/tg/Station 13

It's always bothered me how Xenobiology is supposed to be all about studying aliens, and all you do 99% of the time is breed slimes. I have nothing against the slime system, but I feel like Xenobiology has room for improvement and could perhaps even become its own job separate from regular Scientist with a few adjustments. With the addition of organ manipulation and the ability to harvest Xeno organs and implant them in people, Xenobiologists should be able to capture or breed various aliens and harvest them for their organs. Xenomorphs, Changelings, Shadowlings, Abudctors, Morphs, maybe some mobs from the mining asteroid, etc. could all have organs that give various powers. Adding this would take minimal effort since the systems required are already in place. You just have to add organs to other aliens and maybe make facehuggers a little more common.


It would be a simple addition, and I feel that it would have a number of benefits, including
- More robust Xenobiology department
- Nerfing regular scientists by cutting off their access to one department
- New toys for antagonists
- Increased interplay between department (medical would be implanting the organs, miners bringing aliens)
- Roles for ghosts from bred sentient aliens (i.e. Xenos)

If we wanted to harvest xenos we'd want to make a whole new alien species. Xenos as they are grow up incredibly slowly, and in this case, grow up just to get Xray'd through walls, drug out, harvested, and the cycle repeating anew. This isn't fun at all for the xeno players.

Being livestock isn't supposed to be fun.

Zilenan91 wrote:If we wanted to harvest xenos we'd want to make a whole new alien species. Xenos as they are grow up incredibly slowly, and in this case, grow up just to get Xray'd through walls, drug out, harvested, and the cycle repeating anew. This isn't fun at all for the xeno players.

If it's so bad, they could just ghost and make the Xenobiologist's job easier. Additionally, it adds the possibility of using a sentience potion of them and gaining a crew-sided Xeno.

lumipharon wrote:Being livestock isn't supposed to be fun.

Spoiler:

Hoping for some "unfortunate accident" to let you all out an murder everyone is

Xeno implants are powerful. I like the fact that human error in dealing with them is punished harshly.

One VERY undeveloped idea I had was to interlink xenobiology with genetics with a new system where you could draw species based powers out of various beasts for human use.

Right now the only thing that keeps a bog standard human from having most any ability a mutant race may have is a simple flag. Turn it on and it'll manifest perfectly. The human_mutant stuff (aka catgirl hell) was pretty illustrative of how this works. You just toggle the bits on and there they are.

How it would work is that through either slimes or a seperate "acquisition method " xenobiologists could transfer animal (corpses?) to genetics that could be used with a new machine not unlike a DNA scanner for any mob. Then through some sort of effort the geneticist could isolate a species based power that they could then give to humans. Obviously this could bring people's "humanity" into question and we all know the AI loves that stuff when it becomes relevant. Usefulness would be tied to how difficult things would be to get a hold of. Pointless things like the catgirl ears could literally be lifted from runtime while more practical things would come from stuff that might actually put up some sort of fight (like maybe being able to remove the need to breath by taking it from something that doesn't breathe like a space carp).

I don't know, it's an idea. Maybe someday.

Had a really interesting metaphysical debate the other week about the nature of humanity, and if an augged up human is more human than one with biotech implants like xeno organs. This seems like a really cool feature Incoming