Reworking the engine/merging Atmospherics access with Engineering

[cloud]

Hey, soo.

As things stand right now, the basic outline for setting up the engine is to break into atmospherics, haul two cans of phoron to the engine room, and set the filters to phoron instead of nitrogen. Currently, the engine setup assumes that Nitrogen will be used as standard, but literally nobody uses it. I'm not even sure if it can power our map stably for a full round.

There's the IC argument that phoron is expensive and NanoTrasen may not want to use it on the engine, but my counterargument is that if something as expensive and critical to station operations as the engine wasn't using top-notch coolant, then something is wrong.

Another tidbit is that Atmospheric Technician is such a sparsely populated role (I don't know of any people who play it regularly, I haven't seen one in the last week) that it should just be merged into the Station Engineer slot as a sub-heading, like Electrician, or Maintenance Technician. This sort of coincides with the above fact that people have to hack into there all the time anyway, so they may as well have the access to boot.

IC'ly speaking, any decently trained engineer knows how to pressurize a room and how to lay pipes. Engineers even have access to a pipe dispenser that doesn't require Atmospherics access down in the sublevel break room storage. As it stands right now, Atmospheric Technician is such a niche role that just doesn't have enough merits, in my opinion, to warrant their own access (and lack thereof) and justify an entirely separate role.

So my proposal is this: Remove the 4 nitrogen canisters in the engine room, and replace them with phoron, also setting the filters to phoron by default, and to add the two extra job slots from Atmos to Engineering, with appropriate alt-titles.

[Lohikar]

Engineers are not trained in atmospherics, just being able to operate an air alarm does not make you qualified to do everything else in atmos. The access is separate to keep idiots out of atmospherics (or try to at least).

[cloud]

The vast majority of engineers I see seem capable of doing atmospherics work, and if we're talking about the main atmospherics loop, the alt-title makes that slight distinction well enough imo. Apprentices probably shouldn't have access to there. But if it's a case of atmos grief, if someone wants to get in there it's a matter of pulsing the door, and iirc admins get logs to do with any major changes in there anyway?

But if this is more of an OOC issue of knowing too much, etc. then perhaps we should just change that? Something like an engineer knowing surgery is understandable, but supposedly not knowing how to wrench in a pipe doesn't make sense to me.

[Lohikar]

The vast majority of engineers I see seem capable of doing atmospherics work, and if we're talking about the main atmospherics loop, the alt-title makes that slight distinction well enough imo. Apprentices probably shouldn't have access to there. But if it's a case of atmos grief, if someone wants to get in there it's a matter of pulsing the door, and iirc admins get logs to do with any major changes in there anyway?

But if this is more of an OOC issue of knowing too much, etc. then perhaps we should just change that? Something like an engineer knowing surgery is understandable, but supposedly not knowing how to wrench in a pipe doesn't make sense to me.

 

There's more to atmospherics than installing pipes y'know.

Engineering is already short on unique job slots, we don't need to cut it down even further.

[moltenkore]

Replacing the nitrogen canisters in the engine room and making it phoron by default seems like a good idea as 95% of people disregard the nitrogen policy anyway.

As for atmospheric technician being moved to engineering as a whole, it does seem like a decent idea on paper however, what Lohi says is true and cutting down engineering to just one role would be a bad idea. Maybe the case is too many engineers knowing too much and the default engineering role should be moved to say a specialised role name such as "structural engineer" or something.

[cloud]

There's more to atmospherics than installing pipes y'know.

Engineering is already short on unique job slots, we don't need to cut it down even further.

 

If you're talking about understanding atmospheric differences etc. I don't think that's complex enough to justify a separate position with separate access, especially considering that most random atmos techies that join don't understand all that stuff anyway.

But if we're talking about the main portion of atmospherics, how is it any different to the engine room, or solars? Electricians still have access to the engine room, as do maintenance technicians.

I just don't see any benefit to having something that people have to break into so often locked behind a separate role. I get what you're saying about having a lack of unique job slots, but I don't think arbitrarily assigning a potentially crucial, and more often than not untouched, aspect of engineering behind a dead job slot in order to bump up the numbers is the solution.

 

Replacing the nitrogen canisters in the engine room and making it phoron by default seems like a good idea as 95% of people disregard the nitrogen policy anyway.

As for atmospheric technician being moved to engineering as a whole, it does seem like a decent idea on paper however, what Lohi says is true and cutting down engineering to just one role would be a bad idea. Maybe the case is too many engineers knowing too much and the default engineering role should be moved to say a specialised role name such as "structural engineer" or something.

 

I get what you're saying about engineers knowing too much, but then where do we start to draw the line between what they should and shouldn't know? Are we basing their access and knowledge entirely on their job title, as opposed to any kind of specialization? At that point, I think we'd need a rework of engineering entirely, which is a pretty big undertaking and realistically isn't going to happen.

[climax708]

Something like that was already suggested. Here are links:

https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10300&p=92151#p92151

https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10301&p=92152#p92152

There's a good reason to keep some nitrogen in the engine room, and that is emergency cooling. Nitrogen is traditionally used for that.

[Scheveningen]

There's more to atmospherics than installing pipes y'know.

Engineering is already short on unique job slots, we don't need to cut it down even further.

 

If you're talking about understanding atmospheric differences etc. I don't think that's complex enough to justify a separate position with separate access, especially considering that most random atmos techies that join don't understand all that stuff anyway.

But if we're talking about the main portion of atmospherics, how is it any different to the engine room, or solars? Electricians still have access to the engine room, as do maintenance technicians.

I just don't see any benefit to having something that people have to break into so often locked behind a separate role. I get what you're saying about having a lack of unique job slots, but I don't think arbitrarily assigning a potentially crucial, and more often than not untouched, aspect of engineering behind a dead job slot in order to bump up the numbers is the solution.

 

Replacing the nitrogen canisters in the engine room and making it phoron by default seems like a good idea as 95% of people disregard the nitrogen policy anyway.

As for atmospheric technician being moved to engineering as a whole, it does seem like a decent idea on paper however, what Lohi says is true and cutting down engineering to just one role would be a bad idea. Maybe the case is too many engineers knowing too much and the default engineering role should be moved to say a specialised role name such as "structural engineer" or something.

 

I get what you're saying about engineers knowing too much, but then where do we start to draw the line between what they should and shouldn't know? Are we basing their access and knowledge entirely on their job title, as opposed to any kind of specialization? At that point, I think we'd need a rework of engineering entirely, which is a pretty big undertaking and realistically isn't going to happen.

 

There is justification for the division. Pipenets are not terribly complex (they can still be hard to wrap your head around if you're an engineering newbie, though), it's the fact that understanding the distribution network itself is not very easy when you are new. The divide between atmos tech and engineer is present to avoid having one singular job that has a gigantic amount of bloat in terms of inherent responsibilities. Engineers should not be expected to do too much.

[cloud]

Something like that was already suggested. Here are links:

https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10300&p=92151#p92151

https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=10301&p=92152#p92152

There's a good reason to keep some nitrogen in the engine room, and that is emergency cooling. Nitrogen is traditionally used for that.

 

Thanks for the links, it's a shame they didn't get any traction, aside from the second one which is a bit of a bad solution imo.

I don't wanna digress too much about coolant types etc. but having phoron in there alongside nitrogen wouldn't be too much of a stretch would it? There's plenty of room.

 

There is justification for the division. Pipenets are not terribly complex (they can still be hard to wrap your head around if you're an engineering newbie, though), it's the fact that understanding the distribution network itself is not very easy when you are new. The divide between atmos tech and engineer is present to avoid having one singular job that has a gigantic amount of bloat in terms of inherent responsibilities. Engineers should not be expected to do too much.

 

I understand what you're saying with regards to the complexity, but like you said, when you're new. The engine is probably pretty tough to get when you're new as well.

Still, considering the surprising amount of push back for a pretty dead job slot that gets broken into the majority of the time anyway, how do you guys feel about sticking phoron cans into the engine room?

[Scheveningen]

Fine, I guess. Even with the options for choice, phoron's the superior output choice anyway, if not the only choice considering how much you need to endanger the SM integrity to get any other loop running and powering the station consistently, due to the amount of devices that require power.