Atmospheric Technician
From Space Station 14 Wiki
Engineering Department
Atmospheric Technician
- Access: Atmospherics, Engineering, External, Maintenance
- Difficulty: Medium to Hard
- Duties: Restore breathable atmosphere to depressurized areas. Ensure the station's air remains at livable conditions. Get bored and create tritium.
- Supervisors: Chief Engineer, Captain
- Subordinates: None
- Guides: Atmospherics
As an atmospheric technician, your primary job is to maintain a safe and breathable atmosphere inside the station. As a member of the engineering department, you may also be expected to double as a Station Engineer if they don't know what they're doing in exceptional circumstances.
The primary threats to a safe and breathable atmosphere inside the station are:
- Air escaping into space due to intentional or unintentional removal of walls or floor tiles (spacing)
- Buildup of unpleasant or outright hazardous gases such as miasma or plasma
Your supervisor is the Chief Engineer.
Quick-Start
- Grab equipment from your atmospheric technician locker. You should grab at least a hardsuit or fire suit and helmet, a gas mask and gas tank, a gas analyzer, an RCD, and a holofan projector. Consider grabbing inflatable walls, inflatable doors, steel sheets, and metal rods to be ready to fix spacing.
- Find the distro pipe and inspect its pressure and temperature using your gas analyzer. If the pressure is zero and shows no sign of rising, set up distro.
- (optional) Set filters to recover gases from the waste pipe. Because gas miners are available on most stations, this step is not very important. And, unless scrubbers are set to siphoning, there will only be waste gases in the waste pipe.
- Deliver portable scrubbers to locations that expect miasma build up. This is usually the cloning room or morgue in the medical bay.
- Monitor the station's radio or patrol the station yourself for spacing or other atmospheric issues. Fix issues if they arise.
- Make sure that suspicious people are not sabotaging your department.
Equipment
Like your fellow Station Engineers, you start with a full belt of tools. Atmospheric technicians may also have access to:
| Picture | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
 |
Portable Oxygen Tank | Small enough to carry around. Hook this up to a mask, and you can have a portable air supply to breathe while in space or fixing leaks. People will probably ask you for these. |
 |
Gas Analyzer | Use this to analyze the composition of gases in the air around you, or to measure the temperature and pressure of gases inside pipes. |
 |
Portable Scrubber | Can be wrenched down to scrub waste gases to an internal tank. Useful for cleaning up a miasma problem. Must be emptied once full. |
 |
Holofan Projector |  |
Useful trivia and tricks
- Always be prepared to fix a breach. Carry your Atmospherics hardsuit or firesuit with you so you can survive long enough to fix any breach at a moments notice.
- The Atmospherics firesuit is space proof and functions like a hardsuit. Just make sure you wear the helmet with it or else it wont give you any protection.
- The standard air mix is about 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen @ 101.7 kPa at 293.2K (20°C).
- A quick and dirty way to vent high pressure or unwanted gases is to expose the area to open space. Breach a wall or open an airlock to quickly suck out all the atmosphere. Just be sure you have the area sealed off and no crewmembers get caught in the depressurization zone!
- Overpressurization can be just as harmful as depressurization!
- A pressurized pipe will violently decompress if unwrenched!
- If you want to check the pressure and temperature of a pipe, hold your gas analyzer in hand, shift left-click on the pipe, and click on the magnifying glass in pop-up window.
- Make sure that the distro loop never connects to anything else like the mix or waste loop. unless you want to flood the station with superheated plasma and risk getting an angry admin message.
