Retry removing roundstart setup

[WickedCybs]

15 minutes ago, kyres1 said:

The purpose of the "worst case" statement here was to say that we have less problems to solve, hypothetically. As in, the expectation is to still have problems on our plate if we even drop a metaphorical nuke on the whole department. It leaves the actual impact of these things more clear on the rest of the server, which I painted out as requiring even more content for every department to do constantly to even make up for the debilitating aspects setup has on the problem-rounds in question.

At its core, yes, I played engineering for years. Engineering players matter and I didn't say the contrary, but I did say that we're definitely trading the entire rest of the server's detriment for their enjoyment. That in of itself is not really an outrageous claim to make given the circumstance, to me.

Prefacing this, didn't see your last post because I posted at roughly the same time as you. That aside we will just have to disagree on how detrimental we think it's for the rest of the server at the moment but I do ultimately agree we can take steps to bridge the gap, so to speak.

[ShakyJake]

Hello, local pipe gremlin here. I think it's already been established that automating the current engineering gameplay loop without replacing is not an option here, so I won't go over all the thoughts I had looking at the original post. I'd still like to make some comments around the set up of things for engineering, as somebody that plays the department exclusively.

It's pretty quick and easy to set both power and thrusters up to an acceptable degree as it stands, but I think it should be made clear that having them on and running from the start eliminates most possibilities of trying something new or different with them. In most cases, modifications have to be done in the setup. This is especially the case when you're dealing with anything that largely involves pipes, (SM, thrusters). Once all the gas is in, its a bitch or almost impossible to take back out and start over. You've committed at this point for the whole round.

Giving the option to make modifications can allow engineering to push things to a much higher performance than you'd typically see, which gives engineering means of making a notable positive impact on a round in comparison to others. For that reason, I'm not really in support of automating the setup of these systems to be replaced by something else to begin with. At least, definitely not the thrusters.
 

Another note on the Horizon's thrusters, engineers don't actually need to have an extensive knowledge of atmospherics nor do they need to spend much time on them in order to get them working fine. 

This is why we have the cold phoron setup, and its an option that most disregard entirely. It is done in literally three steps and takes less than a minute while providing the Horizon with acceleration up to 1.38 Gm/h per burn. That's more than twice the acceleration your standard 80/20 burn setup gives for a fraction of the time. The only reason this isn't the standard way of doing things is because its very phoron inefficient and we're in a phoron crisis, not because its mechanically inferior. 

(The thruster guide is currently outdated, but all you have to do is set the phoron supply monitor's output pressure to 15,000kPa, turn the digital valve on the floor, and unlock the adjacent pressure regulator while maxing out its target pressure. Repeat for both thrusters. Done.)

 

As for the round start setup of things impeding the crew's ability to carry out expeditions to Adhomai or elsewhere, I think engineering's part in this may be a little overblown here. While it certainly helps to have the Horizon move the ship around the sector, the Intrepid is capable of doing all of that on its own.

The Intrepid starts off with a full SMES, a pressure tank of CO2, a full phoron tank for secondary thrust, its own sensors, its own air supply, its own stocked medbay, expedition weaponry--Everything. The fuel on the Intrepid is enough to travel the entire sector with efficient flying and fuel usage. How soon you leave more depends on you getting ready with your gear, not engineering setting up the ship. Additionally, as I understand it, whenever Adhomai spawns it does so within a couple grids of the Horizon so that the Intrepid can launch directly to it.
(Fun fact, you only need to set the pumps to 2,000kPa in order to get an acceleration of 1.0 gm/h per burn with the Intrepid. Do that instead of maxing them out to 15,000kPa for more efficient fuel usage.)

 

That aside, the fact that lowpop suffers from things like power outages without engineering staff available is definitely a problem, but there's a few potential ideas that immediately come to mind that could help alleviate it. 

1. Charged SMESes. This was brought up in the original post, and is also actually something we already kind of do. Currently, the SM SMES starts at 75%, and the Tesla at 50%. Telecomm's substation also starts fully charged to ensure comms last as long as possible. Now, I wouldn't have the SM and Tesla SMESes start fully charged since engineers already have to wait a while for these to drain in order to upgrade them, but an SMES or two that acts as a reserve battery might help.
Specifically, the port and starboard wing substations currently do absolutely nothing. The only APC on their grid is the APC of the substation room itself. If these substations started fully charged with maxed output and a disabled input, it would give the ship a bit more breath before the lights go out so long as the breakers aren't touched.

2. Disable shield substation charging being on by default. At roundstart, the shield substation starts with a little over 30% charge, and is set to draw 500kW until its full. If its a lowpop round and the ships not doing a lot, the shield subgrid is really the last thing you want to worry about sending power to, especially since the generator itself won't even be turned on without engineering staff. Making it so this substation starts with its input disabled would significantly prolong how long the ship's starting power lasts on lowpop.

3. Solars. This has already been brought up, but I'll reiterate it because its not a bad option. There's a lot of space on the roof of deck two that could potentially be used to lay out solar arrays. The Horizon's idle ship power usage can be as low as 400kW when you aren't trying to charge shields or its substations. Given that 1 solar panel produces 1.5kW, you could easily cover idle ship power usage with an array of 300 panels. That sounds like a lot, but for reference, that's exactly how many the sensor relay site has.

[Boggle08]

Perhaps as a by-product of the department being so light on activities, people’s reasons for playing are varied and broad. Some like the relative lack of interruptions post configuration, others are more technical, and explore deeper mechanics or subsystem configurations. Some even stick around for the seldom times we take damage, and make it a game to speedrun their way through breaches. One of my reasons for joining this server to begin with was to play atmos in peace, and my reasons for still playing are a combination of all of the above. Attempting to address one appeal, and one appeal only, of playing engineering is going to narrow down what kind of player we want back there, and alienate others. Ideally, we should maximize the number of ways you can play engineering “appropriately.”

On the matter of altering or reducing setup times, this is something that should happen. Not today, not before we introduce features to supplant their absence, but it needs to happen. A full engineering staff can assemble the subsystems in 30 minutes(perhaps half if they’re on their A game coordinating). Doing it alone, especially if you’re trying to install optimal configs, or playing a slow species, it can take upwards of 40 minutes or more. Thruster modifications are especially time consuming. These setup times hold engineering and departments that are dependent on them hostage. What’s even worse, however, is that all of our subsystems are a solved game. Us technical players that we are, we have optimized the subsystem configurations that are virtually the best in every single scenario, and leagues better than the wiki default. What is also terrible is that almost all of our subsystems cannot be reconfigured on the fly, which further damages opportunities to experiment, or adjust for circumstances. Experimenting is also bad on time, and again, the rest of the station has needs that only engineering can meet with their time budget.

Fixing our setup problem involves fixing our subsystem problems. Step one is making our subsystems easier to modify post start-up, whether that means being able to reset the entire subsystem or easily make modifications safely on the fly. Both engines come to mind on this. As an example, the SM could start the round at a low energy trickle, just enough to maintain homeostasis for a skeleton crew. The main SMES starts bypassed and set to not charge. An emergency power supply garage filled with portagens can serve as means for people to temporarily utilize machinery that would generate brownouts in the system. Ordinarily, this would cuck a joining engineer out of being able to setup, optimize, and experiment with the engine, but if the engineer can hit a reset button(or some mechanically appropriate equivalent), the concern is moot.

In regards to the BC’s dependencies at lowpop, I could think of some ways to remedy this:

- introduce a refueling station just outside atmos, with a single access restricted phoron tank(not a canister, a tank) for use. The port should feed directly from the Co2 line by default, but it should also have the pumps necessary to accept from mix line.

- Give the intrepid its own shielding unit. During deadhour, it can function as a quicker and less time expensive alternative for general overmap exploration. Perhaps even give it more starting propellant.

Thruster nacelles are something I have much to say on as well. Right now, they have little functionality, you put the fuel in and it goes. Modifying them for heated pure phoron configurations is practically a necessity at this point, and doing so is both drastic to the infrastructure and very time expensive. A solution to this, in my view, is to design a pipe network in our thruster compartments that is “universal”, incorporating as many design elements as we can to reduce setup times. Need a h/e assembly in the burn chamber? Already there. Want to experiment with other oxidizers, or try to burn H2 for propulsion like the wiki says? You don’t have to lay the pipeline, the pump is right there.

I think it might be worth us having auxiliary thrusters that work differently, sort of like how we have an auxiliary reactor to power the ship in the form of the Tesla. Ion thrusters might do the trick. I don’t know shit about fuck how they work IRL, but apparently, they just use electricity to run. We could cram a bunch into the deck 2 wings and have a power intensive alternative to the main nacelles that come online when the main reactors do. 

What I hope in the long term, however, are more customizable engine and thruster configs. As I’ve said, it’s a solved game. There is no reason to install configurations into the engines or thrusters that don’t maximize power or thrust output, unless it is to save time. On servers that use TGcode, you are capable of synthesizing unique gasses using gas interactions inside of the supermatter, and fusion. Fusion is too wacky for us, but gas synthesis would be a welcome edition to our SM, simply because it would mean we would have reasons to configure the SM for purposes besides power generation. Good examples of what our SM could produce are better thruster propellant, or gas that makes cryo tubes more efficient. Configuring the engine for power generation won’t be the only right way to do things. Same principle can be applied to the shields and thrusters: avoid game design where we are able optimize subsystems to work in all use cases. The endgame of such a design principle being put into place is that engineering will get to customize the horizon every round. How it behaves in the overmap, her power budget, how and where the effort goes into the subsystems. And if they don’t want to do that, the infrastructure of the ship will allow them to rip through what they need to do and get right to the RP. 

About away mission stuff, I’m just gonna put a concept I’ve been mulling over into a new thread. This post is getting longer than it has any right to be.

In summary, we should slowly reduce engineering’s setup obligations as we add more shit for them. I want to chair RP for four hours while putting oxygen into the SM, and the fact I have to hustle so some poor bastard BC can play the game is crimping my style.