If I was tasked with designing a "marco" station (max size or greater)...
Hmm. It's fun to think about how much you can include. I wouldn't mind a few redundant systems, actually. I'm imagining a "side-of-an-asteroid" base, built with redundancy, dangerous hallways, and a "class" thing going on.
The main idea here is a rather ritzy, fancy area that's fairly easily exposed to space, aside from a bridge area which connects to Sec and is beefy.
There's, for instance, a huge-ass bar and kitchen, but a job like Hydroponics is in the normal area inside the asteroid, which is more cramped and shitty. There's a SEPERATE bar and kitchen in shitstation, since the ritzy station is going to have all the good stuff that explosions love so much.
A third area, which is workstation, contains the engineer/research stuff in a less shitty but not great place. It's also far removed from the other two.
Illicit is huge and hard to navigate, built INTO the asteroid. Open the wrong area, and you may wind up opening a door right to space, as there's no security/safety features.
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I understand NT is the shittiest station manager, but you'd think there'd be data on what gets fucked up the most, and redundant systems put in place. Like separate cloning bays.
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Though, to be honest, I've always wanted to do a station similar to the mining colony- the entire thing is built into an asteroid, is very, very small, and includes walks through asteroid tunnels and reinforced glass tube halls.