New Telescience proposal

[Roomba]

this is cool in a nerdy way but what would this actually achieve beyond making people even more scared of approaching telescience and need even more fumbly third party programs to do telescience effectively?

i've always felt telescience needs more transparency, not less, particularly a level of transparency that makes using third party tools much less necessary. Staring at a completely different computer window takes people out of the round while they're doing it (they're not engaged with the chat at all), leading to something like the "geneticist effect" where people just nerd out and ignore the chat/crew entirely.

100% this.

Putting greater rewards behind harder maths would be fine, if this was a maths-based puzzle game. This is a game about being a spaceman on a space station interacting with your fellow spacemen, and all 'harder maths' means is that you spend even less time looking at the screen and even more time crunching numbers in a spreadsheet in another window.

Putting the best stuff behind that maths means there's an actual incentive to encourage anyone who figures out how to use it to keep it to themselves and not help out other people, because there's only so much good stuff to go around.