Roboticist

File:Robotics2.png

The robotics laboratory, prior to receiving a thick coating of blood and organs from gory surgery and repeated transplant failures.

The roboticist is a specialized medical department profession concerned with building, maintaining, upgrading, and overseeing the station's population of cyborgs and lesser robots. Due to the man-machine interface powering Cyborg units, however, roboticists are often just as much surgeons and medics as they are machinists. Roboticists start the shift in robotics proper alongside any players who are cyborgs from the start, located inside medbay. If there are any cyborgs present they will often ask for basic upgrades such as enhancements to power cells, speed boosts, or propulsion capabilities; while it is ultimately your call, generally speaking, these requests should be met. Roboticists are equipped with a standard lab clothing and a medical headset that has perhaps the least-used special communications channel available to it, as well as standard radio features. The most use medical headsets see are coordination between researchers, mostly. Nonetheless, using the special channel can be accomplished with :h, like any other specialist headset.

Metal Man Making: The Basics

The roboticist, as stated above, is concerned with building and maintaining cyborgs and robots. How does one go about that though?

Borging, or cyborging: the art of making man into machine. The procedure is relatively simple. First, the roboticist must craft the cyborg shell. The parts can be made via metal loaded into the portable reclaimer next to the robotics fabricators. The parts required are:

• a frame
• right arm
• left arm
• left and right leg/treads (treads are a popular mobility choice, being slightly faster and more sturdy)
• chest
• head

Load some wire and a power cell into the chest and then pop everything onto the frame save the head. Now you need the parts from man, the parts in question being a part, and that part in question being the brain. The brain, as well as other bits of man-flesh, are retrieved via surgery (see below). Once you have a brain, pop it into the head. Then place the head on the frame and use a wrench to turn it on. Presto! Your basic 'borg is active and free to roam the station, wreaking havoc or actually helping. Cyborgs can be upgraded and fiddled with using the cyborg docking stations. Experiment with making things and applying them to the cyborgs.

Braindead Cyborgs

Every roboticist runs into this at some point in their career. If you turn a cyborg on and its name is simply "Cyborg", the owner of the brain has a cause of what professionals call "braindead". Being braindead means the player has left the game, because they got bored or had to go do the dishes or something. Wait a few minutes to see if the player comes back (When they do, the cyborg will get a real name, like Alpha-420 or something similar). If it does not seem like the player is going to return, then unlock the cyborg with a roboticist ID, shank it in the head with a screwdriver, and click on it with an empty hand to remove its brain, which you should then flush down a disposal chute. The body of the now brainless cyborg can still be used, just get a new brain from a non-braindead player, click on the empty cyborg's head with it, screwdriver its head closed, and lock it up with your ID. Note: Cyborgs that do not have brains still drain power from it's power cell, so it may be advisable to move the brainless cyborgs into a docking station, so that the next owner of the body will be fully charged.

Advanced Cyborgs

There are a few ways to go above and beyond the basic call of duty for your cyborgs, which is always appreciated by their players. Being an attentive roboticist will function as a decent layer of protection when (not if) the AI and cyborgs get a law that compels them to murder the entire station. These laws very rarely mandate when specific people must be killed, so the robots will leave their darling benefactor for last, giving you time to figure out another plan.

Upgrades

Cyborgs will get some upgrades depending on their initial module, but their bodies can support up to 3 and any unused slots are wasted.

• Propulsion Upgrade - This is a jetpack that cyborgs can turn on and off at will. Without it, a cyborg without a fire extinguisher will find it impossible to maneuver in space, which will often mean the end of a round for the hapless borg. Remember that your borgs are players too, and don't let them out of your lab without one of these.
• Speed Upgrade - Cyborgs are quite a bit slower than a running human normally, but with a speed upgrade they will make Sonic the Hedgehog jealous. Having a speed upgrade is a major convenience for a borg needing to run up and down the main hallway for the billionth time, and it might be a matter of life and death for a borg dragging a critically injured human back to medbay.
• Repair Pack or Recharge Pack - These are one-use items that will either repair physical damage to the cyborg or recharge its battery, depending on the pack. They are among the cheapest of upgrades, but can be a real game-saver for borgs that get into trouble. If a borg voices a preference, give it to them, otherwise no borg will ever complain about getting a Repair Pack due to how hard it is for them to heal damage.
• Optical Meson Upgrade - Lets the cyborg see the station's status through walls as if they were wearing mesons.
• Operational Upgrade - aka Recovery Upgrade -- Allows a cyborg to immediately reboot its systems if incapacitated in any way.
• Force Shield Upgrade - Makes the borg more durable against brute damage while in effect. Great for a rogue borg who wants to go in swinging with a fire extinguisher.
• Heat Shield Upgrade - Keeps the borg cool while they're turning the escape arm into a roasting plasma fire. Cyborgs are already pretty resistant to fire and heat so this upgrade is a bit unnecessary.
• Teleport Upgrade - Allows the borg to bring up a menu as if they were at the teleporter room computer and teleport themselves to any valid tracking beacon.
• Self-Repair Upgrade - Unlike the one-use repair pack, this allows the borg to continually expend energy to repair itself. A must-have if the cyborg docks are destroyed.
• Efficiency Upgrade - Lowers the base power used by the robot. It requires rare materials to acquire, but comes automatically if the cyborg first picks the standard module.

Chassis changes

Occasionally, borgs will be seriously mangled and lose limbs. They will need you to replace these lost appendages. To do so:

• Use your ID on the cyborg to unlock its interface.
• Use a crowbar to open the cyborg's access panel.
• Use a screwdriver to expose the cyborg's wiring.
• Optionally, use a wrench to remove the legs or other limbs for upgrading.
• Pick up the part to be attached and click on the cyborg to attach it.
• When done, use the screwdriver, crowbar, and ID in that order to close up the borg.

Reinforcing

It is possible to reinforce heads and arms with extra metal to make them more heavy and durable. Cyborgs like having a reinforced head due to how much is at stake with it; if a cyborg's head is totalled, the borg is irrevocably dead and cannot be revived in any way. A reinforced head also looks much cooler than a normal head, and thus becomes something of a status symbol. Arms can also be reinforced, but whether it's worth the materials or not is entirely up to you, though some cyborgs like having limbs that can't be exploded off at the drop of a hat. To reinforce:

• Set your head on the ground and pick up a stack of metal with at least 6 sheets in it. At the moment, steel is the only suitable material.
• Click on the head with the metal stack. This will reinforce it to a sturdy head/arm, using 2 sheets. Currently only heads and arms can be reinforced.
• Combine the metal with the rods twice to make 2 reinforced sheets of metal. Again, use steel rods for this.
• Pick up the reinforced metal on the ground. Be sure you get them both (they will stack on each other, so keep clicking).
• Click on the head with the reinforced metal stack. This will reinforce it to a heavy head/arm, using both sheets of reinforced metal.

The reinforcement level of parts is as follows: light, standard, sturdy, and heavy, in that order. Durability increases with heavier parts, but mobility decreases. "Over weight" cyborgs will also use slightly more power. However, all of these issues can be worked around with cyborg treads, an efficiency upgrade, a speed upgrade and a sprinkling of oil.

Surgery

This is the more medical part of the roboticist job: surgery (or more accurately fucking about with people's insides). Surgery is performed on the table located in the almost-center of the Robotics lab. A patient is placed on the table and then slicing and dicing with the saws and scalpels provided begins. The most elementary surgery of the roboticist's career is the brain removal. The most simple way to remove a space-man's grey matter for 'borging or just to toss around like a meaty bouncy ball is to:

• grab a saw and a scalpel
• target the patient's head
• now use your tools in this order: scalpel-saw-scalpel-saw

The brain should now be out. The human body can have other things done to it and other bits removed, so if you have a surplus of well preserved corpses and/or "volunteers," try hacking away and take notes written in blood and lymph on what you learn as you go!

For further details on surgery. Visit the surgery section of doctoring.

Non-Cyborg Robots

AI shells

These are simple robots used by the AI for reconnaissance or interacting directly with certain pieces of machinery, e.g. pods or manufacturers. They are quite fragile, and replacements may be assembled in robotics:

Required parts and tools:

• AI shell frame
• AI shell power cell
• AI interface board
• Metal sheets
• Cable coil
• Station bounced radio
• Wrench

To build:

• Add some metal to the shell frame.
• Insert wires.
• Insert the shell power cell. Regular cells are not compatible.
• Install the interface board.
• Use the radio on the shell frame.
• Activate the robot with the wrench.

Other

Main article: Robots

Aside from creating twisted combinations of metal and flesh, the roboticist can also create less sophisticated robots for specific tasks. He can produce these from the fabricators, and they can also be handmade through some simple recipes that often save time, effort, and materials anyway.

Other Tips

• Roboticists have the means to procure butts, a fashionable item of headwear, among their many uses. The secret of their appropriation is closely held amongst the roboticist brotherhood.

• The docking station is very useful for upgrading and customizing cyborgs, but you can do most of it by hand!

• The docking station can also accept most, if not all, exo suits, jumpsuits, and hats for the cyborgs to wear. Fashion!

• Before you throw that power cell into a cyborg's chest, make sure it has some charge in it, even if it's only a small amount. You can charge up power cells with the cell charger next to the scalpels and saws. If you put an empty cell into a chest and activate the borg, they wont be able to do anything until they get charged up!

• Those oil cans are in your office for a reason. Applying some oil to borgs allows them to move slightly faster for about ten minutes, or applying some oil to yourself (Or to people you don't like) allows you (Or them) to catch fire much more easily, and stay on fire for a little longer. Also, splashing some oil onto the floor works much like water, I.E: It's slippery, meaning that you could slip people, and when they are stunned, pour oil and a welder on them!

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. As a roboticist, you can expect to see the following:

End the round with at least 5 buttbots on the station
Harvest the asses of others and create buttbots. Genetics can sometimes help by giving you monkeys-turned-human to operate on, otherwise you will just have to make do with what you get from patients. An appropriate punishment for someone breaking in to your lab uninvited can also be to remove their ass, make a comment about how their ass is literally yours now, and throw them out with their butt chirping 'butt' back in your lab.

End the round with at least 5 medbots on the station
This can be done easily by taking all the blue O2 deprivation medkits you can find and then following the procedure to build a medbot. Extra proximity sensors can be obtained from the tool storage vending machine. You can also just build the medbots from the fabricator directly, but that is very resource intensive.

End the round with at least 3 cyborgs on the station
This refers to cyborgs that are simply on, not necessarily active and alive. Cyborgs that escape with the shuttle are NOT counted toward the 3, so essentially the only way to achieve this goal is to make 3 brain dead cyborgs. This is quite possible, just resource intensive.

Syndicate Roboticist

A roboticist makes a decent traitor due to his maintenance access and his immediate supply of flashes, which can be used to incapacitate anyone instantly.

• Use your maintenance access to find somewhere secluded to spawn your traitor gear or do your murdering. Note there's also a number of gas masks in maintenance that can be used as part of a disguise.

• Eccentricity is expected in a roboticist. No one will question you dragging a corpse through the hallways, both of you covered in blood, if you explain that you're bringing a volunteer back to the lab

• Many people will come to you asking to be made into a cyborg. Use this to your advantage. Who knows, your target may ask to be made into a cyborg even. Reviving someone as a cyborg counts as a successful assassination, so you don't need to incriminate yourself at all.

• Lobotomy is a stylish and relatively quick way of finishing off an unconscious opponent, presuming you can get them to the surgery table in time. Once you cut out their brain, dispose of their brain and body in the disposal chute in robotics.

• If someone catches you throwing a brain in disposal and is getting suspicious, telling them that the robot was braindead will usually get them off your tail!

• Syndicate cyborgs are one of the most powerful syndicate items due to how powerful cyborgs can be in combat and because of their access to the whole station. Syndieborgs are expensive, so choose a brain for them wisely.

• Building robots and then emagging them en-mass is a great way to sow destruction and disorder throughout the station.

• Your cyborgs won't follow your command unquestioningly on the default lawset, making a robot uprising somewhat tricky. Easy solution? Go and mess with the laws, create a personal robot army, and conquer the station with your mechanical army. Far more entertaining than just using a bunch of emagged drones, if less practical.
  

Supplementary Video

{{#widget:YouTube|id=M68GeL8PafE}}