Thoughts and suggestions on medical department

[Egregorious]

Hadn't thought about it, but your takes on cloning are very accurate. It is oftentimes easier to literally clone someone than it is to keep them from dying. This should never be the case. I also vehemently agree with SR becoming commonplace, that's a band-aid fix. Honestly, cloning should just be more dangerous. I want more weird birth defects, missing limbs and organs, spawning as weird mutant races should be the norm, that gives everyone a motivation to avoid cloning at all costs, especially on RP.

From a game-mechanic perspective, the catch-22 with cloning is that it needs to be at its most accessible when things are already off-the-walls. The issue with flatly applying significant cloning defects is that defects become more of an issue the more of them there are, i.e. the more you use the cloning machine in succession. This means that when things are already bad and medical doctors have many things to already be doing, that's when defects are making cloning an issue. Which is the opposite of what you want.

You want cloning to be at its most useful when everything is going wrong, and at its most problematic when medical doctors are free to deal with the consequences. Such that doctors have more to do when things are quieter, and have less to worry about when they already have tons on their plate to deal with.

The simplest way to do that, I think, would be to make defects accumulate in the cloner over time when it's not used, applying them to the next clonee and then flushing themselves out. Is it 30 minutes into a quiet shift and Bongo the Clown offed himself with the russian revolver? He's going to come out wiith a plethora of now-chronic medical problems and needs to be taken care of for a few minutes just so he can stay alive. Conversely, did half of medbay just blow up, none of the doctors on shift know what they're doing, and 5 corpses are piled up in the lobby? The majority of those clonees are going to pop out just fine, because the cloning machine has had a chance to 'warm-up' after the first corpse.

You could even add a module to the machine that warms it up manually, allowing people to clear away all the defects, so that in the case of the latter scenario the first clonee isn't the sacrificial lamb. It goes without saying such a module would need a big cooldown and/or a use-limit, but that also means you can sprinkle warm-up modules in adventure zone areas or mining treasures for people to potentally help medbay out with.

But this idea would maybe encourage people to off themselves or kill their fellow doctors just to reset the defect accumulation, I don't know.