The state of Engineering

[babayetu83]

very odd take on the teg, honestly

pre teg nerf, engineers (including myself) would speedrun a hellburn in the first five minutes of the round and have the hallway air too scalding to stand in at around the 30-40 minute mark, usually resulting in early calls. post nerf, reaching hellburn effectiveness can be a real challenge to fully figure out, which resulted in a lot of negative feelings when engi mains no longer got the funni number go up engine. it was sad, but the change brought a lot more to actually do with the teg. this is sort of just a preface to the point i want to get to though, which is that a new engineer doesnt even need to be worrying about these things right off the bat. burns are something that can be learned, experimented with, and improved upon over time. not understanding how to master a subject without hands on experience with it isnt a bad thing. 

the wiki is not the only resource for information on starting burns. engineers have a guide that spawns on every teg to give pointers throughout the setup process. for higher burns, players can experiment with reagent lubricants, material for a more effective semiconductor, etc. its a very learn-as-you-go department when you dont have another player to tell you the perfect hellmix pipeburn ratio to produce omegawatts of power that can really only be used for the ptl or hotwires.

a great thing about the mechanics - engineering merge is that it no longer has “hellburn” as the primary activity for engis to do until something explodes. they can set up a charburn and go work on mechcomp if they want to, or in the case of singulo, use mechcomp to make the engine more effective. engineers who are looking for something more out of the engine itself have all the tools available to them to do so

i didn't say anything about becoming a master at making hellburns to produce infinity power within minutes, but i think the problem is that there is a massive gulf between not knowing and having somewhat of an idea of what to do. as a barman you can just fuck around with your drink dispensers for like 15 minutes and mix random things together and learn a bunch of recipes really fast. as a doctor you can look around and find first aid kits which teaches you subtle things (like styptic and silver sulf being for topical use by there only being patches, whereas epinephrine, potassium iodide and salbutomal are in pill form and are meant to be ingested) or  you can quite literally roll your face across your keyboard as a scientist and at least get 1 or 2 chem recipes out of it. that's what i think the teg is missing. there's no real hands-on part of it aside from connecting the gas tanks and then once you get a burn going just babysitting pipes in the highly likely event one of them bursts. 

years later i'm still scratching my head about why they removed atmospheric technican and essentially rolled it into engineering