Making Science more sciency

[tristan1333]

 

Currently, Research and Development is dreadfully un-sciency. Telescience and excavation are currently the only TRUE departments of proper !!!SCIENCE!!!. Maybe an improvement to R&D so people can't just write stuff down on notepad and max research 10 minutes in (Err, unless mining is being bad). I completely avoid science due to the fact

1. You have to constantly recalibrate the Teleporter, making it an enormous pain in the ass to use. Otherwise this section is fun for a long time.

2. Making bombs that can only be used in a blank room is boring. And even IF you are an antag, bombing the station with devastating bombs could be considered excessive use of violence. When have the miners ever asked for bombs? Maybe add monkey's or something. I dunno.

3. R&D is super boring. Find item, deconstruct. Repeat. Maybe needing to find a random method of truly deconstructing X item, which may or may not explode in your face if you use the wrong method?

4. Xenobiology, has almost no practical use. For the none-traitor it get's pretty old pretty quick.

5. The Server Room (Only accessible by the RD) seems... Less fancy than it should be. It's science! And it's a computer! There should be !!!FUN!!! for those willing to put in effort.

6. Excavations are fine.

 

Personally, I believe science should be the place where people run out screaming with their labcoat on fire and begging to be taken to medbay.

TLDR

Science only reaches it's full potential of fun if a scientist get's antag.

 

[Rumiluntti]

 

1. It's already scary tool if the user knows what he is doing.

2. Bombed ores do not drop materials

3. Maybe you could. like, USE the things you research, for FUN.

4. >No practical use. Infinite plasteel, metal, plasma, admin only superfoods, golem slaves and the list goes on.

5. It's a server computer in a closet. I have one in my closet. Whoope-doo

6. It's not just fine, it's hilarious when it works out.

 

 

Your personal science department preferences sound like something that is more common in goonstation or something.

 

[Fox McCloud]

 

1. Quite frankly, the teleporter should be harder to use, in my opinion. It literally takes a few seconds of work to be able to steal just about whatever you want, wherever you want.

2. This has always been a problem with toxins on all three major codebases, sadly--you work and fiddle with toxins until you figure out how to make max-size bombs, then you pretty much abandon it until you get antag/there's a malf AI/etc. For a time, on Goon, they could be used to contain the singulo, but that's about as "useful" as they ever were.

3. It is..but I don't really see a path to making it exciting either. The whole fundamental of R&D, when it was launched, was that there was no circuit imprinter, and many more items gave the "this item isn't reliable enough!" message. What you did with R&D was make unreliable items and use them until the broke, then shove it in the deconstructor and *sometimes* get a higher level. The problem with this was...it took forever to do, it wasn't intuitive, and as more and more items and such got added, it became a case of "how do you use this item until it breaks?" (power cells? Obvious. Circuit board? Not so much). Later, the circuit imprinter was added and no one really bothered to make R&D...well...exciting.

4. It does get old pretty quickly, yes, but some people seem to thoroughly enjoy it for the benefits they get. That said, it can definitely be useful tot he rest of science (food, plasteel, etc, as Rumiluntti stated).

5. The only purpose of this room is to store and manage R&D data and monitor PDA messages; don't really see why it should be exciting, to be honest.

6. It's ok; damn shame the analysis machines are borked though.

 

Your personal science department preferences sound like something that is more common in goonstation or something.

 

What's wrong with that? It's far closer to experimental science than Bay or TG is. The way chemicals interact opens up a huge array of custom smoke and foam combinations (not to mention "secret chem" discovery). Anomaly research is based more on data analysis than "try all these random different things and hope it activates". Telescience serves the purpose of allowing for exploration and discovery on other places rather than just "lol steal everything!" Lastly is mechanics, which is very similar to R&D, but allows you to string together a huge array of different components for near endless possibilities (want to set up a toll door that you have to pay to enter? You can do that. Want to set up a teleporter that requires you to correctly answer a quick or else it teleports a person into deep space? Also possible; etc).

 

There's nothing wrong with Goon's science+mechanics; it's a lot of legitimate fun and is far closer to actual science than what exists on Bay/TG.

 

[Fj45]

 

While I agree that science needs a good bit of work, they already have an extremely large amount of content and the work to overhaul it would better be used on other departments. It would be good to have bombs useful for mining though.

 

Hopefully Gooncode does some kind of code release in the future, combining both science systems into one could help fix some of the bad sides of both.

 

[Rumiluntti]

 

 

Your personal science department preferences sound like something that is more common in goonstation or something.

 

What's wrong with that? It's far closer to experimental science than Bay or TG is. The way chemicals interact opens up a huge array of custom smoke and foam combinations (not to mention "secret chem" discovery). Anomaly research is based more on data analysis than "try all these random different things and hope it activates". Telescience serves the purpose of allowing for exploration and discovery on other places rather than just "lol steal everything!" Lastly is mechanics, which is very similar to R&D, but allows you to string together a huge array of different components for near endless possibilities (want to set up a toll door that you have to pay to enter? You can do that. Want to set up a teleporter that requires you to correctly answer a quick or else it teleports a person into deep space? Also possible; etc).

 

There's nothing wrong with Goon's science+mechanics; it's a lot of legitimate fun and is far closer to actual science than what exists on Bay/TG.

 

 

Goon science is awesome and hilarious, our codebase can't handle it sadly. Nothing invokes trust in the science team than a scientist that is constantly farting and giving negative values of fuck about the fact that he is on fire.

 

[Fj45]

Tried to help someone with Goon telesci once. Ended with me bashing a burning scientist to death after trying to put him out. Damn lag.