Engineering Department Improvements

[EtheSpaceWolf]

As someone who loves playing Engineer, QM, Mining, and Mechanic in that order, but as the department as a whole, I feel like Often within 15-30 minutes of a round these jobs run out of stuff to do, or do not have a purpose in doing their tasks anymore.

Im going to start suggestions to my favorite: The Engineer

Most stations come with solar Arrays that could easily power the station for the entire round. 
Besides wishing for maybe an eclipse event, I think it would be best to have the solars sort of be back up power and meant for only critical station functions. 
For example, Bridge, a room in each department, Atmo if it ever comes back, ect. 
This would also mean Engineers have a better reason to not only operate the engine but also keep trying to improve whichever engine they have to increase output.

Another suggestions I have on the topic of power, although more complicated, would be to divert/control individual departments power. This is more so for interactions between departments other than "Science blew up again, can you come fix?". It also could lead to some interesting gameplay if implemented such as, science needs more power for an artifact to test it, then needs power to contain it. Maybe Security's brig could use a force field but if the station runs out of power its harder to contain prisoners? 

I could keep spit balling or throwing ideas at the wall here but those are my two biggest thoughts/ideas for Engineer, now onto QM.

Playing QM Is probably the most relaxing job to me. Move cargo, order stuff for departments, send stuff out, ect. But besides making mountains of cash, it can get quiet boring, especially if people do not realize most stations have a local delivery system. I think a quick improvement to QM/Cargo would be to make the station trader dock there, and maybe have some hot deals for cargo so that way they can get more crew interactions, and have something to look out for. 

Onto Mechanic:

Besides making cool pods, fixing holes and lights, and running around scanning everything to eventually rebuild whatever department blows up, I am not too sure what could be done for mechanics. Maybe a cool personal pod or make hoverboards or scooters or a tram system in their free time? I honestly do not have enough play time as one to be a proper judge of their mechanics. 

Lastly, Mining:

Mining is pretty fun for the first 10-20 minutes until you get your good gear, make the QM's a bunch of money, and the station has endless resources. After that, there isnt much besides hopping over to the bar and seeing what shenanigans happens. I know there is a mining shuttle but I feel it never gets utilized, and I personally havent found it appealing or very adventurous. Again personal feeling, doesn't mean it is bad gameplay wise. For mining I think there should be a higher risk/reward or something along the lines of, get good armor, then to get amazing resources, don't just get lucky on a magnet and go out to the asteroid field or an asteroid belt for more ores/danger/fun. 

This ended up more as a rant than a suggestion but im curious on others thoughts. 

Thanks for reading if you did!

[MetricDuck]

more station-side power sinks and more load management beyond “set SMES” are cool ideas

power breaks everyone’s toys if it dies, so the implementation would have to be quite cautious so as to provide a net positive to crew experience

[LeahTheTech]

I think the issue with engineering is that it only has binary interactions with the rest of the station, either the power is on and nobody cares or the power is off and everyone is mad. Anything that improves gradually as more power is allocated to it would improve this, the only example currently being Oshan's carousel battery, which is great apart from the fact that no-one ever uses the carousel for anything and the only time you notice this feature is when someone jacks an artgen into it and the carousel goes at light speed.
Being able to dump power into things for diminishing returns improvements would give an actual incentive to do something more interesting than a charburn or just relying on solars (which to be fair only works on some maps) and give the wonderful opportunity to yell "divert power to X" star trek style.

I would have a crack at implementing some of this but I am not a good engineer and the power grid code scares me.

[EtheSpaceWolf]

I think the issue with engineering is that it only has binary interactions with the rest of the station, either the power is on and nobody cares or the power is off and everyone is mad. Anything that improves gradually as more power is allocated to it would improve this, the only example currently being Oshan's carousel battery, which is great apart from the fact that no-one ever uses the carousel for anything and the only time you notice this feature is when someone jacks an artgen into it and the carousel goes at light speed.
Being able to dump power into things for diminishing returns improvements would give an actual incentive to do something more interesting than a charburn or just relying on solars (which to be fair only works on some maps) and give the wonderful opportunity to yell "divert power to X" star trek style.

I would have a crack at implementing some of this but I am not a good engineer and the power grid code scares me.

I was thinking something similar, such as whatever you give power to can either work faster, or can do more than one task at a time, or maybe even just the ability to run multiple machines in a room/APC region. For example, art sci should take a lot of power especially with the electricity box, xray and heat pad. Maybe make them have an actual drain, or at least if they do suck a ton of power make it so the APC starts draining, but the engi can send more power to it.

[LeahTheTech]

I think the problem with just upping the drain on machines like the artlab ones is you'd run into the same problem as telesci where you'd just drain the APC while having full SMES units because the wires weren't meant to cope with that much load.

[EtheSpaceWolf]

I think the problem with just upping the drain on machines like the artlab ones is you'd run into the same problem as telesci where you'd just drain the APC while having full SMES units because the wires weren't meant to cope with that much load.

Sorry for the late response, didnt get pinged for some reason.

I didnt think about that, I have seen heavier wires on one of the stations (the orange ones) but cant remember which maintenance shaft it was. I kind of figured that wouldnt be that much of an issue if you either just put more wire routes/connections, or somehow modify the apc. I havent dug too much into the nitty gritty of the power system, guess its time to do so haha. Thanks for your responses.

[TDHooligan]

junction control boxes and APCs going on the fritz with less-dire things than 'it is turned off' would probably be neato