An Alternative to Death Acidifiers?

[Circledline]

Excuse me if this topic has been discussed already, I looked for it but could not find it. For those disinterested in reading this post, the TL;DR will be at the bottom.

I came back to rimworld after a long hiatus to find that some pawns when killed just started turning into green clouds of acid. I thought it was a siege tactic. A way to punish funneling enemies into a thin corridor blocked off by pawns in melee combat. I thought that the acid would affect nearby pawns and thus force them to reposition else take heavy damage. Sadly from what I understand, I was wrong.

Reading some posts about the death acidifier, it seems like it doesn't even deal damage and it's only purpose is to melt the gear off of an extremely well-equipped pawn. In other words, a way to force you to make your own power armor instead of stealing five sets off of raiders. Well I might be wrong, maybe the acid does deal damage or has some other effect, but I think there's a better way to do the above and more.

Introducing explosives. Do you have a pulse? Good, cause that can be used for a dead mans switch. Simply hook up some explosives to a pulse monitor and when your heart stops beating, your body goes boom. Certain explosives are capable of withstanding gunfire without detonating, and this method is probably way easier to make and set-up than an acid filled chest implant.

If ease of use isn't a good enough reason, how about using it as a siege weapon? Sure, the explosion could hurt fellow pawns, but something as simple as a pawn equipped with a wireless device to hold off detonation until they're out of range of the explosive device could work. I wouldn't know this personally, but it doesn't seem too hard to have bluetooth built into whatever computer controls the detonation, at least when compared to plasma weaponry and faster than light space travel.

It just seems to make more sense to me to use modern explosives to destroy all your equipment instead of high tech implants filled with acid, especially when those explosives can cause much more damage to structures and enemy pawns. Or maybe it can't. I don't know anything about explosives, I'm kinda just going off of what google tells me.

TL;DR - I think it would open up more tactical play and make more sense to replace death acidifiers with explosives.

[AileTheAlien]

Having to choose where to kill enemies to have their explosions damage less important things, seems like a good idea. For me though, the bigger problem with the acidifier is that it can be circumvented by using non-lethal force. Although using hammers and weaker guns is some tactical decision by the player, it still gives rewards to players, when the whole point of the acidifier is to remove the large equipment rewards, from successfully fighting off enemies. I think it would be much improved if it activated on downed pawns, and not just dead pawns.

[Canute]

Or made even appareal soulbound.
We don't want that sleeping pawn/guest are exploding because their trigger think it is downed ! :-)

[Circledline]

I think making gear soulbound makes about as much sense as biocoded weapons. I wouldn't be too mad at the idea that there's a mechanism inside the armor that compresses so that you can't squeeze your body inside of it, or latches that simply won't open. Maybe you could try to break the mechanism and force the armor open. Lower it's durability or quality so that it isn't as good as making your own armor, but so that you can atleast earn something from downing and stripping raiders.

Another consideration is the use of EMP grenades and how it could affect acidifiers, biocoded weapons, and these hypothetical explosive replacements and soulbound armor. Just like how an EMP can affect pawns with certain installed bionics, I feel the same should be possible for each of these. A biocoded weapon jams when emp'd as a safety mechanism, or maybe a death acidifier can activate early, though there's no doubt the raiders would think to shield the acidifers components so that not just any discharge could just set it off and kill the pawn.

I want to see how these mechanics could interact, but I feel like having emp grenades then might be really strong if you could kill really powerful pawns, perhaps multiple if they're using the proposed explosives alternative. Or perhaps an emp might just disable these systems entirely. It would make sense to install failsafes into mechanisms that could outright incapacitate or kill 1 or more pawns in an instant.

[Canute]

Not every biocoding need to be based on electronic.
With the addition of psycast, you can explain other ways to bind even dumb things to aura's of other people.
And an EMP don't destroy any electical things, it only overload integrated circuits so they burnout. And there are allready ways to protect chips against EMP's.
But these discussion is so old since power armor exist.

But we all agree that a Death acidfiier isn't the perfect way to prevent the use of the equipment of guards/guests.

[Circledline]

I thought burning out integrated circuits destroyed the chip though and forced either a repair of the chip itself or in the case of using a fuse, it would simply require a replacement of the fuse. Now that you mention it, if having a bionic stomach forces you to vomit when you get EMP'd, how does it start working like normal again afterwards? Are they just so well protected that the circuits can't be destroyed? Can the circuits simply repair themselves? I suppose it's just a little weird.