Give AI shells a magtractor

[somepotato]

I'm against this. If AIs want more power they can request a borg to be made for them.
Magtractors were originally for construction borgs and will likely be given one down the road.

Could medical borgs also get magtractors? This would allow them to do limb reattachments, which would be very helpful to the crew.

Might be just worth bumping up the magtractor power usage and making it a baseline borg item. But I'm against making it an AI shell item whole heartedly.

[Frank_Stein]

I'm against this. If AIs want more power they can request a borg to be made for them.
Magtractors were originally for construction borgs and will likely be given one down the road.

Could medical borgs also get magtractors? This would allow them to do limb reattachments, which would be very helpful to the crew.

Might be just worth bumping up the magtractor power usage and making it a baseline borg item. But I'm against making it an AI shell item whole heartedly.

How bout at least increasing the AI shell tool set? I'd love to be able to handle fires, make repairs, and clean messes without needing someone to make me a borg body.

[Vitatroll]

My only real desire here was to see a bee shaped shell honking at people.

That being said, I don't know what's so bad about them getting magtractors. A borg shell would still be better all around. The worst they could do with default magtractors is inefficiently hellsmoke/foam after a long setup. Maybe steal something important? It's not like I'm passionate about it, so eh.

[NateTheSquid]

no. i consider myself a rather skilled ai player, but with the current ai shells, i can destroy the station, killing everyone or specific people with relative ease. the ai shells can be used to release plasma/co2/n20 and are also BRUTALLY effective at straight up murder via stabs and shocked doors in the right place. this would be unnecessary and somehow run into the ground.

edit: tldr, I play AI, and think adding this would be overpowered

[somepotato]

AI shells are already on the strong side already, having them to go through a borg would be a check and balance in this situation.

[Cirrial]

For what it's worth, in my opinion give the construction borg the magtractor. Don't give shells a magtractor, they're limited by design. You don't have a roboticist or they're refusing to cooperate? That's no different from a lot of situations where a specific job is absent.

It doesn't make life impossible as AI or as a borg, and I've been in that situation plenty of times. If you urgently, urgently need help, politely ask the medical director to do it. If there's no roboticists and no medical director, ask a quartermaster. It's not their job but they can probably do it for you.

If literally no one will help you to make a borg body for yourself, consider what the common factor in your constant rejection is (it's you, it's probably you), and rethink your approach.

[ferriswheel1]

Allowing the AI to make more borgs at best destroys any cooperation between roboticists and the AI, and at worst removes the point of a separate robotics job entirely. Definitely not. I'm also kinda opposed to regular borgs being able to make borgs, given that it's one of the few cyborg-related things that still needs a human to do them.

[misto]

the eternal challenge of the roboticist, to create machines to do jobs, but not to make them too good at it, lest they take your own job

maybe we should theorize ways to make the human/machine cooperation more fun and streamlined because half the time theyre pestering and begging each other to do some pathetically tiny task like open a door or switch a battery, and the other half of the time one or the other has been slaughtered/killswitched and robotics destroyed(due to medbay being a high traffic high priority terrorism zone) rendering the surviving half of the equation crippled

[Frank_Stein]

the eternal challenge of the roboticist, to create machines to do jobs, but not to make them too good at it, lest they take your own job

maybe we should theorize ways to make the human/machine cooperation more fun and streamlined because half the time theyre pestering and begging each other to do some pathetically tiny task like open a door or switch a battery, and the other half of the time one or the other has been slaughtered/killswitched and robotics destroyed(due to medbay being a high traffic high priority terrorism zone) rendering the surviving half of the equation crippled

Good idea, Misto

[misto]

have the magtractor not be any kind of default tool module but an arm that must be built and put on the bot chassis by a human at some point. voila, now the roboticist has a job of putting on at least 1 magtractor arm before the self modifying, self replicating cyborg menace overruns us all

or more likely the borgs will run off to do shit with their new hands and crawl home begging for replacements when their limbs get shot off

[Vitatroll]

Allowing the AI to make more borgs...

Ah. There's the problem I didn't think about.

[Superlagg]

I'm all for replacing people's arms with magtractors at the very least.

And I know it'll never happen, but I still want the shell to be able to pull things. Or at least drive/transform into a forklift. Crates of liquor rarely drag themselves.

[Nnystyxx]

Why not just put some sort of internal limiter on the AI shell that prevents it from constructing/finishing borgs, a la the directives on drones? A sort of anti-replication protocol after THE INCIDENT
If the main problem is AIs making borgs, then cut off that ability for balance and add some sort of vague lore justification
EDIT: Even if it isn't adding a magtractor I think the shell deserves some kind of tweak