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tags: Design, Engineering, Atmospheric Technician
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# Atmospherics: Unity and Focus

## The problems

### Atmos Technician
Atmos tech the job is currently in a rather poor spot. It has a lot of content framed around the fabrication of gases and tools, but little to do with these things.

Even worse, the skill floor for the job is very very high. You effectively need a direct mentor or the ability to code dive to get anywhere with it, or even know what content exists.

It also tends to drive players to hole up in one place, and reach for the very top of the system, most of the time in vain. This reduces the amount of contact with the rest of the round, and reduces the variation round to round for everyone involved.

With the advent of a faster/working atmos system, solving atmos related issues has become too hard/obfuscated. This will need addressing.

### Atmospherics the system

I have less gripes with the underlying system then I do with the job, but I do have some problems with it.

Most of my issues come from the way the codebase and more importantly the playerbase has gotten used to the system being ineffectual. This leads to a lack of understanding on how to protect themselves from it, and a lot of death. There are some internal systems with flow itself, when I first fixed the system I was too focused on making it keep state after a rebuild, which causes lag and visual slowdown, since a hole in medbay is much more likely to be held up by a door opening/closing in cargo.

There's a few other things that concern me, some reactions are very dumb, and there's both too many unused reactions and too much gas in the air that does nothing.

## Unification

### Atmospherics the department, fabrication and fixing
Atmos tech should be focused on maintaining the air of the station. Fabrication should serve as side content that makes them better at their main role, the two should feed into each other

This isn't to say I want to nuke fabrication, I want to refocus it. Atmospherics should be able to make tools that help them effect the atmosphere of the station or resolve breaches. I don't want it to go down the same jack of all trades route as xenobio, it should be focused on one thing and do it well.

On that topic, there needs to be more expansive explanation of the things that effect atmos. The wiki page needs an update that focuses on fixing things/the logic behind the system, Ideal gas laws, all that.

It should additionally document each reaction and gas, and how they interact.

This will significantly reduce the amount of metaknowledge required to do some of the more insane things in the system, so some things will need to be culled/nerfed alongside this, and new problems will natrually arise as old content is more accessible and seen by new eyes.

This isn't to say I want all endgame atmospherics content gone, it serves a useful purpose of creating ahhh adventures? Even if they do require a bit of practice or thought to even consider, it's the kind of depth you take part in a few times and get wonderful stories out of. We shouldn't put all our content there, or even most of it, but it has its place.

A side note, atmos techs will take the interlocking set of systems that is atmos and find many of these on their own. This is natural and somewhat expected, since there's so much stuff piled in there there's bound to be things we don't consider.

Fixing atmospherics ought to be engaging, and addtional threats outside of heat and breaches should be added. In a perfect world they would tie back into fabrication as a resource creating a loop of fix and get better at fixing.

Before we do that however, we need to make the base level fixes less painful. A portion of this is down to general knowledge being low, but a good part of it is down to making the available tools better and the common threats easier to deal with.

Different threats should require different gear, so paying attention to radio callouts will be a time saver. As I mentioned before, the tools in atmos at roundstart, while they should be a cut above the space heaters and porta-scrubbers on the station, shouldn't be the peak of the role's gear. They should be built on over time.

The flow should be Prep -> Respond -> Prep, keeping this from getting too all consuming is a matter of balancing the threat over time, so overprepping doesn't feel required.

### Atmos the system, focus and clarity

This will be brief.

Adding a gas type or reaction is costly, and will lead to confusion when interacting with the system due to information overload.

Therefore, each gas and reaction should fill its own niche. Don't have a toxin and a toxin that's slightly better. We don't want to put a ton of rare things here either, keep things trim.

There should be no reaction that does nothing when it runs, gas reactions should not create gas that effect nothing in the moment, or bloats the station's general atmospherics for no reason.

Don't rely on extremes to be interesting, high numbers will give some reaction from the playerbase, but it will also lead to structural changes that hamper the system itself. See fusion and QUANTIZE() for more details.

**Make no unneeded movements**

### A brief mention of exploits

The system will break, this is inevitable, and to be expected.

Some forms of breakages are more acceptable then others, however. When you want to resolve an issue, focus on fixing the underlying problem, rather than making it more difficult to achieve. Singlecaps are a good example, in the process of trying to solve them in the past we've ended up making them worse, or just made them harder.

Security by obscurity is not a good policy. It can be used as a stopgap, but the playerbase will always adapt. Seek to cut the root, not the leaves.

## TL;DR

Basically I'd like atmos the job to have a well, job, and have a good reason to do the more high tech portion of atmos outside of xenobio grade tools or bragging rights.

Atmos the system should only experince load when something is actually being done, and should not be flooded with gas that isn't effecting the player experience.