People, it is imperative that we focus on the scan systems, as they are more important than socializing, especially since we will most likely have another attack against us soon, and I suspect it's going to be bigger than the last one. Socializing can wait for now, we need to ensure that everything is fine so that we don't have any unpleasant discoveries during a fight.
Just so we are all aware, I would strongly caution against viewing social posts as not having any kind of utility vs improving the ship. Growing closer to others is an important element in this RP and it will unlock further options in the future. Not taking any time for yourself to relax in a more casual context also will have consequences that may or may not offset your original gain. I am not trying to curtail your choices here, but I would consider your options carefully.
Focusing on the scan systems is not guaranteed to make us more capable of handling another fight than the other options. Frankly, I don't think it's even
likely that the scans will be more beneficial overall. This isn't just beneficial work vs relaxation; this is a matter of trade-offs and opportunity costs.
People keep saying, "When will we have another chance like this to fix those small problems we have with the scans?" The obvious answer is that we won't have another chance, because the next time we have downtime, there'll be a
different work-related problem we'll have the opportunity to fix, and then another,
and then another. We won't run out of them. Unless Gazetteer specifically notes one to be urgent, none of them will really matter more than the others.
Meanwhile, we can't treat the socializing as
unimportant. True, we don't specifically know what benefits the various options hold, but we can't assume that they don't hold any; I think of them as mystery boxes with potential prizes inside. On top of that, we
do know that optimizing the scans is
exhausting, both for us and for technicians. We don't know whether that's likely to be an immediate problem, but it's fairly clear it will cause some sort of problem.
We have to remember to treat these not just as mechanical utility options, but as
story options. The question is, how do we want this story to progress? The choices we make aren't pointless, but they'll each have their own costs and benefits that shape that going forward, and one choice will rarely be fundamentally, obviously better than the others.
