Improving Thermals

[Carver]

Thermals; Once the Detective's bread and butter, then relegated to a fairly popular antag-only item. They've aged rather poorly these days in their disguisability. Simply put, it's always obvious that you're wearing thermals.

We have,

• Aviators: The only functioning disguise, they're something you'll never see worn by anyone but Captains, Consulars/Liaisons, the HoP and QM - Security will be wearing their signature (and visually different) HUD variants instead. For a greater majority of the station, they're worthless as a disguise. They don't even offer flash protection when the thermal mode is disabled, for Christ's sake.
• Optical Meson Scanner: A disguise recently rendered extremely outdated. This has no reason to exist anymore as the only time you'll see mesons is in the hands of antagonists.
• HEATpatch: Fashionable, but very blatant in what they are.
• Optical Thermal Scanner: The rarest of all, so old they can't even be toggled off. Last seen in the hands of Detectives when most of the current playerbase were pre-teens.

Now, for the suggestion itself; I'll list the variants again with possible adjustments. The suggested changes don't focus on improving their disguise factor, but rather increase their appeal to any antagonist having a look at them in the uplink.

• Aviators: 6 TCs, give them flash protection when thermal mode is toggled off. They remain a semi-viable disguise and are given utility in combat.
• Optical Meson Scanner: Remove them from the uplink, replace them with the Optical Thermal Scanner. May as well use the old sprite.
• HEATpatch: 5 TCs, cost lowered by 1. They aren't a disguise, so they should naturally be cheaper.
• Optical Thermal Scanner: 5 TCs, replacing the Optical Meson Scanner at a lower cost. Add the ability to toggle them off like you can with the other goggles and the HUDpatch.
• All: Let Thermals see cloaked entities once again. It would allow for other antagonists to counter ninjas via TC investment.

Edited September 6, 2020 by Carver

[Sparky_hotdog]

This might just be me, but from an IC perspective, disguising them shouldn't be needed. People wear aviators and iPatches all the time (sure patches are less common, but it's not exactly a suspicious item), and the colour/name/description is mostly there as an OOC guide. ICly your librarian has no reason to know that orange tinted glasses are thermals, so they really shouldn't need to be disguised any more than that.