So. The title says it all. Currently, medbay has absolutely zero wounded/hugged management needed and has zero priority across the board, because you will get your surgery the moment you enter medbay. This sucks, well, because doctors don’t even need to think who needs to get surgery first. I have seen where doctor did surgery for a marine with broken bone instead of hugged. Many. Many times.
now, we have two solutions :
We can cut down on doc slots, or OR rooms
Cutting down on doctors can impact balance too hard, plus doctors aren’t the only ones who can do surgery.
So lets say we cut down OR numbers to two?
So, the potential for this if we do that? Here we go:
This will Make a Queue;
Actually make holo cards useful(outside of a prankster putting black card on everyone);
Force medbay to sort through wounded, You obviously don’t want to be putting a hugged at the end of a 5 marine queue for surgery where all of them have broken bones;
Force docs to do something new, for example - 10 marines in queue? Put up all the surgical beds you have and make research do surgery too in their containment cell.
Will need some amount of medbay remapping to fill medbay with something. Maybe more beds.
Want more tables? Ask req to buy you a circuit board for moderate amount of money, ask MT to assemble it.
I think it’s a fairly fun idea besides the whole research needing to do surgery thing. But I don’t think it’s a very good one with the nature of most doctors. Doctor in my opinion is a very friendly new player job and this change would make that very different. If you want to manage queues you should go groundside. I may be wrong since I’m not a medical god ( Yet >:) ) but in my hours of doctor I mostly just want to chill and be brainless, if not I’ll just go groundside.
I don’t like the idea of bottle necking tables for surgery because that doesn’t engage the other doctors, unless they do surgery without a table.
The way I see it, if we want to make ship side medbay more relevant here is how I would do it. You’d need to streamline the medivac rapel system.
To make medivac easier I would try to make it so pilots do not need to winch the marines up or even select the stretcher. This way CAS pilots could still do CAS and get medivacs with little issue.
To make rapeling easier I would add an IR beacon item. It takes a few seconds to set up, can be broken with a few slashes, and repaired with a welder (maybe make it only work if in a powered zone). The IR beacon would function as a lit CAS flare, but would be available as a target for the rapel (no fire missions). I’d also have more rapel belts start near the Normandy so they don’t have to go beg req for them after they’ve spent so long moving stuff with the power loader.
A ship made for over 120 personnel by themselves in space has 2 OR beds. Okay. Plus they’re just going to do surgery with surgery beds and save the ORs for larva which is pretty silly to think about conceptually.
I can see why you would suggest this (to make medbay more interesting by prioritizing patients) - but I really think that the negatives outweigh the positives.
Having played doctor a fair bit, sometimes all 4 ORs are full, and it has (in my experience) never led to anyone trying to prioritize patients, it only led to frustration and sometimes bickering. Surgery is not the fastest process, especially with new doctors/nurses, and patients with extensive injuries. The best case scenario is that the new medical staff are able to learn and not have people stressed out because they’re taking 50% of the OR capacity doing the slow newbie-learning-surgery process. On top of that, there is already an issue with surgery tools going missing from ORs (also, good luck asking req for replacement tools). And I don’t think it should ever be a goal to force researchers to become surgeons instead of researchers. I feel that overall this will lead to a worse experience, especially during peak population times.
adding onto that point, this will further reduce marines’ willingness to ever go shipside and get themselves tended. why should they go shipside, wait 15 minutes in line because there’s a full team of doctors but there are infected marines that’ll force them to afk even more than usual.