Wheelchairs and Craftable Bionics

[LouisTBR]

The other day, my favourite colonist (Blitz) had his leg cut off by a raider. He was in bed for days as I had no medicine (from healing up the other casualties). I had an idea that would really help combat this:

Wheelchairs: For people who have lost legs, a simple, craftable wheelchair would be a means of transport. They could still haul, shoot, research, doctor etc. But they would be incapable of melee, construction/mining, cleaning and growing.

Bionics:
For a well-developed colony, waiting for muffalos and spaceships to bring them bionic body parts is a bit unrealistic. I think that there should be a research tree:

Machining (1500)

(Requires Machining) Basic Bionics (1250)

(Requires Basic Bionics) Craftable Bionics (950)

Then, a good smith/crafter would make a bionic body part using:

250 Steel
7 Components
50 Plasteel

What do you guys think?

[milon]

Question: how is wheelchair any different than peg leg, apart from disallowing certain skills?

[SirDerpface]

Question: how is wheelchair any different than peg leg, apart from disallowing certain skills?

Right click incapacitated person, give wheelchair, person hauls wheelchair to incapacitated person and boop, you have a wheel chair guy and you didn't waste any meds or resources.

[cultist]

Right click incapacitated person, give wheelchair, person hauls wheelchair to incapacitated person and boop, you have a wheel chair guy and you didn't waste any meds or resources.

What's with the obsession with not "wasting" meds? What excactly do you need them for if not healing pawns? How is it unfair or unbalanced that you need medicine to install a peg leg?

[Damien Hart]

Not a bad idea, though rather than disabling skills maybe a penalty to manipulation? Obviously it doesn't interfere with manipulation itself, but it gets in the way when you're trying to do things and manipulation is the most obvious place to apply that effect. Probably a movement speed penalty too.

What's with the obsession with not "wasting" meds? What excactly do you need them for if not healing pawns? How is it unfair or unbalanced that you need medicine to install a peg leg?

In all fairness, you wouldn't really need medicine to install a peg leg, I mean it just straps on over the stump. It was probably just done that way to avoid having to craft a pegleg first or something like that. I think it's probably better the way it is, but I can see why it might seem wrong to some people.

Though if you read the OP, the wheelchair isn't a medicine free alternative so much as a temporary stopgap for when medicine isn't available.

[LouisTBR]

Great discussion! Wheelchair is just a temporary alternative, but it could prove quite useful...