As a doctor/CMO of several hundred hours I HAVE to start this thread up, seeing as nobody else has, and it has been “test merged” for a worryingly long period of time - the period of time something usually is “test merged” before it’s quietly added in for good, even if everybody you ask about it has nothing but bad things to say.
It just needs to go on public record: the lower medbay rework is not good. It is bad. There are some elements of it that could be incorporated into a remaster, maybe, a very subtle improvement, but as it stands medbay is frankly a nightmare.
Let me just lay out some of my own primary issues with this redesign.
LE POPULARITY CONTEST
First off, if people are going to be making sweeping changes to important aspects of the logistics chain, can we please… PLEASE… know who these people ARE? WHO IS LC4492? Who does he PLAY? How many HOURS in medbay does he have? Does he play REGULARLY? How many hours has he put into medbay in the last TWO WEEKS? MONTH? THE LAST YEAR?
These people should be making a case for themselves on the forum, they should be publicly standing up and shining the spotlight on themselves and saying, “Hey, I don’t like how we do this, I think it could be better this way.” I mean seriously, where is the credibility? Where is the argumentation? Can anybody just upload wild redesigns to whole sections of the ship and have it patched through for weeks? No warning? No thread discussing it? Ohhh, right okay, okay - you talked about it with three guys at 2 AM PST on a Discord voice chat. Sweet. It’s all hammered out then. We’ll all just work around your vision. You get what I mean? Nobody wants to have to make a Github or Discord account and hunt through labyrinthine, terribly designed quasi-social media pages, fruitlessly digging through random “channels” months back, to quote you and make their cases against you. These massive changes should have a mandatory POLL and THREAD on the FORUM at the very least. Making a forum account alone is an annoyance for many people, I’m sure - it always is for me.
BUDGET CUT THIRD WORLD-TIER CHEMLINE
Can anyone even debate me on this one? I DEFY you to tell me the chemline is better in the “redesign” than it was originally. Seriously.
What does every corpsman with more than an hour of gametime do before first drop? Hit the chemline. Why? They need advanced meds. Why do they need the advanced meds? Because it keeps the marines alive. What does that do? Keep the game running. What does that mean? Chemline is pretty much the most important section of medbay.
So please, tell me why chemline is now:
- Half the size it was before.
- Missing its personal tables.
- Missing its back wall of tables.
There are other possible issues to discuss with chemline, which have similar connotations to the overall issues with the design philosophy present throughout medbay, like the needless 90 degree rotation of all the workstations (dicking with muscle memory), the line the corpsman will form being more in the way of general medbay traffic, the line being smaller, there being no lobby table space for corpsman to dump obsolete pills off, etc…
But seriously, those three are the WORST of the worst.
THE SIZE. WHY? @LC4492? How much chemline work do you put in? Because I put in a LOT.
I run into chemline. I start working. I’m unloading pill boxes. I’m making cryomix, I’m making an industrial amount of pills. Another doctor comes in. He starts making pills. A researcher, or ANOTHER doctor may come in, they make UNGA, they make early round research cocktails occasionally - there are 2-3 people, sometimes FOUR, trying to maneuver around the chem-lab. That doesn’t work now. It is obviously a mess and there isn’t enough space. And while we’re talking about space…
THE TABLES. Why - oh WHY - would you deign to remove the TABLES… SERIOUSLY… I really have to ask this again, has this guy ever played doctor? Chemline? I don’t personally do it but 90% of the doctors I play with seem to like to line a whole table with all the base medicinal liquids for quick use in advanced med creation - but I will still use the table on my side myself as needed, and I usually end up with 3-4 bottles scattered around on it. It’s handy. It’s a table. We’re mixing up medicine in there - we need table space. We use the back table to hold spare beakers and medicines and liquids - why remove that too? Now there’s just one, single, sad little table in the middle for TWO people to work at. It is not enough.
See how clean that looks? See how simple it is? See how well it works? It’s perfect - it WAS perfect. Just the way it was. Table space, room to move, room to work, room for spare tanks and containers. An important location on the ship - equally as important as CIC and the Requisitions Bay - given the room it DESERVES. Why would you make it smaller? OH YEAH-
MASSIVE, INORDINATE BLOAT.
We now have a MEDICAL LOCKER ROOM. We now have a PERSONAL CRYOSLEEP ROOM that the medical staff spawns in, and is twice the size or more of the original cryosleep storage for SSD’s that came into medbay. The DEBILITATED storage and FIELD EQUIPMENT storage now make for symmetrical wings against these two rooms. So… no more back doors through medbay - just four new dead ends, who doesn’t love those?
EACH of the Operating Theatres now have their own personal sleeper, body scanner, LAPTOP, and PHONE… OR 1 and 3 now have EAST afaced surgical tray lockers - again - needlessly changing the entire orientation that doctors have to run into the room with patients and stand and operate. ZERO space for additions or modifications. ZERO table space left after all the needless additions like the PHONE and LAPTOP. WHY. All the Weymeds, blood dispensers, the chem dispenser, the fabricator - all pushed further away from the center, similarly to the marine-meds in the lobby, which there is one less of, for some reason.
– And yet, there is now a MASSIVE “medical storage” - replete with refill tanks, syringe kits, everything else you’d need… even though it was barely ever used before.
And the worst part – the HALLWAYS AND ANTECHAMBERS. I could have SWORN that I read time and time again that Almayer redesigns were under special scrutiny - that, paramount among their reimagined elements, was the effort to SAVE SPACE. You know, REMOVE dead space that didn’t serve a purpose. So why did we trade a stupid simple, easy, utilitarian design for one that now has like - twice the amount of doors to run through? Twice the amount of dead ends? Why are there empty rooms on the port and starboard sides? Why do I have to open a set of doors to get to the ladders? Why are there quasi-hallway spaces separating the OR’s from the rest of the medbay? It’s just… SUCH an unnecessary amount of wasted space.
And what do even we get for it? Let’s see:
- A smaller lobby.
- A more awkward crew-monitor placement.
- Less marine-med vendors.
- A smaller, more crowded chemline.
- An objectively worse chemlab.
- Objectively less modability to the entirety of medbay.
- More running back and forth.
- More dead ends.
- More confusion and blocked off doors for your average marine.
- More niche items locked behind doors that necessitate doctors wasting time being stockboys for people who want them.
- To reiterate - less centralization - everything is more spread out and where it’s found is somehow also more crowded. It’s really just the worst of both worlds.
But I don’t want to just completely dump on LC4492’s work. Some of it is a nice change, namely:
- The body-scanner spawning IN medbay and not on the next Z-layer up, on the other side of the ship, hidden in maints. This should have been fixed years ago.
- The surplus of syringe-cases, portable surgery beds, and refill tanks. Just nice to have spares, as when these are in demand they go fast and don’t EVER get resupplied.
- A better supplied field surgery storage.
- Southward aligned chemline - I know I said before that this dicks with muscle memory, and it’s true, but I think from a design standpoint there is a benefit to the chemline having its patrons come in from the bottom of the screen so their overhead text isn’t obscured by all the menus you’ll have open from the dispenser, wey-med, and chem-master. Does this cause crowding in the lobby? Yes, but if the CHEMLAB WERE ITS ORIGINAL SIZE AND THE LINE WAS LONGER, and the LOBBY WAS LARGER AGAIN, this could be fixed… which brings us to our synthesis…
HOW TO SOOTHE THIS UNENDING BUTTHURT.
So, what can be done then to fix the “fix”? Honestly, you’d be better off canning the whole thing. Just give us the original medbay and go back to the drawing board.
But if it has to stay, and it probably will, there are some obvious improvements to be made:
- RESTORE THE CHEMLAB. Jesus Christ. Please. Just leave it be like a historic site. Smarter people than you designed it just the way it needed to be and it works exactly as needed. I don’t visit the cathedral of Notre Dame or Lincoln or Cologne and start taking a tape measure to the stained glass windows. Just leave it alone.
- REMOVE THE HALLWAYS AND ANTECHAMBERS. Just cut them entirely. Push the Reception back, give the lobby more space, restore the third marine-med. Restore the lobby tables and rechargers. Leave the LADDERS in an easy to access area that doesn’t require opening a door.
- UN-MUNT THE BACKEND. This is the part where I really just start to say scrap it, because cutting out the two back doors and putting them on the side, adding those hallways, stacking all those dead-end rooms right next to each other, it’s just bad design. I couldn’t even begin to suggest an improvement, I just know it isn’t working.
- DON’T CROWD THE OR’S. The phone and the laptop have to go. The sleeper and body scanner being in the room itself… eh, I don’t know. It’s all just too much. Losing the consistency in the orientation of the surgical tray just so there can be windows nobody seems to open isn’t worth it. It has completely taken all the modability out of the OR’s, having all this clutter in it. The sleepers and body scanners worked OUTSIDE the OR when there was ample space for it before.
All in all, it’s just an awkward design. I can’t really “fix” it completely by just offering these few small changes because it has systemic issues, fundamental issues that come from a lack of understanding to the workflow and the hotspots of medbay. It seems to want to maintain a top-down symmetry which results in a forced allocation of space that only neglects those places that need extra space and bloats places that don’t need it; it has seemingly doubled the amount of EMPTY space you have to run through to get to workstations, and doubled the amount of doors you have to open again and again and again throughout the round; but conversely it has shrunk, and crowded, places like the chemlab, lobby, and the OR’s, which are literally the only places people congregate and work - making it all that little bit more annoying and frustrating. I could go on and on and on - how we don’t need a medical locker room, how removing the medkits from the lobby table and medbay interior shelves is a pain in the ass, how I genuinely think this was rushed and unnecessary, but either it’s getting locked in or it’s not. I just want to make my own public statement that it isn’t good and many people do NOT like it.
The OR needs SPACE. We need room to stow 3 bags of hugged marines in the rush hour.
The medbay interior needs things CENTRALIZED and EASY TO REACH. See how the lobby and the interior that leads to the OR’s are directly connected?
Look how open and easy to modify that OR is. Look how everything you need is right there. So simple. So well designed.
“This place is an abattoir.”
