/tg/Station 13

The arrival shuttle isn't good for gameplay. It takes up a huge amount of map space and code for being an area you only spend 5 seconds in. Since there's only one ship, it's susceptible to spawn killing, and that causes admins to use policy as a fix.

Let's just remove the shuttle and create a better way to spawn players in. We have both teleportation and cargo drops. Why not spawn players using one those?

Imagine this: upon joining, you get a list of beacons you can spawn to. You select one, and poof! You land there. Perhaps you could even view the beacons on cameras before joining.

The arrivals shuttle has more flavor and lends itself to more intricate mechanics, like squishing people with it as it arrives. Teleportation being just "poof u exist" is lame and is still susceptible to spawn killing. If somebody bombs the entire medbay/singulo escapes and eats the station, you will warp straight on top of space and die. The arrivals shuttle self repairs (or at least it's supposed to or used to or something) so you can be sure that you at least won't spawn in space.

It takes up... a lot of... code?

Cobby wrote:It takes up... a lot of... code?

End-user functionality equal, more code is worse. The arrivals shuttle is like .05% of the codebase though.

pubby wrote: It takes up a huge amount of map space and code f

These are just straight up falsehoods

I had an idea once to replace arrivals with cloning vats so that knocking out power in Genetics would also mean no new arrivals, but frankly that sounds shitty for a variety of reasons.

The suggestions on the table for replacing Arrivals don't sound great, although I could maybe get behind docking at Cargo and generally moving Arrivals over there, but Arrivals is all on its own so as to be as unlikely as possible to be bombed. Which makes moving it painful because what can you possibly put there, the Chapel? If there was something to put there then maybe, like Tech Storage? Tons of maint? I dunno. And even then, there'd have to be some way for new arrivies to get out, which implies either a public docking bay (which is exactly what we have now ANYWAY) or a Cloning-like open-the-doors button, which isn't great for anyone.