A possible space saving change

[crbd115]

Really love the space saving changes and additions made to the game so far. I think an additional change that would be useful is if suit stations were changed so that they no longer needed a checkpoint.
There could be directional options on the stations themselves similar to how sinks work. There could be an option to allow dupes to pass without a suit when there is no suit available and an option where they aren't allowed to pass without a suit. This would make it so that you just have to have the one on the end not allow them to pass without a suit and acts similarly to a checkpoint. Also it would help to be able to copy these settings over to other stations similar to some other building settings. I don't know if anyone is crazy enough to have jet suits docks in their rockets but this would help with that since each building takes up a 2x4 space.
I personally try to not ever have my dupes in space without a mask or a suit and prefer to have a station or two in my rockets as well. I know this change isn't going to be large impact on the amount of space saved but every little bit helps in the command capsules.

[Sasza22]

On 8/20/2021 at 10:34 PM, crbd115 said:

I think an additional change that would be useful is if suit stations were changed so that they no longer needed a checkpoint.

The chekpoint is kinda needed to indicate which way the docks work. But imo the best would be if the rocket doors worked as a checkpoint. IF you could just set up docks next to the door it would be perfect.

[crbd115]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

The chekpoint is kinda needed to indicate which way the docks work. 

That's why I said it would have the same direction mechanic that they use for sinks on the docks themselves.

 

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

But imo the best would be if the rocket doors worked as a checkpoint. IF you could just set up docks next to the door it would be perfect.

I think this could be a good option, I found it very annoying that the space next to the door is what the dupes use to leave so if you have a suit checkpoint next to the door, they leave without putting suits on.

[ZombieDupe]

The dock system is bulky and could do with a little rework in my opinion. Remember the failed experiment with the oxygen mask dock? The one  interesting idea that it presented was having only a single dock/checkpoint active for multiple equipable masks/suits.

I think a better system then (if it ended up working well), at least for oxygen masks, would be to have a single direction-based dock as you described, but which can hold multiple equipable masks, with a cap of 10 or something and you could maybe change the cap to be lower if you so desired to have multiple masks filled quicker with lower capacity. Having another dock nearby could extend the amount of suits that could be used simultaneously without extending capacity usage as much. This would give reason to having a different vacancy setting on as if a duplicant with a mask is passing by a dock that is "full" on masks docked, they could just run past it instead until they encountered another dock that has space to dock a mask on (this type of feature would actually work even if we have docks that can only store one mask still). Obvious limitation to this is how much oxygen can be pumped into the dock itself if we are using the gas vent input port (and we should retain that and not go back to a dock pulling a vacuum system). So if this worked, we could have multiple masks.

But I think this system can realistically only work for oxygen masks not just because it seems weird to have one dock being able to store multiple duplicant-sized suits, but also suits storing much more oxygen and therefore needing to replenish much more per use, which is definitely going to stagnate access due to lack of oxygen pumping. So if we have docks with directions of their own for suits and you can still only store one suit per dock it wouldn't change all too much besides not needing space for the checkpoint. But if you did have multiple suits storable on a single dock, to supply enough oxygen in time you would need to implement entire high pressure pipes, which would be great for all sorts of things anyway, but it depends if Klei are willing to put in the effort to implement such features to begin with.

Just something to think about I suppose, but thanks for bringing up the idea of changing the way the equipment docks work for efficiency's sake, I was actually considering making a topic about this myself at some point.