Cogmap 2: *** UPDATE TO BYOND 509 ASAP ***

[Kovirii]

My only worry might be the AI core as it seems more vulnerable in this setup. you only need to RCD 3 walls to get into a position that will let you grab freeform and upload.

This about sums up what happens currently.

Could someone stick a link to goonhub in the original post? http://goonhub.com/maps/cogmap2

[Ikkonoishi]

Perhaps, but there's quite a few areas of the new station that look more than a little cramped. Medbay, for example. Using the added space to separate the belt loop from the station a bit, it would be possible to add a monkey pen and put pathology in an isolated area, like it is now, instead of sticking it in a corner that can only be accessed by maintenance tunnel. Also, the test chamber. I think the viewing gallery setup it has now is awesome, but perhaps it could be sticking out a little further away from the rest of the research wing? You get some pretty good explosions in there sometimes, after all. And of course the cargo bay. Yes, I know, with me it's always the cargo bay. It's just that when the QMs are actually doing their jobs, the space fills up fast, and the way crates get pushed and pulled around, it's hard to keep things organized. And I just know that the engineering in the current map preview is too small for a thermal engine of anywhere near the complexity of the current one. So I'm just asking, will all that extra space now be taken advantage of?

On an unrelated note, may I make a suggestion about telescience? It's a little inconvenient to have the expedition supplies in the back like that. The telepad was given a front door so that people could get to it easier, after all, but the equipment meant to be used for that is back in the research zone anyway. Might I suggest making a publicly connected telescience lobby? That side area with the telepad door and the medkit could have public access, for example, but with the control panel walled off in its own booth. Also, the front doors would need their own blast doors controlled from the booth to keep people from just running in and stealing everything.

I like the way it separates the monkey pen from genetics. It opens them up to use from the rest of the station without disturbing the genetics nerds.

How about switching the locations of the pharmacy and cryo-lab with genetics research and the cloning bay. Then genetics and chemistry could share a couple of valu-chimps. Maybe even have a little room between them so they could have monkey fights between roided up chem-monkeys and genetically engineered super monkeys.

[Zadeon]

Add a back door to the dye room in the barber shop.

[atomic1fire]

Are we going to be seeing more secret areas on the main zlevel then, for instance there's a room aboveish to the janitors office that looks empty.

I don't know if it was tg station or metastation but they have an abandoned bar you can break into and get drunk in one of the maintenance halls.

More areas in general to do secret nerd things or traitor would be cool. You can start building walls or build a fort but there's not a whole lot of areas that no one would care if you did those things besides like the radio antenna room that's not finished.

[QP Evergrande]

You mean like that one room on the new station in the maintenance corridors just to the left of the crew quarters? That one that has a bolted door, and inside is a borg, a corpse and a broken window leading out into space? That's a... characteristic touch, to be sure.

[Cogwerks]

You can rest assured that there will be intentional crimespots, hideyholes and weird creepy derelict parts of the station. Maint halls are quite large, anywhere maint has more than a 2-tile wide corridor it's just waiting to be filled in with stuff as I get further along.

I tend to work in successive passes and leave blocked out spaces for later as I work on the general outline stuff, so maint will definitely get a lot more stuff.

Still working on figuring out a sec/ai/armory layout I like. I'm thinking of maybe changing the armory to a sealed room that has a loud alert when it's opened, might make for some entertaining hijinks when the crew knows shit's going down.

Kinda reconsidering the tox layout in engineering, I think I'm gonna move it back to sci and keep faffing with it, then fill in the engine next.

I like the idea of having the adventure gear more accessible for exploration teams, I'll move that around.

Thanks for feedback so far, I appreciate it!

[Ali0en]

I'm thinking of maybe changing the armory to a sealed room that has a loud alert when it's opened, might make for some entertaining hijinks when the crew knows shit's going down.

Oh my god fucking YES JESUS LORD, probably the best suggestion/idea ever.

[pizzatiger]

I'm thinking of maybe changing the armory to a sealed room that has a loud alert when it's opened, might make for some entertaining hijinks when the crew knows shit's going down.

Armory/ should instead having the weapons in lockers have the weapons on stands so a team of syndicate can hack into the alarm grid using a computer and disable whatever security mesures you cook up for the armory for 30 seconds and steal the weapons inside.This means a syndicate can team up to sneak into the armory and arm themselves with weapons or whatever important shit (Stinkeye) the captain stores in there to portect from troublemakers (Assitants).

[BlakeJohnson]

If there isn't a derelict Cogmap 1 in space somewhere/telescience, I will be very sad.

[Clarks]

Here, have some gimp :efffort:
In case you miss the radio room, it's back in that space near the hop's office.

[Cogwerks]

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I'm still working on that area a lot and I don't like how that looks.

[Silvercloud29]

There is a wierd key on the latest link on this thread floating in space near the wizards shuttle

[QP Evergrande]

On the subject of engineering...



This setup is somewhat smaller than the current one, but as you can see it's quite a bit more complicated. I didn't put in all the various tools, or SMES units or control panels so thing would be easier to see. First and most obviously, the hot loop and cold loop have switched sides. Also, the inlet is on the bottom of the generator, not the top. You can tell by the green arrows on the passive gates. There's a lot more ways to move gas around, and if you don't know what you're doing you can be incredibly wasteful. Note that those two 4-way junctions with the pressure sensors are indeed a single set of pipes, not separate. I had to use quite a few crossing-over pipes to make this work with so little space. And yes, that's a cold loop tacked on to the hot loop.

Why would I put such a thing there? Well, it could serve a couple purposes. You can close off the hot loop so the gas all stays inside that one area, and you could use the cold loop to cool off the combustion chamber (that is, presuming those thermal pipes actually work in a way that lets them reduce the heat in their vicinity). You can also run both loops as cold, which may come in handy when the laser reactor is ready for implementation.

Of course, the biggest mess is down there around where the laser reactor is eventually going to be. With all those crisscrossing pipes, both sets of thermal pipes may be connected to either hot or cold loops, or both may be used separately. If we really do end up making fusion reactions with the occasional side-helping of anti-matter in there, it will most definitely produce a massive amount of heat. As it gets hotter, whatever reaction is going on may run out of control. That's why I put the extra cold loop on the hot loop, for extra heat absorbing capacity meant to counteract that runaway. Alternatively, the pipes could just run through whatever containment chamber makes up the core of the reactor instead. For now, that room can be set up as a second combustion chamber (though I didn't bother adding that to this design). Those three blast doors in the middle are meant to have no floor under them. They open directly into space so the chamber can be vented if it's used that way.

Now, you may say that all that is pointless right now, but I strongly disagree. Think of that mostly empty and useless 7x7 room with lots of unnecessary pipes as a promise, that the laser reactor will be completed.

I do think the thermal generator and laser reactor should be available to be used in tandem. But, the code should be reworked a bit so that crazy runaway thermal power is much harder to accomplish. The laser reactor is the shiny new toy for this map. It should be the station's primary power source, to fuel all the various power-intensive things on the station, like telescience, the arc smelter, and the asteroid magnet (Which, really, ought to consume a crazy amount of power. Maybe having a setting that determines how large an asteroid it pulls in? And it takes longer to charge up depending on how high it's set? But that's getting off topic.)

And yes, in the upper-left hand corner, that is most certainly what it looks like. A nexus of seven emergency repressurization ports. And a couple of them just happen to pass right over the north hot loop vent. See, the way I heard it, on the current map the two south gas vents were added pretty much solely for the possibility that they might rupture and spew searing hot gas into the corridors. But how often does that really happen? I say, what's needed is to septuple the potential mayhem. Who's with me?

A final note, this setup isn't all that much bigger than what's on the WIP map currently, but it does get pretty close to the central cargo router. This is what I meant before about it being a good idea to add a bit of width onto this thing using all that extra space the z-level now has.

[Cogwerks]

I'm keeping the generator in the viewable core, but some of the expansion stuff you show there might be useful. A bit over-complicated though, and engineers would scream about those single-width corridors.

Having that many branches and valves looks cool as hell and would be fun for pro-engineers to faff around with, but breaking the gas pipelines up that much will likely make it a lot more laggy. You may have noticed that I simplified Cogmap1's engine layout a bit after chatting with Exadv1 and Pantaloons about gas pipeline stuff.

[QP Evergrande]

Out of curiosity, what is the major source of load in the gas piping code? Is it just proportional to the number of pipes in use, or do junctures and pumps take up more processor power? Because I counted up the pipe sections. The current setup has about 278, not counting that long hot loop vent that goes through the sauna. Mine has 301, including separate crossing-over pipes. It's only about ten percent more, because it's so much more compact. And it's not like you'll be using the full amount of that 301. Most of those valves should be shut most of the time.

And I put in the 1-wide corridors because the current generator also has them. But looking at it again, I now realize that the doors where gas has to be delivered through in the current map are in more convenient locations. My bad.

And what about the emergency million-degree-plasma-gas-everywhere atmospheric nexus? Is that feasible, or would that much gas distribution inevitably bring the server to its knees?