Goonhub
01-04-2015, 12:43 AM
See, but here's the thing that I think you guys should keep in mind. Anything, anything in the slightest, no matter how difficult it is to figure out, no matter how brainfucky the mechanisms are, no matter how godawful the interface is, should NOT be available to the general public if anyone can, if given simple instructions, destroy almost the entire station and kill everyone just by mashing together a few beakers. You don't have to know how something works to be able to use it, Solarium has proven that much on multiple occasions.
Canister bombs don't do this much damage. A superpowered mega-geneticist doesn't do this much damage. Making an entire room out of goddamn erebite doesn't do this much damage. And what sets the Chemicompiler apart from all of these other devices is that all you need to do is put beakers in, do some coding, and then suddenly you have a mega death bomb. No waiting around for gases to superheat, no fiddling with genetic code for an hour, no careful and discrete construction of explosives, just a bunch of beakers and the push of a couple of buttons.
No matter how difficult it is to learn, no matter how few people actually bother with the damn thing, being able to repeatedly and consistently deal that much damage with that little setup should not be an ability given to the general public. As Urs mentioned, people sharing scripts completely negates the one drawback to this thing and turns it into an absolute death machine. If people get secret chem recipes, they still need to be able to go through the trouble of making the stuff, and the secret poisons are FAR from inescapable doom. If people get perfect gas mixtures and setups for station-wrecking canister bombs, they still need to labor over the thing for a long time and hope that toxins lab doesn't blow up due to other things in the meantime.
The Chemicompiler has the potential of letting you completely destroy a really hefty chunk of the station in probably about ten minutes if you know what you're doing.
That's bad.
Canister bombs don't do this much damage. A superpowered mega-geneticist doesn't do this much damage. Making an entire room out of goddamn erebite doesn't do this much damage. And what sets the Chemicompiler apart from all of these other devices is that all you need to do is put beakers in, do some coding, and then suddenly you have a mega death bomb. No waiting around for gases to superheat, no fiddling with genetic code for an hour, no careful and discrete construction of explosives, just a bunch of beakers and the push of a couple of buttons.
No matter how difficult it is to learn, no matter how few people actually bother with the damn thing, being able to repeatedly and consistently deal that much damage with that little setup should not be an ability given to the general public. As Urs mentioned, people sharing scripts completely negates the one drawback to this thing and turns it into an absolute death machine. If people get secret chem recipes, they still need to be able to go through the trouble of making the stuff, and the secret poisons are FAR from inescapable doom. If people get perfect gas mixtures and setups for station-wrecking canister bombs, they still need to labor over the thing for a long time and hope that toxins lab doesn't blow up due to other things in the meantime.
The Chemicompiler has the potential of letting you completely destroy a really hefty chunk of the station in probably about ten minutes if you know what you're doing.
That's bad.