Doctor Proceedure Request: Tune Armor

[bleehu]

A request brought up in episode 2 season 2 of the pirate sandbox.

[1sourcecontrol]

My question is obvious but... What about the aesthetics for a medic 'tuning armor'?

[Turtlelord26]

At the time our logic went along the lines of "It's basically preventative care"

Since then, I've theorized that we could add flavor about the medic using their knowledge of weak spots to specifically target the armor over them. (Robots are pretty common sense, there's a power plant and lots of joints.)

[1sourcecontrol]

Preventive care... of a body armor vest? That seems to defy logic since the doctor is.. well.. a doctor, not a material scientist, M.E., or a trained soldier.

I guess I see where ya'll are coming from tho. It could pass under Suspension of Disbelief

[Turtlelord26]

Preventative care ^of the thing inside the body armor^ by making it (the armor) work better. Fixed.

[1sourcecontrol]

Ah. That makes more sense. But my point is, a doctor having substantial knowledge of body armor seems like a stretch

[bleehu]

It is most definitely a stretch. Gotta be honest, not sure how I'mma pull this one off yet.

[Turtlelord26]

Context for the feature request: Neatly solves the problem of medics having zero nanite generation capability in a party of mechanicals, similarly to how the Engineer's Tune Weapon gives them at least one thing that they can do in a party of ~organics~ meatbags.

So here's some possible flavor: Armor in CX is future Space!(TM) armor and therefore probably both smart and reactive. Off-the-shelf armor will do its best to be extra-reactive over its wearer's weak points, but biology is messy and everyone's different. A medic then can use their knowledge of the party member's specific anatomy and condition to give a slight optimization to the armor's reactive responses. No one in their right mind is putting their smart armor on a network (...right? please? ...help) so the delivery mechanism for the ability is probably touch (like the Engineer's tune weapon), and probably requires the armor OS recognize the medic as an authorized input source.

As for what stat gets a boost, my inclination is toward Coverage, both as a direct foil to Tune Weapon decreasing Miss Chance and because stacking Coverage isn't nearly as broken anymore with the introduction of Armor Strength.

[1sourcecontrol]

Although if the doctor is interfacing with smart-armor, I'd argue that makes sense for the engineer to do as well (that is, If I wanted to be argumentative, heh).

This may diverge a bit: Why isn't the doctor actually taking care of all races needs? If in fact the robots are considered a sentient race, If I was a doctor, I'd want to take care of all peoples. It'd almost make sense for a doctor to be able to repair-heal their wounds as well. The engineer could gain tune armor, and the doctor could gain other healing (repair) abilities.

Of course it's give and take with the engineer, since society could just as easily say Doctors don't deal with mechanical people, robot mechanices (engineers) do.

[Wildlovelies]

My idea, and feel free to shut this down as need be. But I think both classes should be able to heal, doctors, especially in a military setting where cyborgs and robots are common on a battlefield would most likely be cross trained to do some repairs I would assume. And as far as the engineer being able to heal meat bags, think of the healing grenade from overwatch. I say the engineer has specially programmed nano bots that detect what material is there and tries to repair it. I'm thinking the doctor is like mercy, dumps all of the health, and the engineer is like Lucio, heals over time maybe? Of course if they want to improve heals they can always improve the associated skill. I like the idea of two classes that can heal everyone, it adds diversity and starts to remove the probability the a support character who has a large part of their kit dedicated to buffing allies isn't useless.

[Wildlovelies]

If you want to separate the two a little atleast you could make it so engineers healing meat bags use half repair skill or medicine, what ever is higher, opposite for doctors

[Turtlelord26]

This needs to be investigated further. Deserves a line item in the class redesign meeting.

Maybe lovelies' proposals are subclasses of Engineer and Medic that cross a little into each others' domain, letting parties that need them have them, and letting characters for whom the cross would not make RP sense avoid it.

[Wildlovelies]

note for @bleehu medic ability, pre-emptive defib