Guide to Medical

What do you mean this is a job? (WIP)

Synthetic / Augmented Patients and you

Sometimes, instead of having somebody treatable via normal means, they'll have one or more robotic limbs, or even be a full-on synthetic. When treating these, you'll have a few special things to keep in mind:
Robotic limbs are distinguished between full-on robotic (Augmentations, Prosthetics), and biomechanical (called Hybrid in the code). The key difference between those two is that while fully robotic limbs block any and all attempts to inject or spray things on them, biomechanical ones have inbuilt injection ports allowing hyposprays to inject medicine, though spraying will still not work, aswell as their bruises and burns still not being healed by chemicals.
What both types have in common is that healing chemicals have zero effect on them, although damaging chemicals generally still work. Treating toxins damage and suffocation works just how it works for your normal organic person though. This means, in order to fix them, you will require a welding tool for bruises, and cable coil for burns. Surgery will also require different tools to be effective, generally one should have a full toolbelt on hand. Just target their injured limb, apply cable coil / welder, and boom, they'll be down 15 points of damage of the respective type. They can also self-treat via that method, though this takes far more time than being treated by another person, five seconds to be precise.
Now, sometimes you may encounter a most annoying message: The [limb] appears to have suffered severe internal damage and requires surgery to be repaired further.
This means that the robotic limb passed a damage threshhold, and therefore cannot be repaired past a certain damage level with normal means, save surgery, or nanites.
Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do: Just slam em onto the surgery table, target chest with your drapes, select the 'repair robotic limbs' option, and perform the surgery itself till the damage is healed.
The threshhold state will reset upon going below that damage, so you should be fine to repair them with normal means now you have done that!
Alternatively, if you don't feel like performing surgery, you can also use nanogel which you can find at med- / robovendors, which allows you to fix such problems pretty quickly, provided the limb is at it's mindamage of the type you want to reset the threshold of. Very difficult to apply on oneself, quick if you have the help of someone else.

Damage threshholds

This is a list of the damage threshholds, and minimum damage when passed, for all the existing robotic / biomechanical limbs:
Note that threshholds are handled seperately for brute and burn, which means even if a limb is well past its threshhold of brute damage, you can still use cable coil to heal their small burn injuries.

Name	Threshhold	Mindamage
Augmented, Head	40	20
Augmented, Chest	40	25
Augmented, other	35	25
Prosthetic, all	15	10
Advanced Prosthetic, all	20	5
Biomechanical, all	25	10

Special Quirks to keep in mind

Full-on Synthetic people as opposed to ones just augmented have a few very distinct traits about them, which are highly important to keep in mind at times.:

• Full immunity to most toxins, aswell as inability to process most chemicals, though most medicines that would do something to them effectwise still work.
• System Corruption instead of toxins damage.
• Robotic Limbs with the threshhold system, and therefore:
• Immunity to all brute / burn related medicine and
• Easy healing via Welder / Wire, unless above threshold.
• Immunity to any kind of alcohol, which rapidly gets purged from the Synthetic's body.
• Vulnerability to EMPs, which damage them and cause corruption.
• Critical vulnerability to radiation, aka radiation damage at half the rad levels of normal humans. (Can be removed via an upgrade researchable by science, which makes them able to handle 50% more than humans)
• Immunity to special effects of radiation like mutation and hairloss.
• Suceptibility to dismemberment, in exchange for being able to easily have their limbs reattached.
• Use power drained from APCs to gain nutrition instead of using food.
• Immune to low pressure direct damage, but overheats in it instead.
• Resistant to cold damage and low temperatures
• Vulnerable to heat damage and oveaheating
• Have nobreath and take burn damage if in crit
• Are kind-of-coldblooded by default, but have active cooling they can use for blood
• Do not suffer direct oxydamage or death from low blood, but instead gain or lose cooling efficiency which balances heat.

System Corruption

Synthetics have a special damage type instead of toxins, system corruption. Due to this fact, they are immune to all normal sources of toxins damage.
It generally causes a variety of negative effects, depending on how much corruption is accumulated and is comperatively slow to gain aswell as remove.
There is a variety of effects which can be caused, from mildly positive to very negative. I will not list them here as to leave in a bit of surprise, though if you want you can find all of them in the code.

Causes of corruption

Synthetics can gain corruption from a few different ways, the most prominent of which are:

• Head hits have a small chance to cause a bit of corruption.
• EMPs cause corruption scaling with strength of the EMP.
• Radiation easily causes corruption. Synthetics are highly suceptible to radiation and can therefore withstand lower amounts without negative effects.

Ways to remove Corruption

There is a few ways to get radiation out of Synthetics:

• Surgery ('Purge Corruption'), which takes a bunch of time, but purges all of it.
• System Cleaner, a chemical that slowly removes corruption.
• Waiting. Corruption above ten can very slowly move towards ten, though this becomes more and more unlikely the more dire your state is. You'll have to deal with the negative effects in the meantime though.

Temperature stuff

If you have played a character with the coldblooded trait before, you may know this a bit. (Though coldblooded itself is blacklisted from Synthetics due to effectively being a free 2 points)
Effectively, instead of (normally) having active temp regulation, they now regulate towards the room's temp, with some caveats, namely, cooling efficiency.
Cooling efficiency directly depends on how cold (or hot) a room is, aswell as how high (or low) pressure is. Both of these modify how well you can cool down, with the optimal location being high-pressure low-temp.
Your blood level also matters, anything below 100% will proportionally reduce your cooling efficiency.
In addition to this, you also passively gain or lose temp if cooling is good or bad, which in case of low efficiency can lead to you overheating (namely when spacewalking suitless.
To combat this, you also have a fancy new tool at your disposal: Active cooling. Your lungs, which you do not use to breathe, but instead are a main component of your heat exchange system.
Activating active cooling consumes coolant (aka blood) over time, to grant you a significant cooling (or heating in some rare cases you are near absolutely 0 and need to warm up). Cooling efficiency somewhat determines cost and how high the effects are, but even in bad situations it can be helpful. Care with spending too much however, as this can lead to you passively overheating lateron.
Note however that active cooling has a harsh cost penalty in areas with very low pressure and will rapidly drain your coolant supply.
Any spacesuit + spacehelmet combo (like EVA ones) will also set the environment part of your cooling efficiency to 100% (regardless whether it'd be better or worse) as you utilize the suit's heat exchange /cooling instead of yours (referred to as "suitlinking"). Miner gear also has access tp this feature, though theirs is finetuned to lavaland and will not work off-planet.
You gain a funky HUD element to better manage all this, which you can examine (aka shiftclick) for more info. Take care around EMPs however..