Make Atmospherics (not so) Great Again

So, I've been playing Atmospheric Technician for a while now, and after speaking with some people about it for a while, I've realised there's a couple things wrong with the roundstart Atmospheric setup.

Namely, it's way too small, and too efficient at its job.

Here's the current atmospherics room. It's very small, it's very compact, it's very streamlined, and it's very efficient. At the moment, trying to upgrade it as an atmos tech consists of switching around four pumps at most if you want an easy and super effective setup, and then you've finished your job for the round; and you're reduced to either sitting on a chair for the rest of the round, becoming a regular engineer with none of the access, or just going cryo. One of the more enjoyable things to do as an atmos tech is to mess around with custom setups, and see how efficient or fun you can make the pipes work. But as it is, there's not much to do in that regard. It's already efficient, just change a thing or two, and it's much, much too compact and small to be able to do any custom setups.

Here's a proposed change that I mapped after getting advice from some more experienced engineering/atmos members. This setup is much larger, which allows for much greater customisation, and an important additional thing is that it's less efficient. It'll get the job done if there's no optimisation, but it can absolutely be improved on in a variety of ways. There's also a couple quality of life changes, like the placement of pipe dispensers down there, movement of the atmosphere alert console, and the addition of another engineering console. The mixing ports were also expanded a bit, and a gas heater was added, alongside a gas cooler, which saves having to beg your way into technical storage to scrounge for resources, or to spend time begging science instead in order to be able to make one. I also moved all the gas canisters into one section, and switched around the scrubber intake and distro outtake.

There was also a new gas tank for N2O.

One problem with a lack of an N2O tank was that when N2O ended up in the scrubbers, it had nowhere to be filtered to, and would simply remain in the line, which was annoying and would take up space. And, of course, the tank comes with a digital valve to let the admemes know if someone's putting it in the mix.

I'm hoping this suggestion will bring a greater degree of freedom and customisation to the atmospheric system, and hopefully encourage some more players to give it a go and learn; as well as bring some more enjoyment to it for older and more experienced players, too.

Note: I'm by no means a master at mapping, but I understand the basics to it and have a little bit of experience. I'm at least 90% sure everything works as intended.

Give this person a medal! Support 100%!

Furrycactus is one of the view people I know that know atmospherics super in-depth, and he's designed a lot of cool things for it. I fully trust that his improvements/changes would be of top-notch quality and make the role/system much better.

i don't know jack shit about atmospherics, but it seems like he knows what he's talking about, and giving a role more work to do without negatively affecting something else over (COUGHPSYCHIATRISTCOUGH) is always cool

I stopped playing atmos tech because whoever mapped the current iteration mapped out the primary conceit of the job and gave us the end-game set up.

This would be great!

Ä very slight aside but on the topic of Atmospherics.

What happened with making Engine Technician a sub-category of the atmospherics job? There were some words about that a while ago.

Tbh, I kind of want the distro linkage to be space-constrained like Exodus so it requires some actual work to double (or more) distro/waste flow to/from station.

I like the idea of increasing the size of atmos, but that looks like overkill.

Tbh, I kind of want the distro linkage to be space-constrained like Exodus so it requires some actual work to double (or more) distro/waste flow to/from station.

That's a pretty easy addition to make, and I could do that.

I like the idea of increasing the size of atmos, but that looks like overkill.

This was about as small as I could make it while avoiding pipe congestion, and keeping it generally aesthetically pleasing. I could possibly reduce its size downwards a few tiles, but I'm trying to avoid congested pipes and still allow room for upgrades without having to totally repipe everything.

I like the idea of increasing the size of atmos, but that looks like overkill.

Exodus was pretty huge, and it wasn't overkill. I've completely filled Exodus atmos with pipes a few times.

Here's an image of Exodus' Atmospherics, for reference.

I won't go into it too much, because I've made my thoughts known on atmospherics plenty of times on various other platforms, but I've always supported making atmospherics shittier at start. It's literally so efficient right now that you have nothing to do except squeeze the absolute last bits of efficiency out of the system. The overall design seems fine to me, though I'm sure some touch-ups could be done given some time. +1 from me. Make atmospherics (not so) great again and actually give us something to do. Also please bring back the mix tank and N2O tank for messing around.

Made a couple of changes, given some feedback received.

Most notably, I moved the vent closer to its original location, and added a mix tank in its previous location, and also shrunk the size of the intake/outtake.

Atmos has recently been changed here:

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/5178