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Make Pathology harder to access (and thus accidentally spread diseases).
#1
I've gotten into one too many negative conversations about Pathology, particularly how "harmless" diseases keep getting spread around and making an antags ability to murder the difficulty equivalent of learning how to chew your food.  A recent conversation came up with several ideas to fix this problem.

1. Make the room harder to access with an ID.  I think the number one reason diseases spread is any Doctor, Roboticist, Geneticist, Detective, and Janitor can go in, catch something, and spread it to half the crew before they realize they did anything wrong.  I suggest making it a high risk area, where only the Medical Director and the Captain can get into.  The MD is supposed to be smart enough that he knows who to trust with diseases and should be the one person able to easily let people in or out.

2. I remember people mentioning two other ideas, and one of them was doing the same thing with pathology as is done with the AI: Stick it in a room a little out into space and make it so the only way to it is via retractable airbridge.  This makes it significantly unlikely that someone will find going through it to be the fastest route through medbay and also gives the ability to prevent any disease someone is working on from spreading easily.  As a positive side effect, it also gives medbay a little more space for their other rooms.

3. Someone else mentioned simply moving pathology to a different Z level (like the mining and research stations).  Along with the airbridge benefits, it also makes it so anyone really wanting to make something in pathology.  The only issue I see is that antagonists have a significantly harder time actually infecting the crew with their lovingly crafted diseases that makes people catch on fire for no reason.
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#2
Moving pathogens off station could make creating deadly diseases much easier to do without interruption. Security should probably do their job and inspect pathology for exceedingly deadly diseases.

The other issue however is that diseases can spread through walls and space. This effectively makes the containment rooms worthless
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#3
Fun fact: there's actually a fully-equipped pathology lab in the debris field, albeit one buried within an asteroid and full of zombies.

Most of the lax security in pathology comes from the fact that currently, pathogens are incredibly easy to spread and there's not many precautions that can be taken by regular crew-members or pathologists. A gas mask or medical mask, for example, should be an effective protection against any airborne pathogens.

It's incredibly easy to create a pathogen that'll infect half the crew very quickly, even by accident. Making a pathogen highly infectious should come at a high chance for mutation, reducing the potential impact of high tier symptoms that can be loaded on them.

I'd support the airbridge idea, as the current layout makes pathology a free through-fare between medical and genetics, when it really should be a closed off dead end. Use the current space path takes up for a chemical lab or something.

I'd also suggest a separate monkeydome on the satellite, because why on earth are the plague-rat monkeys being mixed with the genetic-engineered monkeys, that's a disaster movie premise twofer.
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#4
(03-22-2017, 08:33 AM)ferriswheel1 Wrote: Fun fact: there's actually a fully-equipped pathology lab in the debris field, albeit one buried within an asteroid and full of zombies.

The lack of a chem master, autoclave, and pathology vending machine makes using it kind of a huge pain in the ass though

Its essentially unusable without dev scanning half your lab, at which point you might as well just build your own pathology in Faint signal where you can buy more samples
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#5
Pathology is dead enough as it is, I don't think making it even more removed is a good idea. The only diseases I've ever seen come out of it besides my own have just been a bunch of coughing in the last 3 minutes before shuttle so I'm not sure the point in this, nor have I ever seen many people just barge on through pathology. 

It has a lockdown to stop people also? 

I do not see the point.
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#6
Nobody ever uses the lockdown from what I've seen, and the coughing tends to stop me from doing anything for minutes at a time. More than half the time it happens, it's barely 30 minutes in.
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#7
The only people to regularly use pathogens to any serious effect have not been playing much. I really don't like the idea of deeper isolation.

This is an IG issue. It's always the pathologist's fault. If they fuck up and a disease gets loose, then give em' hell. Especially the ones that are like: 'ohh nooooo!! my disease accidentally got accidentally release accidentally again accientally!!'
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#8
If the lockdown is not used, the air bridge certainly wont be. I also do not think these are spread by accident, people making diseases with coughing pasted 30 times into them clearly make that for the purpose of being annoying. Diseases also take all of about 8 seconds to cure.
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#9
So let me address these ideas.

Stricter ID Access: I'd like to see this. Ideally I'd love to see Pathology, Genetics, and hipefully one or two future systems all fall under a 'medical researcher' job similar to scientist.

Airbridge: A decent idea which was brought up in the past and shot down due to extensive changed required for belt hell.

Off-station/Off-Z-level: This essentially removes people from the game, making it harder on antagonists, medical responders, and snakeoil salesmen. The more people on the main station the better.

Prevention: It is actually fairly easy to not catch a disease - simply cover up. It doesn't even require the specialized biosuits. If a disease is announced (or Cassie and/or Lamar are in or around medical) simply suit up. Fully. This includes gloves.

'Pathogens go through walls!' - They do not. They used to go through windows but this was fixed. I was there when we were testing it. That being said it could have been accidently reverted I suppose.

That all being said here's an idea.
Give us a VR pathology suite like bombs have. Insert a sample into the machine, put on goggles, and then spawn as many critters/people/ect as you like. Inject the disease and watch the fireworks.
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#10
(03-22-2017, 12:03 PM)cgrn10 Wrote: If the lockdown is not used, the air bridge certainly wont be. I also do not think these are spread by accident, people making diseases with coughing pasted 30 times into them clearly make that for the purpose of being annoying. Diseases also take all of about 8 seconds to cure.

Repeating symptoms dont stack. What you are thinking of is multiple different pathogens all with tbe same symptoms which will stack

Lamar likes doing this I know, since yes coughing and shiver stuns can be ramped up to cause massive stuns. I used to spend all round trying to make tier 5s until he taught me this method. Side note, where is Lamar everyman smith

Quote:'Pathogens go through walls!' - They do not. They used to go through windows but this was fixed. I was there when we were testing it. That being said it could have been accidently reverted I suppose.
was this fixed recently? Because moneys sneezing through windows is how I got everyone to hate me for accidental viral outbreaks.
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#11
(03-22-2017, 12:45 PM)Sov Wrote:
(03-22-2017, 12:03 PM)cgrn10 Wrote: If the lockdown is not used, the air bridge certainly wont be. I also do not think these are spread by accident, people making diseases with coughing pasted 30 times into them clearly make that for the purpose of being annoying. Diseases also take all of about 8 seconds to cure.

Repeating symptoms dont stack. What you are thinking of is multiple different pathogens all with tbe same symptoms which will stack

Lamar likes doing this I know, since yes coughing and shiver stuns can be ramped up to cause massive stuns. I used to spend all round trying to make tier 5s until he taught me this method. Side note, where is Lamar everyman smith

Quote:'Pathogens go through walls!' - They do not. They used to go through windows but this was fixed. I was there when we were testing it. That being said it could have been accidently reverted I suppose.
was this fixed recently? Because moneys sneezing through windows is how I got everyone to hate me for accidental viral outbreaks.

That was what I meant, pasting it on all the pathogens you have. Tier 5s are still easy to make if you actually wanna' kill people or tier 4 is fine, I've seen lamar around plenty recently, not so much in pathology however.
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#12
It was fixed almost a year ago IIRC. Time to talk to the coders again I suppose.
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#13
(03-22-2017, 12:39 PM)Erev Wrote: Stricter ID Access: I'd like to see this. Ideally I'd love to see Pathology, Genetics, and hipefully one or two future systems all fall under a 'medical researcher' job similar to scientist.

On Destiny, they both share the same lab and are labelled "Medical Research". By default, of the medical staff only geneticists/the MD have access - vanilla doctors and roboticists don't.

Honestly, I like this. It gives them their own little playarea and means if when the pathogen gets loose you have a much smaller group of people to yell at about it (on #1, most of the time it's the Captain/HoP deciding to tour the facilities that catches and spreads it).
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#14
mandatory decontamination chambers at every pathology airlock. you may need to sacrifice some space from medbay/medbay's breakroom but it should be doable
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#15
I really don't think it should be a geneticist-only thing - both doctoring and robotics can get boring on a slow round when there's no one to patch up/borg, and the geneticists already have their own toy to play with that no one else gets.

Also the concern about people wandering in is probably a little overblown - locking it is pretty easy from the inside and unsealing it is only possible via the MD's office, and I've always seen it locked whenever someone's pathing away in it.

And yes, all those 'harmless' diseases being spread around are most likely a deliberate act rather than pure accident - any half-decent pathology researcher can experiment with samples all they want without needing to risk infection by sticking them in a monkey unless they really want to, and even then most have enough presence of mind to keep it reasonably sealed up if it's anything actually dangerous.
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