Make chemistry's chem dispensers upgradeable

[trexter555]

Portable chem dispensers can be upgraded, why not the normal ones? Science still has to do RND, and chemists could do with an upgraded dispenser for advanced chemistry.

[BryanR]

As someone who does A LOT of Chemistry in Medbay, I can say that it really isn't needed. A good Chemist working in concert with another good Chemist can easily produce all the medicine needed for Medbay to function for a good hour if not the rest of the round. If you don't let the chems you make go to waste, then there should be no difficulty in achieving this without upgrades.

If you're the lone Chemist and you're good at your job, then its a matter of shifting between the machines as needed.

If your partner isn't doing too great, then when you've used up all the energy and you're waiting for it to recharge, offer pointers to the newbie to help them pump out medicines that Medbay needs. If they don't want the help, then go out to Medbay lobby or the general treatment area to offer any type of support to the doctors.

 

If you're working in SciChem you shouldn't be pushing out chemicals at a pace that outstrips your machine's ability to recharge, you're under no time constraint to offer assistance to a Department like MedChem and your actions should be slow, methodical, and keeping in mind the efficient use of the chemicals towards the experiment you wish to conduct.

 

Upgrading an already pretty powerful dispenser will just make it so that its only really necessary for a single Chemist to do any type of work in Medbay, what's the point in hiring two since a good one not only will be able to stock the Medbay fridge but the Public fridge as well with any possible meds that may be needed and similarly the SciChem dispensers would be pointless to upgrade since your goal shouldn't be mass production of chemicals but rather experiment with them.

 

Anyway that's my two cents on the matter.

[bolognaman]

The addition of several basic compounds to an upgraded dispesner could be a nice QOL upgrade. Namely sulfuric acid, acetone, unstable mutagen, ammonia, phenol (and maybe oil, but that's debatable). Nothing that has any inherent medical benefits, or are hard to make. This would simply streamline chem creation later in the round.

I agree that this addition would be largely unecessary or redundant due to the upgrades only being accessible after the chemist no longer needs immediate access to these compounds - or has already stockpiled bottles of them for future use. It would be a nice little bonus for an industrious chemist nonetheless.

[Landerlow]

With the recent medbay nerf and the (hopefully not) implementation of the new crit system, we could REALLY use some love for chemistry. So yay for upgrades. 

[Pennwick]

If chem dispensers got upgraded I'd like for it to be upgrading the parts gave some extra features instead of just faster recharge. One recent semi complex idea would having resivoirs in the machine for chems. Instead of making oil each time or juggling a second beaker, hold it inside the machine to be dispensed at a button click. Maybe start the round with only 2 slots and 100u each but upgrade to something like 4 or 6 and hold up to 300 each.

This one is semi related but some way to process monkey cubes straight for blood, so we don't have a dying monkey in the chem lab all the time. Put a monkey cube squeezer in the chem dispenser that gives you X blood to work with for each cube. Or make ground up monkey cubes make monkey powder, which when mixed with a small amount of water produce a large amount of blood. If you combined it with the resivoir then just piggyback off that system. Insert cube, get 500u of blood to work with.

I find that as a chemist I'm 'decent' but I only really drain my dispenser when pumping out really simple chems, otherwise its usually hovering midrange. And with the recent changes to sleepers I think I'd really struggle keeping up with medbay's needs. I don't need more speed, I need more Quality of Life features.

[davidchan]

I feel some chemical could be simplified in general, things like salbutamol and oculine being exceptionally complex for rather basic chems.

Having the ability to make acetone, phenol, ammonia, sulfuric acid and deithylamine would be a huge saver on medchem headaches.

It'd be rather neat if sleeper upgrades allowed you to choose what chems dialysis pulls or doesn't pull out of the patient (similar to air scrubbers via air alarms) or auto inject chems if it detects damage/low blood. Though hopefully coderbus sees the light and realizes taking away sleeper chem upgrades entirely was a bad thing.

[BryanR]

24 minutes ago, davidchan said:

I feel some chemical could be simplified in general, things like salbutamol and oculine being exceptionally complex for rather basic chems.

Having the ability to make acetone, phenol, ammonia, sulfuric acid and deithylamine would be a huge saver on medchem headaches.

It'd be rather neat if sleeper upgrades allowed you to choose what chems dialysis pulls or doesn't pull out of the patient (similar to air scrubbers via air alarms) or auto inject chems if it detects damage/low blood. Though hopefully coderbus sees the light and realizes taking away sleeper chem upgrades entirely was a bad thing.

With the exception of Ammonia, not entirely sure on that one, those chemicals are actually available at the start in a chem locker in MedChem in 50u bottles, more than enough for a quick path to complex chemicals like Atropine which can then be used to make Oculine from.

[CornMyCob]

50 minutes ago, Sihsse Zsak said:

With the exception of Ammonia, not entirely sure on that one

You even get ammonia from the lockers.

I personally like having to work from all the base chemicals and wouldn't really want that to change, especially since you get pretty much all the basic compounds you'll ever need from the chemical storage closets anyway. Energy management is and should remain an important part of playing chemistry, the two chem dispensers are more than you need to make all the medicines if you don't waste a load of chemicals.