Good Morning Colonel, as you can see, the Almayer’s fabrication facilities have just been brought online, we’re ready to manufacture anything we can get our claws on to help the marines down on the ground.
So, I have put together some ideas on how to revitalize shipside engineering, giving them more to do, more toys to play with, and a more direct impact on the ground. This update will be concentrated in three major parts: the new construction workshop, and all of its assorted machines, the UD-24 Heavy Lift Dropship, as a joint asset between the engineering and req department for use of transporting supplies to and from the ground, The colony material silo, a source of raw resources to be used in the previously mentioned CW, and how all of these fit together.
The Construction Workshop is a manufacturing facility located in the currently not constructed room in the south by southwest end of the hangar. This room will have a few machines that work together to disassemble and process raw resources, and spit out valuable gear and materials. This is not a fly by night experimental operation: everything this CW can output will either already exist, or be very feasibly viable with colonial infrastructure and colonial marine doctrine.
When you enter the CW, you will see a pair of machines connected to conveyor belt inputs, which will accept Packed Resource Crates (or PRCs for short) and input them into the processing machines, which take these resources and turn them into valuable end products. The products available for manufacture will depend on what PRCs you recover from the colony, and different items will require differing amounts of resources. After manufacturing is complete, the end products are shipped to an output conveyor belt, which will deposit the items into a cargo depot on the other side of the CW. This depot will be a sizable area comparable to req’s bay, which can be used to sort and deliver the end products. I will go into what can be made later, but just know that req will likely be involved with sorting and delivery of these items, as the maintenance techs will be far too busy actually acquiring and creating resources to ship them out. That is where this next item comes in.
The UD-24 “Wyoming” Heavy Lift dropship is a cargo transport in the same family as the UD-4 Cheyenne, it sports very limited seating, but a large cargo bay to transport supplies to and from the ground. Most colonies of course have only two main landing zones, so command will have to coordinate dropship and cargo ship rotations. The large cargo space will be primarily used for transporting PRCs from the ground, and of course can be used to ship excess supplies to FoB, although the UD-24 itself will have very limited offensive potential, and also few emplacement spots on board. As a heavy lifter, it is well suited to transporting vehicles of all kinds with ample space, and can transport infantry in emergencies (although with limited seating you should expect a few concussions along the way). The UD-24’s pad should be integrated inside the CW to keep the high foot traffic areas of the hangar manageable for cross ship movement. This leads us to the next focus of the update…
When colonies are formed, they are beacons of industry and infrastructure, cookie cutter buildings are made, reformatted, refurbished, and repaired in record times to keep up with the heavy demands of outer space economics, which demands a large surplus of construction materials on hand, as well as a steady supply of raw resources and prefab materials. Most of these are expected to be imported rather than created on site, and as a colony lives and dies by its air traffic, the storage for these materials is logically usually not far. The Colony Material Silo (or just Silo) is a multi story structure about the size of the coms outposts on LV-522, located close but not too close to each landing zone, meaning 2 on most maps. Anyone with a high enough engineering skill can operate the terminal, which will give you the option of retrieving a batch of PRCs, only operable of course by authorized colony personnel. Given that the colony director and chief engineer are likely dead or subverted by now, the fine maintenance technicians of the colonial marines will have to improvise to secure what they need. By hacking the terminal (or presenting a valid colony engineer/admin ID), you can retrieve the aforementioned batch of PRCs, and even select a preference for what you’d like to get (think of it like ASRS but you have to fight it somewhat). You can select from the following.
Construction Materials: These are used in the production of mats for different barricades, think high strength steel, durable fabrics, carbon nanotubes, etc
Raw Resources: These are differing mined deposits likely extracted either from the colony itself or one of its neighboring celestial bodies, which can be used to produce special ammo types, as well as chemicals to resupply the OT warehouse, or exotic metals to redeem for req budget, think raw gold, lead, copper, even radioactive materials.
Prefab Parts: Ever notice how all the colony buildings look the same? As much as the company doesn’t want to admit it, consistent, honest hard work and time tested designs will beat out some college architect’s dream design 99 times out of 100 when lives and profit are on the line out in the distant stars, and so in their wisdom, they have created design blueprints for pre fabricated parts for just about every machine, building, component, etc you could imagine. These can be used to acquire special Weyland Yutani equipment, as well as upgrades to the gear marines already carry.
Much of these prefab parts are under tight company supervision, and so you should expect to receive less of them, perhaps even requiring a high ranking company ID to even authorize retrieval of them in the first place.
When you have coerced the silo into retrieving a batch of PRCs, they will be delivered as locked (unopenable) crates which must be transported by powerloader, cargo tug, vtol, or any other method of lifting heavy objects to a transport ship (thus, the UD-24) and delivered to the CW on ship for processing. The Silo will go on a mandatory cooldown, and may require supervision and repair as time goes on similar to generators. The xenomorphs might not be aware of what exactly the silo is or why the hosts care about it, but they do know that you do want the PRCs, whatever they are, and so can and should melt them if they aren’t properly defended. This creates a zone of interest on the map similar to coms hubs and sensor towers, and will give marines another reason not to ungaball entirely on the front, but not be so critical as to force command to dedicate resources to defending it if they aren’t interested in engaging with the CW. Additionally, using the silo enough might attract the attention of some WY bean counter whose wondering why all of the materials for this colony supposedly under distress, and might send someone to investigate and put a stop to theft of company property. This would be a potential story hook similar to how the CMB or Corporate Goon erts are sent under certain circumstances. This team of corporate auditors can arrive to the ship and hassle the engineering team until the liaison bribes them, or if ignored can raise all kinds of hell with the company, and it is up to the marines to figure out what to do with them.
Now lastly, to get into specifics, what can you actually…y’know make here? What is this all leading up to?
Here are some ideas I had for items and objects producable at the construction workshop. Most of these should be either rare or obnoxious to acquire, but not so powerful as to drastically shift the balance in the marine team’s favor. Per each PRC, you will have the option of the following (WIP amounts, work with me here)
Construction materials: 1 stack of plasteel, 2 stacks of sandbags, 2 stacks of plastic(!!!) 2 nailgun ammo boxes, 9 MB-6 Folding Barricades (3 “stacks” if you will). I think powercreeping the never ending hunger for metal sheets is a bad idea, but a more renewable source of sandbags and plasteel wouldn’t go amiss
Raw Resources: Copper/Silver/Gold Sheets (I have no clue how much research/OTs need, or how much would be balanced to get per PRC), AP/Holo-target upgrade kit (will upgrade a basic loose ammo box to its AP/HT variant, requires it to be full), +P Shell load (upgrades a shotgun ammo box to its “heavy” shell variant), 2x Sentry Ammo (1 m30 drum, 1 sentry flamer tank, or maybe make them separate), 2x incendiary magazines of choice (heavily debate if this is a good idea or not, INC ammo is kinda nutty…) 1 OT chemtank of choice, Precious Exotic Metal, can be delivered to ASRS for req budget (this should be heavily controlled to avoid req budget bloat)
Prefabs: 1 set of upgraded tools (standard tools but with faster progress bars and a WY coat of paint), 2x WY-M44 Digg Master (an upgraded E tool that fills sandbags twice as fast, removes sandbag barricades instantly, shovels snow faster, etc…) 1x Advanced medical kit (2x nano splints, 3x advanted trauma/burn kits), 1 WY Comms Decryption tool (can be used on the encryption terminal to give perfect clarity for 15 minutes or however long).
In conclusion, I understand how big of a When you code it moment this was, and how monumental of a change it would end up being for flow of the round, balance, and mentor mental wellbeing, but I honestly can’t stand seeing shipside engineering being such a shadow of its former self. I think that this idea has some merit, and something like it would go a long way to giving MTs and CEs more to do than breaking the law or building fob.
