Ways for more departments to make money

[Captain_Bravo]

I'm pretty sure you can already sell some things to certain traders, like the one in the diner. Plus cogwerks added in quality descriptors to make it so you can make more money selling things through the QM. I'm pretty sure selling a gigantic dagwood sandwich of body parts will make you some cool cash, but I could be wrong.

That being said, I do like the idea of some kind of giant monitor in the kitchen where aliens send in off-the-wall orders, and the chef and bartender scramble to put together disgusting meals for them.

[DrivetimeMozol]

Yea there needs to be more traders you can go to easily. Chef/Botanists/Barman/Scientists should be able to log onto PCs and access traders to sell/buy stuff. Just have little tele-pads next to the computers that send and receive orders, and have the supply request app in PDAs be able to send requests to other departments other than QM too. Adding this along with the segmented budgets that have been suggested would make people way more interested in the economy, cmon guys don't you want to be true free market capitalists

Also I recently tried selling weed and other drugs to Sketchy D and it gave me the "Sketchy rummages through the stuff and finds nothing of use" instead of the "not buying right now" message and he wouldn't accept anything from me.

[Captain_Bravo]

If you find a bunch of weed in a crate, it's not "technically" weed. Something in the way it's coded, it looks like weed, it acts like weed, but you can't sell it to vendors that only accept weed. Found this out the hard way with a crate of rainbow weed that Sketchy would not buy.

[DrivetimeMozol]

Ah, that sucks hard. I really can't imagine there's that many botanists going there so it's kinda a waste.

[Captain_Bravo]

Oh, no, Botanists go there all the time. That's why cogwerks added a pod hanger to the north of the station, with a pod and a cargo bay to add to it. Specifically for botanists.

[DrivetimeMozol]

shit it all makes sense now

[Sundance]

uh... how would research generate a profit?

If departmentalized like suggested

1. Civillian
2. Maintainence
3. Research
4. Medical
5. Personelle

Not all jobs would be capable of making a profit. Take your humble Staff assistant. However due to the fact that they are "Civilian" they would get a % profit too from any money that other civilian jobs happen to make. Not that they can't make dough from other means.

I've broke it down financially, it took me a while. I've re-arranged jobs a bit, like shifting some personelle jobs into their appropriate jobs, etc.

Civilian: Civilian gets a % profit from all winnings from the slot machines. Now the chef+barman has a vested reason to have people in the bar #woah
HoP: Essentially doesn't need to be making profit as he's the money man, although he does get the % of civilian funds. In charge of civilian's.
Staff Assistant: Has no way of making the station money, but definitely can "assist"
Chef: Read "civilian" Although food can be sold via trader.
Barman: Same as above.
Chaplain: Interesting thought: Dead corpses shot outta the mass driver add 3000 credits to the civilian fund. Another reason to get rid of corpses.
Janitor: None, but could assist the chaplain at getting rid of corpses for sure.

Maintenance: The shipping fund. Note that everything sold will be added to maintenance, so it's HoP's job to split it evenly. Failing this the AI can do it too. For this case, the HoP could do with QM records via pda (or does that already happen with head pda's?)
CE: A glorified engineer, although he does have access to the budget computer in his room.
Mechanic: The switch room oh god it's so simple, just have smes units that can be attached via a wrench. Send them out via QM. $$$
Engineer: That Arc smelter looks profitable.
Miner: Ores ORES ORES
QM: These guys are profit central. Moving on..

Research: Botany is research. Get fucked if you think otherwise.
RD: Same as CE.
Scientist: Profit everywhere. Artlab, Chemistry, and some traders could ask for more stuff from tele-science.
Botanist: Good quality food, in abundance. Traders could ask for more rare genes (although this is already in practice somewhat)
Geneticist: Selling print-outs of stuff is a good idea.
Roboticist: None I can honestly think of. Bring back robotics computer 2k14

Medical: A small group of funds. This has the advantage that % profit is split amongst less people.
Medical Director: Same as CE,RD..
Medical Doctor: I think selling body bits should be a nefarious way of making profit, and not NT regulated (lol). As suggested, currently scanning peeps with your pda updates their medical records. Perhaps selling these medical records makes a big profit. Selling a medical record of someone extremely injured gives a higher profit, while selling medical record with record that player was injured then healed means BIG profit.

Personelle: Sec and the like.
Captain: This guy also has access to HoP's main computer, (and can set the pin if needs be) but it's not his job per se.
HoS: Same as CE, RD, MD..
Detective: As suggested in the OP, have a simple machine that gives profit to personelle if the target strapped in is a traitor, and a fine if not.
Security Officer: All fines that sec issue should definitely go towards personelle funds, the greedy fucks.

[Captain_Bravo]

No matter whether you think Botany is supposed to be a research job or not, when you put it and chef in different departments you're asking for trouble. Botany shipping food to the chef would be taking money out of their budget, and that's a bad thing. Mining and Engineering being in the same department is excellent. Mining can make money off their ores, or they can ship them to be smelted into alloys and make more money. They can benefit themselves a little, or ship it to another department and everyone benefits a lot. Botany needs the same dynamic with the kitchen. Ship out your raw plants, or send them to the chef to get cooked and make the entire department even more money. By putting them in different departments, botany actually loses money if they give the chef food. That's a bad dynamic.

Also, I doubt you'll agree with this, but QM needs to be their own department. They are already the single most profit-driven portion of the station, lumping them in with the single most productive portion of the station is just silly. Mining and Engineering are already built to produce, if the QM are supposed to handle transactions for the whole station, they need to be a little more removed from things. Give them the standard 10% cut of all profits, make them the chokepoint for funneling supplies in and out of the station, and they'll work just fine on their own. Otherwise you're basically setting everything up so that the Engineering department has a stranglehold on all financial transactions, and the other departments are just on their own. If you're going to keep QM as the lynchpin for so many departments, you can't have them beholded to a single department like that.

[Shoddy]

selling empty cyborg suits for like 5k base price (could be doubled or even quadrupled based on the make and model of cyborg and how fancy it is) would be a good way for robutticists to make money and would go perfectly with the upgrade comp being brought back.

you get your base budget to research new parts, put them together and sell them so you can research more. eventually you just make tons of fucking cash cause you're dat cash makin' PhD havin' roboticist.

If some of the suggestions here were put into place it could really give jobs more meaning, when I first started playing SS13 I loved playing QM and engineer because I felt like I actually had a job to do.

It also might be possible if these new suggestions worked that super mega things you wanna buy could be a thing, like if the crew manages to make like 12 million credits in a round they can buy for example: A hyper advanced engine modification that triples the output of the engine, for like 500k-750k credits.

Untested genetic samples ( ships a number of monkies with CRAZY mutations) 800k
Prototype plant nutrient (instantly gives you fucking amazing weed bro) 350k
Solar amplifier ( quadruples power of the solar arrays) 150k
Advanced chemistry kit ( gives brand new chemicals for brand new recipes that are ultra cool)

basically giving the station HUGE departmental focused exploration/production upgrades, imagine a super mega death engine at like 3000 GW

[QP Evergrande]

All of this sounds great (though I'm still pushing for giving engineers the ability to sell the energy the engine produces) except for the slot machine thing. You can't split up the profits from the slot machines, that's just... No. There'd be constant staff assistant riots in the corridors, and it just doesn't make sense. That's something people do with their own money. And yeah, research job or not, Botany needs to be part of the civilian sector. They can sell their produce to medical and research, if it's needed.

On that note, the HoP's banking terminal should have its wage function expanded, so that it can set up to automatically shift funds around between budgets every payment cycle. So, every time people's wages get paid, it can be programmed to take 20,000 out of shipping and into the primary budget, which for now is the payroll budget. Medical gets 5,000 per cycle, and so on. It should default to 0, and the HoP can adjust it like I described to meet the needs of the station.

And I also agree that the shipping budget has to be kept separate. No matter how active the crew will be (and knowing goons, just because they can make a profit through their jobs doesn't mean they will want to) the cargo bay will always be by far the biggest money maker if the QMs (and Cargo Techs, if it's going to be made its own department) are doing their jobs.