The Roboticist's Dilemma

[Waffleloffle]

roboticist has always felt like a bit of a half-baked role. they're not as well-equipped for medical work as a standard doctor, but they never really have many concrete responsibilities once the AI has a functional shell. they get turned to for cybernetic surgery, sure, but the only thing really making that their job is the fact that the robotics fabricator is behind their door. with the increase of silicon self-sufficiency as of late, roboticists have found themselves with fewer and fewer things to do for the station, which I find to be a massive shame

one could argue that roboticists may simply be doomed to the same fate as mechanics: being folded into a more fleshed-out role at some point due to their lack of unique station tasks. I'd like to find a way to prevent that. I'm a fan of the roboticist role for several reasons - conceptually there's a lot of potential, the uniform's really cool, it's a pretty good Starter Medical role, it's nice to have a role that can keep Human Players and Silicon Players from stratifying into two separate groups, et cetera et cetera. there's a lot to like, on paper. the issue is that, in practice, their niche is very shallow at best

my main question for this thread is: how can we expand the capabilities of roboticists while maintaining synergy with both silicons and the organic members of the station? I think a nice starting point would be giving them a console that gives them a list of every active silicon on-station, along with serial numbers and every name that silicon's been under, and maybe their last recorded location on-station (though this may be a pretty large balance concern). something like this could be useful both in the case of locating emagged/compromised borgs, or reclaiming the parts of one broken by an antag's destruction. either way, let me know what you think and feel free to pitch your own ideas too