A crystal, some fire, and you. What YOU should do during an sm delamination

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This guide is to be used for when you are an engineer and you are in a position to fix an sm delamination. It will contain what I wish every engineer knew when they are in the sm room and see the funny percentage dropping in the engineering channel.

During an sm delamination you have a few goals that need to be completed for it to end:

  1. Fix whatever sm setup the person was trying to make.
  2. Keep the sm afloat long enough for the temperature to maintain on its own
  3. put out the fire

First, the setup. Usually when an sm is having issues it’s usually near the start of the round when an intern thinks they can tackle the big lad himself and absolutely cannot. This means that the sm setup is usually the base sm setup but wrong in some way or another. A common list of issues with the basic sm setup that interns are likely to make is:

Forgetting to wrench the n2,
Forgetting to turn on a filter because they arent filtering anything with it,
Forgetting the air alarm

Once you have looked for all of these common blunders the next thing you need to look at is the meters on the pipes, they will give you the best info you can possibly get on why this thing is on fire. If it’s later into the round and the sm has had no issues that means that either sabotage or space dust is likely. In the case of sabotage ensure you fix the sm BEFORE calling sec unless you are actively being killed by the person. If it’s space dust that means you need to get into space RIGHT NOW to fix those space pipes or there is no chance.

Second, keeping the sm afloat. This is the step people often forget but it is absolutely vital if the sm has been delamming for any amount of time. This step usually consists of optimizing the existing sm setup as well as adding more gasses from atmos directly into the sm. This step is needed because of the simple fact that so much temp so fast will invariably clog the filters that recirculate the gas back into the sm leaving them useless and therefore the setup will not work no matter how fixed it is until you cool it back down.

Third is to put the fire out. This seems the most simple but I always see people in base radsuits jumping into the sm like it’s some kind of new swimming pool that only looks like it’s on fire. YOU NEED TO PUT ON FIRE PROTECTION BEFORE YOU TRY TO PUT THE FIRE OUT. The radiation is not enough to kill you fast enough for the radsuit to be better than something to stop you from melting alive inside an active engine. You need to put the fire out constantly until it stops igniting itself.

Congratulations you managed to save the engine, if it got low enough or the ai started screaming you are likely a hero that everyone will forget in 5 minutes. Now you wait for the next round when the same intern will make the same mistake on a different filter and do it all again.

TLDR: You need to fix their sm setup (probably optimize too), then pump in cold n2 from atmos, then put the fire out (dont go in there with only a radsuit you will melt and die and shit).

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I feel like this guide has skipped out on a lot of actual explanations for how anything works and i expect it’ll make very little sense to someone that does not already understand how the engine works.

A couple things that i immediately noticed reading this.

  1. You haven’t explained how the pipes surrounding the sm works, what their purpose is, or how to place more. This is usually the most essential part of fixing a delam yet you have hardly mentioned what it even involves (outside of simply saying to fix it)

  2. Simply saying "put out the fire " seems unhelpful at best and at worst is something that’s gonna get new players dusted trying to do. My interpretation of what you are saying is that you want people to spray fire extinguisher into the crystal. Situations where you should use extinguisher do exist but it’s a bad idea to suggest it will fix a delam because it will not without you fixing the pipe loop first.

  3. No mention of NT CIMS, an incredibly important tool when dealing with delaminations. Nor have you mentioned what the cooling loop does, or even mentioned the existence of the freezers and emmiters.

I understand that the point of the guide is for how to stop delaminations, not how to setup the SM itself. However it is not realistically possible to fix an SM without also knowing how to set it up and as such I do not believe this guide will be usable to someone that does not know how the SM works.

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I’m not going to lie I entirely forgot about the emitters (and the part about how to put out the fire properly) and I would add them but I absolutely cannot figure out how to edit a forum post. I also seem to have failed to state the proper intention of the guide, it is meant for an engineer who understands how the engine works and how to recognize issues in a setup but does not know how to run an engine that is on fire or how to fix someone elses setup (me, a while ago). Sorry about a bad guide, I just kind of wrote this up because I saw the guides section and wanted to explain what to do after seeing a few engies just watching during a delam because they didn’t know what to do (or they burned in an engine because they wore a radsuit).

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