Conversation
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The only thing I can imagine plasma with science is the anomaly generator. But I feel like fully recreating the core mechanic of science is a bit much? |
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I think it is important to note that NT is a conglomerate. They are not a company, they are THE company. They have a hand in every market, in every scientific field, and every corner of the galaxy. What may seem like other companies can still be owned or mostly owned by NT. In the grand scheme of things, the station we play on is just another small blip on the radar. I think this idea has merit, though. Maybe not so much on the NT side, but the station side. Having a station designed purpose beyond a research outpost and being owned by subsidiaries would be the peak. Then the stations would be different not only in layout but also in function. |
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I think the research station aspect is fundamentally good to the conception of the station. Not as them learning how to make jaws of life and the like, but keeping those as a "licensing reward" for gathering data in fucked up dangerous experiments for further analysis. It does make sense that NT would want to keep extremely hazardous research isolated, in a station that they could quarantine or even nuke if needed. It explains why there's a nuke on station. It gives a reason for there being such a well stocked medical system. Regarding other aspects, why like cargo exists, all that needs to be said is that NT is super cheap and wants to make profits on things they "really" shouldn't need to if they were being truly efficient in. That's why the support is so sparse. It's meant to be a disposable, relatively self sustaining outpost for them to do all the weird science they want. All the repeated fucking with reality also gives a reason for why so many magical antags focus on the station itself. Science keeps messing with the fabric of reality, and it lets other things bleed through. |
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I think Moxie and Ferynn have said what I would have, calling Nanotrasen an "defense contractor" is like, say, calling Comcast a "cable provider". It's not strictly inaccurate, but it undermines the bigger picture in that Nanotrasen likely has millions of stations and trillions of employees (if not greater). Nanotrasen is, at this point, some kind of quasi-governmental organization, likely with entire solar systems and vast parsecs of open space under their direct jurisdiction. One tiny fuckass mass-produced station in the middle of nowhere isn't gonna register anything more than a single readout going dead on some regional manager's monitoring console. I hope to eventually give a proper reframing of bluespace research and why things are the way they are in-setting whenever I get around to writing my science doc. |
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I do think tying sec more to a Nanotrasen military theme would be good. It’s the sovereign entity out there, and it would be better to drill home that space law is Nanotrasen’s law they’re applying |
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It is on brand for them to own a private military, probably even a few. We already have ERT and Deathsquad, and I liked the closed doc that expanded on them. In addition to ferynns comment, it would also make the station feel less civilian and more outpost-like. |
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the crew are the kerbals and nanotrasen owns the kerbal space program |
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i would like to clarify that this isn't meant to be an explanation of the current way nt works or anything. i think the prior comments are fair, but i also feel like they lean a little bit much into trying to keep the setting the same as before. which is what im trying to change, not keep. i picked using lockheed martin as an example because it's an easy way to explain to someone what the setting is supposed to be like, even if they dont particularly know how these giant corpos work and fuck over the world and their workers. im willing to part on the military industrial complex aspect of it, but my point is that i think letting the setting be vague kind of sets our players up for failure. nt fucking over everything should take conscious effort to ignore, and the current setting and lore is often so vague that like. none of it matters unless you seek it out.
this i will fight on though. we should rebrand parts of the station to be outsourced and ten levels down contracting fraud. i want to see sysco branding on food and amazon logos on mail--all "outsourced" to large corpos then passed down through twenty layers of contracts. i dont think this would actually change gameplay because all of this shit would be fulfilled by local workers, just for pennies in comparison to the original contracts. it would maybe be interesting to incorporate ways for players to be "contracted" by non-nt companies while still working on the station, though. maybe ill build on that more i dunno |
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I've always believed that ss13 and 14 are truly plasma research facilities, but not in the way they tell the crew. Sure the anomaly and artifact data are useful, but what NT is actually researching is the long term effects of plasma exposure. Clearly the people working in the stations are all on some level insane, this is due to the constant shifts on the station where micromoles of plasma are always present. Scrubbers cant be perfect (or are purposefully not). Which slowly leads humanoids to turn insane, and who knows what else. I also believe around half of the antagonists on the station are fabricated by NT themselves to stir the pot and to encourage situations otherwise hard to test unnaturally. to what extent the fabrications go can be left up to the player. Things like cults and heretics are definitely real, and there are a lot of them on the stations, but things like basic traitors? They COULD be real, but most of the time they are probably planted by NT pretending to be the Syndicate directing the unknowing traitor. This can also explain why they selectively erase so many memories. Everyone has been a traitor at least once, they have to wipe their memories of doing that. This explains accidental (non blatant) metashield breaks, sometimes the mind wipe isn't fully done correct. [Though this could be dialed WAY back to prevent players from purposefully "Accidentally" breaking metashield, and is likely better left out altogether.]. The mind wipes will also explain why literally none of the crew ever know what the true goal of the station is, a mostly isolated facility testing highly dangerous and volatile plasma and its effects on humanoids. As for the plasma itself, Nanotrasen encourages its use EVERYWHERE. to "experiment" with it, in both science and atmospherics. But plasma also appears in liquid form in chemistry. we literally make medications with it. Just look at what plasma does to liquid oxygen. It catalyzes pure oxygen into dexalin. There is no way being in the mere presence of plasma doesn't wreck at least some kind of havoc on the body. For as much as NT loves to be cheep and slack on the things they give the crew, they do in fact rebuild the entire station after every shift to its standard design, that cant be cheep. Or at least as cheep as they wish to have an image of. They are fully invested in the outcome of this project, but still want to keep the appearance of cheep for the experiment. Also I liked the above opinion on licensing the research rewards, makes science make sense. |
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I've always imagined that NanoTrasen, as a whole, is a colonial entity. While this doesn't necessarily get rid of it, if we are considering reframing what the station is, then I want to see a note on this specific part. In real-life, we are currently witnessing the transition from neoliberal capitalist policy to a techno-feudal order, in which corporations like Palantir, Boeing, are being propped up by state funds to continue operating. In our timeline, your usefulness to the state is paramount, when compared to your usefulness to your shareholders. That is to say, profit no longer matters in the way it does now. Profit is a benefit, while the primary objective is ensuring that this order is maintained. Space Station is a story in which this goal has been performed. I want to see, in-game, some sort of prompt or tell about hints of this. And primarily, that starts with security. My major concern is that we aren't presenting this idea enough. NanoTrasen isn't simply a corporation selling burgers. NanoTrasen is the reason, the cause and the end. I do think this design doc is a proper start, and I want us to be even more explicit with this framing, as I do think this doesn't go far enough. I want to expand more on this issue of making the station a factory. Rather, developing specific parts that are shipped out by cargo, as well as cargo taking on other private contracts for the station. The Captain works with the Quartermaster on this, and scientists and other personnel ensure that these quotas can be met. Maybe something to do with science having to produce disks to put into machines that eventually get worn out, as I've explained in a prior design doc with burning discs and so on. I do not like the name station goals. I think it implies something completely different, when comparing Funky with our contemporaries. I think something akin to "Contract" or "Order" is much better. During a regular shift, you are there to fulfill orders. You are there to construct, or help construct, these massive machines that do span the entire station. Another primary concern I have however, is that this may gamify the game in a way we do not want to see. It should be "fun" sure, but I think the proper counter balance is reminding people what they're actually doing here. A quick rebuttal to this issue is upping the brutality and allowing even more leniency, from an admin perspective, for groups of people to escalate situations. I suppose the threshold I want to understand is, what would it take for a player to change their attention to "The factory must be preserved" into "How do I get even?" To give an example, if you see security brutalizing a friend, would that be enough to change your focus for the entire shift? I personally say yes, but I do want these issues addressed in this document as well. They are completely related, but I can understand if they don't seem to be related currently. If we compare the game to what this design document says right now, we are not even close. That's why such a shift must happen. Currently, someone can leave their job and the effects won't be noticed, because they don't really matter. This design doc proposes that yes, your job does matter. That's why Command has such an active interest in keeping you working, either by reward or by the threat of violence. Antagonists should be rethought as well, as well as how the Syndicate tries to interact with everything, and the revolutions prior. There is ample room here to tell a story of what happens when these billionaires get their way. You have sections that aren't filled out, so I do want to see those thoughts done later. But I think this is a great start. These are my thoughts for now. |
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My thoughts on how this world would all work. In the setting, and especially in the story that it seems we want to tell, if Nanotrasen is a huge techno-feudal colonial power, then what does, or doesn't, have value is going to be expressed differently. What has value to the shareholders of a corporation large enough to own many solar systems and regions of space isn't goods or profits. They have a large enough power base that if anyone who is a beneficiary of the regime wants it, they could have a 100 story palace built on a private moon in the matter of a few months and this wouldn't be a blip in the resources they have available to them. Most of the galaxy that isn't a black void is mineral wealth, materials you can manufacture anything out of. In a post FTL galaxy, the value of raw materials goes down significantly. What has value to the shareholders is property, and power. A "Research" station needn't discover anything, nor be dedicated to development at all. As corporations grow even more powerful, and desire more and more types of property, information becomes a type of property too. The first corporation to extract some kind of research data owns that data forever. Research here is just farming information, using assets that have little value (a space station, workers), to produce something with greater value to the shareholders, more property under Nanotrasen's control. Every readout from an anomaly or artifact represents something Nanotrasen now controls that another corporation can't use or exploit without paying them the price, if they let them use it at all. More leverage. More power. Every last one and zero of data harvested from the readouts are patented and made into Nanotrasen property. Nanotrasen expands into space not aligned with TSF using its military power because owning more solar systems increases the value of Nanotrasen to shareholders. Nanotrasen embraces war and selling ships and components to TSF because in a world where resources are so low in value, nothing burns resources and worker power better and increases their value than war. As a result then, workers are the real asset of Nanotrasen. You can have all of the resources in the galaxy, and yet what you can do with them is limited by if you have the people to do it. As Nanotrasen grew in size securing workers this way would have been an obvious next step. The economy Nanotrasen's citizens work in is entirely fake, it's a play economy built because they know that creating a system where people can't live anywhere, eat, drink, without spending scrip they have to earn from Nanotrasen is a system where they have all of the labor they want. TSF probably wouldn't align with them if they outright enslaved their workers (with exceptions for borgs of course because robotic life is an "obvious" safety risk worth "mitigating" with laws), so running a fake economy like this is the next best thing. In fact its even better, because if people were enslaved, they'd be more likely to revolt or question things. Whereas when people are competing with each other, and feel in control of how well they do, they're more likely to be compliant. Unless one of Nanotrasen's worlds was in the center of a real armed conflict where supply lines get cut off, space operations are prevented by gunships and real scarcity sets in, anyone who lives on a Nanotrasen world could live in relative comfort and abundance (from our current time's perspective). But none of these people's lives have any meaning to the shareholders and ruling class of Nanotrasen except in terms of what value they produce to the company. If they're all starving, struggling to survive, it doesn't matter. Resources were saved and they are motivated to work for less. They're not being "entitled" to the profits of a company they don't own, to the profits of their own labor that they don't own. That's a good thing. Most characters won't have a reason why they decided to work in Nanotrasen rather than anywhere else - because everything in their lives is already going to be Nanotrasen, either from the big corporation itself or one of billions of subsidiaries right down to the little donut shop a entrepreneur on the station is running to take some of your hard earned scrip. Nanotrasen isn't really hiring people, it is putting them to work so they can pay them in their fake currency to gain things that actually have value for the corporation. That's basically why I don't think the station needs to be "developing" anything and also why I don't think it needs to be manufacturing anything. Its going to be more expensive to manufacture in space than on the land, unless the purpose of the station is to manufacture warships, in which case yeah it would take place in space (not saying that wouldn't be cool as fuck either but I dunno if we want to do that). Researching in space makes sense though - if something goes disastrously wrong, wiping the problem away is so much easier, and collateral damage is pretty much an non issue as well. I'm all for killing the lathes and research unlocks though. Personally rather than manufacturing things on site being the way of getting advanced products, I think it would be much more flavorful to force people to engage directly in the fake economy nanotrasen is running, buying advanced tools and anything else they need with scrip or spesos. The Cargo Rework Document provides much more meaningful flavor around the kinds of supply lines and traders than just teleporting things in, and I would like the supply department to actually be the backbone of station supplies. A station that has manufacturing focused goals would be cool too, to be clear, but I just don't see a need to keep science as a department at all in a fully military manufacturing station. If they're out in space shipbreaking, mining, using those materials in building warships and then fully kitting them with the requisite supplies and guns ready to be sold to TSF or another part of Nanotrasen, why would things be ordered to be manufactured that don't technologically exist yet. Why would the technology needed to make plasma rifles or something not exist yet until you poke an anomaly a few times. You might as well do away with science and properly focus on a new purpose for the station. |
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tldr; reconsider why the station is even there and wtf nanotrasen is doing. i hate the current approach of a vague "research" so this rethemes nt to be a defense contractor corpo (and also considers all the ways the game needs to change in order to actually communicate this)
pleaseeee review this but it is still a wip. this is my first draft sooooooooo i might rewrite it (and i need to expand on the shit i didnt)