I could be misremembering, but I have seen them do it without guards.
Even then, with a single guard, I’m confident as a lurker in taking on 1 guard and a field doc, 1 guard and a synth is a much harder target. Even if medbay itself is caded, the walk back from medbay to fob is an opportunity you don’t get to capitalize on when dealing with synths.
You want to remove the medbay on a MILITARY SHIP, where it’s effectively a penal battalion, with unstable lunatics whom are given guns and pointed in a direction and told ‘go shoot whatevers that way’?
Outside of apparently nobody bringing up the fact that it makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of ‘why the fuck would ANY spaceship not have at least some medical facility on it’, it just encourages the never-ending UNGAball forwards that the game has already pretty much devolved into.
Like, sorry, John Marine. I know you’re 90% broken bones and hugged, but we haven’t taken groundmed yet, and the Field Doctor got taken by a burrower. Guess you’re fucked.
No. What you’re looking for is ‘make it not be a lesson in genuine CBT to get treated for being hugged/having a fuckton of broken bones/get your six different IB sources treated’. That, or you want a complete rework of ship systems and just the way deployment or the round flow in general is conducted. Either or are maybe topics worth discussing, but ‘remove medbay’ is so far removed from anything that can, will, or should happen that I genuinely think it borders on bizarre.
There’s a lot of ways to fix this without just blindly deleting 25% of the ship from the game.
Make medevac easier or faster. Make deployment not a crapshoot if a DP or DCC woke up and is actually paying attention. Make groundside surgery a viable method instead of just the occasional synth or (very rarely) FD making their way to meddome and not dying instantly to a lurker.
Removing Medbay without something else makes a LOT more problems before it fixes anything.
Well said. I completely agree.
The rest of the Medical roles will obviously be there, those aren’t being removed, they just head planetside with everyone else.
There’s now more surgeons at the FOB / Colony Hospital to fix you than just FD + you can get larva removed at LZ - I’m not sure what caused you to make this scenario up in your head that you’ll just die to IB on the LZ.
nah i was thinking about mid-round event like “UPP bomber squadron hit the Almayer” rather than being boarded
then medbay has to revive marines who died from exploding pipes while CIC tracks the bombers and tells someone to set AA to stop the attack
they might even explode in medbay, so thats one way of removing medbay without permanently phasing out medbay
At present there is a Freeze on changes to the Almayer. This idea seems DOA unless you have approval for a change or intended to add it to a new ship.
This is ideaguys for a reason 
i hade a whole post typed up but i think i can summarize it with this
moving all of medbay (and most of the other roles) planetside instead of using the almayer is a cool idea and a grand dream that will never happen, but would make a lot of things (hijack….) a lot easier to manage in the long term
if you move medbay, then you immediately either have to make a slop ‘topside doctor’ role or else the topside roles need to move to the surface alongside. consider OT. consider research. consider MPs. consider the occasional maint tech who gets too antsy and somehow explodes. people do, will, get hurt topside.
this conversation, again, and you even agree with this, should not be ‘remove medbay’, because it is never going to happen
this conversation is, and should be, ‘remove the almayer’. that seems like the actual root of your issue.
I agree with you. Well said.
If Doctors on the Almayer could somehow “consult” or “boost” medics groundside while they have downtime that could make it useful. I dunno, buff them somehow. Just spitballing.
EDIT Update: My brother is a surgeon and yeah, maybe modelling something on da Vinci Surgical System - Wikipedia where some surgeries have actually been done remotely via interfaces. If groundside medical has these systems maybe that would permit shipside Doctors to do remote surgeries?