You know that thing about the USS Almayer being all battleworn and damaged + undersupplied at the time we spawn in on? Maybe it should actually be visualised by AA damage outside the ship hull, giving MT’s something to do.
Personally, I think if someone could code some sort of nightmare based system (except alot more common, essentially just a randomiser) for damages around the ship (AA fragments in hull, loose weaponry, jammed systems, etc), it would really promote MT’s to actually do their job.
If you want to go a step further, you could have minor consequences for not doing such things, like OB chambering time being lengthened, AA being prevented from being assigned to an area with damage, etc. This may have the unintended effect of flat out nerfing the marines if no MT’s or other engineering staff come on, so a playercap on this system may be required.
If its something minor, like lighting being fucked in random parts of the ship (not being simply replaced), or non-functioning, non-critical airlocks. Then sure I’d be down for it.
A few days ago I did a minor, minor, event where I placed some debris on the Anti-Air cannon exterior, and alerted the Almayer to this. This resulted in two of the Maintenance Techs/CE using the exterior airlock to perform an EVA, travel to the AA gun, and remove the debris before returning inside.
While a minor event, I feel this was a enjoyable distraction. Personally, I’d love if there was more offically EVA activities for shipside techs to perform.
My personal suggestion would be to add a system to give shipside Maintenance technicians something to do that has almost no, or a minor, impact on the Almayer should it not be at tended to.
For example, areas of the ship may randomly suffer some kind of maintenance issue that requires a Maintenance Technician to attend to it to resolve it, requiring some kind of repairing mini-game. If the issues are not fixed, the area the issue is in might undergo a minor failure, such as the lights flickering or changing colour or being weaker.
Furthermore, there could be tiny modifications that Maintenance Techs could maintain that give a tiny boost to shipside performance. For example, there could be a refuelling system in the hangar that if it is setup and maintained by someone, it speeds up Dropship refuelling times by a few seconds, or a cargo recovery system that might grant an extra few points of cargo budget or one extra cheap ammo crate every ten minutes.
Just to add a quick idea onto this topic if we’re automating EVA: it should be time restricted, to make it more entertaining and to prevent the locks staying open all round and causing a space-hijack nightmare.