/tg/Station 13

Singulo is old, stale, and has probably ruined more rounds than any other thing in the game. I don't need to be a mind reader to tell that the playerbase is sick of rounds where one engineer is retarded at roundstart and as a consequence the crew gets to spend the next 20 minutes waiting on the shuttle. Every time this happens the server loses at least ten people.

Let's agree as a community that singulo needs to go and start thinking of alternatives. There's already supermatter, but it's kind of boring.

Here are engines SS13 has already had, to my knowledge:

- a plain combustion engine (big fire in a room - ye oldeste venerable engine, birthmother of dwarf bombs)

- a turbine engine (the thing we have in a maintenance hall near atmos. it is gimped now)

- solars of course

- a heat differential engine (two closed gas loops; one passes through a fire room, one passes through space, they meet and the temperature differential generates power. goon has this)

- singulo

To my knowledge there's never been a finished nuclear engine, so that's probably the best bet. It fits all the bills: it's plausible, it's cool, it's foreboding, and it feels volatile in a fundamental way. You can also have its failure mechanism be way cooler than Singulo's is, where it's a binary thing of 'has it escaped or not? if so, round is over.' A nuclear engine meltdown is a gradual process, with plenty of opportunities for a selfless hero clown to charge into the core and pour water on the fuel rods or whatever, at expense to his own genetic wellbeing.

Don't forget about the glorious supermatter shard! It meets most of your requirements.

EDIT: Besides, I'm pretty sure pouring water over overheated rods would have explosive results.

Jazaen wrote:Don't forget about the glorious supermatter shard! It meets most of your requirements.

EDIT: Besides, I'm pretty sure pouring water over overheated rods would have explosive results.

Actually the rods are already in water

It depends on type of the reactor. Given NT's obsession with plasma (and it's ill-defined capabilities), they would probably use it as a coolant (despite it being terrible at it's job due to high flammability. Maybe it captures more radiation that would otherwise be lost, or something?)

Perhaps the other tested way to make something behave strange can work here... Maybe it's a BLUESPACE fission reactor! <Insert technobabble here> makes it so that if it starts to "melt" down it teleports bits of station around it's Z-level, runs wizard "Change" events, has a chance to summon Xenos and cult construct mobs, with rate of summons and changes increasing as it is nearing total "meltdown"?

inertial fusion reactors

Doesn't bay have a thing where they use a supermatter shard for heat rather than radiation and have it drive a heat engine?

I tried making an atomic pile kinda deal once with uranium walls/doors surrounding radiation collectors but apparently it's the wrong kind of radiation so no free power for me.

AFAIK rad collectors literally only check for supermatter/singulo nearby.

DemonFiren wrote:AFAIK rad collectors literally only check for supermatter/singulo nearby.

Well that brings lazy coding to a whole new level.

Nothing would be quite more entertaining than a reactor steam explosion ala Chernobyl sending fuel rods through the station and irradiating the shit out of everything.

Maybe not. Radiation sucks balls.

funnymatter shard is cool and i wish it was used

supermatter shard is never used because it's containment isn't built by default and takes an hour to set up, and everyone and their friends will rush to stop you from building an engine for it because of the supermatter shard meme

that and no one has any experience with it, experienced engineers are rarely on the engineering staff for a number of reasons, so it never gets built so no one ever gets experience.

I think a nuclear engine literally nuking the station (ie destroying everyone on it, and instantly ending the round) could be very interesting. Because of course nobody would ever want to release it (apart from suicide traitors, which you could work around by making it create redtext, and maybe nuke ops). It's the ultimate reason to maintain the engine, the ultimate reason not to bomb critical systems too much. Whereas the singulo creates stupid concepts like "I will release it, hoping my target dies and I escape!".

Plus, unlike the singulo, you wouldn't get 15 minutes of evacuation. The station broke? That's it, round over, fresh start.

I think it'd be pretty awful to have the entire round wiped because nobody was paying attention to engineering, so there is that as a problem.

Sadly, nuclear reactors cannot cause thermonuclear explosions. Perhaps we could come up with some sort of absurd futuristic Nanotrasen reactor that can trigger a thermonuclear explosion under the right conditions?

invisty wrote:Perhaps we could come up with some sort of absurd futuristic Nanotrasen reactor that can trigger a thermonuclear explosion under the right conditions?

Plasma collider

You could just port vgstations fixed up version of rust. Pjb is even working on improving it and adding stuff I'm addition to cleaning and fixing it up. http://ss13.pomf.se/wiki/index.php/R-UST

Saegrimr wrote:

invisty wrote:Perhaps we could come up with some sort of absurd futuristic Nanotrasen reactor that can trigger a thermonuclear explosion under the right conditions?

Plasma collider

An engine so powerful that most of it consists of a large vent to allow 99% of the energy to escape in the opposite and not blow up literally everything.


Also ITT people that don't know how nuclear reactors work.

> nuclear reactor that uses liquid plasma instead of heavy water because fuck safety regulations
> fucking superheated gas plasma powered turbines going crazy and being replaced every so often because the heat melts them
> hook it up to the distro on one end, supercooled air on the other
> half the station explodes, massively radioactive rods tear apart the rest and horribly irradiate the remains

supermeme shard is hilarious sometimes

>shuttle called
>shuttle arrives
>board shuttle
>im a bit hurt
>go to shuttle medbay
>SM shard in medbay fnr
>dont question it
>patch myself up
>SM shard suddenly travels across the room fnr
>burn and die, SM shard irridiates everybody else to death.

i was laughing too hard to be salty.

I DO want another way to flood plasma, though. When I'm playing atmos tech I like to set up the system to better handle plasma floods because there's nothing else to do, so more ways to burn the station is a plus by me.

Bay's (or at least Urist idk what Bay has) version of the supermatter shard is best, when it reaches critical levels it fucking explodes and devours half the station.

A nuclear fission engine would be completely harmless if it failed because, as previously stated by CosmicScientist, they'll just melt through containment and probably the molten rods would be ejected far away due to the explosive decompression. (the coolant would have flashed into a gas inside the reactor core) On the other hand if you get a reactor that doesn't do that you'll have an inherently safe design like the LFTR design which is self-correcting which is why the idea is so intriguing. (our current nuclear fission reactors come from a technology line that would produce fissile material for weapons, obviously during the Cold War this was extremely attractive)

This is a game where our current engine is a black hole in a forcefield. We don't really have to be perfectly realistic with our portrayal of engines.

LNGLY wrote:This is a game where our current engine is a black hole in a forcefield. We don't really have to be perfectly realistic with our portrayal of engines.

Except harvesting energy from a singularity makes at least a sliver of sense and is largely an ambiguous thing because we can't do it right now in any way. All of it is conjecture and guess, really, but nuclear fission is easily understood and has been a successful thing for decades. You can't really compare the two, all you want is something that's got a level of !!Fun!! to it but nuclear fission really isn't that thing. Port over Bay's supermatter shard setup because it's A: fun, and B: extremely capable of Fun.

There's been so much focus on security and antags that science, supply, engineering, and service have been neglected a lot.

I really enjoy the singularity though. I'd prefer if the CE could choose which primary power source the station would use (nuclear reactor, singularity, tesla ball collider etc.).

[ Primary points highlighted in bold print. ]

That's what really need.

Options.



Expand engineering, make a super matter engine with no super matter shard, have the super matter shard spawn in secure-er storage. Have a PA and containment field set up on the other side of engineering, and have a thermal engine set up in the middle. Then leave blank "Construction Areas" for when one of the engineers decides its a good idea to build TWO super matter engines or TWO singularity engines.

The problem isn't with the singularity itself, its the fact that no one wants to bother to set up all the solars or set up a turbine or supermatter engine, because it takes to much time. The fact that the singularity is easy to set up if someone knows how to do it, generally means they aren't going to say "Well shoot, i might aswell go preform a even more difficult and time consuming task, instead of doing this simplistic and quick task."

The point is, instead of removing the singularity engine, you can add the option to have different kinds of engines. Instead of completely removing a game play mechanic. Experienced engineering players will want to play engineering again, because its something different, not something that got removed and replaced.

If I wasn't so ass at mapping, I'd map out Engineering for a Supermatter.

I remember we were talking to someone about adapting the holodeck code to work for the engine, making it choose a random engine on server launch.

We really do need something other than singulo though.

we could ask /vg/ for their antimatter engine, not supermatter, antimatter

AME is like their least interesting power option. I'd rather have the thermal gen back than that thing.