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.

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.