the great construction/repair complaining thread

[Kotomata]

i have been reminded of the horrors of the construction system as a result of a recent (to this post) shift with a bombed medbay so i have elected to compile a list of complaints and desired changes

PIPES!!!

• broken pipes (the ones where you have to welder them and they turn into scrap) must go, their aesthetic value does not outweigh the metric ton of extra clicking they impart upon disposals reconstruction (plus they litter scrap everywhere which sucks and is ugly)
  
• the pipe dispenser cart should have the capability to rebuild pipes off blueprints (this might be too strong but honestly no one repairs this shit anyways so who cares)
  
• the welding fuel cost for putting down pipes is insane you run out of fuel in a welding tool after like 10 pipes, do you KNOW how many pipes there are in medbay
  while it shouldn't cost 0 it should probably cost like half as much as it does now so i don't have to constantly refuel (also this is exacerbated by broken pipes which is another reason to nuke them)
  
• minor thing but itd be nice if the pipes could be painted somehow to become their different variants (mail pipe, crematorium pipe, etc)
  

WINDOWS AND GRILLES!!!!

• i maintain that grilles should not get damaged if they are under a window since it looks ugly as sin and the only way to fix it is to break the window (pain in the ass)
  
• window repairing kind of sucks you can use un-reinforced glass to repair reinforced windows and it's a non-stackable action bar so it's basically as time consuming as girders
  
• if we're adamant on window repairing requiring sheets then let me welder glass shards to turn them into sheets instead of the great shard collection adventure    (in which i have to run all the way to a reclaimer/processor then a nanofab to make them into sheets this sucks) (at least with scrap you get like 500 sheets)
  
• only tangentially related to the headline but can we remove the clickdrag interaction to split a stack? i have never wanted to do this. i only want to stack all the scrap and debris into one pile so its not horrifically ugly (also can we make it so shards/rods automatically exit the tile if you build a window on it so they stop getting trapped under windows constantly)
  

WALLS AND FLOORS!!!!!!

• it would be reaally cool if i could upgrade standard walls with reinforced sheets instead of having to welder it down first... not everyone has a RCD you know (and the people who do (borgs) only ever make standard walls when repairing i hate you)
  
• do displaced girders REAAAALLY need an action bar to anchor... i mean come on....
  
• if we dont have a walls blueprint system that would be cool (though idk where youd put it the t-ray is already pretty bloated)
  
• either make the floor/wall designer item an engineer locker item or fix the thing where bombed tiles lose their tile paint its ugly and ruins my pretty rebuilt medbay fun
  
• floors and walls are pretty much fine its hard to come up with suggestions or problems, only other thing is maybe make an automatic tiling mode like with cables so u dont have to spam click so much
  

MISC!!!!! (PROBABLY JUST CABLES)

• you know the data terminals under APCs that connects them to the wiring grid? i have a suspicion that you can't actually repair those, i tried printing the data terminals via mechlab but they didn't autoconnect to the APCs and they did not re-attach to the electrical grid
  
• i haven't built an apc in a while but if they still only build in one direction please change that (this is mechlabs fault i hate mechlab)
  
• oh i forgot to complain about this in the pipes section but either pipes and cables should really avoid windows/walls (except for grille shocking) or there should be a way to cable/pipe under them slightly easier, its not really that bad since usually the walls get blown up with the pipes but people tend to build walls and ask questions later which can be a pain
    (making it easier to go under windows and walls could make pipe traps really strong but mechcomp teleporters still exist so im not that phased by it)
  
• you can't place tables where there's a thindow/thindoor and it's really annoying on maps (LIKE COG1) where there happens to be table thindows everywhere at roundstart (which you can't reproduce naturally because you cant put tables on thindow tiles)
  
• edit: did you know that 100% destroyed atmos pipes require a long (probably not modified by carpenter/engi training) action bar with rods, then ANOTHER action bar with welder, to fix? for each atmos pipe? this is terrible
  
• this is more of a statement than an idea or complaint but mechlab sucks and i pray for the day someone decouples it from station repair
  

CLOSING THOUGHTS
god i hate the forums the bold and underline features keep coming back after i untoggle them

feel free to critique and obliterate my ideas since a lot of them are probably overly subjective or against some kind of dev policy somewhere (plus im absolutely not proofreading or going back over any of this im lazy as hell)
however do not expect me to post in this thread ever again

(i tried to give this some formatting to make it decent to go through but its still very stream of thought so i apologize to the readers)
oh god the bullet point feature has destroyed my blank lines and created massive text blocks why would it do this

[UrsulaMejor]

P sure welding shards into sheets is already a thing

[TDHooligan]

P sure welding shards into sheets is already a thing

it was at some point. i tried it recently and didnt get anything out of it?

this is a good thread tbh. constructing new parts of the station is always both a pain in the ass AND a slog. i consider it a godsend we *barely* avoided having the floor/wall tool nerfed. 

one of my pals i play with loved construction gimmicks but by the time we'd setup our gimmick and the prerequisite tooling, we'd have 30 minutes of the shift left, where everyone's too engaged in their own thing to bother. your best bet is just filling in a pre-walled space (like opposite cog1 sec) since floor tiles take 2 clicks and no action bars.

heres some guidelines i thought up:
ACTION BARS FOR:
- Deconstruction (to prevent griefing)
- Anything that creates and strengthens solid objects (wall , tables, windows and girders)

NO ACTION BARS:
- Repair actions
- Modify actions
i wholeheartedly support removing actionbars entirely for repairs that don't create solid walls. action bars for deconstruction actions make sense too.