Engineer

ENGINEERING STAFF

Engineer

Access: Engineering, Tech Storage, External Airlocks, Maintenance, Engines Qualifications: At least 25 years of age, applicable Bachelors degree or 7 years experience in engineering-related field. Employers: Hephaestus Industries, Zavodskoi Interstellar Supervisors: Chief Engineer Duties: Start the engine, repair the hull, point an emitter at a blob. Forget your insulated gloves and shock all of the blood from your body after touching a wire. Guides: Hacking, Guide to Construction, Guide to Thrusters, Supermatter Engine, Telecommunications, Guide to Shields, Guide to Gunnery

As a Ship Engineer, you are the individual who provides power to the ship and keeps it running. When called upon, you may also be asked to hack a door, debug a vending machine, and clean up a Xenobotanist's mess. You watch over the engine, ensure the electrical machinery aboard the ship is up and running, and, most of all, repair the ship when it inevitably explodes due to unforeseen consequences.

Starting Out and Equipment

You spawn in your engineering break room, right next to shield control and above the engineering deck. Your initial equipment is a hard hat, a t-ray scanner, a tool belt, and assorted departmental uniforms and headsets. Before getting right into any repairs, you will require:

• Insulated gloves: Impossibly useful and found in an electrical locker, they shield your hands from any electrical damage you might take while you're dealing with wires. Never forget insulated gloves.
• Multitool: Found in an electrical locker. Useful for hacking doors, checking the power running through cables, and changing the color of cable coil.
• Global positioning device: Found in your personal locker. Click on it while it is in your hand to set your GPS tag, and track other GPSes.
• Welding goggles/helmet: A helmet or set of goggles to be worn when you are welding; if you don't wear them while you weld, say hello to eye damage.

In your loadout and in your personal equipment locker, you can equip items such as drop pouches, webbing, and engineering overalls. These have several extra storage slots that you can use to store your myriad equipment. Hazard vests enable an engineer to wear an emergency oxygen tank in the suit storage slot. And of course, your suit sensors are excellent to enable for when you fall victim to a workplace accident.

In the Engineering storage room, there are also stacks of steel, glass, plasteel, and inflatable doors. It is highly recommended you prepare a duffel bag with materials, circuit boards, and any extra gear you may require, so you may quickly respond to any damages that occur. It is also helpful to have a prepared voidsuit. To assemble one for yourself, apply magboots and a helmet to the main suit item, and fill an oxygen tank. Attach the oxygen tank to the suit, and equip the suit when necessary. Remember your magboots when entering a vacuum!

If your materials are all gone, more can be obtained from a sub-level storage on Deck 1, or ordered from Operations.

Doing Your Duty

Your primary task is to keep the ship powered, and the air supply breathable and inside the ship. Apart from that, you will frequently face smaller events such as glitching vending machines, broken cameras, or the occasional wall-destroying fungi. All of these are simple to fix, and can be overcome by communication with your team and a clear head. Your teamwork, however, will be tested when the level 7 biohazard alarm rings.

Starting the Engine

See: Supermatter Engine

Your most important task at the start of the shift. Luckily, provided you follow directions, it is simple to set up. It is highly recommended that you ask a more senior engineer to assist you with engine setup if you are new to the work.

Working the Thrusters

See: Guide to Thrusters

The thrusters are the purview of your Atmospheric Technician colleagues; however, if they're not around, you might have to set them up yourself. Use the guide as a reference, and good luck!

Fixing the Ship

See: Guide to Construction

As an engineer, it is your job to repair a door, re-pressurize a vented area, seal a hull breach, or repair broken furniture. This versatility also gives you the leeway to start renovation projects on the ship, and add elements that weren't there prior for convenience. However, this requires permission from the Chief Engineer to start out on.

Power Management

You can use your ID on the Power Monitoring Computer to remotely controls APCs. In the event that your power sources run dry, it may be worth turning off a few unneeded APCs or entire departments via the RCON. On the other hand, make sure to charge everything with excess power in advance whenever possible.

Guide to Power Storage Units

A diagram of the supermatter's PSU. Red indicates at least one wire knot where a cable line ends. When lines have overlapping knots they are connected. Green is the input line. Note it ends with a knot under the terminal, the only way they can work. Blue is the output. Note how it feeds into the terminal of an APC. Cyan is the bypass, running from input into the breaker box and then output, merging them. The wires directly under the breaker disappear when it's disabled, separating the grids.

A Power Storage Unit (PSU), or Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) in the US and Canada, is an industrial battery capable of drawing electricity from one power grid and sending it to another. This allows Horizon's grid to be divided into multiple sub-grids, each powered by a self-sustaining PSU called a "substation". The reactors feed power into their PSUs, which feed the master grid, which feeds the substations, which feed the local department grids, which feed their APCs. If you're ever confused between the master grid and a sub-grid, remember that the master grid is the red line and the department grids are all green.

Power enters both PSUs and Area Power Controllers (APC) through a terminal. The output leaves through a wire knot under the PSU, which if wired properly never has to touch the input line running into the terminal. If a PSU lacks the power demanded by its local grid, you can open the floodgates to the master grid by enabling its breaker bypass. A breaker, which is always beside a PSU, creates a wire bypass from the input grid to the output grid when enabled, and removes it when disabled. This merges the grids and "bypasses" the PSU entirely, hence the term. All substation breakers start the round enabled. You can learn more about breakers and when to turn them off in the RCON section further down.

Magnetic Coils

Every PSU is comprised of 1-6 magnetic coils which determine the unit's stats. A PSU will always start with 1 coil when it's constructed. More can be added by clicking a unit with a coil while it's screwed open, has 0% charge, and completely turned off. But be careful: once a coil is in, the only way to get it out is to disassemble the entire unit. You can see what coils are in a PSU by examining it while the hatch is open. Coils have 2 stats: capacity, how much more charge a PSU with it can hold, and throughput, how much more power it can input/output. Our Lord and Saviour Titanius Aeson has bestowed upon us 3 types of magnetic coils, each with varying stats:

• Superconductive magnetic coil. Jack of all trades, master of none. While it has only decent throughput and capacity, it's a safe bet for a basic PSU and is the only coil that can be ordered from operations.
• Superconductive transmission coil. As its name suggests, it transmits the most power with the highest throughput. The downside is its capacity is a fraction of the throughput, meaning though it will charge fast it will deplete itself just as quickly.
• Superconductive capacitance coil. The opposite of the transmission coil with the highest capacity at the cost of abysmal throughput. A PSU with these will hold a charge for hours—assuming you have time to charge it to 100% with such low input.

You can find a crate with every type of coil in engineering hard storage. Mix and match to experiment with different setups!

Construction

1. Set a wire knot on the tile the PSU will go, ideally not facing where you want the terminal to be. This is the output line, and you'll want to plan ahead of time where it runs before the finished machine is in the way.
2. Use in hand at least 2 steel sheets, navigate to construction recipes and then machine blueprint. This will be your new PSU. You can pull it around if need-be or scrap it with wirecutters.
3. Click the machine blueprint with an empty hand to "finalise" it.
4. Add 5 power cable coils to the blueprint.
5. Insert a "superconductive magnetic energy storage" circuit board into the blueprint. You can find a crate with one in engineering hard storage or request one from the machinist/scientist.
6. If you examine the blueprint you can now see all parts required to finish it: 1 magnetic coil of any type and 30 power cable coils. Magnetic coils can be found in the same box with the circuit board or you can order them from operations.
7. Use a screwdriver on the blueprint once everything is in. You now have an anchored PSU.
8. Unscrew the PSU's maintenance hatch and, standing where you want the terminal to go, use 10 power cable coils on it. Screw the hatch back shut and your brand new PSU is finished! Make sure a powered line is running into the terminal and the output line under the PSU is connected to the grid you want powered. If you laid the wiring correctly the input should read as charging and the output as outputting. If not, refer to the PSU diagram to troubleshoot what you did wrong.
9. (Optional) With the hatch unscrewed use a multitool on the PSU to add it to the RCON. Always make sure it's screwed shut when you're done. You can check by examining.

Deconstruction

1. To safely diassemble a PSU it must first be fully discharged. Maximise the output while disabling the input and wait for the charge to reach 0%.
2. Once the PSU is discharged, make sure both input and output are off. It will forbid you from modifying it if either is on.
3. Unscrew the PSU's maintenance hatch and use wirecutters on it. This will cut the terminal.
4. Use a crowbar to pry out the PSU's components. You will be left with a machine blueprint.
5. Strip the blueprint's wires with wirecutters.
6. Disassemble the blueprint with a wrench.

Setting Up RCON

RCON is the term for the remote-control power network that runs through the entire ship. When you set up the Supermatter at the start of the round, the power it generates will run freely through its connected power storage unit , and to the rest of the ship. Depending on the setup you are using, this can mean any amount of electricity from three to ten megawatts running through the grid.

There are several issues with this:

• If someone accidentally touches a wire, they will be severely injured.
• With no prior changes to RCON, the grid will attempt to supply every APC on the ship with an equal amount of power. Depending on the amount of power being generated by the engines, this can overload the grid and bottleneck the power.

In practice, what this means is editing how much power each power storage unit receives from the engine. If you browse the RCON Remote Control program on an engineering console, you can see all of the substations on the ship. Each of these substations is labelled with the department and area they power.

By default, the values all substations are set to are set to 15,0000 watts input, and 14,0000 watts output. Below is a table that recommends values you can set each substation to.

RCON Values

Substation	Input Value (W)	Output Value (W)
Deck 3 Civilian	150,000	140,000
Deck 3 Command	150,000	140,000
Engineering Lower Deck	210,000	200,000
Engineering Main Deck	110,000	100,000
Hangar	150,000	140,000
Medical	150,000	140,000
Operations	150,000	140,000
Research	210,000	200,000
Security	150,000	140,000
Service	150,000	140,000
Xenoarchaeology	110,000	100,000

Research, which includes the Machinist workshop, draws a significant amount of power due to the many machines running off its grid. Engineering Lower Deck requires a large amount of power because of the atmospheric systems. It's worth noting that the power needs may change throughout the round depending on how many guns security is charging at the moment. You can use the Power Monitoring program on an engineering console to get a good idea of what departments may need more power at any given moment.

At the bottom of the RCON program, you will see a list of breaker controls. These control whether the bypass that allows the main grid to directly power the department grids is on or off. You will want to turn all of these off, but make sure that the substations mentioned above are slightly charged before you turn off bypasses. At best, you'll have the common channel annoyedly informing you their power is gone; at worst, you'll have ship-wide blackouts as power adjusts.

Traitoring

Being a traitor engineer can be both the easiest and hardest task on the ship. On the one hand, you can go almost everywhere on the ship, and have easy access to the tools to get rid of any pesky doors (or walls) in your way. Also, many crew members don't bat an eyelid when they see an engineer wearing a jetpack, or standing in a hole in the wall. Any curious crewmen are usually deflected by saying you are doing engineering work ("I need this to repair hull damage, Captain!")

On the other hand, Engineers lack ranged weapons. With the right know-how, you can easily use the fire axe or make your own weapons. Also note, engineers loitering near their target may quickly arouse suspicion without a good task at hand. Find something to do like APC upgrades or installing some spare stuff like lights or machines. And finally, if you truly hate the ship, it is within your grasp to generally sabotage the power supply of the ship, but you should only touch the main engines after making sure that it is okay with staff via an ahelp.

Engineering Apprentice

ENGINEERING STAFF

Engineering Apprentice

Access: Engineering, Tech Storage, External airlocks, Maintenance Qualifications: At least 18 years of age, currently studying for an applicable Bachelors degree or under 7 years experience in any engineering-related field. Employers: Hephaestus Industries, Zavodskoi Interstellar Supervisors: Chief Engineer, All of Engineering. Duties: Assist Engineering in all of their tasks, be supervised. Learn! Guides: Hacking, Guide to Construction, Guide to Thrusters, Supermatter Engine, Telecommunications, Guide to Shields

As an Engineering Apprentice, you are here to get hands-on experience in Engineering. Either you are new to engineering, demoted, or waiting for some missing paperwork, like your bachelor's degree. This is a learners' role, you shouldn't be expected to know much about Engineering in this role, but the skill gap is pretty much open-ended. Someone at the end of their studies might just lack practical experience for example but know a ton about the power grid theory. Established characters shouldn't jump into this position outside of very unique circumstances like CCIA actions or other staff approval.