Trio Station (Feedback wanted)

[JackHunt]

So I've been throwing together a station in my free time. It's not much and obviously the boring parts like disposals and piping and wiring are not going to be done for a while. That being said I'd like some feedback as I realize as I'm designing it that:
A) Maps need a ton of polish to look good
B) I have no idea about departments that I don't play function

So if you're a regular in a department, give me some feedback on how you think it should work layout wise and if I'm missing any vital features

Overview

Trio0.04.png

Med

Med03.png

Sec

Sec03.png

[danno]

I've always really liked the idea of a station cut into sections like this, connected with bridges.
Need more pictures though.
From the overview, immediately it jumps out to me that Medical is nowhere near Science. Medsci is a classic pairing, and with good reason.
I'd swap Cargo and Medical. Another thing is the long, long, loooooong hallways. I would stagger them a bit; Take the top half of the entire map and lift it and shift it over to the right 14 blocks or something, and then add a turn in the hallway (Obviously not JUST like that, but you see what I mean hopefully).

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I agree on swapping medical and sec - having those three right next to the bridge is just asking for an enthusiastic bomber to blow up the access to all three.

[JackHunt]

Trio0.04.png

Okay, swapped Sci and the maintenance across from med so they're nice and buddy-buddy now. Moved mining and cargo below Sci so they'd be nice and close as well. In the intrest of spreading out targets I've moved Sec to the pod next door. Dorms is across from Sec. I'm thinking of moving the AI into the bottom of the left pod to put it kind of out of the way.

What I've done is made two little Sec-Med posts in the farther flung corners of the station to ensure that they've got some reach. I've always found departmental sec a little toothless so I've put a single holding cell in with the sec post so that they don't have to haul the prisoner all the way to the brig. Assuming Security doesn't abuse this, this should hopefully ensure a smoother experience. The warden has a camera console for those two cells.

Post02.png

On a related note, any easy way to take a picture of an entire Z level?

[miggles]

for botany, i would suggest removing the top tray of the 3 rows (for ease of movement) and the 2 extra lockers. there's no need for 5 botanist lockers and they clutter up the area. also, there's no theatre storage room. clown and mime are sad.
in general, more windows. everywhere. ESPECIALLY medbay. medbay is full of windows on every map, you're supposed to be able to see into every room from the medbay hallways. windows from cryo to the main hallway, from the foyer to the main hallway, med hallway to med storage, genetics, etc
from what few screenshots youve shown maint looks really boring and almost tacked on, as if it's there for necessity and not use or flavor. with the huge gaps between sections of the station, there should be plenty of room for extra maintenance areas
i dont like the atmos tanks being indoors and not in space
i dont like atmos in general, really. its a huge mess with too much open space. you have to pull out the other tanks to get to the empty ones. the fire axe is in a really weird spot. the computers are too far from the entrance and theres no window to the main hallways. and i dont see any pipes going to the scrubber/vent setup that should be outside either. welding tanks and water tanks should be together. pipes shouldnt mix colors without a pump or valve in between (bottom near the air setup) the entrance hall from what i assume engineering is only 1 tile wide, as well. this is really bad. 1 tile wide halls should be pretty much exclusive to maintenance, and even then, most maint has some space to move around.
the armory, or mini-armory, or whatever the heck it is, should not be exposed to the hallway. it should face the space between the 1st and 2nd parts of the station. same for the HoS office. warden's office has a really weird shape too. sec in general is super vertical when it could be expanded horizontally into the empty space a bit. the area i assume leads to perma should have doors between it and the brig hallway, or, at least, the lockers and medical supplies should be behind a door. if you look at other maps, you'll notice that the normal brig hallway which extends to other areas is devoid of absolutely anything but floor and entrances into other areas. there's no disposals, tables, vendors, computers, etc. that's for a reason, and a good one: prisoners shouldnt have access to absolutely anything should they break free of cuffs in the brig.
medbay as a whole is way too cramped. that random barred-off medbay storage thing has more free space than the actual storage ffs. chemistry is teeny. virology is SUPER teeny. it needs more than one isolation cell, and so does the medbay itself. the morgue is so small that it cannot even be traversed if someone opens a tray.
the hallways are too wide. normal hallways are 3 wide. this extra space takes up too much that could be used for expanding the departments. though those blue tiles going down the middle give me a cool idea for using transport tubes.

for that new secmed thing: its really cool. very nice idea. the table needs a windoor and the sec office needs windows in general, though. the cell should also be rotated 90 degrees i feel. or you could make it 2x2 on the inside to save space.

[allura]

from a distance? completely and utterly shit, structurally. on a departmental level it's progressive, but ultimately quite shit. the little sec post and medpost things aren't original, it's straight from cogmap.

[miggles]

stealing things from other maps is only bad when its cogmap quoted allura

[WeeYakk]

>No lipstick
>No costume or clothing vendors
>Botany fridge isn't accessible from the bar

0/10 would not play on.

[JackHunt]

Expanded med and sec so they now look like the following

Sec03.png

Med03.png

Never actually played Cogmap. However if it isn't broke there's no need to fix it. I find at least as far as prototyping rough sizes of rooms and what they need to have in them, copying other maps is a good way to get a feel for that.

I actually was going to put transport tubes down the center of each hall but I'm debating if that would look okay. We'd probably need another sprite for the crossable tube as right now it only looks good for when the tube is in space. Actually, does anyone know how the tubes on Efficiency's asteroid work? I'd like to know if they'd fit. I have space allocated for a transport hub.

Fixed botany up a little. Tearing up Atmos and putting it somewhere with more space. I'd like to try and maintain the spacing between sections so that's why some of the departments have ended up all long and skinny. I now think I might need to shift the whole thing wider to give some more room. I've put a separate room for the theater that contains storage for the mime and clown. I'm not touching maint until I'm sure I'm not moving any departments around because it'll be a pain in the ass to have to cut up a well done maint to move some other stuff around. For the same reason I'm avoiding piping and disposals.

Cargo currently looks like this:

Cargo03.png

[Phalanx300]

Were you inspired by Sevastopol station? Has a somewhat similar outline, figured it would make a good space station in the game.

[JackHunt]

Not especially. Mostly I wanted big 5 wide corridors so I could put transport tubes everywhere. I also always liked the idea of spindly bridges connecting different parts of the station. The other big thing was making each station section on some level independent from another. I think a station that is somewhat easy to sabotage but hard to completely bork is a good setting for the game requiring action and reaction and not just calling the shuttle when something bad happens. Other factors were a focus on larger spaces for higher player counts and wanting to just try my hand at making a station.

I should also note that in the screen shots I post I'm ususally going to be missing items and the like, at some point, once I have everything vaguely nailed down I'll need to do a big pass to make sure all the right things are in the right places.

Here's the newer, larger atmos. Hopefully slightly less of an orgy of pipes than usual.

Atmos03.png

And here's the little stand alone theater. I haven't figured out what I want to do with it yet.

Theater03.png

[Fayrik]

>Seperate clown and mime backstages.
That is inspired. I love it.

[DemonFiren]

0/10 theater setup not symmetrical, this offends my autisms.

[as334]

That is one sexy atmos setup.

[DemonFiren]

It's so frighteningly organised.

[allura]

atmos is absolutely terrible. absoutely fucking ZERO room for modularity. have you ever played atmos tech in your life? even worse is the classic "side by side" valve system, please fucking look at meta or eff 3 for good atmos set ups

[JackHunt]

Hey I did say criticism welcome. What would be most helpful is explanations behind criticisms. I'm currently working on R&D and I'm sure it'll be a disaster because I only ever play roboticist and then only occasionally. However I do play atmos and honestly out of all the rounds I've played it is exceptionally rare to have someone touch atmos except for the purposes of fucking with it. Honestly the current scrubbing system is very much not improvable barring some sort of complex cooling loop or other obscure and arcane things. The setup as it stands is very clear on what each loop is doing and the mix loop is very multipurposed. I can't actually think of a situation where you'd want filtered to canister and not air to canister so maybe I'll delete those ports. I've shifted the stuff out of the top few squares to give some more room to play with the scrubber loop if anyone really wants to. I don't quite understand the part about the parallel pumps as every loop is plenty long if you want to stick T manifolds across and I like the neatness of having everything in rows. Here is the readjusted version.

Atmos04.png

However I've always hated the job atmos has on station. It's very boring but at the same time there really shouldn't be a reason that a big stations air system isn't functioning properly at round start. There are a few miscellaneous projects on box but they're pretty obscure and honestly not all that interesting. So what I've done is given each section of the station a mini atmos.

MiniAtmos01.png

This is a first draft but ideally I'd like to have each section of the station have either a fully completed or partially completed version of this and now atmos has three times the ground to maintain. Ideas and improvements on the design are welcome. This addition also means the loops will scrub faster and repressurize faster. I don't see any better way to scrub and pump into vital areas across a huge station without atmos substations. Additionally it makes for cool things like having to quarantine sections of the station or more localized tomfoolery. It's kinda crappy when an antag floods the entire station but significantly more exciting and dynamic to play with if they only flood one section of it.

Connections01.png

[Not-Dorsidarf]

We had this but smaller on eff3, and nobody ever touched it.

[Methelod]

The ore machine needs to be moved somewhere more public for use by chemists/research/anyone else who has some reason to grab the materials from the ore processor. It's hard to tell from this distance but you'll probably also want that big secure cell that most xenobiology sections have on the maps.

What's the section south of the dorms going to be? A general construction area?

[Steelpoint]

Allure means good, he can just seem toxic in his feedback though.

Overall designing a station can be quite enjoyable, so good luck.

[allura]

i think this station, overall, has absolutely zero potential. you're learning right now (it's nice that it's quickly, at least) and as you map more and more you gradually become aware of the absolutely enormous structural faults you overlooked previously.
let's point out the biggest of all. if the station is connected by small, unprotected hallways, what if someone bombs them? now a huge section of the station is inaccessible and important departmental interactions are severed.
giving large mini-atmos to departments makes it laughably easy to sabotage an entire department. it's as simple as connecting a plasma canister and a department is useless for 10 or 20 minutes, and the shuttle may be called. just put various 3x3 rooms around maint, each connected to some department, with 3 portable connectors and 2 air tanks, and a table with a wrench.
i would rather take a dick to the eye twenty times than see departmental smes revisted, so don't do it. it makes the lives of engineers a complete pain. no matter how hard you try, the only kind of design that will make engineer a less boring job is code design, not station design. walking around pre determined places for 5 minutes isn't fun, building an autism fort is.
atmos has still not improved. stick to the common around-the-wall design, instead of a large room with lines of pipes going here and there. this spaces out pipes and means that if an explosion occurred in the direct center, atmos wouldn't be totally impossible to save. also add a specific room for the distro loop instead of leaving it in the open, and make the room larger in general. side-by-side canisters is bs, put some at the bottom and some on the other side. again, bombs or meteors.
stationary theatres are fine, but the one you made is atrocious. i don't hate a separate backroom idea, but 4 random tables, metal chairs (please use stools), and a puny communal backroom with costumes literally laying on the floor is absolute bullshit. also, how about you add a public costume vendor like on ministation. it's swaggy.
security is hilariously defenseless. it's like it's made to be rekt. the entire design in general is in need of total overhaul, 100%. make sure permabrig is spacier so you aren't stuck in a tiny room suffocating yourself. it needs personal cells as well. the armory is a literal joke considering it takes up 30% of security itself, there is no reason at all to have it so large. so don't. sec office is puny, and where's the detective? permabrig is so excluded from the rest of security that no one will ever visit prisoners ever.
medbay's open design is very progressive and interesting, but it's still quite cramped. morgue is an actual joke, virology is too segmented and strange, surgery is too small, the extra cryo tube needs to go, genetics having individual monkey pens is a joke AND it looks way too small, storage is bland and understocked and what looks to be a surplus room is incredibly tucked away, hidden. cmo office i an open room, sad and dour.
make the main cargo room bigger and segment the entire department less. why is there a break room that's BIGGER than sec's office?! where's DEPSEC IN EVERY DEPARTMENT?!