Dial-A-Department Phones

[Weavel]

Intercoms and headsets are all great, but when you want to get in contact with a specific department or room, it's hard to get their attention.

I propose we have cool 80s style office phones that give an obnoxious ringtone when it's dialed, put one in e.g. Chemistry, Security, Genetics and similar places so you can ring them directly to shout obscenities

and if they don't answer, leave them a message about how you're going to bomb them or something

[QP Evergrande]

This can already be done with intercoms. I guess all you'd need is a directory for which department has which frequency.

[Weavel]

But they don't make a loud BRING BRING noise

[atomic1fire]

Only if captain has his/her own red office phone, which he/she can then demand people call the batphone when cap wears the batcape.

Also maybe some kind of traitor cellphone could be added for vague threats and prank calls, give them the ability to mask their phone as "unlisted" or another department.

[Crumplehat]

I... I really want the captain to have a big red phone that rings in a very annoying way. Maybe the other phone is in the HOS office so he can call up the cap, or so hooligans can break in and crank call the captain.

I want to sit in the captain's office and bang on my desk and bark orders and call superheroes on the phone when syndies come to murder me. I want this more than I've wanted anything ever.

[Crumplehat]

It has to be a big red rotary phone too, because of budget cutbacks and "since you dumb salvager spacemen keep bringing back old shit you might as well try putting some of it to use anyway you big nerds" - Nanotrasen.

[Paineframe]

It should already be possible or mostly possible to do this with PDAs. They already have the obnoxious ringtone and retain messages, it's already possible to do things like spoofed messages via PDA hacking, and although I haven't figured out the proper command for it yet, it should theoretically be possible to craft a PDA packet that sends a group mail to specific departments instead of specific people (some station functions, like the morgue chute, already do this automatically).

[Crumplehat]

But where's the fun in that? Most people toss their PDAs away at the start of the round anyway. It's about STYLE.

Also we have a lot of really fucking stupid smilies apparently.

[Frank_Stein]

Let phones sometimes randomly ring and have random voices say different cryptic and spooky messages before hanging up. And add phonebooths that obscure people's faces and muffle sounds for gimmicks.

[epicdwarf]

Give each phone an 1980s answering machine too!

Hello this is engineering! Please leave aessage after the beep.
beep
The Caption exclaims,"THE BRIDGE JUST EXPLODED!!! WE NEED A.. OH G-bzz"

[Fox McCloud]

What about a wall-mounted console within major rooms (Toxins, genetics, mechanics, etc)? You could send messages from one console to the other, but not make console-wide announcements with it (unless you were a head of staff or something).

Bonus if you can authenticate your messages with your ID.

[DyssalC]

Will ghosts be able to make the phones ring? If so, I'm sold on it.

[Splatpope]

Intercoms should really have a dropdown list of each department + stationwide

[Cogwerks]

I like the idea of improving intercoms with this functionality. I'll do some tests on it soon.

[Anticheese]

I think we had this back on Ovarystation?