What's with those recyclers, anyway?

[neogeo0823]

As I understand it, the recyclers are part of a materials/ore/mineral/general manufacture overhaul that's being put in place slowly to test things out as they go. This is all fine and dandy, but there's been some complaints about the current iteration of them, and I'd like to offer a possible solution.

Idea: Instead of a ton of recyclers, have ONE BIG ONE at the end of disposals. Currently, disposals doesn't really do much beyond crushing stuff and then flinging out to space. That's such a waste of potential, all that material flying off into the void. I propose that once an object is run through the crusher, it's turned into a chunk of whatever matter it was made of. So jumpsuits turn into chunks of cloth, most tools become chunks of metal, windows and glasses become glass, bodies become biomass, etc. etc. Then those chunks are loaded via belt/driver into a recycler, which store the matter in one giant pool that all the various types of manufacturers draw from.

Pros: Got some garbage you wanna recycle? Chuck it in disposals! This idea uses almost entirely existing infrastructure, excluding the actual recycler, so there's less messing with the map and less new crap people have to learn. With a system like this, the disposals system would have a legitimate reason to be used frequently, which would make escaping through it more exciting, and the somewhat silent murders by it more noticeable.

Instead of running to a recycler housed in each department, which eats up a lot of space, there's just a central one, which can be tampered with for various shenanigans. Chuck everything in a department into the disposal chute, flush it, then hold the stuff ransom one tile from the crusher! Throw a couple of willing volunteers through the system to get much needed biomass for the cloning vats! Turn all that random scrap and gibs from medbay blowing up into vital station-rebuilding materials

Cons: Uh... I guess there's not really any infrastructure proposed for how to get material from the recycler to the manufacturers, but really that's more of a my immersion thing. I don't think it really needs it, either, but feel free to make suggestions.

[Zadeon]

How about it stores all the material in disposals, and people can either go to disposals and get what they want or just "request" what they want from wherever they are? Something like either giving those mail chutes a screen that shows what's all stored in disposals or a whole new console all together? Every department would have access to the storage but there should be limits imposed. Something like only allowing a certain max amount for each request with a "cool down" of when they can request items again. Maybe even a public transfer history that everybody can see, so that you could form a riot against robotics for stealing all the materials for making butt bots.

I really like this idea, it would allow other departments to throw away all their unused crap to help others. Be that for the station you've always wanted to be.

[Captain_Bravo]

It also makes a valid reason for the crusher to be on, moving, and open. You see people just shutting the whole thing down as a matter of course, because the only reason for it to honestly be used now is for traitorous disposals. How about this:

Keep the departmental recyclers. They can still do what they do, but every manufacturer in a department is linked to that recycler, and they all work automatically. So instead of sticking in 50 metal sheets, clicking "10 mauxite" 5 times, waiting.... pulling out 50 mauxite bars, and then loading those into the nearest GM, you simply toss the metal into the recycler, wander off to fart on someone, then come back and start ordering things out of one of the manufacturers.

Then, add in one GIANT recycler in Disposals. Link it to the crusher, so that everything crushed automatically gets dumped into the recycler. Add in a mail slot to disposals, so the janitor can mail off mauxite bars or cut molitz to any departments that request additional materials.

Finally, add in something that organic material can be recycled into. How about Mysterious Slurry? Nobody knows what's contained within, but it can be used to make sloppy joes, or just chunked straight into the Loafer for prison chow.

[neogeo0823]

Keep the departmental recyclers. They can still do what they do, but every manufacturer in a department is linked to that recycler, and they all work automatically. So instead of sticking in 50 metal sheets, clicking "10 mauxite" 5 times, waiting.... pulling out 50 mauxite bars, and then loading those into the nearest GM, you simply toss the metal into the recycler, wander off to fart on someone, then come back and start ordering things out of one of the manufacturers.

Then, add in one GIANT recycler in Disposals. Link it to the crusher, so that everything crushed automatically gets dumped into the recycler. Add in a mail slot to disposals, so the janitor can mail off mauxite bars or cut molitz to any departments that request additional materials.

Uh, yes, this is exactly the idea I proposed, except you added keeping the recyclers at individual deaprtments in, and added a thing for the janitor to do. Instead of using the departmental recycler, toss your crap into the disposals chute, wait a bit, and suddenly there's basic materials ready to be made into stuff. Though, I'm not sure I like the janitor being made the one responsible for it. Make it easy to break into and subvert, sure, but I'd figure the janitor's got enough on his plate without becoming QM Lite and distributing stuff around the station.

How about it stores all the material in disposals, and people can either go to disposals and get what they want or just "request" what they want from wherever they are? Something like either giving those mail chutes a screen that shows what's all stored in disposals or a whole new console all together? Every department would have access to the storage but there should be limits imposed. Something like only allowing a certain max amount for each request with a "cool down" of when they can request items again. Maybe even a public transfer history that everybody can see, so that you could form a riot against robotics for stealing all the materials for making butt bots.

I really like this idea, it would allow other departments to throw away all their unused crap to help others. Be that for the station you've always wanted to be.

I really like this idea. Hook the recycler into the mail system, or crate hell. Have it automatically send shipments of materials that can be loaded straight into the manufacturers/are auto-loaded in upon arrival at the department. It should definitely be easy to see what's in there and who ordered what though, so that street justice can be enacted against hoarders.

Finally, add in something that organic material can be recycled into. How about Mysterious Slurry? Nobody knows what's contained within, but it can be used to make sloppy joes, or just chunked straight into the Loafer for prison chow.

This is also a good idea. More uses for biomass would be awesome. Just make it a broad spectrum sort of thing, where every organic and edible item counts. This way, botany can make a metric fuck ton of "mystery meat" and "soylent green" for the kitchen just by tossing away their failed attempts at splicing stuff. And of course people murdered via disposals would count in this category as well.

[Captain_Bravo]

Keeping in departmental recyclers solves the nagging issue of "How do the materials get from disposals back to individual machines?", as well as prevents overzealous roboticists from easily and silently cleaning out the entire station without ever leaving robotics. It still adds a degree of autonomy to each department's manufacturers, instead of just lumping it all into a station pool.

Not to mention the fact that keeping stores departmental neatly sidesteps the next question, of "How does mining fit into it all?" Since they have their own machines, and are completely disconnected from the station's other various grids. (Power/Network/Camera)

You're exactly right, that the crusher should have a purpose in recycling materials for the station. And your suggestion of a central main depot for gathering that material for distribution to the station is good, but I think it functions better to have that disconnected, and something that required a sanitation worker (I.E. Janitor) to actively send out, instead of just having it automatically feed into a stationwide reservoir of materials. It just adds a little bigger degree of separation to "fire extinguisher goes in trash chute" and "QM has extra Mauxite". All the elements you suggested can still be there, you can still have mad trash thefts, and zany standoffs in disposals, you just have a little less of "Oh, QM pumped out a shitton of pod parts to sell, now no manufacturers in the entire station have materials, well fuck."

I mean, honestly if you just have everything go into a stationwide pool, there's really no reason to do those things at all. Why bother going to disposals, when you can just walk into the nearest tool storage and clean the station out of all it's material instantly. Why wrassle with anyone over your theft when you can just instantly empty the station's pools in a remote location, with 5 seconds of effort and an empty crate? Surely you can understand why that seems a bit too... easy? A little obfuscation isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when it makes things more complicated for fucking over other people. Not necessarily harder, just more involved.

[neogeo0823]

Hmm... Maybe have the disposal chute in each department somehow mark the items sent through it and credits materials to only that department? For example, the mechanics send a bunch of junk through their disposal, and get credit for it in their fabricators. Medbay and QM can't utilize those credits, because the stuff went into the chute at mechanics. Similarly, mechanics cannot utilize stuff sent in at medbay or QM. This also means that if you really wanted to, you could sneak into disposals and steal stuff off the belt as it comes in and then put it through your own chute to get credit for it. Some interesting fights might break out in disposals for control of the belts if word gets out that some scarce resource is going to a particular department.

[Lavastage]

I really support this idea, it is actually pretty neat.

Though, with the problem of devilvery, how about bumping out QM a little bit, and using that unused RDM (whatever the fuck its called, the little plate thingy that pushes things directions) to ship the reprocessed materials back to qm, and allowing them to furfill orders of material requests. it makes the qm job more than just "buy stuff, sell stuff, get drunk, bees." and if there is no qm, no problem! the AI can set it to autonomous mode so it (tries to) evenly distribute materials to all of the departments of the station. (though it dosent automatically distribute to qm, so qms don't just set it to auto mode and just slack off all day and ruin the point of this.)

Problem (mostly) solved

[QP Evergrande]

Pipes. The answer is pipes. All recyclers, including the one in disposals, have pipes that lead to a central repository. QM can have an ore loading chute that goes to the same place, but mining would be disconnected from the network, as it is now. There's a machine in the repository that stores all ores, and distributes them to manufacturers when they make a request. That means, more pipes.

Now, as for having the station's stores cleaned out simply by over-ordering, I hope a few things could keep that from being too severe a problem if it does happen. First, the repository starts empty. All manufacturers are pre-loaded as they are now, so initially the material is distributed throughout the station. Secondly, if you're paranoid about theft, you can still send ore around the station to be directly loaded into the manufacturers, and then it won't be shared everywhere. Thirdly, the recyclers could be set up so that they only send ore to the central repository if you "flush" them like a disposal chute, so you can produce what you need without worrying about losing it. Fourthly, an alert could be added to the cargo mailbot if the repository receives a request it can't fill. QMs pay attention to those alerts, because they're usually telling us how much money we just made, so we'll notice if someone is abusing the system, and stop feeding ore into it.

Overall, it'd work the same way as it does now, but if a department does need more metal or whatever, the QM can produce mauxite, molitz and pharosium in essentially limitless quantities, and make it readily available, along with higher level materials should we ever have a big surplus.

[Ikkonoishi]

The simplest way to do it would be have the current scrap generated from the current grinder setup sent to QM, and let the people responsible for managing the materials on the station manage the materials on the station. The recyclers already process scrap so I don't see why we need to massively overhaul everything.

[QP Evergrande]

We're asking for things to make ore distribution more efficient than it currently is, and also to expand the number of ore types that can be retrieved through scrap to ease some supply issues, because while sometimes miners are awesome, usually they don't do much of anything for the station. And since we've been told that a major item manufacturing overhaul is in the works - probably in relation to the smelter getting implemented - if they're going to be messing around with the system anyway, now's the time to ask for any cool new features we want.

[Cogwerks]

I was planning to have a recycling system shunt materials from the crusher down to QM when Aph was working on coding some new gear, but that project got abandoned. ISaidNo and I are working together on some materials stuff now, so that's probably what I'll be doing with scrap - have it function as a material type, and instead of dumping into space, it'd launch into QM via Belt Hell.

[Clarks]

Make meatcubes chemical containers.
Make formaldehyde delay meatcubes' explosion.
Make the recycling machines turn gibs (or whatever ground humans produce) into meatcubes.
Give meatcubes a value in the QM market.

[Captain_Bravo]

Cogwerks has already said that he's planning on replacing the crusher in Disposals with a trash compacter that will be able to turn people into meatcubes, so you're already 1/4 of the way there!

[Cogwerks]

I won't get rid of the grinders entirely, they'll still be around, but I'm thinking of making it more into a slowly-killing scary smasher thing. Instakill things just aren't as entertaining as WHIRRR SMASH *SCREAM SMASH *SCREAM WHIR SPLAT SPLAT *SCREAM

[Lantern]

I won't get rid of the grinders entirely, they'll still be around, but I'm thinking of making it more into a slowly-killing scary smasher thing. Instakill things just aren't as entertaining as WHIRRR SMASH *SCREAM SMASH *SCREAM WHIR SPLAT SPLAT *SCREAM

So basically we are gonna get a bitchin trash compactor?