General Station Maintenance

[Nexusuxen]

Engineering and the AI could be able to maintain certain parts of the station which gradually wear down/clog up/grow more inefficient over time, giving them something to do mid-round while still not interfering much with rounds if not done.

For example, some subsystems and machines to maintain would be:

 

• Atmospherics, which would slowly increase the chance of scrubber backflow events over time
  
• Telecommunications, which would cause radio messages to, over time, take more time to process and broadcast (Maximum of, say, 3 second delays)
  
• Substations, which would over time decrease power output to its respective area until it reached a threshold
  
• Solar Arrays, which would get dirty and receive diminishing amounts of sunlight
  
• Assemblers (i.e mech assembler or autolathe), which would decrease in speed and material efficiency
  

 

As parts of the station wear down and require maintenance, they can be serviced or recalibrated through the use of manually disassembling and replacing worn out parts; pressing a button or a sequence of buttons on a console; manually cleaning.

With the above examples, ways to maintain them would be:

 

• Atmospherics - Rerouting the Scrubber Line to a tank of gaseous space cleaner, which would "clean" the pipes. The AI could do this on its own.
  
• Telecommunications - Using a console to clear the saved messages on the servers, or going to each one with a hard drive to download its data
  
• Substations - Using a wrench on a screwed open breaker to re-calibrate it.
  
• Solar Arrays - The panels would dirty over time with space dust, requiring application of space cleaner.
  
• Assemblers - Manually removing its parts and replacing worn out ones with newer ones.
  

 

All of these examples are at least semi-arbitrary, simply explaining a general concept rather than a solid plan.