Medbay Overhaul

My suggestion is aimed at significantly changing mechanics relating to anything involving cloning and organ surgery. All of the suggestions below would operate in conjunction with one another.

Here goes:

Brain Rejection Following Transplants:

Organ Printers:

Genetic Marker:

Organ Genetic Identity Modifier:

Immune-Suppressant Drugs:

Change In Organ Repair Surgery:

Instead of being able to repair organ damage by using trauma packs during surgery, change organ repair surgery to require using a compatible organ to repair organ damage in the patient. If an incompatible organ is used, rejection occurs. The new organ repair surgery would go as follows:

The above surgery would also apply for brain damage.

Peridaxon would still be effective due to difficulty in making it.

Remove Alkysine (Inb4 I get flack for this):

Hallucinations Following Brain Repair Surgery:

Make Cloning Require Some Supervision:

Make Cloning or Borging Impossible After a Certain Time:

Add meme-tier deathchems

That is all.

As always, feedback would be nice.

Its squickier to have these things grown rather than printed.

Vend-a-Gut: organ vending machine.

Mar-o-Mat: blood-producing marrow cultures. Also a soda fountain for vampires.

I think you're absolutely right about increasing the difficulty of cloning. Right now it is damn near unbearable to be a non-medical character standing over a clone-ready corpse in the cloning bay, knowing the system is as stupid and simple as clicking two or three prompted buttons and leaving them to print.

Easy little puzzle; DNA repair. DNA is a predictable pairing of amino acids. A-T / G-C. Give two strings of A-T-G-C random letters, omit a number of those letters as X's, and then replace the X's with the correct pairing. Sometimes you'd even get a pair that's both X, leaving it a blind guess. How many you get correct or incorrect determines how much genetic damage the clone suffers. How long the clone is dead determines how many pairings are X's for the cloning tech to try and figure out. Sally Snowflake can no longer walk up and clone people since it is clearly a more intensive process than before. "Scan" and "Print" do not require 8 years of college, this presumably does.

For double-hard mode, A-T / G-C is only in humans. Other species have a different pairing scheme.

Another suggestion is that the rate at which pre-clone damage (decay?) accrues to bodies could be determined by the temperature of the body. You'd take an incoming corpse, stuff them in cryo, and pull them out when the cloning machine is ready for them. This lets a buddy recover your corpse and stuff you in the cryo tube, pausing your decay and letting him walk off worry-free that you'll be neglected. Morgue trays could also have this function; freezing bodies to prevent further genetic decay. It also means a corpse lost in space will freeze and be viable to recover in spite of the time it takes, so bodies that get spaced won't be written off as unrecoverable due to genetic decay making them completely nonviable to clone.

Brain Rejection Following Transplants:

Right now, you can do inter-body or inter-species brain transplants (but not any other organ) without rejection.

ill probably get to this while working on medical/genetics stuff generally

Organ Printers:

Baystation already has these.

As the name implies, these would take synthmeat and use it to create artificial organs for transplantation, including brains - which won't be good for anything except what I'm about to post later down-. A reasonable price would be 25 units of synthflesh, considering that a full cloning takes 150 units. As for potential lore implications of organ printers, it would be cloning done on a smaller scale. Robotics would have an organ printer that prints limbs and hearts, but consumes metal instead of synthmeat. ICly, all medical personnel would know how to operate this.

On my work list, major plans

Organ Genetic Identity Modifier:

A new machine which takes a blood sample from any crewmember in one slot, and an organ in a second slot. When activated, this would change the organ's genetic identity into the identity of the person whose blood was inserted into the machine. The purpose of this machine is to combat organ rejection. The job of handling this machine would fall upon the medical doctors and essentially require the same IC qualifications as the now-defunct genetics lab.

This seems like a good research item. and genetics will not be defunct much longer

Immune-Suppressant Drugs:

A new medicine which can be made in chemistry, halts organ rejection for 5 (Can be adusted) minute per unit of drug metabolized, plus how long it took to metabolize the drug. After that, rejection sets in aggressively. This would be used if for some reason, nobody could make printed organs compatible for transplant. These would have the negative consequence of making you more likely to get an infection, even without open wounds, and make existing infections progress faster.

on the agenda

Change In Organ Repair Surgery:

Instead of being able to repair organ damage by using trauma packs during surgery, change organ repair surgery to require using a compatible organ to repair organ damage in the patient. If an incompatible organ is used, rejection occurs. The new organ repair surgery would go as follows:

Aim for the area where organ is at in the Damage zone.png Damage Zone.

Use the scalpel to cut.

Use the hemostat to stop any potential bleeding.

Use your retractors to lift up the skin.

[CHEST OR HEAD ONLY] Use the saw to open the ribcage.

[CHEST OR HEAD ONLY] Use the retractor to pull their ribcage open.

Use the exact same organ to mend one of the damaged organs, or nanopaste on an robotic organ. (If multiple organs are damaged in the patients, you will have to repair each organ individually. Robotic organ repair remains the same). The message that will be given to the person performing organ repair surgery at this step will go along the lines of: You use parts of the intact [organ] to replace the damaged parts of X's [organ]

[CHEST OR HEAD ONLY] Use the retractor to close their ribcage.

[CHEST OR HEAD ONLY] Apply Bone bone gel to mend the cut ribcage.

Use the cautery to seal the incision.

The above surgery would also apply for brain damage.

Peridaxon would still be effective due to difficulty in making it.

i think this sounds pretty dumb. i have plans to work more towards transplanting replacements for excessively damaged organs

Remove Alkysine (Inb4 I get flack for this):

Right now, alkysine just allows one to fix brain damage nearly instantly and be on their way. Removing alkysine would mean that the medbay actually needs to be staffed(*GASP*) in the event of more serious injuries involving brain damage (Instead of me just giving people an injection of the appropriate healing chem and sending them on their way).

 

Hallucinations Following Brain Repair Surgery:

Exactly as the title implies. Undergoing brain repair surgery would cause hallucinations in the subject, with severity depending on how much damage was sustained.

I think these two would be contingent upon a more elaborate system of brain damage. Something like an organic equivilant of the wiriing minigame, but more complex.

It's a pipe dream though, no present plans to change brain damage.

Make Cloning Require Some Supervision:

Make cloning be an actual task that one has to do in the game, rather than just tossing the subject inside the cloner, doing a scan, tossing the fucker in cryo, and then continuing to do whatever one was doing before being forced to clone a dead crewmember. Similar to how you do spectrometer analysis in xenoarchaeology (Albeit, more simple).

more elaboration on this would be interesting

Make Cloning or Borging Impossible After a Certain Time:

Exactly as it sounds. Brain damage received by clones of dead crewmembers should also be proportional to how long they were dead for.

Ive thought about this and personally decided it was unnecessary.

If people are dead for long, they often tend to log out, or play as a mouse/drone, or maybe even respawn as another human.

Or, the most common of all, they idle in deadchat while they tab out to do something unrelated to SS!3

Either way, in all cases they're not available for rejoining as a clone or borg, and thus these procedures largely fail after a significant timeperiod anyways. I don't think a mechanical enforcement of that would really change anything

Add meme-tier deathchems

We already have them and you damn well know it, you of all people/

I've watched you executing people on the battlefield with polytrinic acid injection

As always, feedback would be nice.

Most of this is, to some degree, already planned

Make Cloning Require Some Supervision:

Make cloning be an actual task that one has to do in the game, rather than just tossing the subject inside the cloner, doing a scan, tossing the fucker in cryo, and then continuing to do whatever one was doing before being forced to clone a dead crewmember. Similar to how you do spectrometer analysis in xenoarchaeology (Albeit, more simple).

more elaboration on this would be interesting

 

 

See Nikov's post, I think it conveys the idea perfectly.

 

Easy little puzzle; DNA repair. DNA is a predictable pairing of amino acids. A-T / G-C. Give two strings of A-T-G-C random letters, omit a number of those letters as X's, and then replace the X's with the correct pairing. Sometimes you'd even get a pair that's both X, leaving it a blind guess. How many you get correct or incorrect determines how much genetic damage the clone suffers. How long the clone is dead determines how many pairings are X's for the cloning tech to try and figure out. Sally Snowflake can no longer walk up and clone people since it is clearly a more intensive process than before. "Scan" and "Print" do not require 8 years of college, this presumably does.

For double-hard mode, A-T / G-C is only in humans. Other species have a different pairing scheme.

 

Maybe have the other species use P and Z pairings ( Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150710-genetic-alphabet/)and require more work to repair?

Add meme-tier deathchems

We already have them and you damn well know it, you of all people/

I've watched you executing people on the battlefield with polytrinic acid injection

Never Happened.

Oh shit, I just had another thought.

Humans are A-T C-G. But other species might use more pairs, or different pairings. In a Li... Unathi, A might bind with L, and G would bind with I. So you'd have A-L I-G for the Unathi specifically, but if you were unobservant about the species you stuffed in the tube (say a husk?), you might botch your pairing of Unathi DNA with memorized pairs of human DNA. The result is a really defective clone with organ damage and brain damage and ... ew.

Each pair might tie to a given organ, and botching the match for your clone could result in, say, lungs at 50% damage right out of the tube if you got half the pair right, or 100% damaged if you totally botched the pairing.

I think when you combine DNA decay over time with a increasing difficulty for the cloning process itself, you produce characters who have a sense of urgency about death, recovering the dead, and esteem for the geneticist role.

Easy little puzzle; DNA repair. DNA is a predictable pairing of amino acids. A-T / G-C. Give two strings of A-T-G-C random letters, omit a number of those letters as X's, and then replace the X's with the correct pairing. Sometimes you'd even get a pair that's both X, leaving it a blind guess. How many you get correct or incorrect determines how much genetic damage the clone suffers. How long the clone is dead determines how many pairings are X's for the cloning tech to try and figure out. Sally Snowflake can no longer walk up and clone people since it is clearly a more intensive process than before. "Scan" and "Print" do not require 8 years of college, this presumably does.

For double-hard mode, A-T / G-C is only in humans. Other species have a different pairing scheme.

I missed this before. I think you might have some good ideas here, ill look at this when i do genetics

A complete medical overhaul will be discussed in the next dev meeting