The state of Engineering

[Passive Engie]

This is all well and good, and the mineral accumulator does need some love or at least a resprite, but we're getting off-track. The main topic here is that recently engineering has been changed to be significantly more work in exchange for significantly less benefit. The main way to make engineering fun again is to try to conceptualize a series of "intended strategies" in writing for the different engine types, and then design systems so that working towards those intended strategies is:

* Not mostly repetative busywork (emptying/filling tanks, welding pipes, farting, etc.), as this tends to be boring.

* Gives returns that scale appreciably with the amount of work and skill put in.

* Can be done to some effect by one person, but is more effective with multiple.

* Doesnt cause major lag or station destruction in non-antagonist gameplay.

* Preferably involves other systems in under the engineering department's domain (cargo, mining, mechcomp, DWAINE, ruckingenur, etc.)

A dedicated mass-feeder machine instead of jank item duplicators is one aspect of how this might look for the singularity. Designing other systems to these criteria will require considerable thought and community discussion, but should hopefully make engineering more fun as a whole. Designing for the TEG may be especially challenging, both due to historical perceptions of its infinite power that will likely have to be dispelled and that the underlying systems of it (atmospherics) are rather...... arcane.

This is a very apt summary of the issue with engineering and what could be done to fix it. Getting the other engineering departments involved would honestly be a very good change and perhaps two simple ones I can think of would be that if they want to keep TEG mechanics the way they are then ordering graphene hardening compound from cargo and mining getting a mineral that can extract into fart gas would be great ways of getting them involved. As you stated further above in regards to the singularity, there is a lot of systems in place that just can't be handled by a single person without a large time loss on the other systems and that is also true for the TEG. Just those two changes alone would help alleviate that.

One other change I can think of would be for Oshan engineering and it would be a small one. Being able to use signallers with stompers. Once a stack gets quite high it's extremely hazardous to the engineers health to try and go in and stack it, especially if they've had the misfortune of mining already going underneath the hotspot stack. With a signaller you could pre-position a stomper for when you've managed to get a hotspot in place to add to the stack.