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Make Telescience dangerous


LordBalkara

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Basically what the title says.

Make Telescience do bad things to teleported people/things, so it will feel more like the highly dangerous and experimental technology it's supposed to be. Instead of a fancy taxi service.

Suggestions of effects:

  • Irradiate them
  • Loss of limb
  • Mutation
  • Loss of life
  • Gibbing
  • Brain trauma
  • Organ damage
  • Plain old damage

Maybe a random chance of one of these, with a chance of nothing happening.

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Having negative effects simply for transporting is maybe a little too harsh? I Don't didn't really see many people use Telescience alot. Even though it has immense capability, especially for departments like medical and security where getting across the station quickly can be imperative. Perhaps a system could be implemented to allow more information to be required. I have no idea how hard that'd be to accomplish really but I feel that some of these would be much better served as punishment. If you mess up an input, you mess up the process. But that's just muh two cents

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Telescience is too rarely to be used to call it OP, and the people who do it, including myself, don't have perfectly accurate calculators. With the decimals, and maybe some random chance, i'm unsure, you tend to miss your target anyways, so it's rarely used as 'fancy taxi'.

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Eh, I've seen it used almost casually a few times, as a way to do the EMTs job, or show off a bit. Especially by those who know how to use it well.

Making it dangerous for people still allows people to experiment with it, while preventing casual or incautious use of it.

And saying a way to instantly transport everything on a tile to another spot in a matter of seconds with no repercussions or limitations beyond your ability to do some math/find a decent calculator isn't OP seems odd.

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Guest Marlon Phoenix

It already gas a high barrier of entry for usage. Punishing people for figuring it out seems mean spirited so NO ONE will want to use it.

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Make it interesting, not punishing. Mechanically it's already been heavily, heavily nerfed since 2016-17. Bluespace is full of weird, unknown and seemingly supernatural things. Make it more than a meme method of transportation somehow before you just make it less fun to mess with.

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Telescience is inherently one of those things that aren't RP'd out, and are only used for "ung bung recover x corpse lol who needs a paramedic", and the "Barrier to entry" is just knowing some 10th Grade math, and figuring out the offsets.


I've been meaning to make it mematicly more in depth, but I've both been lazy, and working on other projects.

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God no, there's a handful of people on the station who ever use the Telescience room and there's absolutely nothing to find with it.

The only two uses are possibly to either recover corpses, or to steal something remotely.

Telescience needs to be buffed instead of nerfed.

Let us save multiple locations in it to be recalled later, for mass transport of something.

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Everyone said what I wanted to say more or less, RNG is not a good balancer and Telescience is barebones as is.

Sure you can "Guess" where that shit lands based on 8th grade math but getting the machine to actually hit 1:1 reliably is a bit trickier, mainly now when the map is so fucking big and we have 3 layers.

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This might just end up as a super fancy murder tool if they do something like that, even more than it's done now. It'll remove all the useful applications of telescience and replace it with a massive fucking grief tool or murder tool which only antags would ever really use. I'd suggest giving it a chance, a rediculously tiny chance, to send people to another dimension or something, or send them to a random location or the derelict instead of the normal goal. Don't make it tedious, make it interesting with how it can screw up. This is bluespace.

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Giving random chances for failure will make it considerably more difficult for a player to learn the mechanics, and that just isn't fun.


Nothing's more frustrating than spending two whole rounds doing the math and perfecting your process just for one or two randomised failures to make it seem like your method is completely incorrect.


I'm also of the mindset that telescience needs to be made more robust before it is made more dangerous. I would love to see it used more often as a tool for medical and security.

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It's a fringe mechanic as-is, only a few people bothering with the algebra to make it work, and even then doing so without certainty. Given how rarely it's even applicable to in-game problems, using it should be encouraged wherever it is practical. It's not powergaming; it's just enjoying the benefits of a relatively complicated game mechanic.

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The issue with Telescience is that, unlike every other job it doesn't have a climb.


While every other job restricts you artificially by either not having everything unlocked immediatly(robotics), requiering materials(science), needing other jobs to assist(Chef/botany), have to wait a certain time before it procs(Entire station/SM), rely on uncommon mobs/RNG/positioning(Xenobio,security,cargo,mining,xenoarch) or simply have to build up to a point (chemistry, virology).


Telescience like Chaplain and Psychologist, relies on your IRL education and math skills, not how well you can memorize the wiki or how good/lucky you are at the game.

This creates a large divide, the people who know how to calculate it which makes them feel smarter and the people who don't know how to calculate who only feel dumber when doing this job (me).

This leads to one side calling it powergaming, as you can simply use software/spreadsheet to calculate 1:1 ratio in the first 5 minutes of EVERY round no matter what happens with zero research (unless someone literally sprints in there and steals your crystals) while the other calls it easy because "Everyone can do it".

It ends in one side afraid of using it for being labeled as powergamers just by using it on ANYTHING and the other bashing it as powergaming because of how it requires IRL knowledge and thus is extremely easy for some and unusable for others.

The job of telescience benefits you when you put a single round of effort into it and then you never have to put the effort in again as the formula is completely identitcal each time (with minor number adjustements),

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My opinion? (In this post I'm noting a difference between the Teleporter and the Telescience console)


Make the Teleporter and Telescience public use, with a Scientist behind a screen to manage it.


Make Telescience perfect, but make it draw a lot more bluespace crystals to point out that it's only to be meant in emergencies.


Install bluespace disruptors in secure areas like Command and AI core so that all Telescience attempts will be shunted away, while the Teleporter would require command access to teleport to those areas. All while the Telescience console could be upgraded to ignore the disruptors.


or not. *shrugs* It's just a thought to make things useful and accessible to all.

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The issue with Telescience is that, unlike every other job it doesn't have a climb...

 

Is this not also true of toxins? It takes a little bit of real-world knowledge to unlock the potential, and then the sky's the limit. Still we see that the potential isn't widely abused because if the scrutiny always placed in it - if you overstep whatever invisible threshold is there, you get in trouble, IC or OOC. Personally, I've always thought this was a strength of the role... It plays very uniquely because of that barrier, and is rewarding if you work through it. Now, whether or not it's overpowered... Seems to depend on what you try to accomplish with it.


Like toxins, again.

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The issue with Telescience is that, unlike every other job it doesn't have a climb...

 

Is this not also true of toxins? It takes a little bit of real-world knowledge to unlock the potential, and then the sky's the limit. Still we see that the potential isn't widely abused because if the scrutiny always placed in it - if you overstep whatever invisible threshold is there, you get in trouble, IC or OOC. Personally, I've always thought this was a strength of the role... It plays very uniquely because of that barrier, and is rewarding if you work through it. Now, whether or not it's overpowered... Seems to depend on what you try to accomplish with it.


Like toxins, again.

Well

1: The use of toxins is limited due to the obvious rules.

2: Toxins still takes about 10-20 minutes as you need to properly heat up/test the canisters if they actually work.

3: If you fuck up toxins once, you're dead.



Technically telescience takes time too, but it's not mechanically enforced as you wait until phoron heats up, the only limit is your own calculations.

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To address a few points mentioned:

Original Reason for the nerf

Back in 2016 (I think) we had the issue of telescience being regularly used to pinpoint teleport people into N2O filled chambers and then convert them as cult.

Thats why the equations have been reworked to prevent pin-point teleporting with existing calculators.

As far as I know there are still no prebuilt calculators available.

However, with a bit of research and math it is possible to make one yourself.


The point that there is "no progression"

Telescience is limited by the number of bluespace crystals installed.

Since can upgrade Telescience, if they research the crystals produce them and insert them into the console.


In addition: you can figure out roughly the area that you are going to land in, if you guestimate the values.

You can always fine-tune the position by teleporting them back again and readjusting.

Once you have figured out how the three settings effect that, the next step is to start working on the equations.

So if you invest some time you can master these skills up to pin-point teleportation.

It follows the general principle of easy to learn and (relatively) hard to master.


Current misuse

I currently do not see misuse of telescience. Most of the people operating it, use it responsibly and usually in a interesting fashion.

There were a few incidents with a specific telescientist, but they have been dealt with.

It is by far not as bad as in 2016 when we nerfed it the last time.


Random Damage / Equation Changes

Randomness in the equations is not a good solution.

It would be similar to randomizing the engine setup each shift and will lead to even less use of telescience.


One option that would be worth looking into is tieing it more heavily to the bluespace crystals and reducing the number tsc starts with.

Or even tie it to meta-research once that is implemented

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Maybe we could impose similar limitations onto telescience. To match your observations...


1) The use of toxins is limited by rules. This is an OOC solution, but telescience could be reined in with IC rules. Make serious laws concerning the conditions where it's appropriate to use teleportation for practical purposes. If you play fast and loose, you lose your job or go to jail.

2) Toxins takes more time to prepare. We could impose some prep time onto the telescience lab, like by making the scientist build/install the machines personally, or making them require some early level of research.

3) Failure is dangerous to a toxins scientist. To copy this, we could make teleporting have more dangerous consequences for failure, too. What if teleporting into a structure or object (wall/door/grille/window/machine/etc) caused massive brute damage, like the classic 'telefragging'? What if the act of teleporting something tried to suck in nearby objects too, endangering the user? There are lots of possibilities for this.

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