General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

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General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Wickedtemp » Sat Jan 02, 2016 7:49 pm

So, generally speaking, the attitude towards the hiring standards and NT's job of assigning jobs to people is more or less...random. I've heard things like "Oh, NT pretty much throws darts at different jobs when assigning us our roles." and such. And one thing that I hear quite often is how the Virgo Orbital Research Establishment is supposed to be like...Misfit Island in Space, where everyone who was too useless was rounded up and shipped off to avoid inconveniencing the more "proper" stations...

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, if there's any truth to it or is it something that people tried to use to explain the fact that incompetence is rather rampant in almost every department, due to...well, the vore and kinkiness. Is there official lore as to how the hiring process works on Vorestation?

Personally, I find it rather, well... absolutely stupid to say that VORE is just where NT crams all of the less-than-ideal workers, which is implied when people say "Well it's not like we'd work on this station if we had a choice." and similar statements. Think of it this way: NT is a company, their top priority is to make profits. Take McDonalds for example, you wouldn't see a McDonalds where everyone working is an incompetent fool that isn't even able to make an order of fries, and then have a Manager say "Yes, this is where we put the people we couldn't have working at the proper locations." Why? Because every day that joint is losing the company money. It takes money to keep it open and to keep it running after all. It'd be absolutely pointless to even keep a restaurant like that open, and it'd be bad PR for anyone who happened to visit it.

Now replace the simple McDonalds with a multi-billion, possibly even multi-trillion research station... I know that we have to be a bit more lax when it comes to these types of things, in order to justify the silliness and sometimes downright stupidity that graces the server every now and again, and also to justify the sex RP's that often take priority over people doing their assigned role to a decent level, but the fact is, NT isn't going to hire anyone but the best of the best to work at this station. Doing anything else would lead to losing obscene amounts of money invested into the station.

At least, that's how I see it. Questions, Comments, and Fun Facts are all welcome. This is in hopes of starting a discussion about what the NT hiring standards are and what they should be, so we have an actual statement to go off of, rather than speculation and fluff that differs from person to person.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Gramzon_the_Dragon » Sat Jan 02, 2016 8:13 pm

From what I know, their hiring standards are supposed to be somewhat lax this far into space, but there needs to be SOME quality control. The justification in regular SS13 I believe was mainly to allow traitors to exist on station. Here it is re-purposed to allow voraphiles and other kinky things into play and helps play into a willing suspension of disbelief. What isn't clarified well is just how lax these standards really are.. which would probably be difficult as people's ideas of overpowered, ridiculous, unbelievable, and too silly are all different.

For example, someone who openly admits as a captain that they were fired 4 times... who started mutinys... yeah I don't buy it. Someone who may have had incidents of eating other people at their old job resulting in demotions and getting them sent out here to the sticks for a fresh start or not is more believable. And sometimes, joke characters, or ones who technically weren't supposed to get on the station because they were never actually hired but arrived anyway are sometimes given exceptions.

Another thing having to do with the best of the best: why pay ten times the salary for the best of the best, when you can pay for the okay of the sketchy for 10% of the cost?
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Wickedtemp » Sat Jan 02, 2016 9:39 pm

Good points, however the whole bit about NT being sketchy and cutting costs by hiring less-than-competent crew... I don't think they'd allow that to the extent we see on the server. They'd cut costs for salaries, but they wouldn't be making hardly any profit, if any at all.

I've heard plenty of "I'm an excellent doctor, and that's why I was hired." and just as much "Oh, I was fired from every job I've ever had, so they sent me here as a punishment."

So, there's got to be a middle ground of sorts. And I think we should find that middle ground, put a pin there, and then roam around in each direction and see if we should be a bit more lax or a bit more strict, or if we should stay right in the middle.

But there needs to be legitimate reasons behind it.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Gramzon_the_Dragon » Sat Jan 02, 2016 11:56 pm

Wickedtemp wrote:Good points, however the whole bit about NT being sketchy and cutting costs by hiring less-than-competent crew... I don't think they'd allow that to the extent we see on the server. They'd cut costs for salaries, but they wouldn't be making hardly any profit, if any at all.

Well it is a research station. Spoiler for long semi-off topic reply.
[+]
You're technically be right, but from what I see the reason it isn't a profitable operation isn't because people are incompetent, it's because we lack engineers to power the station for work a lot of the time, and science/research positions are not the most popular. The most occupied departments from what I see are:
1. civilian, almost useless for actual profits (with the major exception of miners who are the only true direct source of profit for NT on station by mining phoron, platinum, etc.), contains assistant which ooc are getting used to mechanics or have joined to take a break and/or scene.
2. Security and medical, almost always having 2-4 people on duty. These are damage control/prevention departs, keeping the crew and station from getting decimated. They are designed to reduce costs of replacing crew members and hardware.
3. R&D/science! Not played by all too many people. This is and mining is the primary income source of the station. Every "discovery" here be it through chemistry, genetics, xenoarch, xenobio, and any other science job is what the station is here for. Once we discover them, NT would be attempting to discover ways to monetize the findings any way they can.
4. Engineering, frequently empty or understaffed. Maintain the station which is again more of loss prevention. The station having power, the crew having air, things getting repaired are not profitable directly, but keep other departments going.


Wickedtemp wrote:I've heard plenty of "I'm an excellent doctor, and that's why I was hired." and just as much "Oh, I was fired from every job I've ever had, so they sent me here as a punishment."

So, there's got to be a middle ground of sorts. And I think we should find that middle ground, put a pin there, and then roam around in each direction and see if we should be a bit more lax or a bit more strict, or if we should stay right in the middle.

But there needs to be legitimate reasons behind it.


Being fired from EVERY job would probably be pushing things too far in my opinion. Being an excellent doctor could be a good reason to be hired, especially as a CMO or older and experienced character. Saying you're the most amazing god of medicine who is the most renowned doctor back on earth with his/her own TV show is another thing.

But yes, I agree that some more definition could be used here. A good bit of stuff in lore is a little more vague than ideal and has people quoting totally different things on the same topic as if they were fact. It'd be neat to have some more stuff set in place to better implement characters in the universe we got here.

I'm going to wait for some admin input before replying more just in case my points are way off, and because I would like a primary source here.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Aces » Sun Jan 03, 2016 12:12 pm

I should mention, VORE has a little bit of a special quirk to its hiring process.

Its hiring methods are just as loose as any other station but really applicants on Vorestation face more scrutiny than anyone else. Why? Because it's no accident that a bunch of people who can eat people whole just wound up on this station. Everyone hired here has that ability, even if they do not use it. It's never been confirmed by CentCom but many crew suspect it. Others blow it off as conspiracy theory nonsense and blame it on the culture of Virgo Prime which had a large Unathi population prior to NT's arrival and Unathi sometimes eat humans.

Any of you familiar with Fallout? Our station is an experiment designed as a testbed for how the crew responds to an environment of constant danger, and how they respond to being desensitized to the process of cloning. We're also a good stress testing platform for cloning tech in general.

In fact our lore has had some significant contributions to the science of cloning both in our own research and by CentCom if you guys have been around / paying attention to notice. We're the only station with an off-station cloning facility where NT offers backups at no additional charge.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Wickedtemp » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:13 pm

...

Not only does that explain how incompetent people get hired, but it also explains just about everything. The reason vore is allowed, why NT keeps the station around because surely it can't be too profitable... And also it's a neat little twist. Of course, nobody in-game would know about it aside from maybe th CentComm reps that swing by.

I like it. It's a solid reason to allow what's being allowed and it doesn't make anything less fun. Plus I find it to be a pleasant little twist.

I've one question though, was cloning researched to such an extent that it's a 100% guarantee of another life? Or are there complications that can arise? Gun safety mechanisms for example, they normally work and people assume since the safety is on the weapon won't fire, but sometimes the safety fails. It's rare, but it happens and it's injured/killed people before.

So, how about cloning? Is the science behind it so solid that the only chance of failure is through faulty equipment, "glitch in the system" incidents that are a 1 in a 1,000,000 occurnce, or is there a genuine chance of failure?
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Aces » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:51 pm

Oh cloning can certainly fuck up. I like to think of it like this.

I imagine there being 3 generations of cloning used by NT. Possibly a 4th in prototyping stages. Each one more reliable than the last. 1st gen is good chance of severe fuckup that renders the subject as good as dead and unclonable without the original body, or if the original body isn't fresh. 2nd gen, which we use on station, still fucks up but it's fixable. 3rd gen almost never fucks up but it still does and we get defective clones (baldies) who come to the station and grief act on self-destructive impulse and then get banned go brain dead and drop SSD. But if 3rd gen fucks up, they have backups upon backups in any standard cloning facility.

There's also the "Zeroth" generation which doesn't involve artificially accelerated growth or retraining of any memories what so ever. It's basically just exactly how modern cloning works IRL.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Aces » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:53 pm

I'm gonna move this to lore discussion. Seems more relevant there.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Wickedtemp » Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:24 pm

Aces wrote:Oh cloning can certainly fuck up. I like to think of it like this.

I imagine there being 3 generations of cloning used by NT. Possibly a 4th in prototyping stages. Each one more reliable than the last. 1st gen is good chance of severe fuckup that renders the subject as good as dead and unclonable without the original body, or if the original body isn't fresh. 2nd gen, which we use on station, still fucks up but it's fixable. 3rd gen almost never fucks up but it still does and we get defective clones (baldies) who come to the station and grief act on self-destructive impulse and then get banned go brain dead and drop SSD. But if 3rd gen fucks up, they have backups upon backups in any standard cloning facility.

There's also the "Zeroth" generation which doesn't involve artificially accelerated growth or retraining of any memories what so ever. It's basically just exactly how modern cloning works IRL.


Okay, so the cloning that's used on the station can fuck up, but if it can be fixed is there any real risk? Is there anything stopping a crew member from getting a genetic scan/backup, getting killed, getting a new scan and then die again, and so on? A lawful, reasonable scenario for this would be someone in Xenobiology who's working with untamed slimes. Is there anything that can go wrong with the 2nd gen cloning that CANNOT be fixed on-station, or perhaps at all?

If there's absolutely zero risk, then aside from the cost in resources/energy/biomass there isn't anything to prevent the crew from killing each other for fun in the holodeck. When there's zero consequence or risk, people will potentially use cloning as a free respawn for whatever dumb and dangerous experiment they're going to attempt.

It's like...just because there's a safety net below you (in case accidents happen) it doesn't mean you should push someone off a building, or jump, or say it doesn't matter if someone jumps because there's a net, etc. Just because there's a safety mechanism on the gun doesn't mean you'd point it at someone and pull the trigger. Personally I think there should be a legitimate consequence or danger to repeated cloning, perhaps a side effect could be a degrading genome from repeated copies -if one gene is messed up, it could be harmless but over time as more clonings are done and more genes are altered, it could become problematic or possibly even dangerous.

These are just my thoughts on the matter.
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Re: General Discussion About NT's Hiring!

Postby Aces » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:57 pm

Like I said, part of NT's experiment with our station is desensitizing the crew to death and cloning, but that doesn't mean that after dying repeatedly on the station it'd be unrealistic to have a sort of mental breakdown, as each clone isn't as perfect as the last. If you're cloned again without fully recovering, you're liable to end up going insane, I'd say.

There's no real way to enforce strict consequences to repeat cloning. Mechanically, if you have a competent medical staff, there's zero risk as long as you remember to get re-scanned.

But RP-wise, if you've been repeatedly cloned that shift, I'd say maybe 3-4 times, your mental state would rapidly deteriorate by the 5th clone and by the 6th you'd be liable to be a danger to yourself and others. I'm wondering how that would be roleplayable without being disruptive.

And there is cloning disorders where genetics becomes corrupted and unclonable, but this usually requires other fuckery, like messing with your genome using other Genetics facilities. I sometimes RP that my character's gender gets messed up on rare occasion from cloning.
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