[Suggestion] Life Alert Uniform Accessory

[Wickedtemp]

An armband in the custom loadout, costing 1-3 points. It'd be placed on the right arm so it wouldn't interfere with any other armbands a character might be wearing. Here's what it would do:

• Automatically turn on an individual's suit sensors to Tracking when their damage reaches a certain value. The default for this value would probably be 100 points of damage, but might be made adjustable by the wearer. Between 20-150 would be a good range limit.

• Toggleable feature, a death-alarm-like announcement or notification. This notification could be said over Sec/Med Comms, or sent to Sec/Med PDA relay, or pop up on the Medical HUD in the same way the treatment notifications do for the Medical Bot. The notification would include the wearer's ID and location. If you wanted to go even further, you can have it list the primary source of the damage, I.E. "The LifeAlert of Judas Osbourne has been activated at The Chapel, due to Brute damage!"

• Wearing a LifeAlert counts as providing consent to treatment in the same way getting a cloning scan counts as consent for cloning. We'd need to decide whether or not having your LifeAlert go off counts as ICly calling for help to Sec, however.

So, people who want it can get it in the custom loadout, maybe you can add a box of them in Medical as well.

Credit for the idea goes to Aero, and the others who discussed this in Discord.

[aerowing]

This is a good idea, and I did bring this idea up initially on discord as a way to offer players privacy without the need for having their location actively tracked. All my points seem to be listed here but maybe another good function would be to allow a 'prey friendly mode' that informs medbay that X user needs to be cloned due to 'digestion' or otherwise. As far as a look, it can be invisible on the person or just show as an armband displayed on the opposite arm that department armbands would show on. This would make a graphical integration easy as it just flips the location of the sprite. Menu for it can be accessed by holding it in your hand, etc. It should probably also malfunction under the same conditions a death alarm would when hit by EMP, etc.


Potential tagline:

"Help I've been swallowed and I can't get out!"
Manufactured by Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals.

[crystaltyrant]

Yes... Just... YES! This would help out so much in medical it is not even funny. Most people don't ever turn on sensors, even after an announcement about them and sometimes people need to be badgered a little even if we leave code green. Having this as a loadout item and having a box of em in medical to hand out with scans would be awesome. Get a scan, get a free life alert. Get gurgled? No need to worry! We know you got gurgled and everything is fine, time to clone you now so you don't sit in deadchat for the rest of the game because your predator didn't tell medical. I do suggest though that if we get this, it should also trigger when REMOVED from someone. So that way medical gets alerted if someone tears it off you. At least then if it gets removed, we can try to ask if they are ok and prepare to clone or treat people based on that too. Might be hard to code that, but I have no coding knowledge. Just putting my suggestion into the box.

[Scree]

"Help I've been swallowed and I can't get out!"

god fucking damnit I was gonna post this

[Scree]

I do suggest though that if we get this, it should also trigger when REMOVED from someone. So that way medical gets alerted if someone tears it off you.

In all honesty, I'd suggest that they explicitly NOT do this. Otherwise you might as well just get a death alarm implant.

Right now, it's a good idea to get a death alarm if you're going to be taking a gateway trip or fuck around with artefacts in xenoarch or whatever, but getting said implant means that if you finish your conventionally-life-threatening work and head off back to the station with your prefs all reading "grab me and drag me into the darkness for a good old fangorious devouring any time you get the chance and murder the shit out of me without warning, I love it" there's no way to get those scenes without the entire station being alerted (and given a location!) when you're all gurgled up.
With the lifealert, predators could strip you to avoid this - which is something that hostile mobs, plasma fires, the vacuum of space, bombs and the like explicitly don't do.

[crystaltyrant]

But if it just sends out a PDA message to med relay that it was removed instead of to everyone then at least medical would know that there is a high chance they are getting eaten and can prep to clone them. Just a few days ago I had a ghost LOOC message me asking to be cloned because their pred didn't bother alerting medical and they were left sitting in deadchat waiting for an hour while other patients were being helped. As I said, it does not need to trigger a death alarm for everyone to know, but just a relay to medical it was removed. It would even make sense from an RP standpoint for that as if this device is constantly reading your vitals, taking it off would have it either trigger or turn it off (likely turn it off to save power). I just want to avoid having someone needing to OOC ask me for cloning just so they can get back to game.

[jemli]

From an IC standpoint, having it alert medical every time it was removed would be counterproductive because of how many false alarms it would generate. You'd have to remember to take the steps to turn it off properly every time, which is guaranteed to not happen, and a predator who knows the system would be able to turn it off properly anyway. And it'd be even worse if there wasn't any way to keep it from sending a message, as medical would be getting notifications of every time people wearing them got changed. It'd become a game of finding a specific needle in a needle stack, and eventually medical would just ignore all of the notifications, including the ones that were legit.

[crystaltyrant]

Fair enough. I concede that my idea was flawed. I did not see that. I only wanted to try and make sure medical knew when people maybe got hurt or dead.

[Wickedtemp]

I think the "X's LifeAlert has been activated!" message should be enough of an alert for Medical to be ready to treat wounds or clone. This sort of message wouldn't be said over General Comms, so it isn't like the entire crew is going to know about it. Medical wouldn't even *need* to say anything over General Comms because the LifeAlert would turn the patients sensors to max giving Medical all the info they need.

I don't want these to replace death alarms. This item would purely be for those of the crew that say "I'd totally turn my sensors on, but sometimes I forget. Or I'll turn them off for a scene and forget to turn them back on." The LifeAlert would be perfect for those people, or for really anyone who just wants an extra layer of safety, in addition to cloning scans.

[Schlippy]

So its basically a DocWagon contract band from shadowrun I kinda like this idea; all heads should have to wear it.