Extend the Nuke

[Conservatron]

rather than just have the nuke kill those zones, run the game for 5 minutes after detonation and simulate shrapnel spread from the recently nuked station blasting holes through the tcomsat and asteroid

[TishinaStalker]

Okay, now you confused me.

 

The point of these two rounds is to escalate into a life or death situation. It is designed around fight or flight.

 

Why is it a problem when they select flight over fight then if you just explicitly stated that they're designed to be either fight OR flight? I'm... I'm sorry, but it kinda seems like you made a counterpoint to yourself.

 

I'm simply saying that flight is too easy. To the point where the crew always succeed at getting away, cutting down on genuine conflict.

You'll note I didn't say that every Z-level would be affected. The sattelite, or jumping off would still be viable ways to escape. However, the asteroid isn't difficutl to reach anymore. Not by a long shot. In fact, it's stupidly easy to escape from the escape wing to the outpost. (Perhaps thirty seconds if the AI isn't actively trying to kill the escapees)

The issue isn't that people are running away. It's how easy it is to run away.

 

Ohhhhhh, okay. Now I understand, haha. I was mildly confused by that, so I just wanted that to be cleared up. Thanks!

[swat43]

Then why do we have malf at all? Why do we have nuke? Why do we have both in the secret rotation?

The point of these two rounds is to escalate into a life or death situation. It is designed around fight or flight. There is a very explicit reason that the shuttle is not possible to be called in malfunction, and during nuke the original design was a head-to-head war between the station and the ops.

Yes, I get we aren't the same as every other server. But discarding the very basic premise of the round when the antagonist is playing the round straight is something that should not be done.

It used to be that getting to the outpost alive was an accomplishment. Cargo was, and is, far from the rest of the station. Before the research outpost and the engineering outpost were even a thing, you had to cross the entire damn station to get over there for a chance to escape. Your other alternatives were to jump, or risk the teleporter. Getting out was hard. It was difficult. If the AI wasn't taken down, you almost certainly would die. If you didn't stop the ops, you would probably die.

This led to interesting conflict. Forcing you to face mortality and either weather through it, or crumple. Sometimes both.

Now? People evacuate here at the drop of a hat. Evacuation is easy, and it's inexpensive. People flee to science, engineering, and cargo instantly. To the point where players have screamed and whined when an op team destroyed the asteroid before bombing the station!

The nuke is intended to be game-ender. Do or die for everyone. Yes that even means the fucking chef and bartender (both of whom /do/ have weapons and tools at their disposal).

And right now it's a joke. Just run 30 steps to the nearest shuttle and survive. Whoop! nobody gives a flying fuck about their jobs, because their mortality isn't at risk. Currently the tension that is supposed to be present in those situations is simply missing.

Something needs to be done.

 

I don't even know if you even start to care about the people the players are roleplaying with. I would be out right insulted if i was said what to do as some sort of civilian job to do something that has a death percentage higher then the survive ability.

We both know the obvious why we have antag round types at all. But there is a difference on how we like to solve the problem. You want to risk it all and gain something from the actions you think is best, while i try to save something that is of value, of real value before the REAL shit storm comes in my best of ability.

"Getting to shuttle is eas-" FUCK YOU. I will be straight forward, just F- Off. This is plain stupid statement. Let me explain why.

If the civilians got easy to shuttle and to outpost, then there are two reasons, or hell even multiple! One is they got lucky, second the antag didnt affected these areas, or hell what if antag DID anticipated them to go to outpost, MAKING THEM FEEL safe. There's tons of reasons why and hows. But the real salt is when and what is implemented on that round.

Shuttles can be called but not in normal way. Emergency shuttles CAN however be called because the word EMERGENCY. This was once asked ICLY on the cult round where i was the RD, and a roboticist or scientist was asking 'Shouldn't shuttle be called on Code red' It could be, because it was Emergency one. Now please any one correct me if i am wrong on the shuttle being called on Code delta is possible, and if it's not, then hell, people will do everything JUST TO SURVIVE. ANYTHING. MOST, believe me, MOST will try to preserve themselves and make sure they are safe themselves, and hide their asses.

Evacuation is easy yes.But crew can be hard to be replaced, unless you dont care if clowns come to secured RESEARCH station and honk around the damn place, sure, why not let everyone die. Fuck the people who wasted their own time, money, and the knowledge they gained which could have made some breakthrough in research. Why not. Hell.. You are either a devil or just deeply insane monster to say, "NT is not paying you to survive but to keep the research station alive, you morons! Get that knife and carve tattoos on those guys if you have to! WE NEED THE STATION MORE THEN YOU, YOU LOUSY SLOBS!"

Really, i just.. feel bad for even typing ALL of this. This is like simple moral thing for people to understand. A simple thing that most people will not throw their lives against some bastard that has clearly an advantage against you and other crew. If i had the chance to space myself while keep myself alive, i would do it! Fuck that noise, i ain't no Space rambo, with scars all over my body, that fought 20 wars, having nightmares and killing anything with out mercy by cutting everyones throat. I am a person with a fucking life and want to live, and keep living. I am done. Sorry mostly for the swearing but i can't stand these kind of things, things that are so obvious and shouldn't even raise a question.

[Jamini]

I don't even know if you even start to care about the people the players are roleplaying with. I would be out right insulted if i was said what to do as some sort of civilian job to do something that has a death percentage higher then the survive ability.

 

Civilians already have the lowest death rate out of all jobs. Scopes pulled up the numbers on it for the last few months a couple days ago. Security officers are #1, Engineers were #3. Service crew were way down at the bottum.

Mind, service crew are also an extreme minority on the station. The bulk of station staff are response crew to begin with.

 

"Getting to shuttle is eas-" FUCK YOU. I will be straight forward, just F- Off. This is plain stupid statement. Let me explain why.

If the civilians got easy to shuttle and to outpost, then there are two reasons, or hell even multiple!

One is they got lucky, second the antag didnt affected these areas , or hell what if antag DID anticipated them to go to outpost, MAKING THEM FEEL safe. There's tons of reasons why and hows. But the real salt is when and what is implemented on that round.

 

There are three shuttles. It's fairly tricky to deny all three to the crew. Even assuming antagonists want to shut down evacuation plans. Most of them don't give a fuck. They want to "win" or "rp". To date I've only once or twice seen a nuke team actually threaten the outpost. And they got yelled at severely in ooc for it.

 

Evacuation is easy yes.But crew can be hard to be replaced,

 

Sol has and NT have several million potential employees. None of our staff, except scientists, are innately irreplaceable. Doubly so in an emergency situation. The research and facility honestly is more valuable than anything but /perhaps/ the people working on it and maybe the civilian heads of staff.

 

unless you dont care if clowns come to secured RESEARCH station and honk around the damn place, sure, why not let everyone die. Fuck the people who wasted their own time, money, and the knowledge they gained which could have made some breakthrough in research. Why not. Hell.. You are either a devil or just deeply insane monster to say, "NT is not paying you to survive but to keep the research station alive, you morons! Get that knife and carve tattoos on those guys if you have to! WE NEED THE STATION MORE THEN YOU, YOU LOUSY SLOBS!"

 

This is almost impossible for me to actually comprehend. I'm certain what you are trying to say here.

 

Really, i just.. feel bad for even typing ALL of this. This is like simple moral thing for people to understand. A simple thing that most people will not throw their lives against some bastard that has clearly an advantage against you and other crew. If i had the chance to space myself while keep myself alive, i would do it! Fuck that noise, i ain't no Space rambo, with scars all over my body, that fought 20 wars, having nightmares and killing anything with out mercy by cutting everyones throat. I am a person with a fucking life and want to live, and keep living. I am done. Sorry mostly for the swearing but i can't stand these kind of things, things that are so obvious and shouldn't even raise a question.

 

You are perfectly in your right to want to roleplay that sort of character. That said, you are still playing a game mode intended to pit your character against near-certain death if the antagonist isn't handled in malf and nuke. Evacuation isn't supposed to be easy, and frankly it is. You can tell me to fuck myself all you want, it doesn't change that you have three major points of almost certainly safe escape from a nuclear threat. A fourth if you have access to the teleporter. Plus you can jump into space. This is compared, historically, to a single mining shuttle.

You cannot call the shuttle in code Delta. Malf always auto-recalls the shuttle.

[Commissar_Drew]

Point One: Crew (Players) and Fight/Flight

I believe that the final decision to stay and fight or run like hell falls to the crew member.

Of course, the results of their actions may not turn out like they hoped. Many things can change the outcome including:

• The AI detonating the shuttles.
  
  A borg crowbar-ing your face in.
  
  Getting shot to death by a squad of psychopaths.
  
  Getting tasered, detained, and forcibly evacuated by security
  
  And so forth and so on.

 

In the end, it is up to the player to roll with the punches how THEIR character would react.

Do you run or do you fight?

What will happen if I take these actions?

You will not always get the wanted outcome.

Hell, you most likely will die in the process if you try to stab that fellow over there in a fully armored hard suit toting a sub-machine gun.

But, just make the best of the situation and roll with the story.

And try not to get too salty OOC when any of the above results occur.

---

---

Point Two: Difficulty of Denial of Exfiltration

The crew has at their disposal:

• ERT
  
  Evacuation Shuttle
  
  Three Outposts
  
  EVA Gear/Multiple External Airlocks

Is it hard as hell to deny all of these? Yes. Yes it damned well is. It takes some stellar coordination/precision (or luck) to deny all points.

However, on the flip side, it isn't too easy to REACH all of those aforementioned exfils.

• ERT - requires two heads of staff reach keycard readers.
  
  Evacuation Shuttle - requires one head of staff to reach a communication console
  
  Outposts - require a person that has the requisite access (and, even then, may still be threatened. Though, it is doubtful a strike team would target said facilities unless their mission is a black operation [kill all witnesses] or a capture mission).
  
  EVA Gear/External Airlocks - jumping into space. Probably going to die (again, I know this doesn't go through every players head, but, hey. It goes through some).

So, it isn't a cakewalk to deny it, but, likewise, it isn't a cakewalk to reach it. Is it easier to reach with the myriad of options? Yes, yes it is. But, you can't lock all the people in the burning movie theater all of the time.

---

---

TLDR

I don't see any need to go after this 'issue' OOCly. This comes down to player behavior ICly and the mindset of evacuation plans that many have.

You want to fight?

Fight.

You want to run?

Run.

No matter what we change, people will still do whatever they want. If they run now to the outposts, they'll run in the future. If they hold on facility, they'll hold on facility. If they fight, they'll fight.

If antags WANT to deny evacuation, well, they better have a plan and a good one at that. And then be able to react to circumstances.

WARNING: Personal Bias Ahead (and some coarse language)

Let's not make it easier on the bad guy. He is, inherently, the bad guy. Many players want to see the good guys win, or survive.

So, hell, the deck IS stacked against the criminal. Maybe its some inherent bias among persons that good triumphs over evil.

But, it's like that in real life too.

Local, state, and federal law enforcement; Security systems/personnel; Multiple exit paths; evacuation plans. Shit takes smarts, skill, and adaptability to overcome.

What I am saying here is, when the bad guy wins it's a damn good story of things gone RIGHT (or wrong from the good guy's perspective) that will be all the sweeter for the 'baddie' and all the saltier for the 'good' guys.'

As for all the civvies caught in the crossfire? Their victory is living. And I don't see an issue with provide several ways to achieve this.

Evacuation shouldn't be easy? Bollocks. Bollocks I say. There are multiple ways out of buildings now-a-days. And multiple routes. Evacuation is easy.

Is it easy from the modern space station? Dear God, I'd sooner be locked in a dark room with something growling than up there when it all goes tits up.

But, in our little spessmenz game, we are four hundred years in the future. We have rapid interstellar travel. We have people who own personal space ships. Hell, moving about space is easy. It shouldn't be hard to evacuate.

The image of an oil rig comes to mind. Now, note, I have never been on one. NOR am I an oil rig evacuation planner, BUT it seems relatively easy (in comparison to modern space station) to do THAT as well. Multiple boats for crew to escape on. A helipad for landing an extraction helicopter on. That's what I see Aurora as. A future oil rig. Is it harder to get out than a building in the middle of town? Yes. Is it an almost certain death trap like the ISS? No.

And that, the oil rig image, boils down to our lore here. It points to these conclusions I've made. I like the lore. And, shit, unless Jackboot wants to shake things up, I'm gonna stick to my "evacuation is fairly easy" stance.

 

Edit was under personal bias. Stuff about evacuations.

[Guest]

I'm really curious as to why you think people should value their workplace so much. I wouldn't care if I'm working in the white house, the UN HQ, or the ISS, if there is a nuke in the building that is activated, I am going to run full tilt as far as I can from it. Characters are assumed not to only work on the Aurora (except Heads, who probably have like, yearly rotations between stations) , there is also the Exodus and many other stations in Tau Ceti.

In the end, NanoTrasen would care more about their employees than the station, if the employees die, then thats a PR disaster, mixed with giving money out to grieving families and also dealing with police investigations. If the station explodes with no crew on it, the only people that need to care are NT, and they have enough credits to build plenty of NSS Auroras

[Jamini]

You ... are aware that a major reason that security exists at all is to protect the station from outside threats. Which is why they have an armory at all? (It's not just for show) By your reasoning, we have no real reason to keep our security staff even a fraction as well-armed as they are currently.

Also, I can say with full certainty and confidence that the White House, the Pentagon, and UN HQ security forces almost certainly have defense plans in place to handle large-scale bombings and full disaster scenarios much like Nuke. To the point where all three would have military or paramilitary personal there to lay down their lives to protect the higher ups of each facility.

See:

http://www.secretservice.gov/protection_works.shtml

http://www.secretservice.gov/kids_faq.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headquarters_of_the_United_Nations#Security

http://www.pfpa.mil/

All of these organizations, all of which are VERY similar to how security in Aurora operate, have people who's job it is to risk their own lives to protect the assets of the company, and the more sensitive crew within. While they are by no means suicidal, they should definitely be trying their damnest to stop their workplace from going up in smoke.

Let's not forget that no company in their right mind would keep a Head of the Security who openly left a facility in the hands of a hostile force. Such a person would be fired so fast heads would spin. Hell, I've explicitly went through something very similar with Nasir and one of his previous workplaces, using an investigation into that as justification as to why he was suspended for command. (Ultimately my justification in why he /is/ still in command is that he ... didn't give in. He fought to keep the station intact as long as he could before getting out. And the "investigation" showed that.)

Quite frankly, we should be discouraging people from outright giving up without a fight. This is a game. A roleplaying game? Certainly, but roleplay does not give you a free card to simply do whatever you want. Doubly so in command roles. A very explicit part of every head of staff's role is to maintain and protect their workplace. If people need to lose some safe havens to make that happen... then those safe havens need to go away.

Besides, lore-wise the strength of the nuke is enough to kill anyone near the station. Unless someone changed it again.

[Jakers457]

Is this still a thing? I suppose we could do conscript station where everyone and their mother keeps a 45. in their ass cheeks so they can fight off all them crackers.

But let me tell you a tale about xenomorphs, an unknown enemy that in reality is a terrifying specimen. The station had a couple of xenos or so picking people off. The Captain decided to authorise weapons to civilians and ordered gank 64 upon the alien foes. Suddenly no one gave a shit about an unknown horde of monsters and went valid hunting. The round was more or less over at that point. The horror of such a creature ignored and we ended up having a bunch of randoms.

My point? Sure you can do what it takes to win, but what's an empty victory compared to a story of desperation. The idea of the crew attempting to survive on the asteroids is much more appealing than stomping out the threat then sitting with a thumb up your ass wondering what to do now, seeing as the rounds fulcrum got ganked.

Also, I wouldn't say the station is overly close to the asteroid because that seems like an overly stupid idea and not to mention nukes kind of suck in space.

And my final point, attempting to change how someone else's character should react is shitty and if one was to complain how one of my characters should fit to their ideals, I wouldn't be all that friendly in my response.

[Jamini]

Is this still a thing? I suppose we could do conscript station where everyone and their mother keeps a 45. in their ass cheeks so they can fight off all them crackers.

 

Strawman fallacy. Disregarding.

 

But let me tell you a tale about xenomorphs, an unknown enemy that in reality is a terrifying specimen. The station had a couple of xenos or so picking people off. The Captain decided to authorise weapons to civilians and ordered gank 64 upon the alien foes. Suddenly no one gave a shit about an unknown horde of monsters and went valid hunting. The round was more or less over at that point. The horror of such a creature ignored and we ended up having a bunch of randoms.

 

This actually has some basis founded in real life. People who are armed actually do have a tendency to become overconfident and less risk-adverse.

Also, to be really honest, if the aliens allowed themselves to be put in such a position they probably acted in a manner that deserved it. Alien mobs are hilariously deadly, especially if they have a competent queen. Terror stems from intent, actions, and activity. Emotes are not the only way to roleplay.

 

My point? Sure you can do what it takes to win, but what's an empty victory compared to a story of desperation. The idea of the crew attempting to survive on the asteroids is much more appealing than stomping out the threat then sitting with a thumb up your ass wondering what to do now, seeing as the rounds fulcrum got ganked.

 

That is solely your opinion. Personally, I see a story of intense conflict and ultimate glorious victory for the crew due to the actions of the captain more interesting then the idea of sitting on my thumbs bored to death on the asteroids until the shuttle comes. That is my opinion.

 

Also, I wouldn't say the station is overly close to the asteroid because that seems like an overly stupid idea and not to mention nukes kind of suck in space.

Then that bit of lore needs to be changed.

 

And my final point, attempting to change how someone else's character should react is shitty and if one was to complain how one of my characters should fit to their ideals, I wouldn't be all that friendly in my response.

 

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2700

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2193

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=955

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2678

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2559

http://aurorastation.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2585

This is on the first page of the general forums alone.

Throw rocks not ye who live in glass houses.

I'm not saying we should force people to act differently. I'm saying as of right now mechanically the danger from malfunctioning AIs and merc teams who decide to go nucler is... far lower than it should be. In part due to how easy it is to avoid a nuke. Evacuating should be nearly as difficult and danger-wrought as facing the antagonist head-on is. It shouldn't be an instant survival-themed "win".

[Guest]

We are not changing this, there is no need.

Jamini do not compare government security forces to Aurora's security, they are completely different things with completely different SoP's

IF a computer system has the potential to explode and kill everyone. The HOS (yes the person in charge of security and only security) has it in his right to GTFO. He is not trained in IT or advanced AI repair, he doesn't need to stick around or powergame to "win"

Stop trying to force people to play how you want them to play and let them roleplay.

As for the timing, if people weren't so 'Quick run' when delta was called and actually RP'd not knowing what it is (Don't quote that it is announced, it's not reachable IC'ly at all) or if AI's weren't so worried a CE or engineer would just walk in in 5 second flat using the same way every single time (It's predictable) so security can bypasss the turrets and shoot it, then the timer might actually be shorter than you might think. I have seen timers from 60 seconds to 10 minutes, all because the AI was paranoid about the engineers doing the deconstruct, make wall x4, deconstruct, kill methord.

I will remind everyone that Aurora has one specific rule that applies here "Do not play to win" since people have posted messages saying that they are not winning/loosing, I feel this needs re-emphasizing.

Do not play to win

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