Jump to content

davidchan

Members
  • Posts

    1,076
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

Posts posted by davidchan

  1.  

    It's been a long, long time since I've seen an IPC drain their cell entirely (it was horribly suggested that EMPs would suck their cells dry initially, thank god that was rejected) but last I saw, an IPC who let their cell drain was effectively dead/perma-critted. This can be fixed by throwing them in a borg charger and/or replacing their microbattery (maybe?)

     

    To my understanding, it's meant to balance the fact that they don't seem to suffer a 'hunger slowdown' like organics. On a sidenote I wish we had the disarm shove on APCs to dump power into one, was actually entertaining on baycode to see IPCs run about the station absorbing power from public APCs to force it into their departmental APCs, and more than once I saw a robotics IPC passed out in front of his semi charged APC from over donating.

     

  2.  

    In my opinion, for khaptain to be actually interesting role, you need interesting interactions with central command (less required than with NT rep, but still)

     

    I never understood why Tully said that fax goes to "an equivalent of president of USA" if you fax CC, even thou there is a NCS Trurl. All CC answers are from there per backstory and not from NT HQ.

     

     

    Tully has always had... unusual ideas on how SS13 is supposed to work.Can't say I agree with most of them.

     

    As for Captain, I'd strongly advise against giving them too much to do. Captain is an overseer role, at least in my book. If Captain is actually needed to do something it is likely a result of somebody not doing their own job (properly). With a Competent Crew and Heads of Staff, Captain really shouldn't have to do anything but regular check ups. During rounds where people aren't doing their job (like revolutions, cults or shadowlings) the job can be hell even if your heads are still loyal and carry out their orders.

     

    Captain is in a good spot, currently. At least in my own opinion. He/She has the most authority on the station and is in charge of 60+ people's productivity, safety and general well being. Better interaction between active admins and Command staff would improve things but that's not something that can uniformly done.

     

    If the Captain needs anything, it's generally just a bit more literature/wikilink books in their office better spelling out the limits of their authority, examples of appropriate behavior and interactions between themselves, their heads of staff, the NT Rep and Blueshield, their crew and CC. Player run event suggestions for slow rounds (parties in the bar, parades, events, scavenger hunts or things the Captain can do to speed up rounds) and general procedure books on what a Captain should do in the event of 'uncommon' phenomenon such as Nuke Ops, Vampire/Changlings, Cults or even things more mundane like general crew unrest, mutiny or even how a Captain SHOULD go about correcting power tripping staff, bad security or other rogue departments.

     

    None of these would be mechanical changes, but rather flavor improvements, guidelines and inspiration for how a good Captain should behave WITHOUT hampering or restricting Captains to a few specific playstyles that might not be fun at all for people to play, either as the Captain or General Crew.

     

  3.  

    Neutral/Kind of in Favor.

     

    On the one hand it'd allow IPCs to never worry about running out of charge and make long term space travel for them much more limited. It's not urgently needed and there rarely is a case of IPCs who can't find a APC or Charger and die of power loss unless they SSD'd or got flung off into space on accident.

     

    On the other hand, it would give IPCs a welcome Quality of Life improvement that wouldn't affect game balance much anyways, IPC rarely comes into play and round start to 2 hour crew transfer rarely requires an IPC to recharge more than once. Since Hunger and IPC power are supposed to be parallels this isn't that different from the amount of food a person needs to eat to stay satisfied, and the IPC doesn't heal from this like human/carbons do.

     

    The cherry on the cake is that it would add the ability for IPCs to RP (*GASP*) and join their fellow crew in the bar during down times to enjoy their own flavor of meale next to their coworkers, and could even open up the door for Synth Food recipies for the chef like the Bartender gets for Synthahol. Plus our Kitchen Recipie list could use a bit of diversity with each species having a favored dish with more alien foodtypes (because who doesn't wanna see a Vox eating a tray of worms?!)

     

  4.  

    Disposal tubes do infact sort mail in them, and this happens within the junctions themselves, not the chutes and inlets that you see during standard gameplay.

     

    Fun fact, for the longest time this was how Drones got around, and they still can, though pretty much everyone agrees Vent Crawling is better though mailing yourself from security to science is a lazy and effective way to get around for a drone.

     

    As for garbage piling up in random offices, it comes down to how the junctions are sorted, and changing the orientation of these tubes and junctions can have radically different results. Not many people understand or know the default layout, so when bombs blow open chunks of disposals its hell trying to get the system back into basic working order.

     

    For regular crew, this means if you can get a hold of some parcel paper and a tag gun you can set up your own delivery system (many chefs in the past have done this) to ship items to other departments without (much) fear of Cargo intercepting and stealing them or just tossing them into the crusher.

     

  5.  

    I have a few ideas:

    1. A Nuclear Engine with cooling rods. Dipping the rods produces less power, but increases the safety/decreases the destruction due to malfunction. Raising them increases the power/increases the destruction. Furthermore, the rods would have to be checked throughout the round to ensure they are optimal, else a malfunction occur. It'd be an engine with a little bit of playing room, gives the engineers something to do over the course of the round, and can be potentially devastating if misused.

     

     

    SS13 already has this. It's called the R-UST engine and baycode laid the foundation for one and /vg/ actually coded it.

     

    It's a bit more babysitting but like most SS13 engines it's just scary to new players because if you fuck up the set up bad things happen. Once you learn to use it you can easily set it up to to run 2+ hours with little to no problems, but the MOAR POWA settings do require constant tweaking to prevent making space chernobyl/fukashima.

     

    Ultimately it's only a more complicated Supermatter that superheats the air around it, allowing said air to be channeled into a ThermoElectricGenerator (TEG) engine that creates energy based upon the differential between its 'hot' and 'cold' inputs. The R-UST engine itself doesn't produce power that I'm aware of but creates steam for a turbine to run, much like how actual Nuclear Power Plants function today.

     

    For me, the path to fixing engineering is as this:

     

    1) Make power mean something. Currently the power needs about 250kW to sustain itself long term, though it's possible to do this under 150kW on less populated stations. Solars produce this much, and the Turbine can as well, with the actual engines both capable of producing up to 2-5 million with default set ups. This ultimately means that the primary job of Engineering, setting up power, is mostly meaningless because once the SMESes have been fully charged 15 minutes in you can just disable the engine and do nothing. Power needs an actual use right now since the only time you notice it is when it's not set up or a cable was cut to APCs.

     

    Solution to this? Make a shield generator that needs constant power to maintain and regular meteor/asteroid waves that pound the shields and drain power. Also having thrusters on all sides of the station that can produce thrust, giving us an imaginary orbital map of the station floating somewhere between the planet and asteroid belt that miners go to mine. Changing the orbit could be done to avoid heavy meteor showers or potential events, with a risk reward of the station staying in certain altitudes could decrease cargo shuttle times and affect how quickly people could get to the miner asteroid (I've asked before how difficult it would be to RNG 300x300 small asteroid belt mining maps but never got a reply) and going the reverse could increase these times while reducing the impact of events like radiation belts or meteor showers by drifting closer to the planet's magnetic sphere to shield the station. Traitors could have objectives or options to fully de-orbit the station (sinking it into the upper atmospheres of the Gas Giant it orbits, changing space tiles into plasma tiles and ramping up the pressure outside the station till the windows and walls implode like a sinking submarine) or pushing it into the asteroid belt to ram it into a larger asteroid or just let it get shredded to pieces.

     

    These thrusters and shields would both require a lot of power, overloads to equipment could damage or destroy them requiring repairs or replacements while the station is vulnerable. Station equipment in general could just be ramped up in power usage, particularly science who are the most reliant on their machines, but places like Security or Engineering too could use more QOL machines to increase their power usage. A Security Lathe that creates and prints security specific items, for example, or an 'Interrogation Chair' that can be used to zap prisoners to help encourage them to speak, or even the Station/Prison VR network that was talked about. Engineers could use something similar to the bluespace shelters on tg lavaland that allows them to design or set up basic station structures and toss the capsules onto catwalks or space to rapidly create rooms for station expansion. There are dozens of other ideas that could be put to the test as high power consumption items like Orbital Mining Lasers to Power Transmission Beam. We'd ultimately just have to find what the server would get the most use out of and what would be the easiest to implement. Keeping with the current limit to the powernet there could be overlapping power nets to each wing and Engineering would have to determine every round how much power each department/wing was using and adjust from there if we did manage to make it so the station was using 5+ million power every round.

     

    Also Carp should ATTACK solar panels on sight, as proper solar panels would be a mirror almost and they should see their reflection and go apeshit like a Betaifsh trying to destroy them, makings even Solar Panels requiring SOME checking from time to time.

     

    TL;DR Part 1 decrease the efficiency of power production by making the station consume more power and make more ways to use power.

     

    2) Preventative Maintenance. Currently the only things that fall under this category are the green Space Fungus random events that are generally ignored because it takes for ever for a fungus infected wall to crumble and that rarely does anything because the girder is still in place. Constantly used machines across the station from APCs and Air Alarms to medbay equipment, science or even vending machines should require regular checking up on them to ensure they are operating at 100% and won't break down. Engineers would have to move about the station inspecting and scanning the various objects throughout the shift. Mice and other station rodents chewing on cables or even stress points and cracks showing up on T-Ray scanners that the engineers would have to address quickly or else the station might breach itself without an explosion. Not only would this give engineers shit do like their Science/Medical/Security counterparts on the station, but it would also give most traitor engineers a very good excuse to get into departments and areas they'd otherwise be turned away from to inspect for damage or problems on a regular basis, and if players are more used to seeing engineering in their departments they might actually remember they exist and even go as far to ask for upgrades or layout changes to their work areas (adding/removing walls and doors to create/remove rooms, new machines, ect...)

     

    Further more, I feel the equipment in Atmosia should require some babysitting, maybe some ACTUAL filters that require replacing or even various methods of doing this (rapid heating and cooling to kill bacteria/changing gas states, bombarding with radiation, or the current classic filters) with each method having a con/pro compared to the others in terms of power efficiency, change of removing or preventing viral agents from spreading to just what really does happen if a swarmer or mouse crawls through all that radiation?

     

    3)More engineering related events. Shorts or overloads in the powernet, metal stress causing parts of the station to shift, fluctuations in the gravity generator, ect... Currently the only real engineering events are not something engineers can do much about. The Power Outage, while a good event for traitors and a slowdown in the shift doesn't really have anything the engineers can do aside from crowbar open doors to save trapped people before the SMESes finally turn back online. Meteors on the other hand is almost always an instant shuttle because the waves have no lull in them to allow for repairs, they either do minimal damage to part of the station no one cares about (maint or arrivals) or damage someplace vital and instantly get the shuttle called because if an engineer does try to go out and repair while the meteors are still coming they will die and by the time the event passes its unreasonable to assume they'd fix the area before the shuttle comes anyways. The vending machine event is the closest engineers get to being useful on the station since they have the tools to shut down rogue vending machines before they animate but even then, so does pretty much any prepared station crew member.

     

    4)Stop making perpetual energy engines/change the ones we have Currently, the PA is a cool design, admittedly, but its also just spending power to make more power. Tesla and Singularity can both be wired to directly pour energy into the emitters and PA so the power they expend naturally is a pitance compared to what they will continually produced. Engineering barely burns any plasma as is in radiation collectors, and while the PACMANs were once a good and balanced trade of Plasma for power, they serve no point and engineering doesn't use up any resources they can't easily get more of doing their basic job, and the only major limiting factor is how much time they want to spend on set up. Repairs similarly are mostly just dependant on how much metal and glass Cargo is willing to order/miners have collected and if Science didn't steal everything in the ORM before they got there.

     

    PA should probably consume Uranium or maybe have lenses that can be fashioned out of Diamonds that wear out over time, emitters needing to be recalibrated or replaced after over use and so on. Just adding an operational cost and regular maintenance intervals would go a long way from making this a non-job into something that engages the player and makes their presence actually useful. Chief Engineer should be one of the hardest jobs on the station requiring them to manage who goes where and guess how much time that job will take, juggling which tasks are most important and pressing at the moment and hoping the crew as a whole doesn't realize how close to imploding on itself the station really is. Presently its a job that facilitated up to 9 people and can be entirely run and managed by one person barring saboteurs or terrible RNG luck with meteors.

     

  6.  

    A short term 'fix' to the healing would be fairly easy in concept, though probably a bit more difficult in practice.

     

    Having any extra healing from a welder or wiring overflow into other body parts, as in, if an IPC has 10 burn damage distributed across their body, and you wire their chest, 1 wire will be consumed regardless, and this is supposed to heal 5 burn. So the first heal would completely heal the chest and randomly heal other body parts until the left over heal was reduced to 0, and then they could target another damaged body part and continue the process until they were fully healed. This might make Nanopaste actually worth it's steep resource cost as it heals both burn and brute (or last I checked it did)

     

    As far as EMPs go, while I am fine with them where they are now, I'd happily trade EMP 1HKOs for EMPs dealing steep damage and force shutting down the IPC (like they do borgs) for 10-15 seconds, and to compensate for this slight buff taking away their radiation immunity and making 'letha'l doses of radiation deal burn damage to the IPC, as we basically all agree they are tinfoil and cardboard tubes and when you put tinfoil in a microwave it burns.

     

    I would also fully support going back to IPC posibrains in their skulls and not their chests, but I always thought there was a bit of a charm to having decapped IPCs still be 'active' if immobile, maybe fix it so their heads can only whisper without their body as a primary power source or give them a battery back up in their head that only lasts for a minute or so, meaning they still 'die' if disassembled. Granted, this would mean they'd need a slight buff to prevent their heads from falling off by a random toolboxing as usually happens.

     

    And as Dumdum pointed out, IPC limbs breaking is possibly the most annoying and crippling con they have going for them, since they can't self repair these, and unlike broken bones they still can't heal over it and splint the broken limb to allow somewhat activity till they can get someone to surgery them. I really don't know how you'd go about fixing this, but it seems like broken bones aren't a guarantee for organics but for IPCs getting significant damage on any limb immediately renders that limb useless 100% of the time.

     

  7.  

    I personally feel that the chem immunity is more of a con than it is a pro, for the same reason 'easy healing' is a total line of crap from anyone who knows what goes into healing IPCs.

     

    Losing the ability to process chems means that 99% of medical/average player has no idea how to deal with IPCs, and since chems effect every area of the body at once it is always going to be easier and faster to heal a human/organic than it would be to heal an IPC. This is most apparent if you have an IPC and organic get exposed to space and take that 5-10 burn/brute combo across their entire body. For a human, this can be fixed in a matter of seconds. A synthflesh patch, SS/SP patch(es), sleeper or cryo. For an IPC this is 14 applications of welding and wiring or 7 stacks of nanopaste to get them back to 100%, targeting every area of the body individually.

     

    The only two things that heal an entire IPC at once is a hivelord core, good luck getting one of those if you aren't a miner or happen to be really good friends with one willing to spend the points to stabilize a core for you, or an upgraded cyborg charger, only one of which is in public access for all IPCs to use and suit chargers almost never get upgraded meaning you can count on this method of healing about as much as you can count on science to give every department their own personal chem dispenser. Only a handful of science regulars understand you can upgrade chargers, even fewer know what those upgrades do and fewer still care enough to use parts they mass produce anyways to do it.

     

    Clone immunity is a none issue since it's standard practice to cryodip clones anyways even if the cloner is upgraded, you'll rarely see a person with clone damage outside of the rare Xenobiologist who got glomped, thanks to the remote Xenobio system though clone damage is even rarer. And this all comes on the side of not being able to use Genetic powers or DNA scramblers to empower themselves and change their identities. Virus immunity comes into the same category as several virus combos are blatantly OP and only balanced by the RNG barrier to acquiring them. IPCs can't self-heal, stimulant inducing space walking viruses like everyone else.

     

    As for Radiation, outside of the radiation belt events the only other sources of radiation on the station are genetics, which is of no benefit to them anyways, and the singularity, which will kill them outright via EMP from farther away than an organic would even begin to feel the adverse effects of radiation. Every other source of radiation is so rare and niche (The useless plasma pistol and even more useless Tator Medic analyzer) that even regular players aren't worried about them.

     

  8.  

    Yeah a lot of people forget that atmos pipes run on systems or zones. All connected pipes will have an average/identical temperature and pressure, regardless of their distance from the heat source/cooling point and inlets. Pumps, Valves and any other connector that isn't an actual pipe seperates two systems allowing them to have different values.

     

    This is why you have a lot of rookie atmosians connect their freezers/heaters to very small pipe runs, the machines seem more efficient with smaller volumes of gas because they move the numbers faster, but in reality you could hook your entire loop that you want to adjust to a heater/cooler and the end outcome would be about the same. There really isn't any reason to have that initial waste pump once you learn how atmos works, the filters will draw gas on their own just like a gas pump and all the gas waiting to be filtered can still be climate controlled just fine.

     

    Can't say I fully support hooking waste pipes right up to a space loop, but I am the guy who accidentally hooked my main oxygen line to a space loop trying to supercharge the turbine only to find out I was freezing my distro loop in the process and had -250c~ air going right into the station. Atmosia with care!

     

  9.  

    You can just remove the singular pumps that don't separate heated/cooled areas of your system with manual valves or regular pipes. So your parallel pipes would draw directly from the waste loop and move the most gas at once. It sounds counter intuitive but I'd actually NOT use volume pumps going to your filter loop (from your chill/heat area) and actually just use gas pumps so you can ensure that the filter loop is only ever bothering with 4500kPa anyways, meaning your gas will spend longer being chilled/heated by your space loop or machines.

     

    Really the important part is to ensure you're keeping the waste loop near empty so scrubbers across the station can just dump bad gases into a near empty loop to be vacuumed back to you (I usually turn the exhaust of in maint next to the turbine since it doesn't filter anything.)

     

  10.  

    Most of its okay but those parallel pumps on the back side of your freezers going into filter loop aren't doing you any favors, your filter loop is gated by the filters themselves that can't more than 4500kpa anyways. May as well keep all that gas cooling down as it goes into the filters rather than have small eection for it to cool off at.

     

    Pumps are good for moving gas and parallel pumps are great for getting large amounts of it where you want to go, but you have to remember your inlets and outlets are fixed in size so unless you expanded your filter loop with more parallels you aren't changing much.

     

  11.  

    Scientist: RnD needs to be more proactive. Actual prototyping and use of a various items that can be distributed to the crew/departments. Prototypes have built in 'Data' stats that raise every time they are used/active. Data rises randomly by 1-25% for each use or minute of continuous use for items are always on. Once Data reaches 100%, it can be turned into RnD for analysis and raise research levels (And this might ACTUALLY give the firing range a use to RnD weapons). Making SciChem and Toxins more than just a tator's workshop would be nice as well.

     

    Robotics: Not much to add here as a Roboticist can usually keep themselves busy over the course of most rounds, particularly if they have active miners and someone did enough RnD to let them make mechs. The only expansion or improvement I can think of would be to bots. Give Robotics a terminal that allows them to summon bots on the station for maintenance, give bots internal power supplies and micro chargers in mech bay or positioned on the walls throughout the station that bots (and drones) can use to recharge, and add more bots to help in other jobs, like a litter bot that goes about collecting trash items and dumping them in cargo/disposals for sorting and recycling, a gardening bot that automatically checks flowers for weeds and could be upgraded to water plants at regular intervals.

     

    RD: Not much to add here, particularly if above methods go through. That said the ability for the RD to have a way to program or upgrade the AI and Cyborgs through ease-of-use/quality-of-life methods such being able to give the borgs night vision, upgrading the AI's tracking and ability to recognize requests, auto scripts that could recognize commands and execute orders based off those commands (If Captain says lockdown, AI could program all doors to bridge and Caps office to shut, bolt and electrify, for example. If Doctor says emergency all doors in 3 tile radius go to emergency access for 15 seconds, ect...)

     

  12. This would all be true if the current AI setup didn't render the turrets completely ineffective against raiders because they are located against perimeter walls of the core, making it easy for any intruder or AI slayer with an RCD or ability to rip down R-walls to assault the AI without taking damage. Why does there also need to be a method to taking down the AI without any reasonable detection or counter-play when it's already possible to kill the AI without risking damage to yourself?

  13.  

    Given how unsecure cargo really is, it's bad idea to incentivise even more people to break into Cargo to nab tools or goodies from their lathe. This would only lead to lathes having access restrictions like the RnD machines or Cargo ordering terminal, which is also bad. That said I do like the idea of raw or recycleable materials being strewn about the station that Cargo/RnD can break down for metal and glass or be exported for points to give assistants something to do, it'd be like harvest moon except your not searching the woods for honeycombs, your scavenging the abandoned parts of the station for goodies. That might even incentivise people to go to the derelict (aka the most underutilized facility in the game) to cannibalize it's systems to make the Cyberaid even better.

     

    Increasing hostile mob counts around the derelict could make things interesting, or having an abondoned wing on the station that fills a similar purpose and maybe overrun wtih spiders or other potentially dangerous pests that the crew could either clear out every round or just barricade and seal the wing to keep the !FUN! stuff in there (do I hear reasonable place for a xeno hive?)

     

    TL;DR everyone seems to want Cargo to be a trading post but most jobs just don't have anything worth trading. Fix that and and you'd have a good step on the road to an economic system people seem to want so bad.

     

  14.  

    saying "I Ded Ples Nerf" is basically a meme at this point, but... this is entirely what this post is.

     

    You got killed by something that is working literally as it was designed to work. Such is life.

     

    I will say that the 'i ded plz nrf' meme only has credence if there is some form of counter play that is viable without severe cases of metagaming.

     

    In the case of the AI, what exactly do you suggest they could do to protect themself against bullets fired by an assailant they don't have any means of detecting?

     

    You can't just declare something like that without a counterargument or logical means of defending yourself. I.E. if someone says e-sword op you reply disarm intent, banana or bucket of water. These penetrator rounds are about as bad the old syndiborgs that could remotely open and unbolt doors without ever once triggering a core alert, there was no counterplay aside from straight up bolt and depowering every door in the core, which was deemed metagaming/powergaming and not something an AI should do.

     

  15.  

    Detomax is shit, but you get what you pay for. In the right conditions they are super deadly, but if you just buy and spam click boom don't expect results to be good.

     

    I've had a few funny run ins where a tator dropped their detomax card after a failed attempt of theirs to do syndi things, and having a pretty good guess who it was (they came at me with an esword with no mask on) I picked it up, selected their PDA and boom! Funny part was they were in space and dropped their O2 tank because of it so gg'd no re for them.

     

  16.  

    See, that's 5 laws masquerading as one law in my book, and it's just anti-fun.

     

    The asshole in me would argue that Silcon's can't be killed because they are not alive, they are shut down. Any law that demands the AI suicide or self-terminate should be considered invalid by policy.

     

  17. Honestly I'd prefer tgs 'Act like an Antag get treated like an Antag' rule in which shitty players who intentionally start shit to try and banbait get their comeuppance. Honestly it seems that much of the bad behavior on paradise seems to stem from that 'You can't hurt me!' despite there being some pretty good justification to send someone to medbay or even the morgue if they repeatedly and constantly harass other players enough to provoke violence.

  18.  

    My understanding of these weapons sets was that they are to be a low-cost alternative tool, with similar functionality as the Autorifles but entirely minded for stun.

     

    In 1 to 1 combat they would be inferior to hybrid tasers as their pershot stamina drain is lower.

     

    But having high capacity of darts for each gun, somewhat faster firing speed and ability to carry plentiful amounts of spare ammunition would allow security (or team antags) to utilize them for sustained fights or large scale crowd control when you don't particularly want to kill everyone see.

     

    Ideally, these items would have a burst fire and relatively inaccurate firing arc per weapon (similar to how real life nerf guns rarely shoot straight) and either be cheaper per crate and/or come with more weapons and darts per crate. I can definitely see QMs and CTs teams viaing to get these as their nonlethal nature allows them to keep intruders out of cargo while also not falling under the dangerous weapon category making them a low priority for security in terms of crimes and illegal items, possibly even encouraged in shadowling or cult rounds (and rev and gang if those ever return/get ported) when command/security doesn't want to see cargo fall to conversion and start supplying their enemies with guns.

     

    And as stated above, these would be a rather niche weapon set perfect for Amber ERTs as they are capable of controlling a situation without causing mass casualties, and given that Security loves to use items associated with ERTs they might go out of their way to get a set like SWAT gear crates that regularly found their way to security despite not being needed on the station at all.

     

    tl;dr are these absolutely needed or an answer to a problem on the server? No. Do they add variety, choice and a fun alternative to riot control and team combat? Yes, and so long as they are balanced I feel that's actually what the server needs. These aren't meant to be a buff, they are a side-grade for those that prefer an abundance of firepower without fear of killing bystanders.

     

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Terms of Use