Scientist

RESEARCH DEPARTMENT
Scientist
Scientist	Difficulty: Medium to Hard Requirements: None Access Level: Artifact Lab, Chemistry, Toxins Research, Toxins Storage, Research Sector, Research Outpost, Test Chamber, Teleporter Lab Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Research Director, Captain Subordinates: Research Trainee Responsibilities: Experiment with artifacts, chemicals, plasma, and/or telescience Guides: Artifact Research, Chemicals, Chemistry, Plasma Research, Science Objects, Telescience

Not every experiment has to be boring...

As a Scientist, your job is to explore the wonders of SCIENCE!. You get full access to the station's/ship's research labs and the freedom to pursue whatever discipline(s) you want (within the Rules). You can create concoctions of chemicals for better living through Chemistry, investigate strange, otherworldly machines and devices in Artifact Research, teleport people and objects and explore far-off locales through Telescience, or tap into the magnificent power of plasma gas in Plasma Research.

Scientist is a very freeform, self-directed job popular with experienced players. You get to explore some very intricate game systems and have little responsibilities. There are no quotas or such unless you decide to make your own, and unlike, say, Security Officer, you aren't harming others much if you decide to abandon your job and chill or aren't very good at its mechanics. At the same time, risk of death or injury is ever-present, though it can be mitigated, and the game expects you to set up your own goals for the round and guide yourself (similar to Staff Assistant), which might turn away people looking for direction on the game's end, like Engineer. Overall, if you crave some depth and don't mind some danger or having to "create your own fun", this is a good pick. Plus, you can make things explode--who doesn't enjoy that?

Your Equipment

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Your Research Sector of SCIENCE!, located in the southwest by Medbay...

...and your Research Outpost of SCIENCE! floating way southwest of both.

Your Research Wing of SCIENCE! in the southwest, sitting right by Medbay.

Your Research Wing of SCIENCE!', smack dab in the middle of the station.

Your Research Wing of SCIENCE! in the lower eastern half of the NSS Clarion.

Your UNDERWATER! Research Sector of SCIENCE! in the northeast corner of the station...

...and your also UNDERWATER! Research Outpost of SCIENCE! sitting east of it.

Your Research Wing of SCIENCE! in the bottom left corner of the NCS Atlas, left of Medbay.

You start with the following items on you to aid in your pursuit of SCIENCE!:

• A gas mask and air tank , partially to protect you from certain job hazards, partially so that you don't have to scour maintenance (which you don't have access to) for internals.

• A headset with access to the research radio channel. To speak through it, enter something like the following into your text parser at the bottom:
  • say :r Stay away from the test chamber, I'm going to test my thermite-phlogiston-CLF3 bomb.

• Spectroscopic scanner goggles over your eyes and a PDA with a built-in reagent scanner, so you can determine the chemical contents of beakers, glasses, and many other things.

• A pristine purple scientist's labcoat of science. Right-click its sprite to button and unbutton it for the right mix of science and fashion.

Fields of Research

There are four disciplines of research for Scientists to pursue. You're free to work on whatever one you want or drop out of it at any time, regardless of how many people are working on it, but do try to listen to the Research Director if they ask you to help out in a certain area.

Each discipline also carries some risk of death or injury. Sometimes you can prevent it, sometimes you can't, but in any case, the important thing is not be discouraged. If you get hurt or die, focus on what you can, have, and will learn. If someone else is caught in the crossfire, you should apologize and politely explain that you simply didn't know what what was going to happen.

Chemistry

The main cornerstone of Research and easily the most popular. Basically, you make and mix chemical reagents to create something interesting or useful. There's tons and tons of different chemical reagents, all with different effects, and learning the recipes is a challenge in of itself. Not everything can be made with just the chem dispensers in Chemistry (though a lot can), so you might have to ask Hydroponics to grow you something or request the Kitchen to make a certain dish or drink.

The real fun of Chemistry, however, is in the mixing. It's where Chemistry truly shines. For just one example, you can fill a flamethrower with just plain ol' welding fuel and set people on fire with it. That's all fine & dandy, but with a certain combination of chems, you make a flamerthrower that sets people fire, causes them to spontaneously burst into huge fireballs, and then explode into pretty colors. And Chemistry isn't just about wanton destruction. With a bit of ingenuity, you make a mix that actually repairs or cleans a room or fills it with delicious cheese, bread, and pepperoni. Medbay will love you if you restock their medical supplies or create new restorative cocktails for their patients. The possibilities are endless.

Once you get the hang of Chemistry, you can start tackling secret chems, chems whose recipes are trade secrets. Some do funny harmless gimmicks (e.g. transparium, ageinium), some are a little stronger than certain non-secret chems (e.g. saxitoxin, initropidril), and lots are both (e.g. freeze, dragon's breath, strychnine). All are there as fun little puzzles for experienced chemists to solve.

Plasma Research

Let's not beat around the bush here, you make bombs. Specifically, you burn gases in the Toxin Lab's mixing chambers to heat other gases up and/or run other gases through special cryo-cooling units and/or pipes exposed to space to cool it down. You then use these gases in three unique kinds of bombs, each of which relies on different interactions between the gases and certain qualities, like temperature and pressure, and observe their destructive power, ideally either by running a special VR simulation or detonating them on some off-station site. Admittingly of dubious use to the station, but, hey, who doesn't enjoy watching stuff blow up? Or, in a rather morbid way, walking among the wake of an entire station leveled by a few good bombs?

It's a surprisingly complex system, in no small part due to SS13's generally weird atmospherics and thermodynamics physics. While it often comes down to a waiting game, people play it different ways. Obviously, you can vary the amount of time you heat up the gas, but there are also interesting techniques like opening up the "emergency" chamber vent early to slowdown CO2 buildup and putting holes in certain places to exploit interesting vacuum thermodynamics.

Comparing and showing off the destructive power of bombs made by toxins is one of SS13's oldest pastimes, stretching all the way to the 2003-2004 years, back when player counts were barely above twenty and plasma came in shitty boxy canisters drawn in MS Paint. Chances are high you've seen at least a few pics/vids of such nature scrolling through the SS13 subreddit and other social media outlets. If you looked at the linked album or said pics, and thought, "Wow, teach me to do that!", you're in pretty good company.

Artifact Research

A complicated game about finding on-switches. You investigate mysterious machines and devices with random names and of unknown function and try to figure out what they do by exposing them to a certain stimulus, like electricity or heat. This is usually done via DWAINE-controlled machinery in the Artifact Lab and occasionally more rudimentary but acceptable substitutes. As you're doing this, you document your research with artifact analysis forms. If you complete them correctly, you might get more artifacts to play with.

You can often find lots of interesting and unique stuff from Artifact Research, some bad, some good, some useful, some not. For example, you might turn on a menacing pylon with electricity and touch it to discover that it replaces your heart with a cyberheart. You might prod a ornate brazier with a robot arm and find that it's actually turret--perhaps too late. You might hit a gross-looking pulsating lump with an extinguisher and see that it's just actually a lamp. Who knows--it's random!

Telescience

You teleport things in and out of places using the telepad and teleporter computer in the Telescience/Teleporter Lab. Everything in there is all nice and set-up, except the computer has one slight problem: the coordinates on the computer don't actually match up to GPS coordinates. To get any use out of it, you have to send some GPS units through to get some test coordinates and use them to create two linear equations that convert GPS coordinates to computer coordinates and vice versa.

As you can imagine, once you have the equations and a good list/map of GPS coordinates, you can pull some real crazy shenanigans. Obviously, you can steal things or kidnap people, but there's much more than that. For example, you can rescue people (or corpses) stuck in space or in dangerous traps. In fact, the Telescience/Teleporter Lab comes with Tracking Implants just for that purpose. Or you can strike a partnership with the Quartermaster and create your own delivery company, with instant-delivery guarantees!

As with Chemistry, Telescience also has plenty of secrets for you to discover, in the form of the Adventure Zone areas. Not only do these semi-hidden locations have unique loot, puzzles, and monsters to discover, but they also feature an actively developed alternate reality game, centered around a sun, Sumerian mythology, and lots of strange keys.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. If you complete your objectives by the end of the round, you'll get some bonus Spacebux and possibly earn some Medals too. As a scientist, you can expect to see the following:

End the round with methamphetamine in your blood stream
Since at least one scientist makes meth per round, just borrow some from them and inject/eat a pill of it when the shuttle is about to leave.

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Meth is a hell of a drug medal. Unlike some of the other medals below, this does unlock a reward. For your...foray into stimulants, you get a purple-striped "science labcoat" skin. It's just a reskin; it doesn't change how the labcoat functions, but dang, doesn't it look nifty?

End the round on fire and with Silver Sulfadiazine in your blood stream
Use Chemistry to whip up a few pills; one with lots of Phlogiston to make you spontaneously combust, another with Silver Sulfadiazine.

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Better to burn out, than fade away medal. It doesn't unlock any special rewards, because intentionally setting yourself on fire and then living is sort of routine. Still, the fact you got this medal in the first place is essentially the game giving you a pat on the back (if largely to try to pat out the flames).

Make sure the floor of chemistry is not scorched at the end of the round
Hahahahhahahahhahahahhahahaha. Yeah right.

If you get this objective and somehow manage to complete it for the first time, you get the We didn't start the fire medal. For your effort in achieving the impossible, you get a skin that turns a large beaker into a round-bottom flask. It doesn't change how it functions, but it sure does look neat.

Create a portal to the void
That weird purple cloud that appears sometimes in Telesci? That's the stuff; it has a 5% chance to appearance when you toggle portals to, send people/objects to, and receive from locations with valid coordinates. Now jump in it!

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see medal. The name refers to a line from the 1997 sci-fi film Event Horizon, specifically a (rather spoiler-riffic) scene where a villain with scarred eyes delivers a monologue about how the ship transformed after accidentally entering a hell dimension. This reference is pretty much all there is to it, since the medal doesn't have any reskins or other rewards tied to it.

Research and activate 10 artifacts by the end of the shift.
To activate an artifact, you need to find the appropriate stimulus. You need not activate the artifact yourself; if you are within 5 tiles of an artifact when it's activated, it counts for this objective. That way, if you are helping with a fellow Scientist research artifacts or are guiding a Research Trainee through their first artlab experience, you can still fulfill this objective. Also, you do not have to complete artifact analysis forms for those artifacts (unless you want to, of course).

Completing this objective for the first time gives you the Licensed Archaeologist medal. You don't get an actual license, but you can still brag about being a space archaeologist at space parties in order to impress that cute space guy/gal/non-binary pal who's mostly listening to be polite.

Syndicate Scientist

Oh boy, if you are a traitorous Scientist you have hit the Jackpot! With access to Chemistry and Toxins, you can create some of the most dangerous items in the game while claiming they are harmless experiments. Syndicate Scientists are constantly one-upping each other to be the most horrifically destructive, agony-inflicting, psychotic maniacs around. Have fun!

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