Roboticist

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

The Roboticist

The Roboticist is a specialized Medical department profession concerned with building, maintaining, upgrading, and overseeing the station's population of Cyborgs and lesser Robots. They do not have access to any other restricted Medical areas, such as the Medbay, and are generally somewhat apart from the rest of their department. 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 due north of the Medbay lobby. 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. Note that anybody in close proximity to your headset will be able to hear it. Roboticists also possess a mechanical toolbox which contains various tools that will come in handy when making and fiddling with 'Borgs 'n' 'Bots. An incredibly helpful upgrade for your job, available from Robotics autolathes, is the Machine Translator Implant, which is described below but basically allows a human being to participate in the robot talk comms channel, sending and recieving messages this way. Savvy Roboticists can be counted on to implant themselves with this device, and may even prepare a few for Heads to facilitate better communications.

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- 'Borging, 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 Robotics autolathes. 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. Thne place the head on 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.

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. For a complete listing of upgrades, check the Items page. Below are the most often-used upgrades, due to their use and ease to produce.

• Propulsion Upgrade - This is a Jetpack that cyborgs can turn on and off at will. Without it, a Cyborg without a Fire Extinguisher on his chassis 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.

Chassis changes

Occasionally, borgs will get 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.
• 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.

You can also click on a cyborg with its wiring exposed with an empty hand to remove appendages. This is useful in the very rare case a borg asks you to replace its legs with superior treads.

Reinforcing

It is possible to reinforce heads, arms, and legs with extra metal to make them more heavy and durable. Most cyborgs prefer treads to legs, and arms are often not worth upgrading, but cyborgs like having a reinforced head due to how much is at stake with it. If a cyborg's head is totaled, 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. To reinforce:

• Set your head on the ground and pick up a stack of metal with at least 6 sheets in it.
  
• Click on the head with the metal stack. This will reinforce it to a Sturdy head, using 2 sheets.
• Double click on the metal stack in your hand and choose to make 2 reinforced sheets of metal, using 4 sheets total.
• 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, using both sheets of reinforced metal.

Heavy parts will put a cyborg 'over weight' and will make the cyborg use slightly more energy, so be sure to give it a high-capacity battery.

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 shit done to it and other bits removed, so if you have a surplus of un-rotten corpses and/or "volunteers," try hacking away and take notes written in blood and lymph on what you learn as you go!

Non-Cyborg 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. There are a lot of these and they are not the pure domain of the Roboticist, so for information on these please see the Robots article.

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.

• If your tools are stolen or go missing, you can make more with your fabricator.

• Oh no, are you out of flashes? Hack the fabricator!

Treachery

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 gasmasks 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 body in the waste chute next to the operating table for a stealthy kill.

• Syndieborgs 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.
  

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