It should be easier to rebuild after a hull breach

[cacogen]

If a department is bombed the most anyone's willing to do is fill in the holes and leave dark, airless plating because of how time-consuming it is to rebuild everything manually

[SpaceManiac]

Any concrete suggestions?

[cacogen]

I want to know if people agree and don't want to make the thread about my ideas rather than the issue itself and discourage people from sharing their own but:

1. Give the drone that's used to build the auxiliary base to engineers with greater capacity (can spawn machines, for example). Also give them something that shows them the layout of the department before it was bombed (similar to what the blueprints do for wiring/piping)
2. Just give them something that returns a tile or an area to how it was roundstart. As far as I know the game can already pull from .dmm files. It would need the right balance, and fluff to justify its existence.

[Anonmare]

I have an idea.
As an engineering cyborg, the memorized blueprints you've got in your modules are great for rebuilding, because after an explosion you can see where wires, pipes and stuff ought to go which helps avoid situations where you get re-building and realise you've rebuilt the pipenets entirely wrong. I'd like it if engineers had that same holographic overlay, even if it's integrated into the mesons/engineering goggles as an alternate mode.

Another idea might be using air shutters. Other servers also usually have air shutters to prevent/reduce air loss, along with disabling air vents in the affected area to cut down on spacewind and loss of air. Firelocks have a sort of functionality like that with how fire alarms react to sudden bursts of cold but they don't reinitialize if reset, which can be irritating if you're trying to fix somewhere and some jackshit assistant keeps opening the doors and knocking you around with spacewind.

One final two ideas I had is merging fire alarm/air alarm/APC electronics into a singular circuit board subtype (either the frame the electronics go into differentiate it, or screwdrivering it into a particular type). And adding a BULKY construction satchel that can hold W_CLASS NORMAL or smaller construction items (can carry, wires, boards, electronics and ~half stacks of materials), making carrying materials to the site of hull breaches less of a PITA. The satchel ought to only be able to hold around about ~150 sheets of any material at a time, if it was filled with nothing but sheets of course.

Alternatively, repurposing floorbots into construction bots that will rebuild rooms' floors, pipes, cables and walls according to the station blueprints but I imagine that'd both be extremely tricky to implement and probably eat into server resources a fair margin.

[Dr_bee]

Simply having an easy way to see how the room used to look before an explosion would be nice. Right now there are enough tools to quickly seal breaches with smart foam and RCDs, its the full repairs that require a bit more time.

Hell if you made air and disposal pipes bomb resistant so only the obliteration radius destroys them it would make repairing the station ten times better while still letting people C4 disposal and air pipes if they dont want to use tools.

[CPTANT]

New wires are already an improvement.

[Dr_bee]

New wires are already an improvement.

Arent smartpipes coming as well? I guess it will do different loops with layering.

[Atlanta-Ned]

You're all wrong.

It should be harder to the point where it's easier to seal off the area around the breach than it is to actually fix the breach.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

no the point is its easy to fix the hole but making it not look like shit is hard, especially when you cant even make floor overlays and almost every floortile now has an overlay


the CE blueprints show (i think) how the pipes/cables/disposals were at roundstart, would be nice if a read only version of the bp existed where it just shows pipes and cable shit

[terranaut]

This is a player issue and not a code issue. On others servers, where breaches are slightly more annoying to fix because the atmosphere loss is much more severe, a maxcapped breach usually gets fixed within 10 minutes by a team of engineers supported by a borg, fixed meaning lights, wiring, piping, disposals. On /tg/ you'll have half the engineers just refusing to do it because there's no penalty to not doing your job and they'd rather get drunk in the bar or do their private autism project or think engineers are just assistants with roundstart tools and gloves. I'm not saying we should penalize not doing your job here, I'm just underlining that this is not a code problem.

[Davidchan]

Upgrade the blueprints to store map default configurations? Or rather, make a holoprojector that can have room layouts uploaded to it. When used it scans the room as defined in the blueprints and creates holographic overlays of missing or destroyed items/structures. If a pipe runs through that was destroyed, a holo blueprints hovers in the air saying what kind of pipe it was and it's layout. Examining the overlay of something like a machine will list the required parts needed to build it (for example, a cryotube would list 5 metal for the frame, 6 wire lengths to wire it plus the wire it needs after the board is installed, the cryotube board, a matter bin and 4 sheets of glass.)

If a room was remodeled engineering could do a new scan to mark the layout and upload it to their collection. Attacking the overlay will dismiss it on that tile if engineering decides not to build it and the holoemitter itself would have a clear all projections option as holofans and other holobarriers would. In the long term, some coder could implement a system to allow players to save configurations to some copy/paste format and allow them to post them here on the forums or wiki so future players in other rounds could upload them and build them, so if CE decided he wanted to build an SM chamber or Singulo containment in space off of engineering, he could input the parameters and project it, basically allowing engineering to color in the lines and build according to blueprints.

[Anuv]

It absolutely should be harder. A single engiborg can fix a bombing in 15 seconds.

[oranges]

We are working on it

edit: also blueprints or engineering goggles already show roundstart pipes/wires iirc.

[CPTANT]

It absolutely should be harder. A single engiborg can fix a bombing in 15 seconds.

The hull maybe, but that still leaves an airless barren hunk of plating.

[cacogen]

time to quotemine

Simply having an easy way to see how the room used to look before an explosion would be nice.

That would be helpful but I can already get the image on the wiki (or open the .dmm file in the code). It's the building itself that takes ages because of the step-by-step nature of it and the need to source materials. This is balanced normally, just not when you're an engineer that is expected to do a lot of it. It's an unrealistic expectation to the point that when engineers actually fix hull breaches they just add plating and leave it at that.

Hell if you made air and disposal pipes bomb resistant so only the obliteration radius destroys them it would make repairing the station ten times better while still letting people C4 disposal and air pipes if they dont want to use tools.

This is a good idea.

It should be harder to the point where it's easier to seal off the area around the breach than it is to actually fix the breach.

you sound like a realism kiddo or hard sci-fi nerd

It absolutely should be harder. A single engiborg can fix a bombing in 15 seconds.

i doubt that. even if the holes are RCD'd shut it's still a airless, freezing, depressurised, dark area that's untenable to most of the crew and is probably sucking air from other places leaving them dangerous as well. but the point is returning a department to functionality, not whether filling in the breaches themselves is balanced

a maxcapped breach usually gets fixed within 10 minutes by a team of engineers supported by a borg, fixed meaning lights, wiring, piping, disposals.

it sounds like you're describing high RP servers where people are penalised for not doing their jobs. and it's dumb to aim the code at an ideal player rather than at how our players actually play the game.

doing large amounts of construction like this is tedious and unfun because of how finicky and painstaking the manual construction is and there is no reward. no one cares. it should just be easier for engineers who have to do a lot of it, and the RCD is a good start but it's received few additions over the years

and you also have to take into account the short rounds that make it easier to call the shuttle than to put in the effort and the fact some rounds end abruptly so your work is lost anyway. and are long rounds even good?

New wires are already an improvement.

Arent smartpipes coming as well? I guess it will do different loops with layering.

this is a good start

[wesoda25]

A remote control drone for engineering (controle console in engineering, or possibly an app on engi tablet) would be pretty cool tbh.

[Cobby]

readd drones :^)

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

FIX BOMB CALCS SO THAT THE TOP TIER GASSES ARE REQ'D TO REACH MAXCAP

[MisterPerson]

The problem with having robust RCD/RPD/RPED/etc is that they still leave manual construction in a shitty place. And then it's like... why even have manual construction at all if it's going to be left awful?

Serious question: do we actually expect people to rebuild all the newscasters and light switches and status screens and fire doors and fire alarms and cameras and snack machines and signs and colored floor tiles and stylized airlocks and windows? Like how much repair do we actually want people to do? Get the room back into working order, yeah? So I think it's really telling that if someone bombs Medbay, the thought is "gotta fix the hull" or "gotta fix the wires/pipes" or MAYBE "gotta reair" instead of "gotta get Medbay working again".

What I think would help get people back in the right mindset is to make bombs and shit less deleterious but still destructive. Instead of deleting a computer, leave behind a broken computer frame that you need to fix. Instead of deleting a camera, leave behind a broken camera shell. All you gotta do is examine the broken stuff around you and follow the directions. Easier repairs, you don't gotta constantly check how things were and try to recreate it, just look, easy! Don't delete the required building material either, just throw it around. So if you need some wires to repair that airlock, spawn enough and throw it. This will help with component requirements; you won't need to run back to gather more, you can just scavenge what's around.