Technical Trainee

ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT
Technical Assistant
Technical Assistant	Difficulty: Easy Requirements: None Access Level: Engineering, Maintenance, Mechanics Workshop, Tech Storage Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Chief Engineer, Captain, Engineer Subordinates: None Responsibilities: Assist the Engineers and Chief Engineer with their duties. Guides: Construction, Guide to Wiring, Engineering Objects

As a Technical Assistant, your job is to help your fellow Engineering personnel keep the station/ship up and running. Since you can't actually access Engineering, your work will usually consist of non-specialist tasks like replacing broken lights, repairing walls and floors, and fighting fires. It's not exactly as glamorous as, say, stoking a fire hotter than a star or operating a nuclear reactor, but it is worth doing. After all, would you want to work in a station/ship that's dark, on fire, and full of holes?

This role is exclusively available to those that join after a round has started. There are always two Technical Assistant slots.

It's an unconventional choice, but Technical Assistant can work as a job for newbies. You're pretty low on the food chain, and people don't expect much from you, so you learn things like the construction system in peace. You have the same access as a Staff Assistant, but unlike them, you actually do some direction, so if you're bored with greyshirts, you might want to try being a yellow-shirt. With that said, the lack of access to Engineering is probably gonna hurt.

Assisting, Technically

Being a Technical Assistant doesn't have to be a pain in the ass. There are still plenty of ways to enjoy your round when you're playing what basically amounts to a yellow Staff Assistant. You can focus on the "Assistant" in "Technical Assistant" and make your own fun by doing silly antics or emphasize the "Technical" in "Technical Assistant" by fixing up things and doing repairs, making do with your limited access and resources.

By the way, did you know that as a Technical Assistant, you obtain a stun weapon right from the get go? You see, Tech Storage spawns with a flash, a device that stuns people at close range if they don't have good eye protection. Most jobs don't get access to Tech Storage, but you do, so you can get your hands on a decent weapon fairly easily...if someone doesn't grab it first. It has limited uses though, so use it wisely. It would be waste, for example, to just randomly flash someone while walking down the hall just for kicks.

Making Your Fun

One of the nice things about being Technical Assistant is that people don't expect much from you, so you can do silly gimmicks without any real pressure. Here are some ideas:

• Buy up/barter for other crew members' trinkets and other weird items, like toys from the Arcade or handheld artifacts. Build some display cases and create a museum of curios!
• Get some glass sheets from Tool Storage, gather up some animals, and make a zoo.
• Experiment with rocket shoes. See how fast you can go. Die horribly!
• Has the Quartermaster bought some skateboards? Ask them for a few, find some metal sheets, and build a skate park somewhere.
• Grab a crowbar and some wire. Find a big room, and pry up the floor tiles with the crowbar. Voila, a canvas for some wire art!
• Make a bunch of colored bulbs and/or lights with the general manufacturer in Tool Storage and swap out the station's/ship's lights. You could color-code lights for each department area, give the Bar or Chapel some mood-lighting, or just see how much of the station/ship you can outfit with blacklight.
• Make a custom vending machine and sell wares for fun and profit. You can offer hand-crafted paper domino masks, rare Spacemen: The Grifening cards, delicious food from the Bar, drugs designed by the Scientists, random but useful tools, whatever.

Since you have the same access as a Staff Assistant, you also do a lot of the same silly antics. See here for the list.

Making Do

Doing Engineer work as a Technical Assistant is a lot like doing Engineer work as a Staff Assistant. (In fact, you have the same access, so in a way, you're like a greyshirt but yellow.) It's hard not having the proper access, but you can do it, with enough resourcefulness.

Your lack of Engineering access might prove to be a problem, but it can be solved. The simplest way to just to ask the Head of Personnel, Captain, or Head of Security to give your ID access to the various engineering areas. This is a pretty reasonable request, so they shouldn't be too annoyed. Besides that, you could also follow an Engineer or the CE around;it'd be best to mention this to them to alleviate their "Is the person following me trying to kill me?" sense. In addition, you could ask the AI via radio that you want a door open.

Failing all that, you can still make do. You have maintenance access, and sometimes there are tools in there, but more importantly, you can still access Tool Storage. It might not have the fancy-schmancy tools like deconstruction devices or oxygen grenades, but it does have construction supplies like metal and glass sheets, so you can still fix floors, walls, and windows with the right know-how. Tool Storage (usually) also has a general manufacturer, so you can craft some bulbs and lubes to fix any broken lights and obtain highly-useful tools crowbars and screwdrivers.

One tool you'll likely have a hard time obtaining, though, is the multitool. Engineers spawn with it, but you don't, and while general manufacturers can make it, it starts off without the special materials for it. Without a multitool, you can don't do things like fix APCs, and without Mechanics Workshop access, you can't really replace any missing electronics, but you can still some electrical work. Tech Storage has boards for certain computers, and Tool Storage has glass and wires, so if, say, the console for the cloning scanner is gone, you can still whip up a replacement.

Likewise, you can still do some fire-fighting. Just go into Maintenance and find a firefighting closet, or, if your map has one, head to Emergency Storage. Grab a fire extinguisher, a fire suit, and firefighter helm and pull (click on it while holding down Ctrl or press the Pull button in the bottom left corner of your HUD) a foamtank, and you're set for braving the flames. Just make sure to head to Medbay if you get too badly damaged.

A Brief History of Yellowshirts

Technical Assistants have a long, long history, dating back to the days when Exadv1, SS13's creator, was still actively developing the game and SS13 had not yet split off into multiple branches such as Goonstation, /tg/station, etc. One of the very first jobs Exadv1 added to SS13 was an assistant role for the engineering department, though it's unknown if he actually named it "Technical Assistant" or some other name. Certainly Goonstation's take on the role did (and still does).

As it is now, Goonstation Technical Assistants didn't get Engineering access, so they often had to ask the AI for help getting into the place. Technical Assistants spawned in Tech Storage, and since there was only one flash but multiple assistants, they would often fight each other over who got dibs on the flash. As you might imagine, this flash also made greytiding (or should it be yellowtiding?) Technical Assistants quite annoying to deal with.

RIP

Sadly, the shuttle containing this shift's technical and medical assistants crashed. Into the moon. Forever.

To make up for their deficit, the Staff Assistant got their objectives and access to Tech Storage.

A Shocking Renewal

On September 24th, 2021, Technical Assistants got rehired as a Latejoin job, along with the Head Surgeon, Research Assistant, and Medical Assistant.

Crew Objectives

When they are loyal crew members, Technical Assistants get optional objectives to entertain themselves while waiting for something to happen. They can expect the following objectives, which might look familiar:

Make sure that you are wearing your own butt on your head when the escape shuttle leaves.

Pretty self-explanatory, you can ask a bored Medical Doctor, Medical Specialist, Roboticist, or Medical Director to cut it off, then you can put it on your head.

Escape on the shuttle alive wearing at least one piece of mail courier clothing.

Mail courier clothing here means the postmaster's hat and jumpsuit; there's a "Police cap" that looks just like the postmaster's hat, but that doesn't count for this objective. It isn't always easy to come by. You can try asking the Quartermaster(s); they have postmaster clothes in their lockers, and postmaster's hats sometimes appear in the Haberdasher's Crates they can order. On some maps, there is mail courier clothing hidden somewhere along Belt Hell. If there's a Mail Courier around, you might be able to persuade them into parting with a piece of their uniform.

Completing this objective for the first time unlocks the The mail always goes through medal. There aren't any rewards associated with it, aside from the satisfaction of having worn some pretty snazzy-looking clothes.

Escape on the shuttle alive with a non-assistant ID registered to you.

You can get a job change from the Head of Personnel pretty easily, just make sure it's not any sort of assistant job.

Get your grubby hands on a spacesuit.

It just needs to be the suit, so you can most likely just ask the AI to let you into Engineering's space suit storage to grab one. Failing that, this objective does care about what type of spacesuit it is either, so if you find one from another department, it should still work. If you get this on an underwater map like Oshan Laboratory, diving suits will still count for this objective.