Malfunctions. You’d think the Almayer, recently recovering from a Operation that fucked it up so severely that it has lost literally any up-to-date ammunition and Railgun capabilities to have some serious electrical and mechanical issues. Devs already dont give a shit about making shipside life harder but they do it on the one role that actual matters. CIC, Punchcards and Garble shit, yeah, no thanks.
Something other than a few lights being broken at roundstart. Maints Doors are randomly shocked, sometimes the power spikes and MTs have to fix it. Harmless stuff that still is inconveniencing enough to warrant it being fixed
MTs are given an opportunity to NOT be MP bait and to do something other than start a bar and pick fights with the MPs, anything, goddamn anything. ASO/CE also must inspect the repairs and make sure they are up to date. Additionally, this may be handed to any officer, should the ASO/CE not be present.
If there are no MTs present on the ship, then any personnel can fix the issues.
We are in a loop here. Stuff has to be harmless for not fucking whole OP when MTs aren’t around, but also impactfull enough for MTs to care to do it. Can’t do it, can’t eat the cake and have it too.
That is what I had an idea for minor boons for walking around in maintenance as MT/CE and “fixing stuff”. Might tie a minigame to that, or something. For example fixing “planetary illumination flare launcher” (or something like that) deep in maintenance by bringing some spare parts and shit that lets command launch single use flare that will light up whole colony for like 3 minutes (depending on how good CE/MTs fixed it, for example, or fixed time), or OB sized ground for much more. Fixing old “storage chute” that will spit out empty AP mags for marine guns. Maybe fixing and hacking old “armylathe” that will let you print more, or less balanced Non-USCM weapons (and mags and ammo for them) like MP27 submachine gun, or (supposedly balanced) sawn-off shotgun, but only one type each round if you feed it metal, wood and plastic. Some kind of powernet hacking and bypassing that might speed up OB cooldown, or passive req funding.
Hell, might even add critical failure to those steps, if they fail the minigame, or bring wrong parts, or something like that, stuff can backfire and that flare launcher gets sucked into ventilation and then flashes everyone standing around few tiles next to vents for a couple of seconds straight. Slowing down OB cooldown, or reducing passive req funds for a while (or just breaking OB/req requiring MTs to come to fix it if they risked that) etc.
This wouldn’t impact xenos much, wouldn’t hurt marines if no MTs are present to do it, would bring fun variations into each round and gave MTs something to do.
I feel like everything MT has mechanics-wise beyond the big ticket items (cleaning, fixing all broken lights, metal collecting, processing garbage) is a sisyphean task: none of them really have to have an end in sight if you want to keep pushing them. Want to metal hound the whole round? Collected all the barrels? Tables next. Those too? Start recycling empty mags from preps.
MTs that pick fights with MPs are simply MTs that pick fights with MPs and adding anything else won’t change that they want to pick fights with MPs and will prioritize that above other mundane task things.
Atmos was removed for performance reasons AFAIK, and since it wouldn’t really benefit the main gameplay loop I don’t think it’d get merged even if somebody did make a PR to add it back in.
adding small things to do to benefit the operation is nice, but then newer players or MTs who want to do something different and fun will just get shouted at by CIC or other people for not doing those things. I could in particular see inexperienced MTs getting brigged for fucking up so badly that it results in a critical failure (I’ve seen GPs get jailed for really bad cas before)
