Elemental Plants

[Lord_earthfire]

considering just how intense botany mains can get with the reagents currently available, and how it's possible to get resulting chems into forms where they can be either endlessly gassed through an area or endlessly injected into someone in proximity, this seems extremely dangerous

I second this opinion. With botany, you need to check carefully which chems you add to the department.

Botany got good access to decent (not good, thsts scientists and traitors realm) application methods and litterally fucktons of chems, so you need to be able to expect what chems botany can make.

E.g. chlorine would enable the following splices:
phenol (harmless),
unstable mutagen (far too hard splice for mediocre effect),
hydrochloric acid (that one is interesting),
atrazine (botany got better poisons ans start woth like 800u of it in the vendors),
Chlorine itself (easy skinpen poison)
Strange reagent (that splice will kick lumen off the "most annoying splices botany can pull off"-throne and you will see it once upon a blue moon)

In this example, hydrochloric acid and chlorine itself seems like the only spicy additions. I think it would be ok, but this can lead to stuff like rafflesias that melt off half a departments equipment when they bloom.

The possibilities just get higher once you add in other basic chems.

So yes, more basic chems in botany are interesting and can get fun you need really, really be sure botany nerds cannot screw over half the station.

You don't want sonething to enable like black powder, which is why e.g. i dont see sulfur to be added to any plant in botany