Bottom post of the previous page:
Well here is the way I see it.Everyone has baseline dependancy on security to prevent total breakdown, engineering for power, and in most cases cargo for replacement supplies, in this case metal and glass deliveries from the shuttle or mining up till you decide to just build yourself an autolathe to recycle your own materials. Power isn't up and there is no captain or HoP to order the bare minimum crates you need? Too bad, so sad, but you will probably have bigger issues in this case than research as this would cripple pretty much any department. That should be enough to do the baseline job. Science with this minimal amount of co-operation is able to actually fully or nearly fully research tech, which they can use to do things like make chemical dispensers for themselves anyway assuming they were smart and worked on making those before working with the acid for other research.
After that we currently have a dependancy on advanced minerals for a lot of the really interesting stuff. This is poor for a couple of reasons. A big one is that even baseline mechs and some inventions already are replacements or otherwise too strong. There is also little incentive for science to share their splendors with the ship if only mining is co-operating with them. And it also creates bottlenecks, as mining is not a popular job . It also is pretty unexciting for other production jobs like engineering, virology, chemistry, botany, or genetics, up to making it so science is the job more suited towards expanding the ship, not engineering, due to them having exclusive access to the ability to craft machines. A diversification of source materials would allow more tech to be gated behind unique extra-departmental resources, bringing science into greater circulation with the rest of the ship, while at the same time helping prevent a mining bottleneck. No miners? Well it looks like you will need to work mostly with plastics and biotech with the help of chemistry and botany. Engineering could due with having their own unique resource, possibly based on the singulo, possibly based on lathes, to provide to science as well in this hypothetical system.
The argument circiutboards require assembly is a non-argument by the way. Science has the ability to assemble machines solo, and you misused the term counterplay. And other departments don't rely on science more because science would have little incentive to give anything to them. Saying science needs more departments reliant on them is ridiculous. You could make it so engineering absolutely needs rigs, but what the hell could engineering give science? The server used to have an extremely powerful science team on which the medical staff was entirely dependent and it really proved how bad an idea this was. Science basically ate Medical entirely because they had access to all their best tools. Why call a doctor when chemistry genuinely is better at healing than them?
Science already has plenty to offer other people. That isn't the problem at all. they can make everything other departments have independently of them with no outside aid. Science is pretty much entirely self sufficient outside power and metal. Science needs incentive to offer things to other people, and incentive to take things from a diverse range of people. Engineers fix everything and can upgrade things (allegedly), security protects everyone, medical heals everyone, and logistics feeds and supplies everyone. What does science generally do? Hunker down and research themselves a ton of cool toys because no one offers them anything they can't do themselves after 10 minutes work.
