Suggestion: Space Suits?

[CanadianWolvie]

Now, I am not quite sure if its already meant to be abstracted in the crew members that they are already wearing gear, but that was not necessarily readily apparent to me in the demo or more recent update videos (thank you for those, look forward to more) that a reduction in the health of a crew member was their outfit getting worn down - life support running out on their person when there is no atmo or is it their body not getting enough oxygen to the brain? I take it is meant to represent physical damage with the med bay repairing it and this gets me to wondering:

Why aren't the folks in a space ship using space suits? Especially in enviroments hazardous to their health?

To that end, if it isn't a hassle on the budget (time, money, etc), could you please make one of the things that it is possible to research and use be space suits for the crew? Survive the vacuum and radiation of space, be fire proof, wear some armor to fight of boarders and to board enemy ships? Heck, maybe even have personnel shields and cloaking devices, crew portable heavy weapons systems? Bonus to salvaging ships for valuable stuff like the first episode of Firefly and enemy crew if they were wearing a space suit when their ship got wrecked?

Just sayin', I found myself caring about the crew (especially if they start getting good at doing a bunch of the different crew tasks as you suggested you would be trying to put in, IIRC), I would want to give them as good of fighting chance as possible if I was Captain of the USS "Oh Gawd They Are Coming RUN" Enterprise.

How wild would it be if like the apex of the space suit would be some sort of exoskeleton cybernetic "Get away from her you bitch!" robo-mech-heavy gear thing. Oh hey there rock aliens

[Rohk]

They didn't wear space suits on the enterprise.

I like the idea a lot though. Space suits could make a cool upgrade though, maybe allow your crew to keep working in areas that you vent out the airlock to kill fires, or make a last ditch effort to repair life support. Would it be unnecessarily cruel to acquire suits on a 1ea basis to put the player into a situation where life support is failing, but he only has 4 suits and 5 crew? Somebody's drawing the short straw!

[CanadianWolvie]

Heh, not trying to quibble but Star Trek did have space suits if you count the movies, where they even occasionally vented some poor crew member out into space when there was a hull breach.

I like your take on maybe not having enough suits for everyone ... that just gave me an idea, what if the space suits had to be stored until use? So picture them desperately trying to get to a space suit room if there was an atmo leak or life support was failing or so they had a better chance to fight boarders or a fire...

Hmm, makes me wonder why a crew member wouldn't just wear a suit all the time though. Maybe a crew member would be slower moving around the ship with a space suit on and upgrades to the space suit's tech/design (or just jettison / sell that and buy / make a better suit) so that with robotic exoskeleton assistance gets that speed back to normal or even faster like those few episodes of Stargate: SG1...

Hope you don't mind my brain storming.

[Rohk]

if they are available on a limited basis, then I'd say keeping them in storage until needed would be awesome. They should have some sort of trade off to keep people from wearing them constantly, like maybe they make you slower, or some might make the crew faster, but slowly drain health. Dexterity would be effected to, I'd imagine. Ever try doing any complex task with gloves on as opposed to bare handed? maybe the benefit is being able to survive without atmosphere, but the crew only performs tasks at 80% speed.

[jocan2003]

Who knows, maybe its a planned feature not in yet?

[Stelly]

I think that this is a great idea, the ability to customise your suits, maybe even upgrade them with defense points and what not would be a good idea

Stelly

[Snake Plissken]

and to add a little more depth to it, whenever suits are available for purchace they may only be the right size for one race. If you have a mixed crew some would miss out

[Nikolai]

Heh, not trying to quibble but Star Trek did have space suits if you count the movies

Actually, not to quibble, but they had them in the original series -- back in 1968. (In "The Tholian Web").

Spacesuits are kind of expensive from a costuming point of view, but they've been considered a part of space exploration at least since The First Men in the Moon (H. G. Wells). Space isn't just hazardous because of the aliens with ray guns.

[Rohk]

my point was that they didn't wear them all the time, damn quibblers!

[praguepride]

Perhaps it could be implemented as an automatic situational event.

For example, a critical hit on the hull causes a hull breach. All crew members automatically stop their current activity and head for a nearby locker to put on their space suit.

Until the hull breach is fixed, all crew members work and move slower due to the bulky space suits. As soon as the hull breach is fixed, you can start ordering the crew to remove their suits to go back to maximum speed/efficiency.


This could also be used if aliens use a gas attack, or the life support system is compromised etc.