Nanites and You

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1

Nanites and You

Background

As it stands, Nanites are absurd. With a few minutes of your time along with some work in R&D, you can become borderline immortal. And while I don’t think borderline immortality is effecting the game negatively in of itself, what makes it negative to the game is the fact that ANYONE can get it with minimal effort. The Public Nanite Machines most prominently. It is very common for people to get nanites for themselves and now they’re a Demi-God! All with next to zero consequences other than the VERY, VERY rare chain detonation.

Solution

I am suggesting changing how nanites are distributed and stored fundamentally. For one, which will upset most nanite enthusiasts, the public nanite machine will be removed. Along with it, the server as we know it will also disappear. No longer will anyone be able to upload chain detonation in order to get an easy W (win), because with this system every nanite user would only have the nanites implanted into them at the time of the implantation. This also leads to more interactions as now you have to revisit the nanite lab in order to update your nanites.

Nanite Implanter

Has to be loaded with a nanite chamber implant which is implanted into your chest automatically.

Nanite Chamber Implant

This is where all nanites are stored. It can be upgraded with a Research Disk occationally located on Lavaland.

Lavaland Nanite Lab

Similar to the veterinarian clinic, a nanite lab of an unknown organization has been teleported through Bluespace fuckery to Lavaland.

Loot

It contains various nanite equipment including a few special one of a kind nanite disks. Namely Transparent skin, Fire skin and Iron skin. All three of which are exclusive to one another. Along with this it also contains a research disk which unlocks the ability to print a MK2 Nanite Chamber Implant. If you overwrite the disks, they are lost forever.

Nanite Programs

Additions

  • Passive amphetamine (passive speed boost)
Skin variants

These three are exlusive to one another and having more than one of these programs on a user will cause significant cell damage to its user.

  • Transparent skin will cause the user to be mostly transparent, similar to the ninja, while it is active. I expect this to mostly be used by detectives sneaking up on people or antagonists doing the same.
  • Fire skin will give the user fire and lava immunity for as long as it is active. I expect this to be the default for most station inhabitants.
  • Iron skin will give the user additional natural armour along with minor vacuum protection and ash storm protection. I expect this to be the ideal miner nanite program.

Changes

Sleep condition

Because of their extreme capabilities to make one immortal during combat, I think it is for the better to require a condition of the nanite user being asleep in order to allow the program to work. Affected programs are: Bio-Reconstruction, Selective Blood Purification, Blood Regeneration, Neural Reimaging, and Defibrillation.

Automatic conditions

Automatic conditions are no longer applied, if you wish temperature control should be active, then you must set the rules for when to activate it. Affected programs are:

Removal

  • Mental Barrier (Mindshield)

Future

Nerfing it harder

If you wish to nerf Nanites even harder then a possible interesting nerf would be to have the nanite chamber implant replace one of your four vital torso organs. Causing you to now become dependent on the nanites to survive and have to ensure its continued functionality. Say you replace your lungs, then you need the nanites to be programmed to fulfill the function of the lungs. Perhaps even the heart could be replaced!

New Virology

I hope that the Nanite Lab will be able to stand on its own two feet and function as a proper subdepartment with dedicated personnel and not something done and forgotten. Seeing as this department is most commonly used to heal its users, I think it is more appropiate puttiing it in Medbay where there is already a lot of patient and doctor interactions. Some times I see Doctors wondering why a patient keeps dying, not being aware that they have corrupted nanites. Perhaps this may be what puts the final, final, final nail in the coffin for Virology and replaces the unused space.

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Maybe add a traitor objective for midround traitors to mess with the nanites.
With increased chance to get this objective based on the x% of the crew with nanites.

Give them a pre-programmed weaponized/glitch/suppression program disk that they need to upload to the most-used cloud.

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With this, clouds would not exist.

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I like that this is being discussed, but it seems like a lot of work to dance around a few problem programs. The mind shield, sleep, and defib program should be gone entirely or put behind so many barriers they might as well be gone. Healing should be reduced drastically or consumption increased dramatically. It should be something like food where it can heal you a little bit but by no means is it a replacement for actual treatment.

That way nanites still retain utility with the speed, armor, ID, all that jazz but it’s not a pop in a bubble for 5 seconds and never have to go to medbay ever again.

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I think the unconcious condtion I’ve suggested is a fair balance to make it powerful and assisting Medbay in fixing bodies, but not a replacement. And if you get injured in Engineering from a work accident like a laser, you can then take a nap and feel fine again shortly there after. It doesn’t remove anything, but it makes it more complex to use.

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I don’t really agree with the extreme method being taken here. Public chamber removal just means that the nanites won’t get used at all. There is a way better method of wrangling this particular problem, hiding right under your nose. something people never even think about really. Nanite storage.

Remove protocols. Cut current nanite storage in half. Slightly increase the cost of medical nanite programs.
Let people run out of nanites. Ideally, the nanites save you one time. Only one time. And then they are burnt out. Nanites right now can save you over and over because you can have 750 nanites stored, and have 2 production protocols pumping out nanites faster than you can actually use them.

I agree with the Mindshield nanite thing though. Those should have never been added. Theres no reason for them.

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I think they’ll still be used if the nanite lab is more closely related to Medbay rather than Science.

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You’ve been talking about the idea of moving Sci-stuff (See: Robotic implants PR and all that discussion) to Medbay and i personally don’t agree with that, SS13 is a Research Station and all ‘‘sci-fi’’ stuff should remain in the Science Department whose job is to Research rather than Medbay, otherwise you’re slowly taking away stuff from the Sci department to give it to a department that already has enough basic content.

I agree with MalevolantBacon, the public chamber removal will make the Nanite progression slower and would end up in people doing ‘‘NaniteFort’’ gaming where they create their own special nanites for themselves

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I think Science has enough content for how many players plays it. Hell, if the player is experienced enough, they can solo Science. I often do solo R&D, Robotics, Nanites with no problem. Then after that there is Exploration, Xenobio, Xenoarch and Toxins which I typically don’t bother with unless I am squeezing out some extra points. However, it is quite often that Medbay players scream that they do not have much in terms of content early game. At the same time, they complain how they feel teplaced by Nanites.

Medbay is big because it has a significant amount of players.

I hope that the Nanites won’t be OP enough to justify the effort. If you want to do nanites, you’ll want to do it for your job and for the good of the station.

Despite being a research station, Science only occupy as much space as Medbay, Cargo and Engineering, curious. I think every department is multi-purpose. Why have a big Cargo? SS13 might work as a bit of a pit stop for shuttles to unload and reload cargo. Why have a massive Security department? To assist Lavaland and Space Exploration in addition to securing science research. Sciences’ job is to research, but that’s become quite the background task. It’s done automatically without thinking and how research is made isn’t changed by anyone other than incompetent coworkers researching the wrong things.

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If I had to suggest Nerfs to Nanites, two obvious ones come to mind.

1st - ANY electrical shock/damage should cause immediate nanite damage/corruption.
you’re becoming an unintended circuit for god knows how many volts that you’re not suposed to be, subjecting the nano-scale machines in your blood stream to that should cause similar damage, Electricity would likely conduct perfectly through nano-machines.

2nd - Bleeding should hamper various nanite functions and also hemorrhage nanite count.
Nanites may be machines in symbiosis with a body, but that means they are similarly dependant on the body’s natural pathways for delivering functional components.
sure some of these functions would be dependant on stationary, clustered nanite deposits around related organs, but all functions consume nanites so disrupting the body’s logistical system should fuck up your nanites too.

Expansion:
Taking a longer read of the OG post, to start I concur that a merger of Virology and Nanites into a Nanoscopic Biology sub-department, giving staff managed by Medical authority a dotted line (and coms) to Sci, similarly to how one could argue Robotics could have a dotted line to engineering.

I will disagree with the sleep condition for selective blood purification however, but I will link this this to an agreement with a later aspect, having nanites in your bloodstream calibrated to isolate toxins shouldn’t require sleep, it’s just one thing floating in your bloodstream noticing another floating thing in said stream that so happens to be able to isolate it. Reducing the effectiveness of other programs while you’ve got every nanite in your body scouring your literal entire cardio-vascular system for the bathsalts you took.

With regards to replacing organs, I think Nanites should be explicitly tied to either the Heart or the LIVER seeing as both of these are key components of the cardio-vascular system and distribution of blood through the body. Nanites have to rely on both to circulate the body, just relegate the system to one of the organs dependant on patient’s choice or doctor’s requirements. I could expand on this but I think I’ve said enough for now.

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Would you be able to elaborate further on this?

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Robotics: we handle industrial maintainance and construction equipment regularly, while building and maintaining autonomous machines that wander the station keeping it in good shape.

Engineering: we also handle industrial maintainance and construction equipment regularly while working along side aforementioned autonomous machines and also maintaining them.

Robotics: isn’t the A.I. one of the thing’s we’re suposed to help with?

Engineering: yes, convinently on many stations The A.i. is only accessable through our department.

Captain: what if I just gave Robo’s some engie coms so that the CE and engies can yell at robos when they think you two can get along in projects?

Centcom: what if we made that the default?

(and that is more or less what ran through my head)

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Basically… Turn nanites into genetics 2?

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