YOU be the technologist

If there were a wider range of schematics, perhaps some the same with subtle differences, and a bunch of them actually shared the same components...

You look into your inventory and see a bunch of generally useful components, observe the sort of place you are going into, and mix up on the spot whatever device you can make from what you've got that would be most effective.
If you see corridors, use those springs and casings to make traps, but if you smell dumb ogres you can't beat up too easily, perhaps some sort of mechanical distraction in a case would be a better bet.

Thus, not only would your character have a higher rating as he got more schematics, but you as the player would learn to be a smart inventor along the lines of your character.

Also, if you could dissasemble things...
You are cutting through hoardes of nasty little bitey things in an underground cabin: they pop around the corner and you fill them full of lead with the blunderbuss and you are wearing a miner's helmet.
When you get to the surface, you are in a forest, and dark elves are shooting at you from the trees. Blunderbuss back in backpack, light detached and in hand, you take them down with your more accurate and longer ranged marksman's pistol, whilst donning yr chapeau of magnetic conversion.
I suppose all this saves is the weight of carrying an extra lantern, but if the chapau were also made from a helmet rather than a top hat, you could also fix that up on the spot. Combined with the other suggestion, this could give a very small character a mighty arsenal in a designer backpack.

Smart things like this make any game fun to play!
Feel free to share your own.

 

Sounds perfect to me.

 

Being able to tear your or anyone else's inventions apart would be nice! No more wasted guns!

 

If you don't need one thing, you turn it into another!

 

(i think this is stealing someone elses idea but here goes)
i think it woudl be cool if you could repair mechanical parts (not just weapons) like taking a rusty revolver parts and making them into fine, or at least good, revolver parts with a reair kit or something. The repair kit (which you could buy at general stores and all the tecnology places) has like 10-20 uses, and after u use them all up, it gets tossed.

 

yes, you are stealing ideas from alot of games

 

As the great man himself said

There is NOTHING new under the sun

 

That is quite true but I think there is a way for it to work. If you were to dismantle a piece of equiptment, it would be reduced into "bits" i.e. a revolver would be broken down into metal "bits" and wood "bits", a suit of leather armour would breack down into leather "bits". These "bits" of whatever would accumulate and once you had enough you could re-smelt, re-stitch, re-craft them into a metal tube or a bund of clock parts or some lether strapes, depending on what the materials were. This way the average technologist doesn't need to carry around an Expandable Laboratory with him but still gets to recycle parts.

 

Perhaps another skill is due then? Crafting.

This would enable technologists to smelt down or disassemble technological items into base materials, such as metal, leather, electrical components etc.

For example, you could turn 1 plate armour into 4 bits of steel and a leather strap. 2 fine daggers into 1 bit of steel, 2 helms of vision into 2 steel, 2 leather strap and 1 clock parts etc.

Of course, you'd only get a fraction back of what went into them, but it's a nifty way of reusing things. Then again, you could just sell them....

 

Or these pieces (which you are not supposed to find any where else) could be used in another college Recycling.

 

Whats the point of that? The items are there be be made into another and even if you sell it, it wouldnt give you much money anyway. I suggest they raise the damage for throwing unwanted items at the enermy.

 

throwing unwanted items h dont think it should do any damage if i throw shoes at them. and plenty of items were never designed to be thrown, or have sharp edges. plus if the item is even light enough to be thrown and doesnt have any sharp edges, how is it going to damage them?

one thing i think is kind of silly about the game is the way that no matter what you throw the distance can be completely random. try throwing a 200 stone piece of sheet metal, or a 1000 stone suit of armor. if my character was strong enough to throw that far, why dont i do superhuman damage with my fists?