Increasing rarity of medical scanners

[wowzewow]

Basically, make med-scanners unavailable for departments other than medical and dedicated medical rooms on shuttles, away ships, independents etc.

Reasons :

1. More reasons for people to interact with Medical's mechanics. / Basic medical diagnosis is already there

It is fun to be able to flex your ghetto medical skills. It makes things interesting. Anyway, most injuries are mostly an examine-bandage fix anyway, so even then, you don't even need to go through the trouble.

2. "Soft" mechanical skills for medical.

Inherently, it makes sense for only trained medical staff and contractors to understand how to use one. Anything more complex is out of the purview of the layman crewmember who shouldn't be attempting medical stuff anyway other than CPR. It's not like you need to know the 0.1 burn/brute damage to apply an autoinjector.

3. Gives more agency to medical players

Rather than having more people having baseline medical skills that makes medical's jobs moot, it encourages people to actually go see someone from medical for an actual diagnosis, better yet, give medical more opportunities to step up.

Anyway. If you REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted a medical scanner... just ask medical. Roleplay for it. It's just like asking engineering for insulated gloves. Better yet, just play medical in the first place.

 

Now. I know the argument of the health analyser being a "basic item", but I really do believe it's not, it's just thought to be so by virtue of just existing there for so long. However, the "basic" actions can be already be achieved by grab-examining.

This also applies for the argument that "it's an augment, therefore it's basic, removing it would force people to pick it."

You can use augments to hack doors. You can also just bash it open using a crowbar.

You can use the medical scanner augment to scan injuries. You can also just grab-examine.

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by wowzewow

[Ramke]

Most of my fun recent medical experiences were when we were severely under-geared or didn't have basic things like handheld scanners, as that encouraged having the patient cooperate and explain what happened, what's hurt, what's bleeding, what's broken, what's wrong, etc instead of just left clicking them once and finding out everything while the hurt person can AFK.

Medical scanners are basically already unavailable to departments unless they get shipped medkits though, to my awareness. That or they steal it from the shuttles/forensics autopsy/etc.

Eitherway I wouldn't mind and personally would like them to be more rare since that, in my experience, encouraged two-sided cooperation instead of succumbing to the medical treadmill. The only thing I'd be wary of is perhaps getting a better way to determine bleeds if someone is unresponsive, and maybe upgrade the stethoscope to be more specific in terms of organ damage (i.e. right now it doesn't show heart damage iirc, and if there's any lung damage it will show "no respiration").

[wowzewow]

13 minutes ago, Ramke said:

Eitherway I wouldn't mind and personally would like them to be more rare since that, in my experience, encouraged two-sided cooperation instead of succumbing to the medical treadmill. The only thing I'd be wary of is perhaps getting a better way to determine bleeds if someone is unresponsive, and maybe upgrade the stethoscope to be more specific in terms of organ damage (i.e. right now it doesn't show heart damage iirc, and if there's any lung damage it will show "no respiration").

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll be willing to code stuff like this, so anyone reading this thread feel free to suggest stuff too.

[Fluffy]

I would personally rather some additional, advanced diseases that requires different devices to be discovered and treated which are only available in medbay (and finally make any actual use of the third deck area) rather than reducing the availability of something that is already around, something like an ECG to diagnose an imminent heart failure that does not show up on a handheld scanner and simply tell you that your chest hurt for example, or an hemogasanalysis device that identifies sepsis, things like that

[GeneralCamo]

I was considering porting the various levels of portable medical scanners from Polaris. We could potentially find a compromise here: Make really poor scanners that handle surface-level stuff only common, and everything else is either rare or non-existent unless you work with Science.

[greenjoe]

I had a bit of a concept for a very basic health scanner before, which would ICly be something that anyone can use without any training.
It'd have very very basic info, only really saying things like if there's an arterial bleed (and to call medical personnel if so), say if someone needs CPR, etc, not even showing things like pulse level. blood level (only saying if someone's low on blood, and to call medical personnel if so)