gets back on a jet, flies back to the airport, goes out to his car, drives home, and goes to sleep? Aren't about... ALL of these steps ridiculous? Sure, space travel in our setting is as common as air travel today. That doesn't mean its as easy as driving your car to the office from the suburb. A much more reasonable model is ships and ship crews. Not the navy, but inland freight shipping on rivers. You live, work, and sleep on the ship. You get 'shore leave' every weekend or two weeks or four months or whatever your ship's schedule dictates. Maybe you sign for a one-month posting, then at the end of that month, go through the rigmarole to return to your home proper, where you spend the next two weeks off before returning to the airport for another month on station. In this model, you wake up, step out of the dorms, grab breakfast in the cafeteria, go to your post, and swipe your ID at 8:00 or 16:00 or whenever the shift starts. Normal shifts see us swiping out in eight hours, having dinner, socializing around the station's off-duty socializing facilities (why else is there a library, bar, chapel, garden...) and then go back to our dorm bunks, sling a hammock in one of the firefighting closets, whatever. Maybe you pay for a hotel room on the Odin if you're a real high roller. Our crew transfer shuttle is just the "TGIF Bus" for everyone who's multi-shift stint on the Exodus is over. They go back to the Odin, get a passenger ship to their various homes, and hang out there for a week or a month until their contract calls them back out. Or the Odin has all the fine dining, dance clubs and hotels the local Nanotrasen employees blow money in during "weekends" or "liberties" before returning to their ongoing shift. Maybe officers and career types really do live on the Odin. But to assume all fifty or sixty crew are going to hop aboard fifty or sixty passenger ships and fly back to our front doors by dinnertime on planets across hundreds of light years... I'm sorry, that's nonsense. There'd be no way to pay the commuter flight fees. There's not enough hours in the day. Now, regarding hours in the day, Nanotrasen can set the clock however they wish on every vessel or posting they own. Their space stations can all be on one time or another, twenty-four or twenty hours, synchronized or rotating with one another. All that really need be done, however, is watch-standing for the engine's machinery and Security's vigil for outside threats. For a research team of a few dozen scientists, shift work doesn't make sense. Information in the head of one scientist may need to link up with information in another scientist, but being on different shift schedules, they'll never talk. Instead the research facility model supports having the station on one primary watch, in which the research team is active, and then two other watches; one graveyard shift with engineers and officers to keep the engine running, and one evening shift to perform clean-up, provide off-hours services and the start of large engineering projects like overhauls and replacement jobs which may need sixteen hours to complete before Research goes back to their desks. If the research team is kept to one shift, night-owls and after-hours scientific fervor spilling into the evening and graveyard shifts, then maintaining the circadian rhythm and rest of the science team is a priority that station-wide lighting control can be slaved to, as is all the meal planning, shore leave, engineering scheduling slaved to the comfort and convenience of the Science team's primary schedule. Unless you want three shifts worth of scientists going in and out constantly, messing with each other's shared office spaces, breaking things because they couldn't be maintained because they were always in use... this is why having a primary watch is practiced on ships, and should be practiced here as well. And now you see why realism is useful when advocating for cool stuff. There's a thing you want, there's justifications for it, they reinforce one another, and we have a case for the thing you want beyond "its cool".

Hmm. Backpack, or chief engineer voidsuit. Backpack... Chief engineer voidsuit... Backpack... /me throws the worthless goddamn voidsuit into the disposals and puts on an atmospherics hardsuit, then pulls on his backpack. So this has happened more than fifty thousand times, and its time to fix it. Currently voidsuits (or rig suits, or whatever, its a fucking space suit, stop assigning meaningless names) that deploy from a backpack device exclude you from wearing a backpack, but the ordinary space suits that go directly onto your exosuit slot do not exclude you from wearing a backpack. The obvious solution is to allow a backpack to be attached to the voidsuit control module in some way, giving inventory slots just the same as ever. Or maybe I mean to say hardsuit, or rig suit, or whatever stupid Dead Space meme that is. Just let me snap my satchel onto my Chief Engineer suit with some caribeeners or something.

Sounds silly. Its superpowers in a syringe. Combine holobullshit with your full inventory worth of shivs and stuns and we have a balance problem on our hands. You see, adding a new gun is balanced against all the other guns you could be carrying, or all the other items that could fit in that slot. If I go into combat and have to decide between body armor and a space suit for my exosuit slot, I decide between damage reduction or vacuum proofing, and my tactics adjust accordingly. With holobullshit, I inject superpowers on top of all the inventory-based abilities and skills. Consider old DnD when Fighters didn't get fancy talents or skills and instead just rolled bigger hit dice. Any wizard steamrolled them after level five because a spellbook weighs one pound but contains all the power in the world, while the fighter's full lumbering kit doesn't. Solution? All fighter classes now have 'physical magic' in modern RPGs, such as WoWs rage system, to let them do "magic spells" the same as the magicians. What you're doing here is taking a tool-and-toolbelt balancing act and giving new tools which don't take up space in the toolbelt. You can now get both if you're a traitor, which makes the traitors able to run around with all these talents and abilities to kill bare-handed (wizard) as well as loaded out with all the inventory weapons and tools their competition has (fighter). The result is a Grand Wizard Of the Knights Of The Battlemage, the snowflakeyist of snowflakey, who has the full array of holoshit powers on top of the raided armory, RCD and fireaxe. Its just not good game design.

I attempted to play a loyalty implanted role and very unfortunate things happened because, surprise surprise, loyalty implants were never reformed. Fortunately I see Garnasus was in favor of change, and I hope he applies new leadership to this initiative. Come to think of it, move this thread to Suggestions. The Heads of Staff board has a history of languishing on consensus.

Look, I both want spoopy sparey mood lighting for the rule of cool, and think it makes sufficient sense given all the biological effects night-time has on our various species. We're also discussing where the hell we all sleep (stacked like cordwood in the dorm / on home planets ten thousand lightyears away, duh) and if that has any relevance. I rather hope some Dwarf Fortress style bedrooms make it into the new map, with non-functioning stairs to the "dormitory level" that incidentally is off-screen, like any berths on the Odin. Hoooowever, Jackboot is wondering why the station would be accelerating if we're in free-fall orbit around a star. Are we in freefall? Seems to me we're in 1 gee of acceleration toward the floor tiles. If we were in freefall, we'd be floating around all round. Are we accelerating? How could we not be. Even if this gravity generator device only pulled loose objects to the floor, there's still hundreds of tons of crew, water, furniture, etc. all pressing against the floor tiles at a consistent 1 gee of force. In order for us to continue pressing against the floor, we have to be accelerating the floor plates. Otherwise we break Newton's laws, since force being applied to the floor plates has to have an equal and opposite reaction. And since the gravity generator takes in electricity, pushes a reaction mass of people against the floor, and continues to use the same reaction mass perpetually, we have a reaction-less drive. Do you have any idea how entirely meaningless nuclear weapons are when you can put a reaction-less drive on an asteroid and push it at 1 gee acceleration for a decade? Reactionless drives make for dirt-cheap planet crackers, and dirt-cheap planet crackers will really, really strain interspecies diplomacy when xenocide is a simple, stealthy policy enacted and then ignored as you play nice waiting for your rock to hit Earth at .9 C. Fortunately there is a solution to not only give us gravity but also not break physics or the cardinal rule of science fiction, "Friends don't let friends have reaction-less drives in their universe". The NSS Exodus is on a tether with the asteroid, with the two masses rotating around a central point. This allows neat and well-understood physics to produce spin artificial gravity. It also means you'd have to hold on when on EVA to keep from flying off (you do) solar panels would need to track a star (they do) and if you fell off you have a chance of catching the other end of the tether, the asteroid, if its further from the center of mass than the point you left was (this is a bit of a stretch now, but hell, I'm trying). Furthermore the telecomms sat is now the center of mass for this asteroid-tether-tcomms-tether-station array, giving it a place in our universe. All you have to do is change the "Gravity Generator" centcomm message from "We stopped beaming gravitons" (bahahahah, oh you) to "Sensors in the spin tether indicate the station and asteroid's mass ratios are out of tolerance, and must be corrected to prevent a failure of the tether. The station will now be brought down from spin to re-calibrate the spin ballast. You may experience weightlessness during this time." Tah dah. No more inexplicable artificial gravity, nor its horrible consequences should we be consistent. Want to be super consistent? http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/ will tell you how long the tether is by putting the solar panel tracking rate (how fast the star appears to move in our sky) into Angular Velocity as degrees / second.

Is it consistent we have the ability to generate 9 m/s^2 of acceleration with a reaction-less drive on a mass the size of a space station, yet the space station isn't cruising at 1 gee acceleration up to light speed? Well, there's a reason "realistic" and "consistent" go hand in hand in realistic settings. It is realistic to try and push the crew into a diurnal cycle, although it would be done in two or three watches rather than one watch. I suppose it makes sense to put the whole company on the same schedule to avoid the time zone nonsense modern multinationals face.

Every effort I've made to involve Helper failed, because Helper cannot count above ten. I tried, very sincerely, to give Helper a task or two to do with explicit instructions. He can't change light bulbs. I tried sending him to robotics for a CPU upgrade. Somehow that became a fiasco. I told him to take an inventory of Engineering. He broke several windows then threw all the tools into a pile and said "tenish". If Helper shows up, order him to go into the incinerator and melt him down for scrap. Nobody bats an eye.

I've always presumed the Odin has my state room because the thought of re-entering a planet's atmosphere every evening seems a bit beyond even the wildest of Johnny Rocket sci-fi. Commute to the moon? Maybe a business trip, but not as your 9/5. Christ. In fact, the Odin having everyone's houses is silly as well, unless its a big spin-gravity flying cylinder the size of a city. Gateways? The implications of gateways are completely unrealized in our setting, and I'm fairly certain the off-site gateway is just a holdover from the map switch. It would be a lot easier on this conversation to just presume everyone slings up a hammock in Maintenance, rather than walks through a shimmering blue light to their suburban home in Wisconsin. See how one of these options is patently ridiculous? Oh God, the station is falling apart, get the wounded into the escape pods, oh wait, just throw them through the gateway to Biesel Naval Hospital's ER lobby.

We can certainly try it out here. The rotational period of the asteroid is likely to be much more or less than 24 hours besides. As a station maintaining its own clock, or even a synchronized company clock (everyone in Nanotrasen ships and stations on the same primary shift for ease of communications), we'd have lights dimmed in hallways for perhaps eight to ten hours. I'd suggest eight if only so only a third of our playtime is spent "at night" as the time is randomly pulled. However given alert levels, 1/2 odds may still yield mostly lit halls. Green alerts; hallways at reduced lighting. Blue or red alerts go to full light. APCs have a light level setting, accessible by anyone, like the thermostat. Light settings adjust power requirements. The Chief Engineer or Captain might have a master switch to set the thresholds on all the other APC's, from 50 to 120%. I can see forcing the station into low power lighting mode if I ever had to put her on solars. God forbid.

Wait, what do you mean 'firelock access'. I just click them and they open... Oooooooh. Yes, definitely a Paramedic access level. I was wondering why I never see them in hull breaches.

Adopt the loyalty implant laws I previously proposed, then on an EMP, scramble their hierarchy or delete random lines.

Actually plays as a psychologist, and actually diagnosed my character. 10/10.

I did what now?

You know, I'm glad its a unanimous rejection of donor perks. I'll take unanimously declined over contentiously accepted suggestions any day. Also I note Skull made his protests about donor perks... not the implication of a krokodil addiction. People love you, Skull. Not us, per say, but people as an abstract concept. Say no to bootleg industrial solvent abuse.

I think if donations are tracked by CKEY donating, then we could apply some in-game perks for donors, such as more custom loadout points, bonus telecrystals when traitor, becoming lone-wolf antags independent of game mode... We might also present a "fine" option if someone commits a bannable offense. A $5 donation to nullify a 3-day-ban shows a seriousness about wanting to play on Aurora that going to play on other servers for a few days doesn't. With the appropriate mea culpas, of course. As we approach funding goals these perks are locked out, to be re-opened when the bill gets paid and the next bill comes up. And frankly, if I donate $5 and find out Skull got himself a metric gallon of krokodil with my five bucks, but I can still play on Aurorastation? I don't care. The problem with donations I saw previously in SS13 is when a server host solicited money for a new server box, bought himself a high-end gaming PC, and then hosted it on something other than a high end gaming PC. Which is not the sort of thing I expect we'll ever see here. So long as some professional server hosting company is running Aurorastation with good performance, we see the bill for said company, and the bill gets paid, there's no need for drama.

Oh yeah. WHIPPLE SHIELD. WHIP-PLE. WITH A P.

Its power gaming. Ahem. Lets pretend the shield puts off a small amount of radiation, ionized particles, and other scifi nastiness when its on. Sure, its safe to have on for a short period against a much more serious threat, but we'd want to turn it off when no meteors are approaching. There should always be someone able to get to the bridge as a matter of policy. Sometimes everyone's dead, and that's just good dramatics. Its also possible to add a new element to the shield generator; heat. We're talking about an energy projecting machine that takes hundreds of thousands of watts of power, converts them at some less-than-ideal efficiency to shields, and dumps that inefficient portion as heat. If the shield generator put off a lot of heat in the room its installed in, we'd have a problem if we left it on constantly, unless we engineer a solution. Which is all good fun.

Manfred glanced through the printed glossy fliers that collected in his mailbox and tossed aside the distinctively socialist-looking union flyer.

I'd say anything that improves the chances of a rules-lawyer who's illegally stopped and frisked on a code green is good. It gives some teeth to IAA and command staff against jackbooted rights-tramplers. In the very least it gives grounds for an IR if they randomly dump your pockets and metagame your cult papers.

We also have regulations for insubordination, but Wal-Mart doesn't have bylaws against mutiny. Wal-Mart clearly isn't Nanotrasen, and a Wal-Mart in the parking lot off the highway isn't orbiting a star in an asteroid belt in a nebula. Its a free-orbiting vessel even further from "land" than orbiting a gas giant, and given the surroundings, even harder to get to. That isolation is why you need a person with the legal privileges that come from being a captain, if law 500 years in the future is in any way similar to the law 500 years in the past. The master of a vessel hasn't changed in authority since the Roll of Orleans. If you want to be "Station Manager", fine. Be my guest. I'll be asking for your supervisor.

My whitelist app was also open for a month, but it had spirited debate. This has been pretty well unanimous. Yet another +1.

Engineering.

The station is a tin can orbiting a planet in excess of eight kilometers a second, capable of correcting its orbital course to maintain plane and altitude. It is travelling faster and operates more independantly than any maritime vessel ever could. The station is not "fixed to the sea bed", as some oil rigs are. It is a free floating vessel and as much a ship as any barracks barge in the old Royal Navy. There is no sociological consideration to take as to if the station changes orbits or stays on its course; it is still a small, closed society that depends on a direct chain of command to maintain good order. I consider the ship/station distinction to be entirely pedantic, particularly since numerous navies on Earth consider buildings, islands or other arbitrary things "ships" for the reason of applying honors, legal privileges or appointing captains to them. May I remind you all of i303, Mutiny? Not a crime in the civilian world... save aboard a ship. Or aboard a vessel. If you want the optional title Station Administrator, fine. I don't know many building managers who can imprison people on a whim for mutiny, though.

*innocently whistles and walks by*

*gun-educated person* Shooting steel plates at close range is a dangerous thing with armor-piercing ammunition. While a lead bullet will largely disintegrate, and bullets can be specially formulated as 'frangible' to utterly disintegrate on contact, those with steel cores do have a tendency to fly away if the steel they strike is either at an angle or too thick and hard to penetrate. A .357 striking plasteel reinforced walls may very easily rebound and strike the shooter. This could also happen with the Bulldog or other armor-piercing weapons; I've unloaded two mags into a plasteel wall at point blank and had no rebounds strike me. With a real gun that would get me killed.