A few ideas for marine equipment

[Mr.Smooooth]

Suggestion Title: Field Blood Transfusion Kit

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): Add a box to squad medic prep containing blood bags and an IV drip. The IV drip can be made collapsible similar to the roller bed to fit, or it can be a separate handheld version.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): Additional medical equipment will allow field medics to keep their squad fighting longer and harder, improving both their enjoyment of the round and the enjoyment of their team. This is especially useful when a team is surrounded and pinned in a location and retreating to the Sulaco medbay to treat wounds that caused loss of large quantities of blood is not an option. Theoretically this can also be used to set up an IV for painkillers during field operations, or an IV for tricord as brute damage to a limb must heal to above 50 before you can mend bones.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): I actually belive this was covered in the above field, making this redundant. Feel free to correct me, I'll edit.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): Most of this already exists. The tough part is the IV drip itself. Part of me says make the ones we have collapsible and once collapsed(You can probably use the roller bed code for this), small enough to fit in the box. This will need to be sprited, but its one sprite of a collapsed drip. Blood bags and medkits already exist in the game. Maybe color a standard medkit blood red and give it a special emblem, like a red teardrop label to indicate its a blood kit. One Collapsable IV and 6 blood bags(Or 3 blood bags and 3 bottles of helpful meds like Tramadol, Tricord or Dexalin to help keep a patient stable in surgery.), preferably o- as we can't ask an unconscious marine his blood type and have no med-record access in the field. Baymed doesn't leat people dealing with blood rejection live long, Toxic shock will kill in moments


Suggestion Title: Upgrades to the Grenade Launcher

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): Remaking the grenade launcher into an actual useful piece of kit for the squad.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): Marines get a shiny somewhat new toy to play with, an excellent support weapon to help a squad hold out against Xenos or push into dangerous area.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): The grenade launcher as it is, sucks. Can't carry it anywhere but your hands, 3 shots, and no really useful grenades for it. By changing this we can create a decent squad support weapon. First thing is to make it the same size as the pulse rifle, and able to be stored in all the same slots. This alone makes it more viable to at least have someone bring it along. Second thing is to increase the magazine size, double it to 6. More nades, more fun. Add a way to remove the loaded nades, a verb somewhere. Increase the number of smoke and weedkiller grenades given to troops, and optionally provide a weak explosive as well for offensive oomph

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): Unfortunately, this is mostly altering code and adjusting item spawns. Ajusting the spawns for more grenades seems trival but I'm not sure about adjusting the launcher itself.

[Rahlzel]

Suggestion Title: Field Blood Transfusion Kit

1. We may as well just have a box that medics carry around that unpacks into a full Medbay.
2. Quick Clot was made for this. Marines are meant to be treated in the field to stop immediate death, but transferred to Medbay to regain full health.

[TopHatPenguin]

The way I see it as a medic you get two things to stop bleeding..

1) A roll of gauze for impact bleeding
2) Quick Clot for internal bleeding

As you already have these things above I feel it kind of makes the foldable iv drip and blood bags redundant. If I am wrong please tell me as I don't play medic but from what I have played as a medic I don't really think you need the blood bags and iv drip.

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Oh yeah the grenade launcher seems like a ok idea but what would you replace the current ammo it has now with ? because if is with actual grenades I can already hear the weeping from dead chat of...

Alien Sentinel 666 : "damn OP nade launchers plz nerf so I don't get insta gibbed"

That is my opinion on the nade launcher anyway unless you have a different ammo type to normal grenades or lower the damage my views will stay the same on this.

[Caroes]

As much as I want an IV kit that packs into a box with several O- bloodbags, coming from a medic it'd sort of over simplify healing/sounds overpowered. One of the reasons untreated blood loss is a big deal is that you have to haul your wounded marine back to the sulfa I or your FOB to deal with it. We already have surgery kits so we can perform surgery anywhere (which is insane) but adding a collapsible IV lot just makes medics sort of fill the role of sulaco medics better.

[Mycroft Macarthur]

caroes is right as far as saying it would make field medics even better then the sulaco ones, i've played sulaco medic a few times and half the round is boring as all crap because you just have to sit there with very little to do, sure you can make chems but if there are multiple doctors (there typically are) then one guy will usually take over that part of the medbay near completely so all you have to do is wait for wounded to come back so you can treat them, i understand wanting to be able to handle this in the field but if field medics really can do it all then the sulaco medic may as well be taken out of the game.

think back to red vs blue, it is the job of a doctor to heal you, all a medic really does is hold your hand while you die.

while we should be doing ABIT more then that here, quite frankly its a pain in the ass trying to carry meds for every possible situation anyways and still be combat capable, far easier to just get them stable and move them back to the sulaco.

this would be further hampered by the fact it seems a single blood bag is usually not enough to bring someone back up to 95% when they get low and we have NO IDEA which blood type someone will happen to need, most players will not remember what choice they set (assuming they did at all), sulaco medics have consoles with med reports that list their type but if you give them the wrong one in the field you will end up doing more harm then good, for a mobile IV drip kit to work you would need to be carrying an OBSCENE amount of blood bags for all the types.

the final caveat is that, aliens hardly ever seem to do bleeding damage anyways, the injuries THEY are responsible for more often then not are broken bones, if people are bleeding out its because the marines are shooting each OTHER, you dont need an IV to fix that, you need better trigger discipline (or you need to find out why someone has gone rogue and put them down if it was intentional), only YOU can stop friendly fire and no treatment for injury is faster then not having caused it to begin with.

[Mr.Smooooth]

Actually you'd only need to carry O-, as O- is the universal donor. O- blood can be donated to any person. Even if the drip isn't used for blood, it does help with field surgery to have medicines being delivered during the procedure to help stabilise the marine. Even if this isen't used for fear of rendering the Sulaco Medic completely obsolete, I thought it was a worth while idea to kick out there.

I've noticed nobody talks about the Grenads Launcher suggestion. Any thoughts on that?

Expanding on that idea a bit more, grenades can be given various payloads. Metal Foam grenades could be used for area denial, throwing up quick barricades that the aliens will need to tear down/melt through. Potentially healing grenades (Beneficial Raegents and a smoke cloud) could be used to bolster a wounded squad. Weedkiller and smoke are already in the code, and have their own niches. Personally, I think a light explosive, nothing too powerful could be a gamechanger in a good way. Marines have a rough time pushing into area held by the aliens. Aliens tend to find a marine FOB and lay siege, making it difficult to execute operations on other parts of the nostromo until they can break the siege. Aliens call it bullshit turtleing, and marines call it "We can't push out against them, they have the advantage in close quarters with their bullshit healing weeds". Giving the marines a support weapon like the GL with a handful of harmful explosive grenades allows a marine using the GL, backed up by his squad to become a force multiplier. He's carrying heavy weapons, and can break sieges by lobbing grenades into the breach. This also gives them the power to push easier into alien nests, another area marines find themselves at extreme disadvantage. Mostly due to lolnesting making CQC impossible. Using the GL will be impractical for a lone marine, due to the splash damage making it hard to target aliens once they get close, forcing marines to employ squad level tactics to make the best use of the weapon.

Obviously the power of the explosive grenade will need to be made powerful enough to be useful, but carefully moderated to prevent abuse. Other grenade types will also need to be checked for balance. Even crazier grenade payloads could come from placing grenade materials in Sulaco's chem lab but since those won't be available early round, and need a chemist who knows their craft to make them without killing himself its more forgivable.

[Mycroft Macarthur]

my apologies for not touching up on that portion of your suggestion in my earlier post, i have been thoroughly scatterbrained all week i feel.

on the one hand i definitely agree the GL as it is is fucking crap, i would love seeing either some grenades for it that would actually make it useful against the aliens, or new round types that would give us enemies flashbangs would be useful against (syndicates or rival marine organizations for example), i am unsure how i feel about doubling the clip capacity though, even if we had infinite weedkillers you may as well just toss them like normal, no reason you need to bring a GL just for that, flashbangs are fucking garbage and if they added damage nades, well if you can fire nonstop nades then it becomes less of an edge and more instant-win, even low damage grenades will fucking END the aliens if you can keep unloading on them (and why wouldnt you? better to confirm a few kills and go through half your nades then for him to get wounded, go hide in the hive for two seconds and come back at max), a way it could POSSIBLY work is if the nades were some kind of damage over time effect, napalm for example, while deadly to the aliens it does not do INSTANT damage in the same way an explosive or a gun does so it could be abit more balanced depending on a few factors (and probably the only reliable way marines will ever get fire damage based weapons since the odds of us ever getting flamethrowers feels next to nothing)

removing the loaded nades could POSSIBLY work but that sounds like it could make things super wonky depending on how it was implemented, i guess you could just use the same or similar code as the shotguns pump action which ejects whatever happens to be in the chamber at the time, the idea of a pump action GL sounds funny to me but i dont see any reason why it wouldnt be POSSIBLE in terms of the science at least. increasing smoke and weedkiller amount also sounds very viable and desirable to me overall, the weedkillers are completely useless given how few there are (not even enough to clear out a single hallway) and its goddamn forever to clear that shit using knives, i know that clearing weeds shouldnt be our PRIMARY priority and i dont know if i feel marines should be able to clear the whole ship effortlessly but a few more then we have now certainly would help bring them back, though i doubt GL will ever get to chill in a suit slot for the same reasons the shotguns will never get to.

and then theres the downsides.

any time i notice the GL missing from one of the standard prep rooms i cringe, the GL is very VERY sensitive, with every other gun or weapon i have to double click to fire or use it but the grenade launcher will go off at the slightest touch, looking at something? it fires, you examine someone? it fires, the sky happens to be blue? it fires, admin pm's you? it fires, someone bumps into you? it fires.

i cannot imagine or recall a more sensitive weapon in ANY ss13 server i've ever played and i've seen some crazy ass shit in my time.

not only that but, heres a problem with the gl, when do we tend to need it the most? the aliens almost always avoid charging us down a hallway or fighting in the open because that typically means we've got em by the balls because the entire fucking squad can unload on them, we always need it because they hide behind a wall or a corner or a cramped ass tunnel where we have to fight them one at a time or something like that.

the really, REALLY crowded parts of the ship.

we've ALL fought in viro or xeno at least ONCE ill bet, you've seen how crowded and crazy that shit gets, the crazy amount of friendly fire that goes around, some asshole always moves you (guess help intent wasnt so helpful afterall huh) and suddenly your clear shot lands in a marines back, or they move in front of you and again, it lands in a marines back, or they charge in and protect the aliens from YOUR fire, at least its not so bad considering that our body armor is pretty resilient against guns, i've seen guys get shot point blank from shotguns and walk away more or less untouched, happened to ME on several occaisions, these suits of body armor? do JACK FUCKING SHIT against fire and against explosions, we would see friendly fire incidents increase SIGNIFICANTLY because frankly, even when we have EPIC trigger discipline it just cant always be helped, the difference between headshots and chest shots sure wont matter when you are lobbing BOMBS at people. what if we had some kind of poison gas? the aliens dont breathe and there are maybe two gas masks on the entire sulaco, about six on the nostromo that are easy to find (good luck scouring the ship for the rest) so have fun explaining to an admin why you killed your entire squad, maybe we could make the weedkillers hurt the aliens JUST abit or stop their regen for awhile (the aliens and the weeds are made of the same material right?) that could possibly work but even then the weedkiller is a giant series of smoke clouds that blind us for a few seconds, we cant see while the aliens typically can, even if we COULD engage them in melee we cant see them to click on them (even then though it actually sounds like a pretty good idea, maybe we should do that)

[apophis775]

No. I'm trying to shift the focus BACK to Sulaco Medics, this works against that.