Research Director

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Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

The Research Director is the head in charge of the research department. Their goal is to further the station's grand quest of the pursuit of sciences, while trying to forget everything they learned at that ethics seminar.

What have I gotten myself into?

Well, congratulations! You're a Head of the station, as well as being the boss of the rarely competent Research team. Your job is mainly just to prevent Research from blowing up, burning, and getting covered in radiation for as long as possible. Chances are, you won't be successful at that. It's okay though, as an RD you have arguably the most relaxed and easy Head job on the station, yet you're also the most potentially dangerous. If you're interested in trying out a Head job but you're afraid of being awful, RD is the job for you. As long as you don't blow up the Research Wing or send your unstoppable Guardbuddies on a rampage/let a Traitor do these things, it's almost impossible to be a bad Research Director.

So what's my actual job?

Whatever you make of it! Explore space in the Teleporter lab, make explosives in Toxins, set Chemistry on fire, or accidentally kill everyone...

That being said, your basic job (and really only task) is to be the boss of the Research team. Typical RD activities include ordering chemists to create dozens of chicken soup pills, having Telescience steal all the monkeys on the station, and making sure Toxins and Artifact Research don't spiral out of control. However, you're also a Head, which means you also have some say in big decisions regarding the shuttle. You can call and recall the shuttle, and you have Bridge access for when you just feel like drinking wine with the HoP and ignoring your duties.

Failing your own creativity, here are a few things you can do.

Get the Guardbuddies moving

Using the DWAINE terminal in your office, you can assign your Guardbuddies to various jobs. To start playing with your buddies, follow these instructions on TermOS here.

Figure out Telescience

Telescience is often ignored during games because it requires cooperation from other people to do anything really fun. However, as RD, your entire point is to foster cooperation and efficiency among departments, so figuring out how the teleporters work this round is very helpful. If you've figured out how the teleporter works, all sorts of fun can come of enabling other peoples' gimmicks. Space explorers can be beamed back to resupply and offload their finds, or even better their finds can be beamed back for them. All they need to do is to feed you the appropriate coordinates and you can take care of the rest. One of the few always-legitimate uses for bombs is to beam them out to dangerous derelicts to crack them open like a peanut. If you know the location of something you want on the station, you can just teleport it straight to Research. Are those lazy-ass miners not doing anything with their space suits? Lock in on their locations via the space GPS, teleport them to Research, and distribute them to your staff! Are the mechanics illegally building a bunch of guns? Teleport them into Research and give them to your chemists! Is the Captain brain dead in his quarters? Teleport him to Research and steal his ID!

Convinced? You should be! Check the Telescience article for more details.

Screw around with Chemistry

Failing all that, being the RD is pretty much carte blanche to waste your entire round trying to figure out new and interesting ways to cause misery in chemistry. Or maybe you want to buck the trend and actually be helpful by filling a fire extinguisher with space cleaner and showing the Janitor he's a useless piece of shit. The possibilities are endless!

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. In addition to the usual Scientist objectives, you can also expect to see the following:

Ensure that Heisenbee escapes on the shuttle
That cute and adorable space bee that starts in your office must end the round on the Escape Shuttle--alive. Most of the time, you can usually just leave them in your office and wrangle (click on them with Grab intent) them to the Escape Arm when the shuttle's about to arrive.

If you want to be extra-safe, keep him in a locker, so that he's protected from any explosions that reach your office, and make some strange reagent, so you can resurrect Heisenbee if he does die. When the shuttle's about to dock, drag him to the shuttle, and keep him in the locker, in case someone bombs on the shuttle in transit.

Syndicate RD

Truly, the only difficult part of being a traitor RD is choosing just one plan of action out of your dazzling array of horrific options. In addition to the already wide array of things traitor Scientists can do, you have control over the departments which dictate who lives and who dies, an army of loyal robot servants, and Head access. A competent RD who knows how to put all of these things together can put on one hell of a show.

There's one particularly terrible implement that's unique to the RD, however, and that's the Teleport Gun. Once linked to a beacon from the Teleporter Room (notably not the Science Teleporter, but the one that works with your hand tele), each shot from said gun will warp the unlucky target to that beacon. Bring the beacon to any place you'd like to see your victim whisked away to and let loose - and the beacon can be anywhere, including the combustion chamber, deep space and even the Adventure Zone! Unleash your creativity to come up with interesting and unique traps!

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