Cloning: Once more, with Feeling.

[Warbidon]

Cloning as it stands now is a process that is fickle, unpleasant and usually ignored by all senior staff members because it is a headache to deal with. here is how I propose it is to be changed.

 

A Security Officer, Daniel Turing, takes a deep breath, gun drawn and pointed ot the floor. Bullets and the half second roar of a laser rifle firing past his cover nearly omnipresent.

He was dying. Blood was pooling ont he floor, trickling down fron his abdomen.

putting a hand ot his radio, he quietly calls out, "Medical to Port Hall-Way."

Looking ot his left, he sees on the other side of the hallway a man in only leather straps and a loincloth, sporting a bright pink mo-hawk. He didn't even catch his name, but he was a good guy, as according ot the Head of Security who probably cooked his brains with blow.

"I need a WEAPON" screamed out the mohawked maniac. 

Obliging, he tossed his gun out towards the man before passing the fuck out.

Medical responded a short while later, moving the cadavers of officer Turing as well as the entire syndicate assault team. he was labeled a hero, even as he was brought into depths of the medical bay for the msot complicated procedure yet, the pre-empt to cloning.

At this point, there are two paths that I can see happening.

#1: The body is moved to Medical. After a brief amount of time, the body goes through a complex machine that scans it, finding everything it needs to clone the person in question, and then dumping the now useless pile of meat. Than the whole sum of an entire person, his feelings, his thoughts as well everything that made him, him, is put into a complex data storage called a life Cylinder. Except for some small details like the last 30 minutes of his life span, what his three kids looked like, and the fact that he gave a gun to a guy with a Mohawk He'll remember everything, as long as that Cylinder gets to Centcomm. This process has to be done soon, as it has a time limit, as the tissue will degrade eventually.

#2.The body is put through a machine that systemically preserves it, with a special care for nervous tissue. Maybe it looks like that machine that puts muscles on a Synth in fallout 4, and the body is preserved just long enough so that if it makes it to cent-comm, they get cloned. This has to be done quick, or else the tissue wont be good enough for cloning. Afterwards, they are put into a special shrink wrapped bag so they dont rot in open air. There should be a loading dock in either medical or the Red Dock to hold these cadavers.

 

Both of these processes take time and resources, and there must be some sense of urgency before someone is dead forever. If they are interrupted before completion, the end result is a dead body, dead forever. Interrupted scans result in corrupted data, and interrupted preservation results in a fouled body.

 

What are the benefits?

1. Cloning takes place off station.

2. An effort can be made ti bring people back, even if it is costly, at least in terms of consumable resources (Life Cylinders or whatever the preservative machine will use.).

3. It can be sabotaged like anything else.

Edited December 2, 2019 by Warbidon

[Crozarius]

While thematically I like this more than what we have at present in a lore perspective (I prefer neural laces tbh), I have my reservations from a gameplay perspective. I'm biased and selfish and I want to see my characters cloned if they die and are found, and with this change I won't be able to RP recovery at all - I'll just be dead until transfer 

 

However beyond that very selfish reasoning there's some other issues I'd like to raise: Firstly this is going to effectively remove half of the psychiatrist's job, and remove cloning trauma. I, personally enjoy RPing through this process.

 

Secondly, the time limit. I'm leery of the idea that if nobody finds you within X amount of time you're just dead. Ppbbt. Canon dead forever. I can see this opening up Medical to a lot of stress for not being fast enough in processing/handling the body before it degrades. In fact whereas before Medical that lack staff/experience to clone properly could just do nothing and store the cadaver, they're going to get screamed at for not being quick enough to preserve the corpse and take a scan and so on and so forth, with inevitable IRs and everything that entails.

 

 

Heads of Staff instantly being cloned on death, invalidating the efforts of a would-be assasin **does** suck, but really I feel as though a better solution to that would be to allow assassins to headgib/decapitate rather than just making everyone wholesale uncloneable on-station.

[N8-Toe]

I will say the same thing I say to all cloning replacements. Cloning needs to be removed. With brainmed around the corner it will be harder to die of things that shouldn't be lethal. We have 2 hour rounds, with respawns. if a character dies they should stay dead. lower the respawn timer so people can hop back in, and allow people to invalidate deaths in canon things as just crippling injury or such. But cloning removes tension and invalidates antag actions and in my opinion, making it harder to tell a good story. 

 

The dead should stay dead

[MattAtlas]

I would prefer people only discuss cloning removals after brainmed is fully merged. Since speculating about if it's needed or not right now is a bit useless with brainmed being 1 or 2 days off from being merged.

[GreenBoi]

I used to agree with the idea that we should remove cloning, but honestly, it's changed for me. I've looked at it from how rounds usually go and what is most likely to actually happen, and I feel that cloning is relatively fine where it is.

 

Here's why.

 

Despite what numerous people say, a lot of people just go MIF for cloning. Most of the times you attempt to clone, it will be an MIF.  Past that, it is incredibly easy to make sure someone can't be cloned: antags can snip off power to the room, screw open the clonepod so it's in maintenance mode and isn't working, ghetto-surgery cut off a victim's head and then throw that into disposals- or just hide the body well? If you want to be a real asshole, you could surgically de-brain a person and hide that away somewhere while the body is uncloneable.

 

Now, to the age-old "cloning removes tension"

 

I completely disagree with this statement. Just because someone can be cloned doesn't mean it won't still mean a lot if they die. When a person dies, the murderer very easily gains access to everything the victim had on them. Past that, cloning a person will take 12-20 minutes until they are mechanically able to get out and do stuff; this period is an interval the antag 100% knows where the person will be as well as a time when the person is MIA. The person being MIA for this amount of time is important if they're a head of staff because it allows the antag to use and abuse this time, or maybe finish the job and kill the clone.

 

Besides this, cloning on Red and such usually doesn't happen save for heads of staff (though sometimes not at all) because the threat might just be too prominent for medbay to waste time caring for a clone.

 

Also, little-known tip: if you don't have a psych, but you have a competent science division, just ask them to upgrade the clonepod w/ the best parts. Clones that drop out of it won't even come with traumas though I also remember Matt saying something about clones not spawning with traumas during the testmerge, but I don't know if this still happens because of the lack of clones I get

[Warbidon]

I'm actually with greenboi, and I would advocate for this if the alternative was only to remove cloning.

[Fluffy]

Cloning was removed, so this suggestion is considered outdated.

Locking and archiving.