internals scarcity

[Ghilker]

About The Pull Request

This PR removes internals from all roundstart boxes except engi and atmos since they are the job with the highest chance of dealing with hazardous atmospherics.
The goal is to make atmospheric hazards that aren't fires or pressure not get easily nullified by wearing internals, because getting oxigen is trivial as everyone spawn with a tank in their backpack.
Oxygen scarcity will make internals less forgettable, will make people use more the tanks in the closets (the station is filled with them) and make people go to atmos more to steal request a full tank

Why It's Good For The Game

Oxygen scarcity, more interesting hazards than fire/pressure

Changelog

🆑
del: remove internals from jobs other than engi/atmos
/:cl:

[kriskog]

For the record, I brought this up and think it is something we should try for a bit. Everyone starting with pocket sized tanks of oxygen means practically everything except vaccuum or fire can be ignored. Something as simple as a room lacking oxygen should have consequences beyond "Im gonna have to take my mask off if I wanna eat".

The tank dispensers around the station are still there and dispensing normal sized tanks. The emergency oxygen lockers are all still there too. You can print small tanks if you for some reason need them. This will not in any way cause oxygen to actually get scarce if you need it and go looking for it, but it will mean that you have to go looking for it. Tweaks to these things may come in future if we go ahead with this.

[XDTM]

I remember having a similar discussion about this a while ago, i would love to see what comes out of this, since i'd expect that any form of gas and smoke would become much more viable.

Gassing a crowd with N2O is a fun idea in theory, but is negated when everyone can don their free countermeasure before it can have any effect.

[Ryll-Ryll]

Something as simple as a room lacking oxygen should have consequences beyond "Im gonna have to take my mask off if I wanna eat".

There's still pressure and heat damage

Gassing a crowd with N2O is a fun idea in theory, but is negated when everyone can don their free countermeasure before it can have any effect.

Knocking out the entire station with no warning sounds like a fun idea for the person doing it but it sounds terrible for the other 95% of the people playing the game

[Mickyan]

Although I like it in theory, considering that people routinely loot emergency lockers at roundstart just for the extra protection of gas masks, in practice this seems like one of those things that only punishes anyone that isn't powergaming enough

[XDTM]

I'd invite to consider the situation as if it wasn't already status quo.

Imagine if all people had a thermal battery in their internals box that could stabilize their temperature to room temperature for 15 minutes, and we were arguing to remove that instead.

Knocking out the entire station with no warning sounds like a fun idea for the person doing it but it sounds terrible for the other 95% of the people playing the game

Plasmafiring the entire station with no warning sounds like a fun idea for the person doing it but it sounds terrible for the other 95% of the people playing the game

Although I like it in theory, considering that people routinely loot emergency lockers at roundstart just for the extra protection of gas masks, in practice this seems like one of those things that only punishes anyone that isn't powergaming enough

Although I like it in theory, considering that people routinely loot EVA at roundstart just for the extra protection of spacesuits, in practice this seems like one of those things that only punishes anyone that isn't powergaming enough

[necromanceranne]

A few problems with this:

N2O or Co2 are potentially infinite stuns (Co2 is specifically an invisible gas) if you poison the air supply with them. Usually this is difficult to reliably do since some people will already be using internals or they can eventually pull out internals if they're in a patch of air that has a lower amount of of the gas. And spreading it across the station reliably to easily knock people out is a lot of work and not super reliable. But if the air is thick enough with the gas, say, you just got blasted with it at point blank by someone opening a can in the room you're in,, you're probably not escaping this and you don't even have the benefit of quickly pulling out your internals.

We have a current bug where plasma is apparently poisoning people invisibly. It's genuinely pretty annoying we lack feedback about what the air is doing to you right now, but given most microscopic amounts of atmos contamination can cause you to suffer effects, I think fixing trace contamination causing negative effects to you should come first before a change like this happens. Tiny, tiny amounts of contaminants should just have no effect, but when less than a percentage amount of a gas can afflict you with hallucinations (BZ), and tiny amounts to do lung damage (nitryl although you need a decent amount of that to contaminate the station and that's not happening), toxins (co2 and plasma) or disease (miasma), this is just making this existing problem significantly worse. This is ESPECIALLY a problem with icemoon, since it's sharing the lavaland random atmosphere and consistently contaminating the station with trace amounts of various obnoxious gases.

Our atmos system is not removing these trace contaminates, so the only reasonable method of circumventing it is the virologist giving everyone self respiration, which is very common recently for icebox and extremely obnoxious for medical wanting to do CPR, or people just always have internals on. That's a problem more easily solved by either reversing the lavaland gas pr (which honestly wouldn't be terrible given it's mostly exploited for insane amounts of credits and doesn't really do anything interesting for mining), or fixing specifically icemoon to only have the standard gas mix for lavaland.

Chemistry can produce instant contaminates by throwing beakers of liquid gas. This includes Co2 and N2O, but also superheated oxygen. This is a chemistry problem, obviously, but given there is overlap, it's not nearly as difficult as you'd think to contaminate an areas air without warning. I've done some testing recently to see how good it was and frankly you can fill a room in a grenade with bad air without much warning, especially if you place your bombs inside containers and briefcases. At least atmospherics needs to tamper with air alarms and use the pipes to do their thing. And it's not just a small amount of gas either. The units to moles ratio is 1 for 1, so a beaker can splat 300 moles of Co2 or 1k Oxygen right next to you.

[Mickyan]

Don't be an ass, spacesuits have slowdowns and can't be stored in your backpack

[Ghilker]

@necromanceranne the easy fix would be to increase the amounts of the gas affecting you

[Ryll-Ryll]

I'd invite to consider the situation as if it wasn't already status quo.

Imagine if all people had a thermal battery in their internals box that could stabilize their temperature to room temperature for 15 minutes, and we were arguing to remove that instead.

Knocking out the entire station with no warning sounds like a fun idea for the person doing it but it sounds terrible for the other 95% of the people playing the game

Plasmafiring the entire station with no warning sounds like a fun idea for the person doing it but it sounds terrible for the other 95% of the people playing the game

Although I like it in theory, considering that people routinely loot emergency lockers at roundstart just for the extra protection of gas masks, in practice this seems like one of those things that only punishes anyone that isn't powergaming enough

Although I like it in theory, considering that people routinely loot EVA at roundstart just for the extra protection of spacesuits, in practice this seems like one of those things that only punishes anyone that isn't powergaming enough

Plasma is easily visible, is inert (aside from inhaling toxin damage) until it's specifically lit on fire, causes harm over time via burn/tox instead of all at once via infinite KO, and has lots of mechanics that are specifically designed for countering it (fire extinguishers, fire doors, fire suits, etc). If anything, all you've proven is how bad n2o is mechanically and why it shouldn't be more relevant to the game

[Iatots]

What if the gas masks worked?

[kriskog]

Withdrawing support of this for now, we can revisit it if atmos is ever in a spot where a flood of whatever doesnt take forever to clean up (both due to performance and glacial atmos changes). Maybe next time.

If others maintainers disagree, I guess reopen it.

[wesoda25]

Fucking hell God no

[Losenis]

There's also the issue of default air alarm mode only filtering out CO2, so to add on the glacial pace of a room being breathable again, for contamination it'll only happen if there's active effort from someone with atmos access compared to anyone just grabbing metal and space heaters to then later heal up at medbay.

People will also start looting for internals given that they're both an object that can fit in the mask slot, and an object that can fit in any pocket, compared to spacesuits that are cumbersome, can't fit in backpacks, take up both suit and helmet slots, and the big tank needs specific suits to fit in the suit storage slot. Only one guy needs to greytide the window off for everyone else to walk in later on.

Not to mention it's also extremely slow/difficult/tedious to fix an N2:O2 ratio imbalance for something like a fire, since the distro system only cares about pumping air to a set pressure. At worst the air of the room could be mostly N2 while the O2 level is not breathable.

There's also other instances of hazardous areas relating to air, like some chucklefuck leaving the cargo shuttle shutters open and sending it that way.

We're in a space station where the division between station and space is floor plating that can be breached by chem fucking around. The end result of this PR is either

People looting their internals, nothing changes
People just run around in short vacuum environment just long enough to not give a shit about internals and then jump in again for whatever they're doing, medbay just has to heal more points of damage/the person has to eat a bunch more hotpockets
People are left without internals for any atmos hazards, majority of which are antag-related like fires, gas floods, breaches by blob/dragon/etc, so these antags are effectively buffed further and encouraged to cause more destruction which leads to shuttle calls

I do not believe it's worth it to alter this much gameplay/balance with an atmos system that does not yet support this just for a chance at changing of feeling about the scarcity of internals.