I play exclusively on Salamander (Barring non-wizden servers). I have used every single section of SOP sans one—medical evaluation—at least once, I have used several multiple times, some I use almost every round. Almost none of these sections made the leap to space law.
One of the major benefits of the SOP is it is easily enforced by players themselves. SOP has been invaluable to me in settling arguments quickly and with little hard feelings. It is one of my favorite conflict resolution tools because it has so many common-sense rules made law.
Many people do not know how line of succession works, ask on Discord and you’ll get varied answers. What is considered a high security area? A lot of people will just list what’s in secure trespass, which misses out on some important areas such as: Atmospherics, Gravity Generation, Research Servers, etc.
The point here is the SOP makes this crystal clear. There is no guessing. If I need to know what areas precisely are secure tresspass, I check SOP. If I need to know the procedure for visitors, I have it. I have never had to ahelp after invoking SOP. It has always cleared things up pretty much immediately. I cannot overemphasize how many fires I’ve had SOP extinguish before they even started.
Is SOP underutilized? Yeah, maybe. But it empowers players to fix things in-character without having to involve admins, or get anyone in trouble. In-character rules are incredibly important, and space law simply does not cover them all, nor should it be expected to.
Is the world going to burn down if it’s gone? No. But I think we’ll be a lot better off if it sticks around in some form, especially when it comes to holding heads accountable. SOP can get more granular than space law often does, and I think that’s it’s greatest strength.
I agree that there should be some kind of SOP (at least for MRP). Not having a defined chain of command for when the captain dies seems like a bit of an oversight to me. I also would like more ways for lawyers to disrupt the sentencing process. Court RP sucks so I get why it was removed, but I think there should be something that they can officially do. I also think that (especially on MRP) the person who arrests a prisoner should not be the one to sentience them as that is an obvious IC conflict of interest.
Captains are encouraged to allow non-hostile visitors to come aboard, which essentially implies the Captain shouldn’t be denying someone without very good reason.
Asylum rules aren’t useful now but may be in the future if we add more neutral parties.
Visitors can be searched at will—at least if they are on the station—but nobody should be entering their vessel without permission unless the visitor has already committed a crime.
The protections don’t apply to them if they are doing blatantly illegal things like slavery.
I don’t think visitors should be allowed to be searched at will at any time. SOP had it so visitors could be searched upon their entrance into the station which makes more sense.
And also with new space law I wonder where the distinction would begin between visitor and foreign invader. Say the visitor broke the law and did some harm could they be considered foreign invaders?
I think it would be good to have an outline for how to handle visitors given that visitors can now show up as ghost roles (and not just admin events). It might also be good to designate the ATS as a neutral station, mainly as a place to talk with people you don’t fully trust.
I’m surprised nobody else said it but what I want most out of SoP is cracking down on powergaming even more, Powergaming should be against the rules regardless but it should also be in spacelaw in some way. Stuff like guns only being handed out on red, even for security, Stuff like engi tools/belts, galoshes and such. They arent against the current rules if used for “Being security but better” By hacking into places to raid them or to shoot down syndis on green. (it can apply to other jobs not enforced by space law too) also Bolting random doors every time you leave your office as a head seems like bullshit.
Okay, so apparently current rules have no regulation of random bolting. It kinda falls under over-securing the antagonist objectives, but not directly (which is not good). At least you could yell “Command broke SOP!!1!” on common radio before, now you pretty much cannot do anything IC and have to either ahelp or cope