Remove the Flamethrower

Or move it to traitor TC. With fastmos:

It’s Bonejuice banned by aeder1 - #6 by Aeder

literally Gunslinger201 banned by winterdarkraven

nothing MCrideinspace week ban - archanial - #34 by mcrideinspace

but Archstanton banned by naevi

ban CKEY-J515 Banned by Ravellon

bait Poink Banned By WhyisCaeciliusTaken - #14 by Blueturbo47

I’m probably being a little facetious (i just searched for flamethrower in ban appeals because I’m too lazy to dig through the raw ban log), but the fact is creating a flamethrower and doing literally nothing with it is self antag. It ‘used’ to be a good weapon for fighting xenos or blob, but with fastmos you can get banned just for using it even on a xeno or blob round.

I made them very early on without knowing this (but didn’t actually end up using them because I hadn’t discovered plasma tanks yet as I was still a shobon newbie). Having an item in the T menu that a newbie can make which is pretty much insta-ban/note is dumb.

The only time I’ve seen them NOT be self antag is on nations rounds, and those are so rare I don’t think it’s worth keeping them around just for that. Maybe lock a few up in the Chief Engineers office and make them an engineering-only fireaxe, but remove them from the T menu and from manual crafting.

Honestly, with fastmos, it becomes a cancerous weapon that can make huge parts of the ship uninhabitable because heat sticks forever in a tile. Who tf is going to run around with the atmos tank? The atmos guy? Fat chance. They’re too busy burning funny gasses.

The AI can (I spend half my AI rounds dealing with heat) but it’s incredibly slow. You’re basically either venting rooms (if near toxins/an airlock) or diluting the heat across multiple rooms and draughting.

me pulling up 6 bans that are literally months apart, 1 of them not even being about flamethrowers, and then making a suggestion to remove them because i have nothing better to do

“remove something because you can make it for no reason!!!” ok why not remove spears and the pneumatic cannon and literally any other craftable weapon

flamethrowers get their niche against certain antags (zombies, heretics maybe, xenos) and they should be craftable because of this.

and the heat thing is pretty easy to fix if you know anything about atmos. all in all i dont understand the point of this post, a newbie would still have to go source a plasma tank to actually shoot the thing, so they would have atleast enough understanding to know that randomly shooting a fucking flamethrower = bad

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I’m too lazy to go through the ban log for flamethrower bans that weren’t appealed. There’ve been quite a few of them, including at least one where the guy used it on a relevant round (blob I believe) but still got dunked. You’re also not going to make large portions of the station uninhabitable with a spear just by using it (a couple blasts from a flamethrower can easily do this).

It doesn’t have to be removed entirely, but it shouldn’t be something you can easily make. Otherwise I, as a shobon newbie, could be playing “what funny things can I make out of the T menu?” and accidentally get banned due to not knowing the 45 provisos on the item.

I would be perfectly fine with locking up like 3 of them in the CE’s office (and maybe throw one or two in the Armory) and just making them uncraftable. Then they could still be used for relevant rounds (pretty much exactly like the fireaxe) without being hilarious ban bait.

im sorry but your “ban bait” point is just very stupid, anything can be considered ban bait then. are grenades ban bait? you can make a basic grenade pretty easily, and they can make large portions of the station uninhabitable (harder to fix than an area just being hot BTW). plus, a newbie isnt going to know where and how to assemble a fully functional flamethrower, and then start randomly shooting it at people, if they get banned it’s literally their own fault, its like if you found a gun on the ground and shot someone in the head to “see what it does”, it should be pretty obvious what it does

if there was a compromise i would be fine with, it would be having to fill your own plasma tanks, so a “noob” cant just build one and “accidently” set the room on fire, which seems to be what you have such a huge issue with. with this, putting in the effort to get a flamethrower is only worthwhile on the relevant round, and you could pretty much fill the plasma tank with whatever you want (filling a flamethrower with tritium is pretty funny lol), making it get used more effectively. but idk, i feel like its an unneeded change anyway

Removal? surely not.
But maybe the flamethrower could be changed to behave like a flamethrower instead of being a portable plasmaflood

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Pretty much this. An explosive is kinda obvious. However if you don’t know atmos (and it’s entirely possible to play for months and never really learn atmos) you may not realize that firing the flamethrower lingers long after, “haha funny burning tiles.”

I’m a big, “in practice,” guy. In practice I’ve literally never seen the flamethrower used for anything except griefing.

It’s a great weapon for antags especially weaker ones like revs, brainwashed and heretics.

Can it actually be used by those antags? Making large portions of the station uninhabitable isn’t allowed unless you have shuttle hijack, a specific meme item (her grace, clown car), or are nukies. You could make it a TC purchasable item and give it a special rule set like the clown car (and still keep a few in the armory or somewhere in the engineering foyer for use by those departments). For conversion antags just convert a member of the department.

I just think having a very easily craftable item that has 45 extra rules tacked onto it you can run afoul of or end up in 45 post rules lawyering ban appeal is dumb. I’m pretty sure it’s literally the only item in the T menu in that position besides bombs (and most explosion damage is pretty easily fixable below multiple-maxcap level, hell chemistry blows up every other round).

I have a similar problem with the entire Virologist job (literally everything fun but benign like making people bald is self antag, everything not self antag but useful literally no one wants like healing coma, and it has it’s own giant page of extra rules) which is why I don’t play it.

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Large portions of damage would be like maxcapping, whereas using a flamethrower in a single room is not nearly the same. I’ve personally used it like this as an antag many times without issue and have seen many others do so too.

None of these bans refer to antags using one, just non-antags, where use has to be much more careful (treat it like you would be as a non-antag throwing chemical grenades).

There was just a giant ban appeal about a non-antag using it on a round that it would make sense on (blob or xenos I believe). Basically the admin standpoint was, “You’re not security, you shouldn’t be making a flamethrower to go fight the antag, especially with the collateral damage it caused.”

That’s fine, but then why does a non-antag have access to it at all? It’s an item that should have practical use to a non-antag, but doesn’t because of the rulings aorund it. Which to me means it’s just bait.

Yeah an antag can create and use it for their objective, but why not just make it a TC item then (or put it somewhere they have to steal it like fireaxe, and treat it like a unique item).

Because not every antag has TC, and it’s not nearly valuable enough to make it a unique item. It’s a craftable weapon. You can apply your same argument to explosive lances even and see how silly it is.

Explosive lances don’t fill the station with heat that someone has to spend 10+ minutes fixing.

The new atmos bot is pretty good when it comes to scrubbing and cooling rooms.
If people stopped smashing little robot going left and right because it goes left and right, then maybe roboticists would not be discouraged to build little bot!

Just RCD a hole in the floor if it’s that hot that floor scrubbers, portable scrubbers, space heaters and atmos bots are insufficient. To be fair though I do think floor scrubbers could use with a buff.

I build 1000 of those as roboticist at the first sign of atmos issues, but if you go from room to room setting things on fire you’ll very quickly overwhelm any ability to respond to the issue in a meaningful fashion.

You can’t really do that with any other item (except maybe some botany stuff). Even regular plasmafloods can be easily contained if you’re the AI and catch it early (slam those firelocks and switch air alarms to contaminated). Flamethrower is basically a rapid fire plasmaflood though.

I have yet to see it be used for anything other than griefing or clown pranks. That said, fixing the issues they cause as an atmos tech is relatively easy if you’re even a little bit patient (except in central primary hallway).

chemistry based flamethrower
Napalm sticks to clowns!

As flamethrower is right now - I agree, it should probably be removed/temporarily disabled. It doesn’t function as expected and causes such massive problems for everyone (including the user) that’s it’s almost unusable.

I’ve suggested and tried convincing a coder to alter the flamethrower in the past to rip code from the two dragon’s breath attacks.

Dragon’s breath pros:

  • Makes a straight line of flame and has no interactions with fastmos
  • Does not actually heat atmos, because again it doesn’t actually interact
  • Could consume a set number of moles of plasma in order to fire

Dragon’s breath cons:

  • Doesn’t require oxygen to burn, hurting realism
  • Removes the ability to custom-mix your flamethrower for slightly different effects

Some additional ideas that would take more work:

  • Secondary check to try consuming x moles of Tritium in addition to plasma, swapping the attack to a green line of flame with a set burst of radiation included with the firestacks
  • Swap the loading mechanism entirely to something that isn’t gas tank, and require it to be loaded with liquid fuel instead of atmos fuel (to set our flamethrowers apart from similar servers, so people don’t try gas mixes only to find that it consistently does the same thing)
    • Ethanol / Welding Fuel does normal fire breath
    • Napalm sets targets to max fire stacks
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