Maybe if you give Atmos Techs some hardsuits, they wouldn't be totally useless. After a bomb goes off or something, they could be tasked with fixing the pipes, and restoring the atmosphere. The thing is, there's just so much overlap with station engineers. Anyway, I don't see any reason to get rid of it, but I also would never pick it as a job.
Atmos techs exist because there's a hell of a lot to the atmos tech position, as well as to the engineer position. Splitting the workload between engineers (who deal with the wiring and physical structure of the station) and atmos techs (who deal with scrubbing the air, restoring pressure-lost sections, rebuilding piping and disposal sections, checking the air supply, creating "safe" gas mixes, etc.) is a good thing. Of course none of that says both station engineers and atmos techs can't have access to each other's areas.
As for hardsuits, why? There's no reason they should ever be outside the station, and that's what a hardsuit is for. Now, some kind of pressure suit, sure. But you don't need a hardsuit for that, just give them a few space suits like the ones in EVA.
They're supposed to be firefighters too... but how often does a fire happen that's not a station ending disaster?
This is a problem with the lack of actual fire-fighting tools, not with the atmos tech position. How many firefighters do you know that rely on emergency fire extinguishers to deal with fire?
Android is apparantly against moving research to the asteroid. Could've said that when we hadn't put a lot of work into it.
I would have said something earlier, but I was under the assumption that you were only adding stuff on the asteroid, not removing from the station too~ It make potential antag objectives much harder. Plus noone has really given a good reason for this other than 'it'll be fun.'
Even aside from antags, the more I think about this... how often do people on the main station interact with people on the mining station? I mean besides the folks in cargo and the occasional scientist. And now we're going to move the scientists off-station too? We'd be isolating yet another group of players from RP possibilities, not to mention making the potential hazards of slime outbreaks and station-shattering explosions irrelevant to the rest of the station. That might make sense from a corporate PoV (that is, the PoV of a corporation other than Nanotransen, 'cause they obviously don't care), but it doesn't from a gameplay one.
At least not with our current population. If it continues growing it might make more sense.
I sort of stand in the position that we shouldn't add anything unless we play for long enough and deem it needed. There's not much need to add in new things unless people start demanding it useful. Besides, wouldn't we have issue updating /tg/station code if the maps are different?
So like, EVA tethers and personal radar? The existence of such devices (which btw I have no idea how to code
) would make separate station section less trouble for antags, as getting from point A to point B via EVA would be a smidge more reliable.