Add explo equipment to TEMPORARILY supplant emergency departments

[kyres1]

These additions relate to emergency departments in the context of off-ship expeditions and away dispatches of any sort. It doesn't mean to imply we should make these more or less available to every department inside the ship, which is easy to misunderstand here.

This suggestion is to simply add temporary measures, like gauze in your emergency box, to soften the impact of game-ending frequent things such as lung-popping and severe bleeding where they can be saved.

For away team medical purposes

Very basic recovery and fatality-prolonging methods in medical equipment that don't rely on completely rejuvenating the wounded is a very, very good idea to further make exploring things less blatantly suicidal when we lack a loaded medical department or EMT on every away team.

Those are;

Spoiler

Two inhalers of the current lung-mending medication available on our shuttles.

Putting more, but not too many stasis bags on shuttles. More importantly, making stasis bags safer (since they cause genetic damage, I think?) would let disabling injuries stay disabling while letting lethal injuries remain entirely lethal. If they currently pause all medical difficulties, simply make them non-functional after certain thresholds of injury, so people can't save their characters with pocket bags.

Explicitly for shuttles, higher-end pain medications in code that otherwise go unused, like anti-shock painkillers that practically paralyze you but prevent you from dying of cardiac arrest. This is an especially good idea for when people deal with our current environmental effects in the future, since burning, depressurization, freezing and super heated/freezing gasses will individually damage every zone on your body and you'll end up dying from a slow-coming pain-related heart stop from very rudimentary or fast, unavoidable circumstances. Basically, we haven't had it occur much yet since there's been few cases of lava exposure, but when we begin reaching more extraordinary or varied planets these issues will become really annoying to see deaths on simple exploration missions that were thought to have no real risk with competent people.

For away team security purposes

Expedition shotguns suck for their intended purpose, which is killing any hostile wildlife or low-threat obstacles teams might face. They are, contrarily, extremely useful for instantly killing player characters due to their high volume of laser fire. Since they have literally three-four clicks worth of ammunition each, and expend all their high-damage shots in this time, and can't be reloaded without a powered stationary charger, they do more harm than good as our now secondary (to machetes) protective tool.

Since away-site firing pins already strain believability, it sounds fine to replace these things with literally mechanically inaccessible, but more capable firearms and defensive tools that would only become available when the shuttles depart from the Horizon. Locking those behind really obtuse or specific methods, like having the shuttle undock to access them in the first place, would immediately curb a lot of risk in letting players have access to good gear so readily. It would make the effort and intention separable for those looking at it as literal powergaming, because un-docking and re-docking a shuttle to unlock good gear when two armories are available is precisely that.

Without being pedantic about specifically balancing it, just give them whatever ends up being agreeable that isn't just the current gear. If it can reload and have supplies prepared for it, it's plenty beneficial. If less blatantly weaponized things like protective and environmental gear can be accomplished, even better.

For literally every other emergency department

Any other emergency circumstance right now is well oriented around the allocation of people and materials to given points. Mostly engineering, which is literally a matter of moving materials/tools and fixing problems. They already have these expectations in place when joining expeditions that require those materials and expertise from them, so there's really no changes towards them, or anybody else who is especially important to bring on away missions.

 

[WickedCybs]

I'd say that I think this is a deeper problem that Aurora has had for a while now that essential stuff like (just as an example) a publicly available medical kit could be seen as an anathema and "robbing" medical of its gameplay. The reality now that you've touched on is that it's even harder to believe the crew has any robust ways to help itself when they're expected to go out and do expeditions and be independent.

I'd go further and say the medical lockers around the ship could do with having way more medical supplies and more robust ones at that. We should allow people in general to use stuff like the sleeper on the Intrepid (this is a REALLY good tool to keep someone alive and it doesn't even solve their inherent problems). People can say "sucks to suck" or that an EMT should really be present but away teams shouldn't have any requirement to keep a security officer to protect them or an EMT (and medical only gets the two). Through any reasonable means possible, we should give people the ability to do their best to ensure they survive as long as possible, it's not as if a dead person is going to offer any further roleplay to any department once they're back past any grief roleplay. They would also still have long-term issues only medical can solve.

The part where I differ here mostly, is that I don't think weapons should be standard-issue past the machetes, which are more of a utility tool. If they're absolutely required, they could ask for them but otherwise I think most of the time it's not needed.

[WickedCybs]

Forgot to mention I also think it wouldn't be a problem to make it so the xenoarchs/bcs/the pilot can mostly setup and refuel the shuttle alone. The idea of a refueling port has been shot down in the past, but it continues to look pretty good to me if we're imagining the ideal future where people lollygag on expedition prep and there's confusion on who does what to help who.

Someone who goes on expeditions can also tell me if I'm wrong, but at this point what I've been noticing is that instead of trying to get more fuel/supplies from a department like they used to, expeditions generally leave ASAP with anything they can procure themselves without relying on others that might potentially delay them. They typically don't suffer for this, as the fuel consumption of the secondary thrust was lowered by a lot and they don't burn enough to run out of gas for now.

[Scheveningen]

I think it'd be a reasonable ask for the expedition shotguns to be replaced with something that is actually effective. Or balance tune them so they don't suck as much, perhaps.

[Carver]

Just make the expedition shotguns recharge more than 1 diffused laser projectile at a time and they're immediately vastly better.