Virology Reworked

src/en/space-station-14/departments/medical/proposals/Virology Reworked.md

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+# Virology Reworked
+
+| Designers | Implemented | GitHub Links |
+|---|---|---|
+| AdmiralObvious | :x: | TBD |
+
+## Overview 
+Virology existed in the past and for the most part was very static and boring, as well as generally unpleasant to deal with. This proposal is hopefully going to make Virology as a job more interesting, as well as have more impact on a round. Viruses would be procedural instead of one and done.
+
+## The Core Loop
+Virologists would be working with the crew to identify viruses, isolate the viruses, then attempt to create vaccines or inoculation for these viruses, or use these viruses to create potentially beneficial new viruses. Viruses will be constantly changing over time, and virologists will have to keep up with current known viruses in the crew and attempt to get ahead of them. 
+Antagonist virologists may attempt to create pandemic bioweapon tier viruses. Chemistry will be working with Virology in the fabrication of vaccines and treatments. Janitorial will work with medical as well as perform normal functions to help reduce viral infection. Salvage and cargo will likely be bringing in viruses due to nature of their work.
+
+## Viruses
+At the start of a round, a large percentage of the crew should start with some sort of benign effect virus (will explain more later about benign versus active viruses). Each crewmember would start with between 0 and 3 viruses in their system.
+These viruses initially won't have any effects to the crew carrying said viruses, but later as the round progresses can mutate based on various factors.
+Viruses can be identified and tracked using a similar system to the detective DNA sequencing and collected by crew using sterile swabs on individuals, or by taking blood samples from crew. Method of sample collection will determine which, if any viruses are collected. These samples can then be inserted into the medical diagnoser (or something else but we have the machine for it) to determine the 6 core characteristics of the virus.
+
+## Viral Characteristics 
+Viruses will have 4 of 6 characteristics that the virologist can detect using the diagnoser. 
+* Symptoms, which can have many potential symptoms the virologist can see to assess who has what disease potentially.
+* Volatility, which would operate on a sliding scale of how likely the virus is to mutate, and how severe the potential mutations can be using a random weighted point buy, similar to botany chem mutations.
+* Estimated lifespan of the virus before it eventually "dies", by 20 minutes, none of the initial viruses should exist.
+* Lastly, there'd be the mode of contagion spread. Most likely to spread would be airborne, least likely to spread would be blood to blood contact (this will also require medical to sterilize their tools, which will be discussed later). Contagion types can stack.
+
+Not shown to the virologist would be wether or not the virus is capable of jumping species type, nor the major health effect related to such an event occurring. 
+
+## Viral Mutations
+Viruses on their own will all start with a benign type symptom, or, the carrier of the virus won't know it exists. Over time, viruses will pass between crew naturally through normal work, physical contact, being near each other, and potential medical malpractice with improperly sterilized tools. 
+As the viruses transfer between hosts, there would be a variable chance for the virus to mutate based on the volatility rating of the virus (min of about 10% and max of 75%). When the virus mutates, it can select from a (hopefully) large list of symptoms and maladies, from literally nothing, to a cough or fever, to a series of more lethal traits like coughing blood, blindness, ecetra.
+The point buy can also remove previous traits the virus had, at a moderate weighting.
+Viral volatility should reroll every time the virus mutates. It should be possible for there to be a novel virus that only affects one or three crewmembers before it changes to a different virus based on the original.
+
+## Combating Viruses
+Cleanliness will go a long way to preventing viruses from getting out of hand. Medical tools, such as syringes will have a high chance to pick up viruses and transfer them between patients if the syringes are not sterilized properly. This can be done via a sterilization machine which would need to be added inside of medical for rapid sterelization of tools (reccomend to have science make this), alternatively you can use liquid soaps or space cleaners to attempt to clean syringes and other objects, but with a much reduced speed.
+
+Solid soaps can be used to treat items using the same clean evidence system that is uses to wipe DNA from objects. Solid soaps will not collect viruses unless otherwise specified by certain virus characteristics.
+
+Janitorial will have the primary responsibility of removing messes as soon as practical, but their Janitorial trolleys will be a major vector for disease transmission and mutation, especially airborne diseases. The janitor should ideally try to sterilize their trolley with space cleaner at regular intervals.
+
+Medical and janitorial clothing items such as nitrile gloves, rubber gloves and other appropriate PPE items should allow doctors to safely move potentially infected items and handle patients without getting themselves infected, and without spreading the contagion via touch.
+These PPE items should either be cleaned or destroyed as they will lose their effectiveness after X number of items handled or contacts made (nothing too crazy, 150+ things should be fine). Once the PPE is considered to be worn out it will begin to infect the wearer with increased probability over time and have the potential to transfer any eligible viruses to other objects and players through normal contact infection.
+
+Alternatively, virologists can attempt to create vaccines to the virus in question, in order to create a vaccine, the virologist would need to provide multiple samples of the virus to the vaccinatior machine, which will then synthesize a vaccine with a hidden success probability based on the volatility of the target virus. Vaccine production will require blood, and a specified, randomized curated series of chems besides blood to actually create the vaccine. 
+A successful vaccine will prevent the specific virus the vaccine is created for from jumping to any person who has not already been infected by the vaccine parent, but will not prevent any future mutation of the same virus eventually coming around and infecting later.
+
+## External Infection Sources
+Viruses that don't originate in the crew round start can be instead picked up from other sources, such as raw meats in the kitchen, not cleaning meat cutting tools in the kitchen, rats and mice, rotting corpses, artifacts creating (usually very lethal) diseases, and sometimes external sources, such as carp bites, vent spider bites, spawned blood puddles, cargo imports (such as on/in the crates) and potentially bio terror from nukkies using specific, unique viruses.
+
+Late arrival crew should also spawn with a virus or two at a 20% rate potentially with minor symptoms as well unlike round start crew which should only have the benign symptom.
+
+This is mostly done so the crew can't somehow systematically wipe out viruses.
+
+## Viral Modification
+Virologists can take multiple viruses and attempt to take characteristics from each of them in an effort to create new viruses, which can potentially be used to combat other viruses, or be turned into bioweappns.
+* Viruses can be modified when exposed to chems to cause different effects.
+* Mutagen will immediately trigger a mutation of the virus as would normally happen when the virus transfers between subjects.
+* Radium, Uranium, and Liquid Plasma will not trigger a mutation, but instead randomly strengthen or weaken the symptoms of the virus by one level for each type of reagent applied to the virus in it's respective container.
+* Spacacillin can be used to "stabilize" the virus, and then later be used to intentionally infect people without the virus that the original sample was taken from. A Spacacillin modified virus would block the original virus from transferring to the patient as an alternative to a vaccine, as a form of inoculation instead but still subject the patient to the symptoms of the virus.
+* Placing multiple virus samples together would work similarly to swabbing, and combine all viruses into one once the container is shaken with probability proportional to how volatile the viruses are, the most stable virus would be most likely to retain it's traits in the new virus.
+* Virology should start the round with some samples of current viruses in their department to get a head start.
+
+
+## Homeopathic Treatment
+Per virus, each symptom associated with it will have a specific chem that can be administered to the patient in order to reduce or eliminate the effects of the disease. For example, coughing can be fixed with tricordazine for one specific virus, while another symptom of the same virus would need something like dylovene. Effectiveness of the treatment would depend on the severity of the system and a hidden modifier on each symptom as to how effective these treatments are. Treatments can make viral symptoms worse as well. 
+
+## Contagion Tiers
+These can all stack in one virus based on volatility and mutation, and will always start with at least one of these.
+
+* Blood to Blood: Requires direct blood contact to transfer, such as repeated syringe use, or the same melee weapon used against multiple people. Drinking blood may or may not count. Very low point cost.
+* Saliva: Would require someone to drink or ingest the virus from an item someone else has drank or eaten off of without being cleaned first. Low point cost.
+* Airborne, Inhalation: Would require people to stand near each other in order to transfer the virus. Can be blocked with breath masks. Moderate point cost.
+* Contact: Virus can be picked up through contact with objects the infected has handled with a lifespan assigned to the virus for objects, as well as hugs, cuffing actions, buckling. Moderate point cost.
+* Airborne, Infectious: High virulence, able to infect through anything via proximity except for full virology suits and the CMO hardsuit and Paramedic Softsuit (gotta make them useful for something). High point cost.
+
+All of the above can also have a species jump modifier, which will allow the virus to transfer between species and survive successfully, at a higher mutation cost.
+
+## Virus Symptoms
+Viruses should only very rarely be beneficial. They should be something that the crew should be aware of however. Viral symptoms would be generated based on the mutation point buy system with low cost mutations being most common. Ideally these symptoms would be assigned a severity as well.
+Symptoms should not manifest until at least a fifth of the virus lifetime has passed in the carrier.
+The point buy for a virus symptom severity should operate on a weighted bell curve, where very low severity symptoms (sometimes positive symptoms) are unlikely to happen, mild to moderate symptoms should be common, and severe symptoms should be uncommon.
+When a virus jumps species, the severity should be bumped up by one or two equivalent levels to make the event impactful (assuming this scale is working on a 0-5 scale). The originator species may have a minor cough while the reciever species might be literally coughing up their lungs for example. For the sake of simplicity in this doc, symptoms will be on a severity scale of 0-5.
+
+* Benign: The default virus state. Doesn't do anything. Cannot be removed. Functions as a time delay for other symptoms.
+* Runny Nose/Feels Funny: Basically doesn't do anything but let the carrier know they have something with an occasional popup. At higher levels, this can manifest into diziness, drowsiness or breathing difficulty.
+* Coughing/Sneezing: Makes the carrier cough or sneeze intermittently, creates an invisible area of effect for the virus to cause infection if it has a contact or airborne infection type. Should not generate an AOE if the individual is wearing a sterile mask. Severe cough can include coughing blood, and would cause minor bloodloss. No effect for no severity.
+* Dizziness: Applies the drunk effect to the carrier, more severe symptoms can apply a move debuff. No severity makes the carrier immune to drunkeness.
+* Breathing Difficulty: Makes the infected take a sliding scale of airloss damage proportional to the severity. No severity can slightly reduce the airloss damage the carrier receives from the environment. Carrier should gasp at a regular interval with this symptom.
+* Vomiting: Causes the carrier to vomit, will create a puddle containing any viruses the patient has, and can be spread to others via drinking (why) or through contact if they don't have shoes. Can cause blood vomiting at high severity which will remove a good chunk of the affected bloodstream. Can temporarily blind the victim if they are wearing a breath mask or gas mask. Low severity would just give the carrier a notice that they feel queasy. No severity would make the carrier unable to vomit.
+* Drowsiness: Causes the character to yawn, affects stamina cap, can cause the character to enter forced sleep at high severity. At no severity, slightly increases the stamina cap.
+* Chills: Makes the patient feel colder than they are. Can potentially raise the target body temp of the carrier. Would show on visual inspection as "clammy".
+* Sweats: Makes the target feel overheated. Reduces the target body temp of the carrier. Would show on visual inspection as "hot".
+* Blindness: Applies a set vision damage value to the carrier. Would show on visual inspection as cataracts or a different indicator of eye damage. No severity can reverse vision damage over time.
+* Blistering: Visible blisters develop on the carrier. No severity adds a slight level of armor, or can go the other way where it causes bleeding at 4 severity.
+* Convulsions/Seizures: Stuns the carrier similar to touching an electrified object. Level 5 severity would induce paralysis, level 0 severity reduces the impact of electrical shocks similar to almost good budget insuls.
+* Poison: Variable, but a severe symptom that will eventually kill the patient if left untreated.
+* Zombification/Cluwne: Effectively a way for the zombie virus to spawn naturally, this should be extremely rare (like a 1 in 10k chance), but would function the same as poison above, and turn the victim into a zombie or cluwne on death.
+* Insular: Virus will actively suppress other viruses, removing them from the carrier after a period of time based on the severity of this symptom. Should come with some other negative symptoms to offset.
+* Vocal Modification: Can cause speech impediments, or if you want to be fun, cause full language/word replacements, such as Ravatarian, or straight up mute the patient.
+* Numbing: Acts as a small increase to the patients critical damage threshold, but increases action doafters, and can induce the clumsiness trait. 
+
+## Sample Viruses
+
+Common Cold
+
+* Symptoms: Benign 1 Minute Irremovable Coughing/Sneezing Severity 3, Runny Nose/Feeling Unwell Severity 2
+* Volatility: 30%
+* Lifespan: 6 Minutes
+* Contagion: Airborne Inhaled, Contact
+* Originating Species: Human
+* Can Jump Species: No
+* Homeopathy: Tricordazine Coughing/Sneezing Severity -2 (to 1) Ethanol Coughing/Sneezing +1 (to 4)
+
+Wehpox
+
+* Symptoms: Benign 2 Minutes Irremovable Blistering Severity 5 Drowsiness Severity 3
+* Volatility: 50%
+* Lifespan: 8 Minutes
+* Contagion: Blood to Blood, Saliva
+* Originating Species: Reptilian
+* Can Jump Species: Yes
+* Jump Concequence: +2 Drowsiness
+* Homeopathy: Aloe Blistering Severity -3 (to 2) Stebellin Blistering Severity -1 (to 4) Drowsiness +1 (to 4)
+
+Romerol Virus (Zombies)
+
+* Symptoms: Benign 10 Seconds Irremovable Poison Severity 3 Zombification Unique
+* Volatility: 10%
+* Lifespan: 20 Minutes
+* Contagion: Blood to Blood
+* Originating Species: Whoever gets it first.
+* Can Jump Species: Yes
+* Species Jump Concequence: +1 Poison
+* Homeopathy: Dylovene +1 Poison (to 4) Dipenhydramine +2 Poison (to 5)