1 dismissal Give shaft miners (and/or others, reasonably) the OOC right to pilot the Intrepid in emergencies

[dessysalta]

Title says it all! A semi-recent staff complaint caught my attention as I was spelunking on the forums and come to find out, you aren't allowed to pilot the Intrepid as a shaft miner even in emergencies, because you're forbidden OOCly.

This is pretty weird in my eyes, especially because one of the things that I like about this server is you're allowed to do over-the-top nonsense that your character wouldn't normally do when they have a justifiable reason to do so (like gunning someone down when they just killed your character's partner). Almost every other mechanic or guide revolves around having a character or antagonist roll that must be played realistically; you're allowed to overcharge people or use contraband as a secoff if your character is scummy, you can be an asshole in the lower ranks on the station, you can even have a greater tendency to kill people depending on which race you choose and what has happened to them over the course of the shift, with the downside of all of these being the fact that your character is held liable for these sorts of things. I can only understand this OOC limit as though it was made to prevent miner players from overstepping, but that that sort of defeats the purpose of IC regulations if you stonewall like this, imo.

I feel like it's made worse by the fact that piloting a space ship should be like piloting a plane over 4 centuries into the future. You can't logically say that someone with qualifications to fly a small shuttle would have no idea how to fly a shuttle that isn't that much larger, and imposing an OOC limit for this sort of thing just kills potential creativity. There isn't anything keeping people from putting qualifications in their records as a pilot when it makes sense for them to have them (such as a ex-military PMCs), so why put a hard limit OOCly on what can be flown and when? I have to bring up the "canon event" argument here, too--if there's a canon event that leaves the ship worse enough for wear that a miner must depart immediately and the Spark is inoperable, why am I, as a player, not allowed to take hold of the Intrepid, despite my character having every reason to do so, even if they won't do it very well? Is my character supposed to just give up despite there being no IC justification for that?

It's a weird conclusion to jump to. Like I said, I understand it was probably made to filter out powergamers, but whenever this regulation was implemented, it's definitely been overshadowed by the playerbase in recent years. Plus, you can already talk to staff about having a character who can pilot these things without necessarily being one of the roles, as listed on the bottom of the "Who can fly what?" section.

Also, for the record, I'll consider the Canary enough of a change from the Spark given it's more akin to a fighter jet than a shuttle, so miners shouldn't have access to it.

[Arrow768]

Voting for dismissal.

Just because someone knows how to pilot a small purpose built craft does not mean that they have any idea on how to pilot something much larger.
(If you would like a real life example, compare a Cessna cockpit to that of a Learjet or even a Boeing)

[Sniblet]

Not knowing how to fly a Boeing does not mean that, if the real pilot is dead on the controls and the plane is nosediving, you are physically unable to try your luck with the wrong license. You might not be a good pilot for the situation, but if it's you trying your best or else somebody dies? Are we meant to roleplay the panel detecting our lack of education and locking up? Does the miner look at the other passengers looking at him as they careen into a meteor field and say, "hey, sorry guys, I know I'm soooo good at flying Spark, I know all I have to do is get the inertia dampeners to work, but if I so much as try flying here I could get banned..... wait... I mean sued....."

There's no excuse for an average miner to be flying Intrepid regularly if Intrepid is much more complicated, and that makes entire sense. However, in a major emergency, when no one else is able to do anything about something, and there is no alternative, and the stakes are high enough to justify anything, real people might try to do things that they might not have a license on record for. It's a similar rule to surgery, except even emergency surgery only has one person's life at stake, and piloting can be much worse than that.

 

In the staff complaint, only one person's life was at stake - I don't think the miner was justified in adding himself, and worse, the Intrepid to the list of assets in serious danger. But what if the person dying on the asteroid was his super secret crush, and he was willing to throw his safety and his job away for the chance to save them? What if five people are dying on the asteroid? What if the captain's problematic lesbian girlfriend is dying on the asteroid (and the captain incidentally gave her problematic lesbian girlfriend both of her arms earlier because she asked nicely so the captain can't fly) and she's begging the miner please to give it his best try? What if the miner is a vaurca and a Ta is dying on the asteroid? You can't sit down and emote "^ flicks some switches, sweating all over!" for two minutes and then push the launch button. You can't do anything that ends in pushing the launch button. You can't. You don't got a loicense fer that ship, mate, ye can't.

 

Since it's mechanically hard to fail at surgery or piloting if you have the OOC knowledge, it makes sense to put a hard OOC barrier in front of even trying for most situations. But sometimes it's more realistic to try something difficult, even when you're overwhelmingly likely to fail. The rules as-is don't account for that. You simply cannot try, ever. You might as well ID lock the console and let antags ignore the lock and then be done with it.

Tangentially, I think higher level ships should have different sprites for their controls, so you can see how you're putting yourself in the deep end (or how awesome and good of a pilot you are as BC) without someone having to actually bloat the flight mechanics.

Edited March 9 by Sniblet