If the AI refuses to listen to you, you have to go around turning on the air alarm filters literally everywhere, including places you cant access normally.
Whenever I get an order as AI to "SET ALL THE SCRUBBERS TO FILTER TOXINS", I facepalm a little. For one, I hate meatbags ordering me to do THEIR job for them. And secondly, preemptively setting all filters only ever pays off when atmosia fucks up hard and the entire station gets flooded with FUN... at this point you have failed as an oh so eager atmosian.
If there's an atmospherical hazard in an area, you should go there anyway to inspect damage, secure/seal the area, etc. While you're there, you can adjust the scrubbers too. That's the most fun part of being an atmos tech - running around the station, fixing shit... not sitting in your office with a remote air alarm computer to your left and a security cam monitor to your right, pushing buttons.
If you fail to gain entry to the hazardous zone, it's the fault of the AI/your hacking or people skills.
Atmos techs need more shit to do in general, so this would be great
Not having to leave atmospherics to do your job results in 'more shit to do'?
This will make plasma flooding the whole station super easy, FYI.
Hardest part about being a potato atmos tech is gaining entrance to all the parts of the station you want to hit with your gases. You could hit security with a plasma flood like 2 minutes into the round with remote control.
This remote control would be great to satisfy your OCD though... by allowing you to adjust minor atmos problems with a few button presses so that the alerts vanish from the list.
=====Not related to the topic, really======
It takes the whole round to purge the 10% plasma someone flooded into the distro and is now appearing all over the station.
That's the atmos tech's fault then.
Do not fill distro with too much air. Don't do it. 300-500 kpa is a healthy amount of pressure to have in distro. 9000 kpa is NOT. Volumetric pump on 'Air to Distro' is scrublord-level atmos unless the station has been turned into swiss cheese by meteors.
The distro loop is huge, thus it can hold a lot of gas. If you lazily pump it full of air and later on some guy introduces plasma into it, don't complain that you need ages to get all the gas back out again.
Or, you know, get crafty. There's so many more ways to unfuck pipes than simply pumping it out.
Portable scrubbers take waay too damn long to filter the toxins out of the air
Yup, agreed. That said, scubbers taking so long leaves a time window for THAT GUY to throw THAT LIT LIGHTER into the plasma, for added fun.
Rounds as atmos techs are only boring if you do your job as an atmos tech so well that nothing terrible can ever happen.
Portable pumps, likewise, take way too long to pump air into areas.
You know... you can adjust their pressure check. This way a pump filled with 9000 kpa of stuff can empty out in ~ 5 seconds.
Atmos has very robust tools at its disposal. A good atmos tech can turn a room gone inferno into a cozy lounge complete with black jack and hookers in a few minutes. Biggest problems with atmospherics as it is now are:
- easily panicked crew: PLASMA IN ESCAPE CALL EL SHUTTLE OLE
- wiki-taught atmos techs: not using their own brains to get better at their jobs. Becoming robust at atmos takes a long time, there's so many little things no wiki can teach you. Learn the basics from the wiki, then forget all of it again and figure things out yourself.
- there's rarely anything to do: same as engineering, your job requires somebody else to fuck up/sabotage