Cogmap 2: *** UPDATE TO BYOND 509 ASAP ***

[BaneOfGiygas]

Hey! I haven't been around for more then a year on Goonstation, but when I came back I was seriously impressed with the low-range teleporter thingy. After doing my hardest to locate the observatory on Cogmap2, it was nowhere to be seen.
Please don't scrap the wonderfull observatory PC, whoever made the UI for it deserves a medal. I'ts really simplistic, clear and it fits the "dark" theme inside the room.

Have no fear friend, the terminal for it is actually in the Research Director's office! The telescope proper has yet to be placed, though. Also, the teleporter itself has its own room now, which means that it will hopefully be expanded on in the future.

I think that once the armory guns are broken out, it's rarely worth using anything other than the riot shotguns, for exactly the reason stated - a single hit landed means a very long stun, and you can then finish off/capture your opponent at your leisure.

[...]

More gunfights out in the open would be neat, but whoever enters the armory first has a massive firepower advantage and can easily snowball their way up to unstoppability. You can see this with wizards, who can loot the armory within the first ten seconds of the round and quickly obliterate any resistance from then on.

I agree heartily with both of these points, though the insta-stuns are what gives the riot shotguns relevance in the face of other long-range stun options, i.e. the taser gun. Perhaps have them deal heavy stamina damage instead of being an instant stun, so you need to fire them at someone at least a few times before they fall over. Compound this with the speed reduction from the damage and bleeding and it makes them a solid upgrade over the taser gun without as much of the cheapness.

As for the second point, I also heartily agree, though I would like to say that the increased number of security checkpoints means that armed resistance to armory break-ins will be much more substantial, and that not many people take enough advantage of the extra equipment lockers anyways. If the riot shotguns are nerfed in accordance with my above suggestions, and also considering the greater size of the map, any one player is going to have a tough time becoming walking Armageddon, because even though the increased map size gives security some problems, it also lessens the extent to which one single antagonist can terrorize the entire station. A welcome change, if you ask me.

Is the bomb disposal stuff worth having?

Quite frankly, no. Or at the very least, not in their present state. That's because almost all of the "bombs" you end up seeing are basically souped-up frag grenades in function, being primed and then tossed at whoever. The only bombs that ever need to be "disposed" are canister bombs, and those are both extremely rare and are powerful enough that being near one that detonates is a death sentence no matter how much explosion resistance you've got stacked.

Furthermore, the bomb disposal stuff makes you really fucking slow, and that's inexcusable for SS13 security. To be an effective security officer, and an effective robuster in general, you need to be fast, and you can't be fast in those things. Where there are bombs, there are more than likely gun-toting antagonists lying in wait, and not being able to properly run away from being shot at is a death sentence.

However, I'm thinking of introducing what amounts to an insulated armor suit, giving increased resistance towards adverse conditions while simultaneously providing the additional bullet resistance that standard security armor provides. It wouldn't be anything you could go spacewalking in, but it's enough so that you wouldn't have to sacrifice your resistance to bullets when you need to get through a hull breach.

For the array of weapons in there, I'd hope to see sec teams using certain things for certain tasks. Riot guns and smokes for riots or breaking up big messes [...]

But the intrinsic problem inherent with weapons designed towards this purpose is that there's only one type of player who's going to have a lot of people gunning for them at once and that's the antagonists. There are only about five or six antagonists in a given round, and to have all of them coming after you simultaneously is almost statistically impossible. The threats security faces are almost always single person, or maybe a duo of people in some cases, who have extremely powerful equipment. Never in my days of security or playing the game in general have I faced a group of people that could be described as a "riot" while also not being an antagonist.