Bug Department
This design document is currently completely unimplemented in Ephemeral Space.
You should not expect to find anything listed here in-game just yet.
Tracking issue:
ATTENTION, OPERATIVE. The crew of Space Station 14 are on high alert. We have determined that it is critical that you degrade the station's equipment as a distraction before detonating the nuclear warhead.
Bug Department involves inducing a negative department-wide event. It is a timed objective like Siphon Data, meaning it slows down the pace of the game and gives crew more opprutunities to react the traitor's actions.
Gameplay
Traitors with a Bug Department objective have an innate verb to plant a bug in any APC that's in the room of a beacon associated with that department, provided its panel is open.
Once the siphoning device is planted, the APC will begin to malfunction and start sparking, and make strange sounds when in very close (1-tile) proximity. Additionally, anyone who examines the APC while its panel is still open will be able to tell that it's been tampered with, and can remove the siphoning device if they see it.
After 8~ (vauge estimate) minutes have passed since planting the bug AND the bug has not been removed, an event with a wide area-of-effect will be triggered, and the objective will be marked as complete.
The kind of event triggered can be anything from the greytide virus, to something like an air alarm malfunction or electrical storm that busts every light. Generally speaking, anything that causes significant damage to a given department or its surroundings is fair game.
Outside of the after effect of the events, the behavior is more-or-less shared with the data siphoning behavior of the Siphon Data objective.
Why
Being basically an APC-focused variant of Siphon Data, the reasoning for its inclusion is more-or-less the same.
The slow-burn nature of this objective creates interesting counterplay & strategy from both traitors and crew, encouraging them to create distractions to make their suspicious behavior less likely to be found. It also acts as a source of interesting plausible deniability, since most of the events it causes can be triggered naturally. This helps with creating tension and uncertainty.