Is the Engineering role fixable, and is it needed

[Pissachu]

Drastic title, read before going “erm lmao stupid post much? rizz ohio”
The entire point of engineering is to provide power to the station; this is done at the start of the shift, through multiple ways.
AME is the easiest one, but it keeps going from being able to power the entire station, to not providing enough power
Solars is easy but nobody ever does it
The singularity and the tesla are usually off limits, due to there being very little amounts of people competent enough not to have it kill the station
The TEG gets forgotten
With that said, it’s a with a bunch of actions nobody wants to do. It’s always a chore to set up the power at the start of the shift; it’s a repeated routine every shift, and the constant changes done by people that think one way and others that think another make it harder for new engineers to learn.

The power is finally set up, say with very little problems because the engineering team was capable.
What now? A syndicate blows up a part of the station? That won’t happen that many times during the shift, so it’s not too much of a trouble.
Is the area important, as in medical or bridge? Then evacuation will be called.
The area is not important? Then engineering will simply fill the spaced areas, fix the wiring and pat themselves in the back.

So now we only have 2 things that Engineering is needed for:
the first one is just a hassle that nobody wants to do, but if it’s not done causes trouble to the rest of the station;
the second one is something that they are able to do just due to one click of their RCDs and materials given from cargo.

If you automate the first, then the only thing we’re left is an aimless role, that when called to fix a room probably won’t since they were trying to get any other entertainment from a previously empty shift.
If you try to take engineering off and give every crew member the tools to fix the station themselves, you’ve got everyone running around with a virtual All Access.

Is it possible to find a way for a role that’s so important to the station it makes most if not all others jobs possible not a pain to play?

[Coyote]

I think the problems with engineering are:

1. It has very little reason to build anything.
2. Power is very binary. If one power source gets sabotaged, it is over for the entire station.
3. As you say, engineering is only needed for a couple of things during the round. They have a ton of downtime, which leads them to be just yellow tiders most of the time.

There is also the problem of atmos, as they have it even worse than engineering when it comes to set it up and forget it gameplay.

I think power needs to be radically redesigned to be more interactive. There should be multiple kinds of power, with more advanced machines requiring more interesting power setups. My idea would be to take xenobiology and change it into bioengineering, and have slimes generate power, and the engineers and atmos techs would have to create habitats and atmosphere for the slimes to generate power as power from the AME degraded during a shift. That way they’d have something to accomplish throughout a shift.