Make Maintenance Drones Immune to Fall Damage

[chaotic_idealism]

I'm a maintenance drone aficionado. Call me crazy, but I love the brainless little spiderbots.

There was a bug a while ago that made maintenance drones immune to fall damage. You could jump down from one z-level to another, and take no damage. I think it should become a feature.

To be clear: Immune to fall damage only, not any other kind of damage. It should still be really easy to crush a maintenance drone with a crowbar, or your boot, if you want.

In-character reasons:

1. Maintenance drones already travel the ship by disposals system. They can interface with the system to tell it where they want to go; but more importantly, they can protect themselves from the bumps and jostles that would severely hurt a larger, meatier passenger. Why shouldn't they be able to protect themselves from the bumps and jostles of jumping from a railing?
2. Maintenance drones are small. That means that when they impact the floor, there isn't very much momentum--and that means not much energy in the impact. Think of how a mouse can survive a fall at terminal velocity, but a human can't. It's like that. But it's easy to kill a mouse (if you can hit it), despite its resistance to fall damage.
3. Maintenance drones need to be able to climb, jump, and fall to do their jobs. They're small, and they need to be able to reach things that are higher up on the walls, to weld in the plating and seal the cracks. Of course this isn't apparent in a 2D world, but it's obvious. It would be a bad idea to build a maintenance drone that would crack its casing every time it was fixing something on the ceiling and lost its grip.

Out of character reasoning?

Maintenance drones are small and railings don't stop them. This makes sense; they're tiny spiderbots meant to go into tiny spaces. But when you're moving around in a dark maintenance tunnel with a hole in the floor, or when the game lags and you go one space further than you were meaning to, you can easily walk under the railing and fall. And that takes maybe a third of your health at one go. It can be really frustrating to get damaged this way--especially if you are already damaged, say from disassembling malfunctioning fellow drones, and it kills you. And unlike a borg, you're a small brainless robot, so you can't really go and ask for repairs. Unless someone has upgraded a charging station, there's no way to repair damage to yourself. (Your welder doesn't work; it says you "lack the reach"; other drones can repair you, but there often aren't any around.) The only time maintenance drones really interact with the crew at all is when they're subverted by a traitor, and that's quite rare. Making them fall-damage immune would remove one of the most annoying parts of playing a drone, and improve verisimilitude, too.

Edited December 13, 2023 by chaotic_idealism

[NerdyVampire]

Feel like this is a fine idea. I don't see why we need to enforce fall damage on the drones at all. They have built in jetpacks if I'm mistaken, so we can just pretend they are smart enough to activate them momentarily to save themselves if the other reasons aren't sufficient.

[chaotic_idealism]

On 17/12/2023 at 11:56, NerdyVampire said:

Feel like this is a fine idea. I don't see why we need to enforce fall damage on the drones at all. They have built in jetpacks if I'm mistaken, so we can just pretend they are smart enough to activate them momentarily to save themselves if the other reasons aren't sufficient.

I hadn't even thought of the jetpacks. Good point, yes, they should have the ability to use those to break their fall when necessary. Doesn't actually have to be coded in. Just assumed.