Technical Assistant

ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT
Technical Assistant
Technical Assistant	Difficulty: Easy Requirements: None Access Level: Maintenance, 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: Power Grid, Construction, Guide to Wiring, Gas, 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 important. After all, would you want to work in a station/ship that's dark, on fire, and full of holes?

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.

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 mailman clothing.

Mailman clothing isn't always easy to come by, it can usually be found somewhere along Belt Hell.

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.