When are bombs OK?

[ferriswheel1]

"Non-aggressive" is a bit of a stretch - even if you personally hadn't been causing any trouble, an army of sturdy syndieborgs had been rampaging across the station, with fairly explicit instructions from you to murder everyone in their way. In addition, medbay had been bombed about thrice by three different traitors by that point, and any survivors were killed off by the borgs - by the time I did it, medbay was functionally unrecoverable and solidly under control of the syndieborgs. When a couple of them went in with the roboticist I saw a chance and took it. A bit of an extreme measure, but it cut off the problem at the source and didn't damage any area that wasn't already damaged. Could less explosive measures have resolved the situation? Perhaps, but that wasn't what I had on hand.

The issue was kind of compounded by sec being worse than useless - a whole lot of new players joined that round, and most of them went straight to sec, then promptly began arresting everyone for the crime of being in their general vicinity. Having to dodge both killer robots and sec makes it very hard to come up with a plan other than 'oh hey someone left a bomb lying around, I can deal with at least one of those problems'.

In this context, I would say bombing was justified. A swarm of syndicate borgs is easily a game-over scenario in any round, especially if they have a roboticist backing them up, repairing them and building new borgs from their victims. I should know, I've created them myself twice.

I'd say bombing is okay in any situation when the station is in a state worthy of a shuttle call, I.E unrecoverable, and no other weapon could conceivably deal with the threat. For example, a blob that has taken over most of the station is probably fine, the routing depot not so much. Making a considerable area of the station uninhabitable is an option that should never be used if conventional weapons can still have an effect.

Having said that though, I've noticed a recent increase in vigilante murder of friendly antags. Just because they're an admitted antagonist should not give the average crew-member the right to outright murder them on sight. It's boring, kills fun for both the antag and the round and should absolutely not happen.