SomanB

SoP is IC only. SoP is IC. I've considered it for awhile now, and the day you start making SoP violations OOC actionable with job bans, is the day Security specifically goes straight to hell. Brig someone for theft when it should have been petty theft, job ban. Drag someone to the brig in cuffs before seeing if they'll co-operate, job ban. Walk into a department without asking the department head permission....yup, another job ban. Sec, of all departments, is one of the biggest for SoP violations, be they intentional, unintentional, or "I had a good reason".

Oh, we're talking medbay SOP, and...do my eyes deceive me? VIROLOGY! Ohh yes, as the resident plague queen, I'm jumping ALL in this and lending a hand. Time to nitpick. 1. The Virologist must always wear adequate protection (such as a Biosuit and Internals for Airborne Viruses) when handling infected personnel and Test Animals. Exception is made for IPC Virologists, for obvious reasons; This one makes sense. If you aren't living in a biosuit/hardsuit as a viro, you are doing something amazingly wrong. 2. The Virologist must only test viral samples on the provided Test Animals. Said Test Animals are to be maintained inside their pen, and disposed of via Virology's Disposals Chutes if dead, to prevent possible contamination. In addition, the Virologist may not, under any circumstances whatsoever, leave Virology while infected by a Viral Pathogen that spreads by Contact or Airborne means; Minor nitpick here. A viro is perfectly safe around others with an Airbone/contact viral, so long as they are in a sealed hardsuit with internals on. For normal operations, yeah, stay in the fortress. When things are going downhill and you're infected, suit up, do your thing, and get uninfected fast. 3. The Virologist may not, under any circumstance whatsoever, release an active virus without prior consent from Chief Medical Officer. Contact and/or Airborne viruses may only be released with consent from the Chief Medical officer and Captain. In the event a Contact and/or Airborne virus is released, the crew must be informed, and antibodies should be ready for any personnel that chooses to opt out of being infected; I'll make an addendum here. Positive virals must be LABELED in the virus database as being positive before being released. This is so all those doctors and assistants with a radium needle don't go screaming "LYNCH VIRO!" when they see the infected symbol on their medihud. I'll address this further, later on. 4. The Virologist must maintain Radium samples on their person, or in Virology, at all times; I'd tweak this back onto the chemists again, and make it a requirement to have a radium bottle in the fridge at ALL TIMES. It is utterly annoying as a viro to be standing there asking for a bottle of radium for 15 minutes while the chemist herps along making meth. Have them put it in the fridge at round start like all the other meds, I'll come get it. 5. In the event of a Viral Outbreak, the Virologist must take a sample of viral blood and analyze the viral element. If it is non-lethal, standard procedure with animal testing is to be followed. If it is lethal, the Virologist is permitted to inject an infected crewmember with Radium in order to quickly harvest Antibodies; Fucking RADIUM. Tag this in for general medical SoP. Radium curing is expressly FORBIDDEN for non-Viros to use, when there is an active Viro on station. 6. In the event of a Viral Outbreak, the Virologist must work together with the Chief Medical Officer and/or Chemists to produce a cure. Failure to keep casualties down to, at most, 25% of the station's crew is to be considered a breach of Standard Operating Procedure for everyone involved This one is just common sense. Now, I'm gonna address a couple things I'd like to see added, from a security standpoint. 1. Viral sample plates not in active use must be stored in the secure sample fridge, and not left out. 2. Infected blood samples (Viros use a blood vial to save and clone sample plates) must either be kept on your person, or secured in the virology safe if you leave the lab. 3. Backup disks with negative symptoms must also be locked up safely, before you leave the lab. 4. Prior to beginning animal experimentation with lethal airborne/contact strains, and announcement must be made over general radio that the virology lab is now hot, warning any visitors to take biohazard precautions before walking in (Oh lord the number of times I've had a cage full of airborne gibbingtons monkeys and the AI just decides to let the HoS in for a look around.....) As for actual outbreak, you've got that down pat, I'm just going to toss my expert info in. During a suspected outbreak, it is medbay staff's responsibility to secure blood samples from potentially infected. As in, the first medbay person to come in contact with them gets the blood sample, and hauls it down to viro. I hate trying to chase down an infected patient as they bounce from sleeper to cryo to surgery back to sleeper etc, just to get a blood sample. Once an antibody is developed, the priority list for administration should be as follows: Virologist, known infected people, medbay staff, department heads, then general crew. Antibodies not only cure the virus, they make you immune to future infection too, so if there's unknown infected people still out and about, you won't catch the plague. In the event of severe pandemic, or severe risks to overall station integrity or crew health (I'm talking about radians and toxic sublim specifically), vaccination will become mandatory, and can be administered by force. Put in foodstuffs, bardrinks, cryomix and regular meds, shot from a needlegun, the works. Failure to register antigens during a pandemic event is grounds for detainment by security until vaccine is administered. Anyway, that's all from me, I hope it helps from my little corner of medbay. Wait, I almost forgot......On development of an airborne Pierrots Throat strain, an infected blood sample must IMMEDIATELY be given to the Clown. The Clown is the only one competent enough to handle such a strain of virals.

I've always thought if it in military terms. You've got your regular "core" members of the unit (the different departments), then the attachments (all the guys falling under CC). NT Rep, that's the annoying civilian guy assigned to your unit by Congress to evaluate your work. IAA, those guys are the grunt level inspectors for the Inspector General, the impartial outside department that handles "internal" military conflicts. Magistrate, well he's the Inspector General himself, come down from on-high to render judgement. As for the Blueshield....well, he'd be the equivalent of a Blackwater bodyguard, hired by Congress to make sure the Commanding Officers (read, Heads) don't get fragged. Part of being attached to a unit like that in the real world is, while TECHNICALLY the unit chain of command isn't your boss, in reality, you do what they say because you're working for them day in and day out. Flipside of that, if said chain of command tells you to do something blatantly wrong, you scurry over to your ACTUAL bosses and rat them out. It actually works out as a decent check and balance....the unit command knows that they'll get ratted out for abusing the attached people, and the attached people know that pulling the "you're not my boss" card to get out of legit orders will result in life becoming hell.

Since we're going down the syringe gun line....Give me a 15u chemical that will floor someone with a couple seconds, causes no damage, and is legal to carry. Going down the guide to chem list, we have: Ether: Nope, needs a LOT higher dose than 15u, works way too slow. Morphine: Same as Ether. Hydrocodone: Same, above. Haloperidol: Maybe. Try getting chem to make it for you though. Everything else falls under the narcotics category, or is poison. It may be different when other people play, but I'm pretty sure that me, as a normal player CMO, would get smacked hard for "Well he was being unruly so I shot him with (krokodil/sulfonol/neurotox/capulettium)" And finally, RD can make better dart guns than medbay has, as well as make chems for it. And, we get back to the original point, they still have flash protection, so if we're doing "balance around antag", they're still way on top.

Give the CMO a set of medihud sunglasses like the brig phys and Blueshield get. Why? The CMO starts with a flash in their locker, to hypothetically defend themselves against unruly patients and such. It's utterly useless, because nine times out of ten, the CMO is going to have a normal medihud on. So, easy fix. Give them the medihud sunglasses. You'd figure the Medbay department head would have access to such an item anyway.

I'm not interested, thanks. Yee, I'm really against having stuff that needs staff fuckery to use. They got better things to do than be summoned just to like idk make a tomato or something It's not so much staff fuckery, as an IC answer to an ahelp. Everything is already there to make it happen. AI ahelp: "Dear ghods I got 19 freeform laws and more are incoming I can't handle it!" Mentor: "Yeah that's bad. Your crazy now. RP it up, don't kill anyone or damage the station, but otherwise feel free to be a pest." CENTCOM Message: "We see you've driven your AI nuts. Do not damage any AI systems. Wait for Geek Squad ERT to arrive and reset systems" *trigger ERT* Mentor: OK ERT here's your job, take this reset board to the AI upload, reset the AI, then find and dismantle any unauthorized law upload consoles.

So, I'm not naming names and calling out anyone as bad per se, but during my time of playing AI I've noticed something. There seems to be a tendency to upload LOTS of freeform laws, if the AI is playing along as more than a doorknob/tracker. It's happened a few times where I've gotten 10-15 new freeforms all stacked up, some contradicting, people demanding I list them, follow them, etc. This is my totally IC solution to that. If, at an admin/mentor types discretion, the AI gets too many laws, it goes a little nuts. Crew safety and station integrity rules remain active, but outside of that, the AI can act...well, crazy. At the same time, CENTCOM sends a message along the lines of "OK, we see you guys drove the AI insane. We are sending a tech support ERT to reset the AI. DO NOT TOUCH THE AI, OR RELATED SYSTEMS (cameras, borgs, etc)." Geek Squad ERT's job is to get to the AI upload, pop in a card, and fix the AI to baseline laws, then take apart any unauthorized AI uploads. Now, to cover the loopholes. If the AI goes into this mode, it CANNOT kill people or damage the station. Even indirectly. The AI isn't malf, it's personality is corrupted. Overload lights, sure. Cut power to non-vital areas, go for it. Randomly bolt doors for arbitrary reasons, go for it. Venting plasma to the station and releasing singuloth, no can do. Should an ERT call fail (because the ghosts are having too much fun watching the insanity), Centcom can start a "remote reset" of the core, which will, of course...take more time. Give it a few minutes, the AI gets reset to base laws, and life goes on. As for coding, there's honestly none needed. This is heavily RP directed, so everything needed exists in game as is. It WILL need admin/mentor interaction, as it's effectively a mini-event. Judgement calls will need to be made before anything starts. It can't be an automatic system, or we'll just see people pulling things like uploading X freeform laws just to set off chaos. TL;DR: this is a RP suggestion for an ahelp from an AI screaming "Oh god they've given me 20 different freeform laws and I can't follow them!" AI gets a few minutes of harmless revenge, laws get reset, and hopefully people have a little fun....and learn why it's bad to overload the AI with laws.

It's getting outside my "simple fix", but I really like that idea. Make one chem, maybe a step more difficult to make than cryox, that works basically as a "delay" for virals. Halts the symptoms, stop the spread, but leaves the patient with whatever symptoms they've already gotten. Stopgap until viro/CMO/(insert here) manages to get the actual legit cure made. Makes Viro a valued part of the team, but not such a totally critical part that the round is over if noone takes the job.

I'm going to take you apart a little bit here, Fox. It's not intended as insult. Against a random event, you have plenty of time for an active viro/CMO to build a proper cure. Isolate pathogen, inject a monkey, radium the monkey, get the antibody, dilute and administer. People freak out at stage one, when there are no stage ones that will straight kill. Going into stage two, we have basic tox, brute, and burn for killers. All managed by a doc in bio gear (they have them too), standing by with the right drugs. Stage three, you're looking at chucking someone in cryo to keep them alive. Stage four, yeah, you're likely going to die soon. Stage four is, yes, the end. Against a tator viro, as I've learned, there are severe server rule limits on unleashing a superplague. You're restricted to "be the only one alive on the shuttle" to even have a chance at getting a superplague allowed, and even then, it's a helluva job ban risk doing so. Not only that, it's super inefficient. Take the perfect plague, three silent symptoms, then toxic sublim. The second the first guy starts oozing plasma, everyone is going to go internals and look straight at the viro. Same with gibbingtons, or any of the other superdeath level fours. Easier to emag the shuttle at the last moment, and less risk of job bans. I never said "make it so only the viro can cure plagues and everyone is fucked if there isn't one". I said "put the instant supercure behind the viro's door, and take it away from everyone who can knock down a window to chem". If the station is in such bad shape that there's no Viro, CMO, HoP (who can add access to viro to someone who knows how to do it) Cap (ditto), AI, or willing assistant finally allowed to hack a door legally, then the plague is one of the lowest issues facing the station at that point. To put it a different way, it's like having a "stock medicine fridge" button sitting next to chem, just in case there's no chemist on-hand to make meds. Why bother investing the time to learn the system, figure out the drugs, and make things if the next doc rolling up goes "Taking too long to make mannitol, this guy might die, pushing butan." Thing is, I've seen waaay more rounds where a chemist either doesn't show up, or doesn't work on drugs, than I have plague rounds where a viro is utterly needed. Nobody working on drugs will halt medbay if anything more than the occasional accident happens, yet it doesn't justify taking away the chemist's primary job. If there's no chemist, medbay improvises. If there's no viro....who cares, just give anyone showing symptoms radium, charcoal, and pat them on the ass on the way out the door. It really hit me how useless the viro was in a viral outbreak a day or so ago. Rando plague, of course radium cure happened as I was just finishing getting the virus isolated from the blood. I powered on, out of a sense of duty. Built the antibody, brought it out, had the chemist package it up in nice pills and stock it in the fridge, told medbay radio where the correct cure was.....then watched three other cases get dragged in, radium and charcoal shoved down their throat, then tossed out the door. Right about then, is when my viro time went from "watch for plagues, be on the ball, don't goof off" to "kill monkeys with amusing virals, craft killplagues I'll never use, give myself viral superpowers, and never open my lab door".

Part of that is a good viro will be spending 99% of their time in their lab, running viral mutations, setting up monkey tests, all that jazz. That's the second big part of my job, building virals that make you ooze adrenaline, omni, glow in the dark, repair your brain damage...all the good stuff. It requires babysitting. I try to keep some (creepy) banter on comms about how virals are my friends, how I found this AWESOME new symptom that makes people explode, just to remind folks I'm there and working. Even with that, if I'm not right in the lobby the second someone coughs, a doctor radium cures, grabs some blood, and makes my job useless. Combined with that, people PANIC at the first symptom. It's a rare, rare rando virus that'll go from initial symptom to death faster than I can build an antibody. That only happens when you have three blank symptoms then something like gibbingtons or toxic sublim, and if you see that, you've got a tator viro.

If viro is taking time to cure things, it's up to the rest of medbay to keep the infected patients alive while the viro works. They shouldn't be herping up a meta cure based on an iffy game mechanic. Imagine, for a moment, this hypothetical. Because of a game mechanic, you can totally eliminate the need for an entire job, aside from some small side-work noone cares about. Engineers taking too long to start engine, just wire your APC to a lightbulb and get free power. Medbay not instantly there to cure you, just eat a donk pocket and drink some liquor, the combo automatically cures you. People would be rightly pissed. That's the state viro is in right now. I get the level five viral outbreak alert, I don't even leave my lab, because I know someone is just going to radium cure it. I faff around, murdering monkeys while trying to build myself a positive viral.

So, I've been playing virology for a few days, and while I find trying to get the perfect "good" virus to be amazing fun, I've discovered a problem. That problem is radium. Random (and not so random) viral outbreaks are the time for a viro to shine and be a hero, but anymore it's devolved into whoever can break into/ask the chemist for a bottle of radium and some tox purging chems. Sure, it's great for the min/maxxing metaplayers, but it really sucks for a viro who's trying to cure a plague the right way. By the time you're halfway done getting the virus isolated, you see on the radio "cure in medbay lobby, get a shot of blood from X". So, here's my suggestion to fix this issue, and make viro a little more of a star for their events. Step one, crank the "cure" chance from radium WAY down. It should be a last resort desperation play, not the go-to first line fix. Step two, add a single chem reagent dispenser in viro, like the current virus food dispenser. Have it dispense what we use today as radium. Give it a new name. We have antibody stimulation drugs today (IVIG and interferon being pretty close in definition), so it'd make sense that in the future, there'd be something more effective. Give it a SMALL amount of what I'll call "antibody stimulator", in order to encourage fixing plagues the right way, over just injecting it in a sick person straight. Coding difficulty: easy to moderate. I'm not a coder myself, but it looks like the vast majority of this would just be some copypasta, a new dispenser in viro, and some tweaked values on radium. Scope: while pretty widespread overall towards metagamers, it's actually pretty limited. Restricts effective viral curing to CMO/viros, and offers some new avenues for antags to play with. Makes viro important during an outbreak, rather than the monkey murder room it is now. Balance: Again, it buffs Viro to a good place during outbreak events, and nerfs metagamers who'll end a plague before CentCom even sends the announcement. Overall net gain. As always, I welcome any critiques, complaints, or compliments on the idea. Thanks for reading!

So, the shift started out like normal. I'm quartermaster, My cargo techs and miners are all competent, things are running smooth as silk for a change. Another wonderful day in the realm of Cargonia. Heck, even Head of Personnel was keeping his nose in his office for a spell! Midshift pizza gets ordered, because heaven forbid cargo stops for ten seconds to grab a bite and a beer, and we start getting funny reports of a vampire on comms. Now, I thought vampires were mythical creatures, but hey, we've got the wizards floating around, crazy bastards. Who knows what freakishness genetics is mixing up, much less the plague bearer....I mean virology. Mythical or no, an old QM once told me, there's not much that can stand up to a pickaxe to the face, and boy does cargo got those. I bust 'em out, hand them to my techs, and say "aim for the eyes". This will be relevant later. I figure we won't see any action. Boy was I wrong. Coming back from dropping off medical supplies, I hear over supply channel that one of MY techs has been attacked. Now, that's just not kosher in any form, and I get angry. Did I mention, the vampire was talking crap on the common channel? Well, he was. It's on like donkey kong. I get back to cargo, and get to work on some improv weapons. It's not hard to turn a welder into a flamethrower, and NT gives me a nifty fire suit in case I have to do a rescue. On goes the firesuit, internals set, flamethrower ready....but for the fuel. Plasma is hard to drag out of the engineer's hands, and head sec isn't going to authorize a crazy QM to go on a vampire hunt. So, I do the QM thing, and "acquire" some plasma. In getting that set up, here comes Mr. Vampire again, this time going after ME. Remember those pickaxes I mentioned? Well, he got clocked upside his nasty face by one of them. Last I heard, shattered his skull and blinded him. Pickaxes are good things. Bout that time my plasma magically appears, so I hook up and go hunting. Evac shuttle gets called at the same time. I start taunting the vamp on comms again, trying to pull him into a fight to introduce him to my new friend. Of course, the meddling AI ordered me to evac. What's that, AI? Static, comms must be going! Suit sensors failed too! Ohh well. Back to the hunt, dodging Beepsky and sec borgs. I got down to the wire, and couldn't hold out any more. Rushed to join the evac and get off-station, WITH my cargo crew. So, Mr. Vampire, if you're reading this via Braille, I just want to let you know....rematch any time. Don't worry, Cargo doesn't discriminate against the blind OR brain damaged. Drop on by, we'll have a barbeque. As an addendum, I've also acquired the nickname "Van Helsing" from fellow staff. It's apparently a character from a old earth television show. Pretty robust vampire hunter. I think I'll keep the name. --Tao "VanHelsing" Fortis, Nanotrasen Certified Quartermaster, signing off.