Make Xenoarcheology Relevant

[Aphelion]

Situation:

Xenoarch is a fun thing to play sometimes, but it usually feels very disconnected from the round. Mostly because what you do will rarely influence people, beyond a major artifact having a cool effect from time to time. i.e. corgie cloners, teleporters, universal rechargers, transformation devices, radiation bursts, mental pain machines, etc, etc. These are great if not a bit uncommon, I like these finds. However, something that tends to irk me is just how meaningless the minor artifacts can be, and while the RP value of an interesting blade or trap is nice when people are showing interest, more often than not playing Xenoarcheologist can sometimes feel like wasting your time, because nobody seems to care.

 

Idea/Suggestion:

I think we could make Xenoarch more engaged with the station, if we tied it in more with the other departments in science, particularly R&D. I've seen it done on other servers, where some minor artifacts can be deconstructed to unlock special technology. Not illegal tech, but rather something like "Anomalous tech" or "Progenitor Tech".

If we were to add a new research score for Progenitor Tech, we could introduce a whole collection of interesting items that R&D can produce in the event that specific artifacts are found, breaking up some of the monotony that happens with R&D while making Xenoarcheology actually useful mechanically.

There are two ways I suppose we could introduce this feature.

1. Just allow for special artifacts to be deconstructed with the destructive analyzer

2. Make it so that successfully using the spectrometer on an artifact unlocks a tech level relevant to it.

Personally, I prefer the latter, because it would demand a little more expertise and patience from players to get special technologies.

So that's my idea- for tech so farr... I don't got much. I was thinking maybe like, a portal modulator for custom guns would be neat? Like, an actual portal-gun portal modulator, where you shoot to make an in-portal, then an out-portal somewhere else. Other than that... IDK, this is probably a big spooky project to come up with a handful of interesting tech that can only be unlocked from progenitor technologies, but- eh- it'd be cool. 

[Gromnax]

I don't think deconstructing what are essentially museum artifacts is a good idea roleplay-wise, but the spectrometer gives a good alternative. Instead of a single alien technology level, we could have hidden, 1-level only projects available in rnd, like, for example, alien materials, or alien medical. They would give access, as you said, to some good alternatives to items available through "human" levels. I can imagine alien machine components, or, for alien medical, things that would help with xenobiology or xenobotany, for instance;

 

Anyway. +1 for me.

Edited January 27, 2020 by Gromnax

[NerdyVampire]

Hey bumping this good idea up a notch. There is good reason for the ancient tech to teach us stuff and I think having a new tech tree would indeed spice both sides up a bit. +1 from me.