in-game maps for telescience

[cyberTripping]

i think it's pretty silly that the telesci manager is basically required for any serious, timely telescience use, and i think a game system relying on third party tools to be effective is proof of design problems

like, if you wanted to teleport the spare ID to you without tools, assuming you have your equation solved:

1. basically just guess where the captain's room is roughly, either using your own mental image of the station or the goonstation site maps
   
2. play a game of trial and error with the camera over and over, and keep undershooting/overshooting your adjustments as you inch closer
   
3. finally land on the id, teleport it to you
   

step 2 would take a considerable amount of time and is a massive hassle, and you have to do this every time you want to go to/take from a particular coordinate you haven't interacted with before (assuming youre recording them. need to call shuttle from captain's quarters and you didnt record the coordinates you used to nab the id? have fun doing it again, potentially dying from whatever hazard has you scrambling for the shuttle in the first place)

contrast to using the telesci manager where you just enter your data once after solving, and then pick whatever tile you want the corrected coords of and it automatically corrects it



this brings me to my suggestion: give the telenerds something similar to this in-game. Maybe some sort of simplified, color coded maps of the intial z levels, where a solid color pixel is indicative of the major tile in that location (walls, tables, airbridges, windows, doors, etc etc). This could then output the corrected coords of the tile you want (assuming you solved the equation correctly and put in the right variables!).

The fact theres a map at all makes getting a grasp of the general location you want to examine way, way easier, but the simplified nature of it means you wouldn't get every-item-on-table level precision like with mysha's manager. This means you wouldn't have to struggle to find captain's room for an extended amount of time, but depending on your own memory of the map you might miss the exact table tile youre wanting to teleport from and have to manually correct once or twice. Best of both worlds?

Make it it's own post, this is for tinier ideas

[Wisecrack34]

Take this to Ideas of Questionable Quality, this is for bigieyier ideas 

[Frank_Stein]

I'd love like, some kind of calibration beam. A big glowing light that let's you aim the teleporter better, but is resource intensive and observable by those where you're aiming it

Like, maybe you get a screen that shows you a replica of the tile you're aiming it at. So when you recognize a tile from the bar, you could kinda guess your way around by moving it until you find landmarks