/tg/Station 13

This is an ~ideas guy~ proposal to an alternative to engineering points as a use for extraneous power.
Ideally, the "default" SM setup would be enough to power the station fully, or at least near fully.

Alien artifacts and pieces of wreckage from the station will show up around the map, either as structures or objects. They can be brought back to the station ??somehow?? and then have power diverted to them for various helpful effects. They'd probably be a big power drain and part of engineering gameplay would be managing which artifacts/wreckage modules are receiving power.

Some examples of possible stuff:
Alien vaults or armory pods containing loot

Wreckage of station modules that must be repaired and retrieved like forcefield modules that make shield walls around a certain area, defense systems like turrets, robots like upgraded floorbots, medbots, (things in that style, maybe upgraded floorbots could repair damaged plating and wall girders, medbots heal more or inject specific chemicals, secbots with defense AI to target mobs, etc.)

Alien stuff could be more wacky or random. Machine that vents nanomachines that slowly people next to it over time (maybe as some form of atmos gas?), devices that can teleport or create gateways, prototype weapons like lightning cannons, possibly systems to trap monsters/megafauna or tame them?

Hm, as in, "supply X power to access Y" for vaults? The power required would have to be large enough so that a single PACMAN-family generator cannot supply it, but that would require laying LOTS of cable. Maybe a specialized power-gen mech?

Wait why does it have to be a supermatter why not pacmans

I'd love to have xenoarcheology experimenting with artifacts

Hmm geez i dunno. what if instead we gave engineering membership points for being good boys and they can use them to buy pulse rifles. Seems like the best way to trick those craft players into doing their dang job

Yep, I was looking for what to describe a better thing to use, and "wide benefits" seemed to describe it, and this seems to describe it perfectly.
Why the hell do we need "GOOD BOY POINTS" for engineering? All we need is more things that draw shitloads of power.

Maybe it's completely arbitrary and I'm insane but I wouldn't actually mind engineering being able to redeem stored power for gear if

A) It was done through opening vaults, activating an alien "forge" etc. Just seems more fluffy to me than the GBP vendor.

B) It was a decision they actually had to put thought into. Do I want to print out my sweet alien loot or do I want to turn on the turrets outside the walls or do I want to fire the bluespace cannon etc

Kor wrote:Maybe it's completely arbitrary and I'm insane but I wouldn't actually mind engineering being able to redeem stored power for gear if

A) It was done through opening vaults, activating an alien "forge" etc. Just seems more fluffy to me than the GBP vendor.

B) It was a decision they actually had to put thought into. Do I want to print out my sweet alien loot or do I want to turn on the turrets outside the walls or do I want to fire the bluespace cannon etc

Pretty much my thinking behind the vaults. Maybe they take a really large amount of energy so you'd need to disable a system for a few minutes while you actiavte the vault or something and then wait for more power to be generated.

Make it so that LORE-wise the vault is stored in 11th dimension, to prevent degradation, and you actually have to power the retrieval device to re-compress it to normal space. I think code is even there, with holodeck, and this would allow for admins manually replacing contents with stuff.

Ok engineering thread about how the planetstation might be powered in a engineering setup.

> Alien artifacts/vaults that suck power to open creakily = What? ok i guess that's a fair use for spare power but could you change the title please if that's the basis of the idea.

My personal input on the artifact idea is that we shouldn't sweat too hard about it and leave it as science side activity rather than a crucial thing, routing power into vaults or long lost technology (a abandoned unearthed out of of a bunch of boulders BSA alien super-weapon somewhere deep in the jungle) should be a way of securing the channel of wires & ensuring that its not inefficent when travelling large distances. (Also a problem if the ruin is on the further side of the 3 wide planet z level)

Perhaps as a nessecity, after a certain distance you would need to build mechanical substations in order to keep the current fresh (and somehow get it to cross over z levels and practical natural barriers) with the substations relaying power outward in a local area a bit like a room without borders.

- Fracking for geothermal energy and therefore breaching into the lava layer in order to sap thermal energy could be a good source of renewable power, that is if we don't first apply the hydro-electricity of the jungle river, wind and solar power as alternatives.

getting trapped in an alien vault because engineering diverted the power elsewhere sounds like a true ss13 story.

I also like the idea of additional machinery which draws a lot of power for stationwide benefits. They could be either ruin rewards or RnD-made (with the former having the best effects ofc).
Which would further cement engi's gameplay niche as the keepers of stationwide benefits, with power, telecomms and gravity already being under their supervision.

Some (high-tier) ideas could be a regenerator machine, a teleporter array which would allow people with cheaply-made remotes to move between beacons freely, a machine which connects all the crew to a hivemind, a bluespace mining drill which passively produces minerals, and so on.

ExcessiveCobblestone wrote:getting trapped in an alien vault because engineering diverted the power elsewhere sounds like a true ss13 story.

someone play the saw ending scene where he entombs that guy for six mana

Possibly impractical/dumb, but what if instead of dragging things back to station, you had to power it remotely by getting an engineer to lay down some special cable from the station to the artifact, and hook the thing up?
In my mind I'm more imagining real life heavy duty insulated cable that's rolled out like a hose on a wheel, compared to the power string we have currently.

It also means if power is 'mysteriously' cut, crew will have to go investigate/poor plebs will get stuck in the extra dimensional vault/etc.
It could also mean that a sneaky crew member could power up an artifact for their own personal use by either stealing some heavy cable and routing it themselves from the station, or moving/splicing an existing cable that's connected to a different artifact.

I think either kor or MSO was working on making wires behave more naturally, with switches etc. No idea where that went, hopefully it will be revisited.

Replying to this old thread because this idea has a lot of potential
Big artifact things that draw power directly from the grid, and areas in the world that need to be powered with extra energy would both be a good and fun use of engineering, or at least it'd be better than "set up engine, fuck off for rest of round"

Though instead of just running wires across entire Z-levels to power some random shed in lavaland, I think it'd be better to have some kind of chargeable power core thing that can be carried and slotted in to receptacles on-site and then dealing with the diverting of power once you're there kinda like the power system in Dungeon of the Endless
Perhaps it could also use a power system incompatible with the station's electricity, so that the cores can't just be kept and used as big emergency power cells for the station itself
Could even make just converting the station's power into that power a new challenge, with the whole necropolis thing it wouldn't be out of the question to do something like DOOM's Argent energy