SpaceTimeNow

I don't play head roles very much, what can the emergency message system do? Issn't the communication with Centcom via fax machines?

Are you talking about the charge rate or the max engery stored? I think it's the simple fact that we have a huge amount energy storage on the station. 3 SMES at singulairty, 3 at supermatter, 1 in Engineering, 1 for the AI, 4 at the solars. If they are all filled up there is loads of engery stored, and the station requires only like 60kW to run. Just think about how long the small APCs batteries hold out at a power shortage (except for very power hungry areas) and then put that into relation of how much energy a SMES stores. The default charge of the SMES at round begin can hold the station for a good while, fully charged SMES + fully charged APCs can hold out a very long time. Considering how much energy the singularity blasts out, the SMES are full in no time. If the max energy stored per APCs batteries has gone up, that should also make a noticable difference considering the amout of APCs.

There is only one valid answer to this question. Supermatter! The singularity is a 100% save engine. It runs on it's own without any supervision. There is zero chance for it to fail on it's own, traitors are not allowed to use it and if they would be it would end the round because of lag and unrepairable destruction (certain things just cannot be repaired or replaced). It's boring, stop trying to make the station super save. It's the same problem i talked about in my atmos tech post, this is space station 13 for skreeks sake! Shit happens, people fuck up, the station deals with it. Random stuff happening makes RP richer! The supermatter going up is slow, useable by traitors and it does not force a round to end! It leave the station in working condition and the solar arrays can be used as backup. It's not like the solar Array couldn't handle the station power requirements with ease, people are just to lazy to set them up whene there are two other engines. And with a little work from engineers and atmos techs, the supermatter could be made super secure, this provides engineers and atmos techs with some new work. Also i think the supermatter should be a joint venture between atmos techs and engineers (Access for both!) I tolerate the existance of the singularity while there is also supermatter, but singularity alone, fuck that!

I am torn about one single person, that would give a head of staff a way to go over the captains head. Maybe make a exception so that the captain can call without a second head required. I think if a single head wants to call the ERT against everyone else, he should have to make a very good argument and call a ERT via the fax machine. Which would make the ERT actually called by centcom (admins) and give them more authroity, at least if we go with my suggestion that a ERT called by the station is allways under the captains command. (or acting captain for that matter)

I would suggest a slightly different approach. Give the Keycard device certain options to check, for example: - Security - Engineering - Medical - Janitorial - Combat Every option that is checked unlocks a different room inside CentCom and this that other items fitting the choosen roles. So you can switch different roles between ERT members and take the gear you need. Especially for some Engineering ERT you should contact the station first to know what you should bring with you. Make the airlocks like the gamma airlock unhackable and the walls should be unbreakable anyways. This way the person activating the Keycard call can choose what kind equipment he wants the ERT to have. If they choose "Security" then the ERT has access to normal Security Guard gear (taser, cuffs and shit). Maybe the ERT leader spawns with one energy gun by default (just like a HoS would) and the rest will have to pick up tasers. So they could be controlled by Station Security unless they recieve "Combat" access which allows them access to all the lethal weapons (for nukies, xenos or whatever). Also, i think ERT-Member should get a message that puts them under the command of the stations Captain if the ERT has been called by the station. If the ERT has been called by CentCom, as an admin event, then and only then should they have authority over the station. The station wide ERT announcement should reflect what authority the incomming ERT will have. I would also add a screen like: "You have been choosen as an ERT-Member, your assignment is .... (Security, Engineering, Medical janitorial and/ or Combat), the station captain has full authority over you, do you want to accept?" This gives the people a option to back out and not be in a Engineering only ERT if they just want to light stuff on fire. Because there is no use to force player into roles that they don't want to play. They will either start trouble or go SSD. Edit: Maybe give the Keycard device a small textbox to insert a writting assignment for the ERT. Most of the time ERTs don't get a propper explanation why they are called and arrive in some chaos, which could also lead to shitcurity behaviour.

Fair enough, i just drop some thoughts into the Forum in case someone is looking for stuff to add/code.

Great! Since we are at it, i am trying to think about other things that could be added to atmospherics. What comes to mind are: - Optical Meson Scanner in Atmos lockers - pumps / valves that are activated by certain temperatures, like you could set to only let air pass from source to destination if source has a certain temperature or only let gas pass if destination is above x °C. Would be great to control heat of incomming waste air. - I am not sure where i have seen it (most likely another server) but there was a engineering camera network, that only showed the cameras in areas with firealarms, poweralarms or atmosalerts. That was really neat and super useful so you could take a look at the area fist before you leave engineering to fix a simple breach just to arrive and find busted pipes everywhere. Edit: I might just go atmos crazy but i am pretty sure that last time i used the pipe painter to paint a bunch of new pipes in atmos i found some random pipes that switched color without me hitting them (at least i think i didn't accidentally hit them). I did not have enough time to test this propperly.

Thanks for the changes! Is there something to be done with the Airlocks at the incinerator room? They don't seem to respond to control panels. Also a atmos tech doesn't seem to have any way to leave the station. The airlocks at escape and and arrivals are all locked and since atmos tech can't use the solar array airlocks, i usually run into the problem of how to get outside of the station to repair stuff from the outside. Right now i use the nearest windows for a makeshift airlock. I think the best solution is to add atmos access to the solar arrays, since they are well spaced out across the station. What's also a problem are this heat transfer pipes outside of atmospherics in space, they cool extremly slow. There either needs to be a complete shitload of pipes or the heat transfer rate should be changed. Also, very much this: God, i hope my vox can wear this. That sounds awesome!

A thing that annoyed me for a long time is the Atmos Lockdown. I don't understand why there is a blast door between the small atmos control room and atmos itself. Every time you have to move from the control room to atmos you have to lift the lockdown, which undermines going into lockdown at all. Also it makes absolutly no sense that the atmos control room has only a "half" lockdown. The windows leading into engineering do not have any blast doors while all the airlocks have one. I think it would make much more sense to remove the blast door between atmos control and atmos and add blast doors at the windows leading to engineering. Additionally i would like have a atmos alert computer visible while working inside atmospherics. Many times you get yourself busy in atmospherics and tend to ignore what's going on on the station. Either replace the walls between atmos control and atmos with windows, or what would be really neat are like one or two wall mounted atmos alert computers, where you could see the atmos alarm blinking red like on the normal computer and go next to it to check where the alarm went off. I you want to go really fancy you could add a alarm signal or light flash when the status goes from green to red. Obviously the same should be done for the engineering alert, if someone actually codes that.

Since i cannot convince anyone to give atmos some real impact on what happens on the station, i guess some more room to built stuff never hurts How about moveing the Nitrogen, Oxygen and mixed air tanks to the right, below the Carbon Dioxide. Then you could extend atmospherics downwards. The only thing in the way would be the small engineering escape pod. This could be moved to face to the south. What i also would change is the akward waste pipeing below the tiles near the canisters at the atmospheric entrance, which tends to interfere with your own modifications above the tiles for the atmos setup itself. Also i think the incinerator rooms "airlock system" seems to be non functional. You can hit the open button several times it just doesn't seem to respond at all.

Well, but the atmos techs job evolves around dealing with the atmospheric systems, don't you see the issue here? It's not like the chef spawns with a kitchen full of cooked food nor are the science levels unlocked by default... Well and it's obvious why situations like "nobody picked atmos tech" happen, because it has become a boring and redundant job. If it's the desire to run a failsave atmospherics system all the time, then i don't see the point of having dedicated atmos technicians, just merge them with engineering and make it a sub-job of the Engineer, just like Engine Technician. So you can do your 2 minutes of atmos for the round and then go to beeing an engineer. Well yes, you can experiment with atmos systems, but that's it. There is no reason to improve a atmos systems that's already oversized, your work does not provied any benefits to the station. The supermatter engine is running perfectly fine without additional improvements. I don't know what to say about to pipe freezer, i just dislike it because it's just seems so overpowered. For me it's on the same level as if you would add a handcuff cannon to every security locker that shoots the cuffs directly on the targets hands. At least make me have to cool down some gas to use as "fuel" for the pipe freezer or something.

Well, i would prefer this solution to what we have right now. But i don't think it would have to be so drastic, how about: - Removing the Pipe-Freezer entirely or make it some item that you would have to get from science - Reducing the default amount of gas canisters across the station. Like the Supermatter engine, cyro, toxin mixing and toxin storage. Why even have a toxin storage when there is already a storage built in into toxin mixing? - Give the Atmos Tech some area to test / play around - Remove the Engineers access to fire alarms, that's the atmos tech job. Same way a atmos tech cannot enter Tech Storage or access APCs or Insulated gloves. If a bomb explodes somewhere and breaches the station, the engineers should be the guys getting the power back up seal the breach and repair damaged equipment, after that it should be the atmos tech jobs to restore pipeing and restore normal atmosphere. Something that just seems out of place and could add some meaning to modify atmospherics: - Tie the random scurbber backpressure surge event into the actual amount of gas in the waste loop. I am not saying that it should eject the actual gas inside (That would be terrible if you syphon a plasma fire somewhere) but take the pressure into account so that there is no pressure surge when the waste loop is actually empty. And the other way around raise thre probability of a surge happening when the pressure is high. All boils down to: give the atmos tech some meaning. Just compare Engineers to Atmos Techs: Engineer Access: - SMES - Engines - Insulated Gloves and comming with that the ability to repair shit - Tech Storage - EngiVend (Batteries and ciruit boards) - APCs - Fire alarms - Solars, which actually gives you a way to leave the station (a atmos tech is locked inside and literally has to remove windows to get outside) - Can reach Secure Storage Atmos Tech access: - Atmospherics, considering it's almost setup already and nobody ever needs any gas filled into canisters, this access looses a lot of meaning. - Can access Firealarms remotely - has more atmos equipment like scubbers and portable pumps, but considering the amount of gas that is pumped into the station distribution you barely need to use the portable pumps because the system easily handles a ton of breaches everywhere - has a pipe dispenser (secure storage in engineering has them too now) I would argue, when the CE goes into atmospherics at round start and sets the 5 filters to 4500kpa he could just lockdown atmospherics and the rest of the work for the round could be done by engineers and the oversized atmospherics systems. (huge amounts of gas in distribution, so you can acutally pump air into a breached room for quite some time without any long lasting effects) Also the amount of gas inside the atmospheric gas tanks seems to be basicly infinite for the usual rounds on this server.

I think the job Atmos Techs has basicly become redundant and if we continue the way we are going right now, we could just merge the Engineer and Atmos Tech. I remember Atmos Tech as one of the most demanding, interessing and argubly one of the most difficult jobs on the station. Right now it's just flat out boring and a miserable excuse to spawn with easy fireaxe access. To go into further detail i will just quote my own post that got buried in another topic:

Yep, it was possible for borgs to send PDA messages for a long time. I think they lost their send message button when the AI got it's new clicky icons at the bottom. As it stands right now, borgs can not initiate PDA messages, they can only click the "Reply" button in the chat.

It's just not the same, if the server lags and certain windows open with a longer delay you may send keys into game itself that could result in some random behaviour. It would also work outside of the game and you need to turn it off an on again or it starts clicking/typing in different windows. I already tried tools like that with other games and i am not a fan.

Since i had enough karma to play vox i stuck with it. I think you can have tons of funs as a vox due to fact that you can get away with almost everything if you rp it right. I do like what position vox have inside the community and i think it totally fits my playstyle to do some random stuff and have fun with other people. I do aggree that the vox raider leap mechanic is overpowered for a normal non-antag but i also have to aggree that the new mechanic does not add much to the game. Its only use is that both player drop anything they are holding and you can initiate a coinflip who gets the weapon your target was holding. I have learned how to use this to my advantage and manage to win most of this coinflips but i don't like it regardless. You are obviously working with a huge disadvantage due to the fact that you have to keep your nitrogen tank on you. Not only is it an easy way to kill you (stun, take tank and run. At this point you are done, there is no easy access to nitrogen tank or canisers). But also do you have to micromanage your very precious bag slots. (You are missing a backpack and with that the ability to carry boxes) I kinda like that, it makes your gameplay more interessting and you have to think about what items you really need and not just take everything. But i am not talking just inconvenience here, without a armor a vox is unable to store a weapon bigger than a taser and even then you are wearing it semi visible. It has real impact on gameplay. Sometimes you are able to work around it, use extended oxygen tanks and fill them with nitrogen, but you require at least two to make it work and they won't last very long either. This is only feasible if you have constant access to nitrogen tanks, e.g. engineering, atmos or since. You don't want to die in the engineering hallway waiting for an atmos tech. Maybe the Vox ambassador might change that. The best way to work around this is having an geneticist that gives you the gene that removes the need to breathe. I think it's just fair that the vox keeps the ability of beeing able to eva without a spacesuit especially due to the fact that there is only a single vox hardsuit on the entire station. I totally dislike the fact that vox have blood now. I just don't get why they suddenly need to have blood, it seems odd to me. I would like to see that also be changed back. I really like the change that vox can shriek on command now, that's awesome! Maybe something could be done about the random shriek, maybe it should not be triggered while whispering. I would also state some minor bug with the random skriek: I am playing with WASD mapping and if i hit T every command i send could trigger a shriek. Like *sigh, *shrug, or even if i hit OK/Enter if the field is empty..

Well, i obviously think that the toxin mixing chambers should get some decent windows, else it would be kinda useless. But i do like the removal of all the plasma windows. When i remember back like half a year or something, engineering and atmos actually had something to do on the station. Nowadays everything gets trivialized: - Plasma windows everywhere, that take like half an hour to breach if you don't have the tools to deconstruct them. - A atmospherics that comes by default with a freaking volumetric pump a the distribution loop? That's just flat out retarded considering that you could not unwrench pipes with pressure over 300 kPa. The obvious next step was to implement the easy way out and make some pipe cooling tool to unwrench the stupid high pressure pipes anyways. Come on, that was part of the fun of playing atmos tech. Balancing the pressure needs vs. the need to maybe replace some pipes in the system and keep the pressure as low as possible. Having some emergency systems to almost instantly boost the pressure in distribution. (Even back then a clever atmos tech could add pipes at to a pipe system with over 300 kPa) - Engineers beeing able to unlock Air Alarms and having their own pipe dispensers in the secure storage.. - Supermatter already prestocked with 4 nitrogen canisters, i mean really? This canisters should last for hours. - Cryo prestocked with two full oxygen canisters, that's so much the cooler is barely able to cool down the oxygen anymore. - Science having so much gas in storage that i have never seen a scientist come up to atmos and ask for any canisters, never ever did that happen! - The change with the canisters, that you actually can't fail to use them anymore. Because a eject also closes the valve. - Also fires seem to burn much shorter and have less of a spread than they used to be, i am talking specifically about oyxgen/fuel fires. Don't get me wrong, i do understand the intentions behind all this changes and they work well, they acutally work to well. There is basicly zero environmental danger and everything is super convenient on the station. This obviously effects the jobs that are supposed to deal with this kind of situations like engineers and especially atmos techs. I loved to play atmos tech but now it's just flat out boring. The most excitement you get nowadays are a few cows breaking like 3 or 4 walls, yay. If the time really comes, where there is acutally a giant bomb or something going on, then everyone just crys for the shuttle and just resets the round, because they are used to a perfectly functioning station. And let's be honest, big events like bombs or flooding plasma does rarely happen due to the strict rules on this one (i am not complaining about this rule and i wouldn't change it, i just want to point out that it adds to atmos tech beeing boring). My normal atmos tech round looks something like this: 1. Setup the 5 filters and maybe add some more pumps to the waste loop. 3 minutes 2. Hook the waste loop up to the cooler and heater and make them normalize the temperature (Heater, coolers and the rest of the mixing loop won't be needed for anything else due to the fact that everyone has enough of any gas in storage by default..) One minute 3. Find other engineers and atmos techs to annoy security and after that steal the booze-o-mat form the bar and set it up in engineering to make Cole happy. The smile on his face is reward enough. 4. My newest thing is setting up voice controled airlock lockdowns for atmospherics and engineering, since we now have a autolathe by default.. 5. If the round is still going at that point you have to get really creative and built some defences for the one pair of insulated gloves left in tech storage. I am talking electrified windows, stun turrets, alarms triggered by invisible infrared lasers, the whole shebang. Since this evolved more and more into giant rant about how useless my favorite job has become, i want to finish with some new changes that are really awesome and add to the game: I really love the new game mechanic that you can drill through walls and lay pipes without removing the walls, this definitely adds to the game. Same goes for the visual map of air alarms, this gives you a much better understanding of the current status of the station and definalty helps pinpointing breaches and such.

Well i think borgs already have troubles keeping up with the rest of the crew and if your target keeps running, you loose even more ground if you start typing. Even if it's as short as *halt. The officers have have hailer and and a mask that can be activated via a simple mouseclick, if done right you should not loose any ground. Somewhat off-topic: One of my big issues with ss13 are the clucky controls and not beeing able to set up propper hotkeys. Things could sometimes be so easy if you could just bind some very basic makros like "resist", "*halt" ... I have no problem with typeing stuff like *sigh or *stare in a conversation but the resist verb is so crucial gameplaywise, like beeing fed some bullshit food or pills. The propper way would be to resist the force feeding, but what you usually have to do is move a tile away so you are to far away for him to force feed you. And if you are really unlucky you end up in one of this stupid back and forth dances with another guy and eat the shitty pill anyways.

This command already exists, try: *halt *law