Beacon Missions are horribly outdated and unmoddable

[ubertpendragon]

Necessary rant about beacons and beacon missions:

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Modding problems

- Cannot set beacon mission state as failed
#16380

- Beacons spawned from a custom mission remain in the level when the mission is inactive
#16648

- Cannot prevent regular beacon events from spawning in custom beacon missions
The eventsets beaconstation_populate will ALWAYS trigger in levels. If you somehow make a beacon mission and make it trigger an event, it will not stop monsters or bandits from potentially spawn in the beacon.

- Cannot add new beacon events without overriding whole beacon eventset
If you want to make, say, NPC events in beacons, you will have to override every beacon eventset just to put your events alognside shockjock2. These should trigger a group of a event (tags?) instead of a single event.

      <EventSet identifier="empty" chooserandom="false" triggereventcooldown="false" allowatstart="true" commonness="30">
        <ScriptedEvent identifier="shockjock2" />
      </EventSet>

- Beacons trigger monster spawns defined in the MISSIONS
This is extremely outdated, and artificial.
Artificial because beacons spawn monsters out of thin air around it without fail when turned on.
Outdated because it spawns monsters defined in missions, instead of... immediately triggering the next pending monster event in the level. This would have much better modding compatibility with mods that add creatures.

It's silly that the game PAUSES monster events when repairing a beacon, then predictably spawns a bunch of monsters around it, instead of letting monsters just spawn naturally while you're doing this side objective.

Barotrauma/Barotrauma/BarotraumaShared/SharedSource/Events/EventManager.cs

Lines 80 to 84 in 22227f1

	private bool isCrewAway;
	//how long it takes after the crew returns for the event manager to resume normal operation
	const float CrewAwayResetDelay = 60.0f;
	private float crewAwayResetTimer;
	private float crewAwayDuration;

Vanilla problems

- No need to repair since beacon items take no damage,
I understand this was changed because people would report beacons as "bugged" for turning off due to damage, BUT:
Beacon machinery becomes immune to damage after sonar is turned on. There is no actual need to repair beacons besides roleplaying. Beacons only need two elements: power and sonar monitor. You can typically speedrun a beacon by repairing reactor/monitor to >1%, powering the reactor, and drawing a wire from reactor to sonar monitor, then activating it.
The lack of passive deterioration is fine, THE LACK OF WATER DAMAGE IS NOT. A repaired beacon should be drained and stay drained. Also beacon walls should be reinforced to avoid stray coilgun shots puncturing them (more on that below)

- Fuel rod trick
This is a well known trick that you can observe in every server: since beacons do not consume any fuel (once again, for the same reason as above), players will save low % used fuel rods and put them inside beacons.

- Empty, looted beacons
There are no friendly NPCs in beacons, ever, because there are no other events than Shockjock. Beacons have saferooms for NPCs to sleep in, but no NPCs besides pirates. You can also casually loot beacons, removing all the items that are supposed to be there for maintenance.

- Piss weak pirates
Bandits in beacons have two problems: low wall health and bad weapons. Wall health does not scale in campaign (a problem also shared by wrecks and pirate submarines), so the more you progress in the campaign and the easier it is to trade shots with bandits. Beacon bandits WITH GUNS are essentially a weaker, more vulnerable version of the thalamus. And if you blow up the beacon, it doesn't matter, because you don't actually have to repair all of it!
Worse, some beacons have a Flak gun, which does next to no damage to submarines (also true for laser) #16012

- Every new beacon is pre-wired
Part of repairing beacons would be to also turn on pumps and drain water, but all the existing beacons are currently pre-wired (water detector signal) or automated in some way (autodoors) compared to older ones. Wiring the sonar transducer to the monitor does not even work even if the monitor requires it!

- The ONLY vanilla beacon event is suffocating its npc
There's a single, unique beacon event in all of barotrauma, and it lets its NPC die from suffocation because it doesnt even have power. Bandits have power, but we're supposed to believe O'Kelly just sits in a dark room with no oxygen.

[Solbusaur]

I also dislike bots on guns ratting out any bandits hiding on board.
"Target spotted!" and then pointing their coilgun at the window-less beacon station makes metagaming unavoidable.