Research Director

Command Staff
Research Director
Research Director	Difficulty: Medium to Hard Requirements: None Access Level: Research Sector, Artifact Lab, Plasma Research, Chemistry, Telescience, Teleporter Room, Bridge, EVA, AI Upload, Maintenance, Superuser level for TermOS Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Captain Subordinates: Scientist Responsibilities: Supervise and lead the research department, coordinate with other departments if need be, maintain the TermOS network, make sure the science team doesn't blow everything to kingdom come. Guides: AI Laws, Artifact Research, Calling the Escape Shuttle, Chemistry, Chemicals, Plasma Research, Telescience, TermOS

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Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your starting location. But where's your calling?

Your office.

Your office.

Congratulations, Research Director! You're the Head of Staff of the Research Wing and rarely competent Scientists who staff it. 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, but that's okay. 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, send your unstoppable Guardbuddies on a rampage, or let a Traitor do these things, it's almost impossible to be a bad Research Director.

Your Tools

You come equipped with a few of tools used by a regular scientist and then some, including:

• A headset with access to the research radio channel and command radio channels, which can be communicated on by prefacing your message with :r and :h, respectively.
• Spectroscopic scanner goggles over your eyes
• A pristine white labcoat of science. Right-click its sprite to button and unbutton it for the right mix of science and fashion.
• A PDA with a built-in reagent scanner, health analyser, signaller, and a special application that functions like a more limited version of the Port-A-Sci remote that only your PDA and the AI PDA have. The program can send the Port-A-Sci to a home turf, but not summon it to your location.

Sysadmin: TermOS and You

Main article: TermOS

As RD, you also have access to the Computer Core and a backup of the network in your equipment locker. This is quite handy since some Telescience and Artifact Research issues require taking a look at the mainframe in the Computer Core.

Thanks to your superuser (SU) access, you also have control over the science department's entire computer network. Notably, you can use the DWAINE terminal in your office to assign your Guardbuddies to various jobs!

So what's my actual job?

It's in the name. You're a "Research" Director, so you can conduct experiments in the various labs of the Research Sector. You could explore off-station areas in the Telescience lab for example or make healing mixes in Chemistry. Like Scientist, you can pick and choose whatever you'd like and work at your own pace without worrying about research quotas, grants, conferences, or any number of boring things RDs in real life have to deal with. It's possible to even forgo your work entirely and just have a bender in the Bar.

You're also a Research "Director", a supervisor for the Scientists. Part of that is reining them in when they do something dangerous without taking the proper precautions, acting as a sane scientist to their mad scientist. For example, try to make sure people test their bombs in either the Test Chamber or off-station if it's REALLY dangerous (e.g. a canbomb), and tell them to give at least some sort of warning to the crew before the test occurs. Just try your best and act in good faith; you won't get banned if you try and fail to prevent someone from testing their bomb in Bar. It's not all about being a buzzkill though. As RD, you can coordinate your underlings for gimmicks too! It's "safety first, then fun", not "safety first, no fun".

In addition, you're also a Head of Staff. You can call and recall the escape shuttle, and your voice has a lot of weight when it comes to discussions as to whether or not it's time to send the shuttle. You also have Bridge and AI Upload & AI Chamber access. As a Head, people also sometimes look to you for guidance, because they typically expect you to have a fairly good grasp of the game's science systems.

Things You Can Do

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!

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 and devastating 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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