Good idea with the lunchbox. You'd think a box in your backpack might be useful for putting tools inside, if you wanted to carry a bunch of other things in the backpack, but you have to drop the box every time you want to use a tool. Trying to actually open it while it's inside a backpack just doesn't work, so personally, I just toss the box at the beginning of each round and carry whatever I can fit in my backpack, pockets, and belt.
(I was hoping someone might get interested in doing asteroid mining, but wondering how we would get from asteroid to asteroid without actual moving ships with actual engines, unless you intend to use pods)
By the by, I think it might be interesting to consider the possibility of having someone actually at CentCom. Yes, it might get boring, but what if we...
1. Have new arrivals arrive at CentCom, where a CentCom official equips and assigns them jobs, and then puts them on a shuttle to SS13 where they arrive at the normal entry point.
2. The CentCom official could be the traitor, secretly working for the syndicate, and might be arming new arrivals and telling them that centcom needs the captain taken out because he has rebelled against centcom, or whatever his task is. Or issuing orders to the network tech, HoP, captain, or AI.
3. The CentCom official could send written messages to SS13 and they to him/her, via terminals in the captain's room, the network tech room, and the HoP's office, and directly communicate with the AI. It would require logging in of course and would identify the sender. To send requires the sending comdish to be aligned, but receiving does not so that the CentCom official does not get most annoyed.
4. CentCom could have its own AI upload terminal and so forth.
5. CentCom could have a version of the prototype engine, fully hooked up and powered, with fuel canisters, etc, to power it. Just break seals, connect CO2, and power it up, and it should start powering CentCom.
6. Some other toys for the official so he/she doesn't get too bored, like, say, a fully-functional genetics lab with monkeys and a cryo.
7. Perhaps to alleviate boredom and grant some measure of freedom, a special centcom network-plug-in jack which effectively turns the official into a temporary AI without laws, giving him the ability to see anything on ss13 and screw with shit there. He could leave and return to normal at any time. (This would probably be quite tricky to do)
Problems:
1. There isn't really a way that I see to discourage the official from just schlepping over to SS13, though. Giving him/her no SS13 privileges wouldn't work, since they have ID assignment abilities. Saying "YOU'LL BE ARRESTED FOR ABANDONING YOUR POST" thing might do it, but not necessarily, since he/she probably outranks the captain.
2. The HoP won't have as much to do if the official is assigning jobs, unless the official is making comically bad decisions, which may be likely given that he'll only be getting information via space telegram (and talking to the AI). Or, the HoP could be replaced entirely by this position, but that may be bad if there's no centcom official. It would probably be necessary to send the new arrivals directly to SS13 as it is now if there is no centcom official.
3. He'll probably just get bored from being away from the RP, and when everyone is chasing the traitor he'll be sitting in CentCom having his telegrams ignored, unless the network-plug-in thing is implemented.
Of course someone would have to want to implement this, and that would probably require me to volunteer, join the coding team, and people to like the idea enough to want to see it tried, and me to work less on what I'm working on right now to find time for doing this (which currently consists of adjusting parameters to make a simplistic stellar fusion simulation result in neither a star exploding nor a star failing to ignite sufficient fusion to stop gravitational collapse. So far it has been quite insistent on doing one or the other no matter what.).