After treating a few POWs there are a few things I like about the medical system and a few things that are kind of meh.
- Medical beds default as unstocked. This is no good as wounds are typically under time pressure. Beds should generate a low priority restock by default, that way beds are ready when they're needed and not half a day after they're needed. Maybe job priority should bump up to very high if someone wounded is in bed, but that's solved in the suggestion below.
- Medkits are pretty good. There may be an issue where they don't treat the "most serious" wound if there are multiple wounds. But they're very potent and very valuable and are definitely worth the cost.
- Both medical bed jobs are "medical". I can't tell if doctors are being forced to use the IV or if they're treating wounds.
-IVs are kind of meh. As a food item they are extra expensive, and if a person can walk they have no problem getting food from the kitchen (they may stick a bit too hard to the bed and starve a bit first!). As a default job IVs get used way too liberally, and doctors will chew through your supply to handle even minor wounds. I had a crew at 124/140 HP, surrounded by far more serious wounds, and she got an IV. Of course, locking logistics will lock out both IVs and essential medkits.
- To compound the IV drama, once the job is created it can not be denied or locked with the logistics option. I suspect this behavior is rooted in a lot of other side issues, such as a crew performing cancelled jobs on another ship. If they have a task on another ship they MUST travel to the other ship, it can not be aborted or cancelled via draft/ship tasks, and they won't be satisfied until they touch down on the other side. Job cancelling doesn't seem to work.
- There is no draft ability to treat wounds (can't give oxygen to prisoners either). Not a big fan of that. Instead you have to go around the "back door" and wait for a job to show up, and then force the doctor into it. It seems to not be possible to treat wounds without the med table, it'd be nice to be able to staunch/slow a wound without a med bed.
I'd like to see a system readiness "triage" setting. At 0-alert triage the logistics and treatment will be performed whenever crew feel like it, just like now. At yellow alert medical tasks are given max priority and will force doctors out of bed to perform treatment. Someone's bleeding, that means don't wait 8 hours for a break and nap before fixing it. At red alert medical logistics are given max priority, perhaps pulling people away from breaks or bed. When half the crew are dying, everyone needs to be on it. That covers the bulk of what I try to micro during a crisis, at least.
It would nice for IVs to get a buff. Right now the medical bed does all the heavy lifting with +100% heal rate, and IVs have no real utility for walking patients. They can feed themselves, and that's a very small interruption to their healing. Perhaps med beds could be nerfed to +50% (normal beds are +30%) and let IVs give another +50%-100% heal rate for 8+ hours. This might be done as a direct buff, or indirectly I.E. a mega boost of vitamins which could affect heal rate. Now if a crew is seriously wounded, you'll want IVs to heal them up quickly. Minor wounds obviously don't require the extra healing and there may be an injury threshold for requesting it. Maybe ~60% health? It makes sense for the automatic system to be stingy on valuable resources, while the player can force excess treatment by drafting and forcing an IV on a patient. They'll heal up sooner or later, after all.
Also it'd be great to let med kits vs. IVs have separate usage permissions. They kind of serve different goals after all.
Edit: Another option for IVs is to allow people to eat in a space suit through the IV. It may require a drafted doctor or a bed in a vacuum could do it. That would make them pretty useful in a crisis situation, but it can wait for the crew inventory to be finalized.
