Space weather control device

[poland spring]

A pretty high cost traitor item (8-10 TC) that can cause one of the random events to spontaneously occur.  Subtle at first, but if overused can become real obvious.  Not sure if it should be completely random or not, but it would operate pretty much just like a power sink, requiring a power source and a static location to operate.  It'd have a cooldown time before it could activate again to keep people from spamming it.

[Noah Buttes]

Make it ramp up over time.

It starts out slow, then begins accelerating until, eventually, you're getting a meteor shower every minute.

[warcrimes]

as long as it has to be on the station z-level & has a fairly significant power draw, (so it needs to be on a good, solid grid) I like this very very much.

bonus points if it's nuke-like in difficulty to destroy.

[Berrik]

I would use this for nonstop spectral emissions.

[poland spring]

Yeah that's the general idea, tho I don't think it should have too bad a power draw, we already have a power sink.

[New525]

This would be pretty cool

[Berrik]

The random event should probably be, well, random. Sometimes you get a meteor shower, sometimes a spectral emission, sometimes it's just the annoying spatial rift!

[Vitatroll]

I like it. Agree that it shouldn't be too bad with power consumption, and that it should ramp up over time.

An alternative to random effects could be that it builds up charge vs. power input. Each effect could cost a certain charge amount. So you have an option to automatically cause effects once a certain charge is reached, or to dump all of it's charge into a bunch in really quick succession.

In the end it's probably best to just make it random tho, for ease-of-codery sake.

[poland spring]

Yeah the idea was to put as little work as possible into the coders hands, so I was thinking of it just adding more random events. I don't think we would need to whitelist or whatever, since by the point the later round nastier events happen people should have figured out there's something up! It could also use the cloaking field generator sprite with a few doodads added

[Kovirii]

Get in the basement, the EF-99 Space Tornado is comin' down hurricane alley