# The Altruists

A playable mid-round faction for Space Station 13.

The Altruists resemble a non-hostile "space hobo" or "scavenger" faction which docks with the station on the premise of requiring aid.

**Shortcuts to the folklore / story:**
- [Folklore: Origin of The Altruists](#Folklore-Origin-of-The-Altruists)
- [Folklore: The Vagabond Fleet](#Folklore-The-Vagabond-Fleet)

# Synopsis

"*We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place.*"

The Altruists are small teams of spacer people, of varying races, who originate from (and return back to) a large fleet of needy, poor, and broken-down vagrant ships, known as a "vagabond fleet". Their primary objectives include staying alive and gathering the basic supplies neccesary for life in space, including food, water, air, medical supplies, and whatever other useful things they can get their hands on; such away-teams identify themselves to outsiders as "altruists".

The vagabond fleet has no formal name or officially affiliated factions, but authorities have labeled the fleet as "The Altruists" due to mis-interpretation.

## Character Tropes

I use TvTropes.org as it's a great resource build up a story-driven character.

These tropes may translate to in-game mechanics.

### 🐀 **Too Desperate to Be Picky**

Beggars can't be choosers.

Altruists aren't disgusted by bad-tasting food and bad smells/miasma.

### 🏋️ **Desperation Attack**

*"A man or animal driven through terror to desperation, is endowed with wonderful strength, and is notoriously dangerous in the highest degree."*
— Charles Darwin

Altruists have an innate trait due to their strong survival instinct, which helps forestall death; they benefit from `/datum/reagent/determination` much more than the average person.

### 🗣️ **Survival Mantra** / **Badass Creed**

Altruists may recite a prayer, or koan, which gives them inner-peace and self-confidence; if uttered aloud, it also provides a different minor status effect to other Altruists within earshot.

TODO: *Actual mantra TBD.*

# Objectives

🔹[Action Item: Objectives](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21880375)

Altruists aren't looking for high value loot. They are "poor and needy". Some Altruists are the type to raid kitchen counters, regardless of social faux pas.

The Altruists know that corporations have employees who recently provided under-the-table donations, and they're coming back for more. Corporations and their managers, who were unprepared to face a potential humanitarian crisis, are reeling from the potential risks and losses.

- **Objective #1**: **Go home alive, even if nothing else. Your life matters.**
- Death is an occupational hazard, but a single avoidable death is a failure of the entire mission; reduce these risks as much as possible.
- **Objective #2**: **Seek out humanitarian aid from Artea Logistics.**
- Your primary focus is basic neccesities, such as medical supplies and food.
- Your secondary goal is to find improvements for quality-of-life, if reasonably portable.

## Individual Orders

>Hi \<FIRST NAME\>,
>
>You continually screw up negotiations, so here's our SOP:
>1. Contact Artea on short-wave, ask for emergency docking permissions.
>2. Tell them you're "altruists" seeking humanitariran aid, nothing else! Don't fuck that up!!
>3. Don't take ANYTHING if it's risky to your life. Come back alive.
>4. If you don't come back, we'll consider you dead, and you'd better be dead.
>
> Also please remember to wash yourself and not look or act gross infront of these people. We want some serious supplies, so put on some serious manners so these guys can shake your hand without catching the clap!

# Space Ship

🔹[Action Item: Space Ship](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21879074)

The space ship used by the Altruists is a common frigate with a single main rocket engine and several smaller manuvering rockets. The frigate has wide open space for cargo and passengers. The interior of the ship lacks luxury trims or "high-tech" panels, and instead most of the internal systems are exposed to the ship's inhabitants; this is a combination of the factory-default design, and because the Altruists stripped-out all non-essential equipment.

The engines can be repaired if it breaks down.

Power is generated using a combined-cycle generator named [COGAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_gas_and_steam), which is a compound powerplant made of interoperating gas and steam turbines; steam is generated using the heat from the exhaust of the gas turbines, re-using that heat, and its conversion efficiency is around 60%. The gas this uses is TBD, but it should be gases obtainable from station Atmospherics.

# Equipment

Altruist-made clothing and gadgets are heavily modified, few non-Altruists are able to understand their intended purposes and use-cases.

Altruist equipment represents the height of their technology, which is very low.

## 🧑‍🚀 Uniforms / Space Suits

🔹[Action Item: Space Suits](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21871292)

*"The backpack weighed as much as I did. So I went over backwards. It's a fiberglass shell, and it contained all your life support systems. If it broke, I was dead. I rolled right to break the fall, yet still bounced onto the backpack. My heart was pounding. John Young, my commander, came over and looked down and says, 'That wasn't very smart, Charlie'."*
— Charles Duke, US Astronaut

The Altruist space suit is composed of the last several generations of spacer technology, and is a hodgepodge design that is shared among them as the "de-facto" high-reliability design; the Altruists replicate their space suit design using commonly available parts which were scavenged from an abundant supply of obsolete and broken space suits.

The suit itself is feature-limited, given their limited resources, but it allows them to outlast many situations thanks to the many hacked-on features, layers, and survival accessories. The helmet of the suit has a toggle-able "Extra-Vehicular Visor Assembly", or EVVA, which is an extra armor layer and sun visor that can be raised and lowered independently. When the visor is lowered, it increases armor and prevents blindness from external sources such as flashes and welders.

The Altruist space suit is built around a core "Personal Life-Support System" backpack, or PLSS, which contains an air tank for breathing and has storage gussets/webbing sewn onto the outside; the Altruists have also hacked-on a DIY "Emergency Maneuvering Unit", or EMU, for momentary thrust in space with a low specific impulse. Additionally a hydration bladder is located within the chest of the suit, which allows the user to drink a small amount of water.

## 🖲️ Decompression Detector / "The DD"

🔹[Action Item: Decompression Detector](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21871367)

*"Don't risk it like the last guy. Toss a DD in there first."*

The "decompression detector", known by Altruists as a "DD", is a cobbled-together diametric scanner designed to detect a sudden loss of air pressure, and provides peace-of-mind as a result; it is a very cheap device composed of a basic gas pressure sensor, an LED, and a mute-able beeping alarm. Altruists are paranoid about breaches, and so they use DD's liberally.

Altruists wear a DD as part of their standard uniform, and they often place extra DD's inside the foreign ships and airlocks which they are visiting.

## 💉 A.V.A.S. / "The Sting"

🔹[Action Item: AVAS](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21871419)

The Anti-Vacuum Auto-injecting Syringe, or A.V.A.S., known by Altruists as "The Sting", is a proprietary syringe and chemical cocktail designed to forestall the side-effects of decompression sickness and vacuum exposure. The AVAS is a remarkably high-technology device for the vagabond fleet to possess, and it is in extremely limited supply; the Altruists are typically the only inhabitants who have access to a supply of AVAS, and fights over their supply occur often.

The negative side-effects of AVAS include confusion, high blood pressure, and lung cancer.

## 🛏️ Spacer's Cot

[Action Item: Spacer Cot](https://github.com/orgs/Artea-Station/projects/2/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=21871388)

*"It had everything I needed. Barely the size of a phone booth (kids, Google it), it was freezing cold (great air conditioning), almost totally dark, and, for the most part, peacefully quiet. Yet it would take nearly a week for me to finally achieve reasonable sleep."*
— Clayton Anderson, US Astronaut

A spacer-grade portable sleeping cot which is deployable anywhere there's room, can be anchored to the floor, and has straps for sleeping in zero-gravity; the Altruists have also hacked a space-proof hermetic seal onto it, giving this cot the secondary function of a tiny survival shelter.

# Folklore: Origin of The Altruists

The Altruists are groups of spacers who inhabit and maintain a vagabond, or vagrant fleet of space ships, and they known to perform extra-vehicular activities in order to gather supplies, recover stranded or dead people, and perform external hull repairs. Due to the high risk of death, many inhabitants of the fleet began to call such heroic individuals "altruists", and the label stuck.

The Altruists themselves are generally random downtrodden individuals. Each of their ships' individual circumstances have gone horribly awry, and their original Captains and affiliations are long-dead, thus they simply identify themselves as "altruists" to outsiders. Many Altruists are people who have been temporarily exiled, having been tasked to return with a quota of supplies, or they face permanent banishment from the fleet.

There is no visible command structure which coordinates these away-teams, and no outside organization has been able to contact or influence them all.

# Folklore: The Vagabond Fleet

## 🚀 Fleet Structure

The fleet is composed of an exceptionally large cluster of debris and unaffiliated ships that are barely powered and mostly drifting. The fleet is kept together in a cluster due to their common need for survival, and it is so large that it generates a subtle gravity field. Each vagrant ship is unique, and the fleet does not seem to identiy itself with a common name, nor a common flag.

The vagabond fleet docks all of its ships together in a large cluster in order to share power, air, and sometimes pedestrians. Extra straps and clamps are haphazardly attached between vessels to provide extra reinforcement, as standard airlock docking clamps are inadequate to sabilize such a large mass. The highly inter-connected nature of the vagabond fleet's vessels often causes structural problems to spread from one ship to another.

The most common structural problem faced by the fleet is abberant hull vibrations, which sometimes develop into large imbalances and violent movements of entire ships; such out-of-control vibrations and movements cause damage to other nearby vessels, which may begin to sway and crash against each other while attempting to remain docked. In order to avoid such a large disaster, hundreds of docked ships must regularly and clumsily undock from each other and allow the vibrations to dissipate.

## 🫠 Living Conditions

Daily life in the vagabond fleet is rife with precariousness, and 99% of its inhabitants lack adequate or hygenic living standards. The haphazardly-assembled nature of the fleet leads to numerous docking accidents, fleet-wide catastrophes, and a very high death-rate as a result. Attempts by authorities to gather death/birth statistics from the fleet have failed, but leading investigators have indicated a very high accidental death rate, near 30% of the population after each accident, and that there is a consistent influx of new inhabitants to fill-in for the losses.

Due to the conditions in which the Altruist's civilians live, many governmental ship inspectors are unwilling to physically board an Altruist vessel and climb through its cargo compartment. As a result, there are countless unaccounted-for individuals who inhabit Altruist vessels, many of which are reported as hijacked. At their most extreme, criminals hidden within the fleet are known to "ship-hop" to avoid being detected by local and external authorities.

## 🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Society & Common Morals

*(Or lack thereof)*

The "societal structure" of the vagabond fleet is almost non-existent, and the fleet does not unite under one society, flag, or name; its inhabitants often share common morals anyway, and as a result they appear to randomly synchronize around specific issues. The "Altruist" away-teams are an example of such random coordination, and a decent percentage of them are volunteers who have grown restless and wish to improve their lives or die trying.

Death is a near-constant motivator for every inhabitant of the vagabond fleet, most of whom are united on two matters especially... The first of which is the gathering of the dead for proper memorial, and the gathering of life-sustaining supplies.

## ⚙️ Technology

The vagabond fleet lacks advanced space technology and the majority of what they possess is from the prior generations of spacers, so Altruists frequently hack things together in order to create new and improved designs and "survival hacks", which are often assembled from scrap parts. Altruists in-general have a tendency to modify/hack machines, ships, and devices to make them more space-ruggedized.

The quality of the vagabond fleet's equipment wildly varies, and their individual situations often become deadly as a result. The Altruists frequently recover people who were killed by ruptured pressure suits. The Altruist's uniforms and space-suits are last-generation (old/obsolete), but are more ruggedized and reliable than the rest of the vagabond fleet's.

No one can forget the "big bust", which was an accident involving the botched scuttling of a stranded corporate mega-freighter, leading many nearby spacers to witness the sight of 761 stiff spacer popsicles floating around in its abandoned hangar- all of whom had scavenged, and wore, the same flawed suit design.

## ⚔️ Defense & The Optimists

No matter who you are in the vagrant fleet, the general consensus is "*stay optimistic*".

The Optimists are a sometimes loosely-organized militia which defends the vagabond fleet, and they are drafted in a manner similar to the Altruists; they are only drafted and deployed when the fleet is under attack, which is a rare ocurrence. The Optimists carry their weapons in self-defense, and are regarded as the last/only line of defense for the fleet. If you chase an Altruist back to their home, the Optimists will be your welcoming party.