Misc Item Vending Machine

[Mycroft Macarthur]

Suggestion Title: Misc Item Vending Machine

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): we add a new machine to the squad room armories as well as the basic armories filled with extra supplies that the marines can often need or use but is currently inconvenient to find

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): this will make it easier for the marines to prepare for a variety of different threats and situations as they are better able to equip themselves to prepare for things, this would also carry body armor and helmets for when you get hugged and lose your helmet and then need to get another, or for late joiners who join a round late into the game, join a squad, get to their squad armory and find all the lockers barren and devoid of kit.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): basically one of the vending machines in the armory would be replaced with a new type of vending machine, instead of vending weapons and ammunition it would stock, and subsequently vend a wide array and amount of more mundane items such as flashlights, gas masks, emergency extended oxygen tanks, body armor, helmets, boots and so on, by improving access to gas masks and quality oxygen tanks marines would be better equipped to survive hull breaches in either the sulaco or nostromo (which are becoming more and more common these days, both intentional and accidental) or accidental plasma leaks, we would be able to carry additional flashlights in either our pocket or mount them onto guns (especially handy if we lose the ONE gun we attached our flashlight to since we can get more and attach them to replacement firearms, or do so in advance) and of course this would aid people who for whatever reason, have no gear or just have to replace gear they somehow lost, sure we can just crack open a new locker and grab from those (assuming any are left) but in so doing we are STEALING from whoever would have joined up and needed the contents of that locker.

i personally find that at the start of every round i have to spend time going to the opposite end of the ship and grabbing gas masks and extended 02 emergency tanks before i can go follow my squad, the base blue ones are crap and only really meant for quick, sudden emergencies anyways and even then there are never enough to go around so breaches are WAY more harmful then we would like, only a small few of us will even think to bother given the hassle we have to go through and not all of us will find the supplies we're looking for, in the event of a breach only a scant few of us will survive and admins sometimes have to deal with reviving people once aliens use breaching as a grief method, likewise alot of marines will end up switching to hardsuit helmets or weld helmets after losing theirs, sometimes the reason being that weld masks are sometimes the ONLY THING WE CAN FIND, if the armory in the back gets opened we have spare helmets there but its the same as before, we're stealing them from late joiners who will then not be able to properly equip, its abit easier if the room below the armory is opened since this is the exact reason for it but it almost never is, by being able to vend spare gear from a machine we save alot of time and hassle for all parties involved.

you could bring up balance issues but these arent sec hardsuits or badass new weapons, is the game really going to be broken by being able to carry oxygen JUST IN CASE or by having extra flashlights? sure we might go to the trouble to strap them to every gun we can but again, it isn't suddenly making us unstoppable simply because we can see better, i cant imagine a military would make equipment of this kind so rare given how relatively inexpensive a flashlight is compared to a firearm (while still being incredibly useful or necessary in many scenarios), we could carry two lit ones in our pockets for extra lighting but remember, we keep the pockets for quick, easy item access so each flashlight is one less ammunition magazine, autoinjector or other useful tools, its a tactical choice, i've lost count of how many times i've grabbed flashlights from other lockers at round start because there simply aren't enough to go around

but mycroft, bringing gas masks and oxygen is meta! having extra helmets is META!

well, that depends on your definition, marines are the type of people who try to plan for possible contingencies, a military would keep a ready supply of gas masks as part of their NBC protection just in case because you have no idea what to expect, and the oxygen? WE'RE IN FUCKING SPACE! its not unreasonable to figure it MIGHT come up, especially in light of the aforementioned need for militaries to maintain proper NBC protection, we have no idea what to expect, as for why we would have rows upon rows of spare body armor? aside from the part where we DO have rows upon rows of spare guns (so we're expecting to really really need a few spares since we may lose alot of it) we would end up likely keeping spare body armor and helmets for the same reason we do the guns, in case we lose it, and if not there is one other important reason we would carry some and that is due to how body armor works.

since this is our first IC encounter with the aliens we would likely have gotten body armor designed with the assumption we would be facing other enemies who use guns and body armor and so on, armor designed to protect against bullet fire is designed to chip or ablate, in so doing it deforms the incoming bullet and absorbs the force of the impact, the body armor is designed to protect us by breaking essentially, however this only works so much and eventually you have to replace the armor in question to still receive any real protection from it (one of the reasons modern body armor is made of cloth plate carriers, when shot you only have to replace the plates inside the carrier and not the entire thing), ergo we would have plenty of spares for when we need to trade out.

those are just a few of the examples of the sorts of spare gear or mundane items we would want to have quick and ready access to which wouldn't significantly break the game, i am sure other players could come up with a few but these seem the most practical (perhaps you could also add a way so it can vend spare squad leader radios in case we lose the last SL, but it will only vend that specific item if you swipe your ID and you have the appropriate rank)

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): i imagine this would work the same as when you made the current armory vending machines, i suppose you could make a new sprite to differentiate it but thats hardly necessary and everything the machines would or could vend is already something that exists in the game which we would reasonably have access to in large quantity, again, we're not likely to break the game with flashlights

[apophis775]

THese items are all available in Cargo.