Build-A-Base Workshop 13

[Natsumehack]

Add a brig, and there's a chance the shuttle can randomly spawn half a dozen angry, robust, rolling-pin-wielding chefs. (They got lost on their way to the Plasma Chef competition, and now they're super pissed at everyone and everything.)

How about each place has a chance to do a bad mob spawn event, along with something else.

Having a janitorial closet would unlock the bad event, of a bunch of jerk janitors mobs to spawn that wet only clean floors so people slip.

Adding a bar will give a chance to spawn bad Bartenders who go around first knocking people down, and then force feeding them drinks.

Or just have each section have a random mob assigned to it each round.

So one round building medbay could give a chance to spawn Martins

and next round it could spawn Ice spiders.

[Marquesas]

Okay, so a bit of insight into my fucking around with stuff: we cannot put a secondary map into the main repository without causing unnecessary lag to both the prime and the construction servers. However, it is entirely possible to wipe the map and build the construction spawn point at runtime. This comes at the cost of a setup time of 2-3 minutes. A proper warning is sent about it, though, so I don't think it should affect anything negatively.

[DyssalC]

Now there's a 50/50 chance that the next Bad Event will be meteors, or will be an outbreak of a random space disease.

I like that but I think making it 50/50 is too much, because too many meteors would just entirely screw the station up. It should be more like 50% that the sector specific event happens and 50% that a random non-specific event happens, selected out of a grab bag of standard things like meteors, rad storms, rad blowout, etc.

[Amelorate]

Okay, so a bit of insight into my fucking around with stuff: we cannot put a secondary map into the main repository without causing unnecessary lag to both the prime and the construction servers. However, it is entirely possible to wipe the map and build the construction spawn point at runtime. This comes at the cost of a setup time of 2-3 minutes. A proper warning is sent about it, though, so I don't think it should affect anything negatively.

A 2-3 minute wait time on a 24 hour long round is nothing. Go for it.

[QP Evergrande]

Like, how hard would it be to have the server just do a simple yes/no check on, "Does the station have a Pathology Lab?" "Does the station have a Pod Manufacturer?" "Does the station have a Brig?" and then for each "yes" it adds in a chance for different Bad Things to happen.

So, at round start, when there's basically nothing built, the only thing that can happen a few times an hour is meteor strikes. Since meteors suck, and you want to try your hand at curing diseases, you build some medical equipment and a Pathology Thingy. (Is it called an incubator? I don't know.) Now there's a 50/50 chance that the next Bad Event will be meteors, or will be an outbreak of a random space disease. Build a podbay, and now drones can spawn. Add a brig, and there's a chance the shuttle can randomly spawn half a dozen angry, robust, rolling-pin-wielding chefs. (They got lost on their way to the Plasma Chef competition, and now they're super pissed at everyone and everything.)

I disagree with this proposal.

Firstly, I think that we should start with a couple pods that come with the survey shuttle. And that there should be a number of small drones on the map to begin with. But other than that, for the first hour or so there should be no enemy or disaster events, and after that, maybe only every half hour, plus or minus ten minutes randomly. That's to give us a chance to establish the station before things go wrong, so we have something worth defending.

But for what disasters spawn, it should be determined by how far into the round we are. It would be bad to create a system where the only thing you need to do to avoid certain types of situations is to deliberately leave the station incomplete. It would be far more interesting to let us run the risk of possibly encountering a problem we're not equipped to deal with, when deciding what we spend our time on building. So, a pathogen won't show up immediately, but maybe by the 3 hour mark it will. And an early enemy spawn might be a single meteor that hits the station and bursts open to reveal a few ice spiders, where as a later one would be full of syndicate NPCs.

And as for enemy drone spawns, it occurs to me that though drones can be quite dangerous to people and pods, I can't seem to recall any of them having weapons that would be dangerous to the station. Like, there's no artillery drone or anything like that.

Also, I keep saying survey shuttle, survey shuttle. While we could do this by starting with just a cargo bay, I like the idea of having a starting shuttle with lots of supplies and some equipment in addition to that. The reason is twofold. At a certain point, the survey shuttle could leave. At that point, we'd be expected to have an arrivals shuttle set up and ready to receive new personnel as needed. But alternatively, the survey shuttle could be destroyed by enemy attack. In which case, we'd really have something we need to defend. More on that later.

[QP Evergrande]

...I have too much time on my hands.

I just thought I'd quickly put together what I imagine when I think of a survey shuttle to start this kind of round off. We should have a cargo bay and something like this, and that's it. The more we have to build, the more fun it will be. So of course, this shuttle has pretty much everything we should need to get started.

A few weapons in that security locker, a few medical supplies, a pile of mining equipment, various toolboxes (multiple of each), the mechanics' reverse engineering machines. Those two identical-looking manufacturers are a gas extraction machine in the corner, and the other is a mining manufacturer. And, of course, eight canisters of air, and eight crates which all together should have, I think, 400 sheets of glass and 1200 sheets of metal. The glass probably won't see a lot of use in construction. We're going to need a lot of molitz to produce O2 cannisters. Oh, and I just learned while looking into that thing, there's no way to produce nitrogen gas. Which makes sense. It's essentially useless. Except now it's not. We're going to need a way to make a hell of a lot of it, or our station is going to be extremely flammable. Maybe make it from viscerite? Organic tissue has at least some nitrogen in it.

The cockpit has a printer in it, to print off alerts from CentCom. I figure, we deserve to have a little warning about what's coming each however long. The shuttle can serve as a comm array until we can build one for the station itself. But since the shuttle isn't connected to the station (I'm thinking it should float a short distance from the cargo bay) the shuttle's array won't be usable for contacting QM traders.

The pod bay, in retrospect I should have made the table a single space, with only the weapons, since there's so much equipment available on the shuttle, and put a pod manufacturer in the other space. But the pod bay should definitely start with a mining drill and a linked phaser array for each pod, so we can choose between defense and production as needed.

And speaking of defense, I would love it if each of those green terminals and the cockpit controls would allow us to control one of the nine weapon arrays this shuttle is equipped with. Defending the shuttle should be part of the round. Unlike with the normal arrival and escape shuttles, the nose of this shuttle should not be invincible. And if it takes enough damage, the shuttle explodes, taking with it most of the supplies and equipment we haven't used yet, and possibly damaging the station itself. Otherwise, the shuttle should just leave on its own once the station reaches a certain level of development.

And considering the size and capabilities of this shuttle, it would seem weird if it weren't actually functional. Which is why I added a power generator to the engineering room in the back. It's a plasma furnace... made by taking the thermoelectric generator and sticking the front hatch of the arc smelter on one side of it. Maybe make it an additional possible power source for the station, if it could be scanned and constructed. It's fairly simple. Give it a control panel that lets you set how fast it takes in plasma and oxygen. It burns them together, and uses that to spin a turbine. Then it vents the exhaust gas out of that vent in the back, and heat along with it. This kind of generator is not meant to replace the thermoelectric generator. In fact, it should be very limited in the amount of power it can produce in exchange for taking a long time to burn through its fuel. This is because it should generate a significant amount of heat, so if it isn't run slowly it'll make the shuttle uninhabitable. It should also be prone to exploding like a tank transfer bomb when damaged.

[Amuys]

I hope it means a return of fixed asteroid mining.
Since apparently Nanotrasen depleted all the minerals in the asteroid field next to the station so they now have to use a super magnet.

[Lantern]

cool shit

This is pretty awesome. i love the look of the shuttle, and it seems like it should function fairly well for what Captain_Bravo has suggested.

[Marquesas]

That's pretty good QP, I'll see if I can generate that during setup time.

[UmmonTL]

One suggestion, make the airlocks one square wider or somehow flip the doors so you can neatly connect walls on both sides of the door.
And I think someone mentioned that the QM ordering stuff would need to be preplaced so we might need that somewhere.

[QP Evergrande]

To clarify something I said earlier, in my conception this isn't supposed to dock with the station or replace the arrivals shuttle. It's a different spawn point until we manage to call our own arrivals shuttle, and at some point I think it should leave the map, as we won't need it any more. And the cargo bay, I think the word is, will have to be pre-set up from the beginning.

Oh, and of course I forgot to say something. For anyone who spawns on the survey shuttle, they'd need to have a space suit, jetpack and breath mask in their starting inventory. I only put two internals lockers in so they could serve as backups in case someone loses theirs. After all, if this things sticks around for, let's say, half of a 24 hour round, that might end up being a couple hundred suits that need to be available, depending on how often people have to respawn.

[backifran]

Just played the first round of this - I thought it went really well!

[DyssalC]

Just played the first round of this - I thought it went really well!

Woah wait what?
Hold the phone, does this have an active build running?

[Ali0en]

The test round was awful. 50+ people spawned in a shuttle in empty space with no gear and beat the shit out of eachother until an admin spawned gear for like 5 people.

But the map works.

[Marquesas]

To clarify something I said earlier, in my conception this isn't supposed to dock with the station or replace the arrivals shuttle. It's a different spawn point until we manage to call our own arrivals shuttle, and at some point I think it should leave the map, as we won't need it any more. And the cargo bay, I think the word is, will have to be pre-set up from the beginning.

You are seriously overestimating the things we CAN do here.