is lljk dead

[Roomba]

What I miss from the old days was when you could keep a portal up with telesci indefinitely without a hellburn, so you could just leave it up to the zone of choice, yell for the AI to bolt telesci's public door open, and any bored assistants could wander in to check things out. The change was done to encourage cooperation in telescientists, but ever since then interest in it has been steadily dropping because the anarchic expeditions of the past have been replaced by yelling for intrepid explorers, waiting half an hour for them to gather supplies, having only one guy show up at the end, and then finding out the mainframe is down because no one set up the solars.

Also the actual 'convert X to Y' maths is only a fraction of what makes telesci offputting to the common man. Sure you can work out the maths, but you still have to work out what the adventure zones are and how to get there, you have to learn what tools, items and weapons to bring so you don't get instantly die or get stuck in the first room, and you have to either get your hands on the portasci remote/program or accept the fact that you just might end up stuck offstation through circumstances entirely beyond your control. Sure, all that stuff is stuff that can be worked out from trial and error, but as this thread has clearly established, even getting past the 'basic maths' part is too much of a hurdle for some.