New Telescience proposal

[Frank_Stein]

this is cool in a nerdy way but what would this actually achieve beyond making people even more scared of approaching telescience and need even more fumbly third party programs to do telescience effectively?

i've always felt telescience needs more transparency, not less, particularly a level of transparency that makes using third party tools much less necessary. Staring at a completely different computer window takes people out of the round while they're doing it (they're not engaged with the chat at all), leading to something like the "geneticist effect" where people just nerd out and ignore the chat/crew entirely.

100% this.

Putting greater rewards behind harder maths would be fine, if this was a maths-based puzzle game. This is a game about being a spaceman on a space station interacting with your fellow spacemen, and all 'harder maths' means is that you spend even less time looking at the screen and even more time crunching numbers in a spreadsheet in another window.

Putting the best stuff behind that maths means there's an actual incentive to encourage anyone who figures out how to use it to keep it to themselves and not help out other people, because there's only so much good stuff to go around.

See, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand , I think the game should be approachable to as many people as possible, but on the other we have multiple jobs for a reason.

Not everyone will want to do math in this game. I sure as hell don't. But some people do, and I think it's great we have a job for those people, one that thematically fits.

I think the bigger issue is not having built ingame ways of figuring out solutions and needing to rely on out of game resources. It's the lack of feedback, and not really being able to use mistakes or partial successes to help guide you toward the correct answer that I'd like to see addressed. Though, I think I have a solution for that for this proposal. 

Just have a monitor that displays the path of your last fired projectile, as well as the targets it needs to hit. You set your variables, fire, see how close you got, and make adjustments.

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You could probably tie this into normal telescience as well. The objects launched could be research satellites that act as relay points for the teleporter. Daisy chain a few satellites and take the guesswork out of telescience as you just beam the transported particles from one satellite to the next.

Or mining. Fire missles at asteroids to large to pull in with the mining magnet and blow them up into more manageable chunks