Medic Tries To Explain Things…

There’s a lot of unexplained stuff in Team Fortress 2, a lot of which probably never will be explained. There’s also a lot of stuff that wasn’t explained and then was explained years later, or stuff that we thought we knew then turned out we didn’t know. The list of things that we don’t have an explanation for could fill hundreds of articles and the great thing is, you can make up your own explanations!… Wait, I think I’m on to something…

So now we have Medic Tries To Explain Things!

A quick note, none of this is official.

Number 1 – The Sandvich Conspiracy…
The Sandvich is amazing. It can heal anyone it’s thrown at and unlike weapons like the Razorback and the Ullapool Caber, it regenerates. After a small amount of time, a new Sandvich pops out of thin air and into the Heavy’s pocket, ready to be eaten or thrown at that burning Medic over there. But how does the Sandvich and other food items regenerate? At first, my thought was that they are irradiated and thus somehow grow back, but weapons like the Flying Guillotine don’t work that way. So I thought that perhaps every class has their own inbuilt teleporter somewhere? Most classes have pouches on their belts, or in Scout’s case, a backpack, so instead of filling said pouches up with spare cleavers and chocolate bars, why not have mini-teleporters in those pouches? Items like the Razorback and the Ullapool Caber are simply too large to fit in these pouches or travel through these mini-teleporters though.

Number 2 – How do dropped weapons get turned into boolets?
This one’s a tricky one. I remember a TF2 GMod comic in which Soldier crushes a small fairy who turns out to be the Ammo Converter Pixie, so the whole team runs out of ammo, but pixies are just silly. Maybe it’s the ghost of Poopy Joe, the poor Monkeynaut who most likely died in that failed rocket in Doomsday, but even then, that’s a lot of work for one chimp. A better idea is universal ammo, where every weapon uses, essentially, the same ammo, the guns just fire them differently, but then how do you explain Huntsman arrows and giant syringes? Finally, I decided that everyone carries a small nuclear generator that instantly melts down, fuses then molds dropped weapons into the correct type of arrow. Plus, it explains why Soldier’s insane and why everyone’s got such a nice tan.

Number 3 – How do those paper masks fool people?
Spies can disguise as anyone, other classes, whatever, but to us, the outsiders, all we see is a paper mask. Surely there’s more to it than that? And although many of our mercenaries are not considered the sharpest tools in the shed, they’re not THAT dumb, are they? Of course not. I really wanted to say “a wizard did it!” to this question, but I thought of a nicer idea. The power behind the disguise is built into the Disguise Kit, that’s what generates the smoke and fuzzy particles and actually creates the disguise that enemy mercenaries see. The masks are mostly cardboard, but they also have small chips in them. What these do is give a reference point of where the Disguise Kit should start generating the disguise, so you don’t accidentally have part of Spy’s arm sticking out of the disguise or noticing that the Heavy over there has an extra leg or something. Quite clever, really.

Number 4 – How does the Payload Cart heal you?
This was a legitimate question I asked when I first started playing Team Fortress 2. Payload seemed simple enough, you just follow the tracks, mostly. The fact that the bomb heals you was a bit out of place though. I never found an answer until I was looking up old TF2 bugs, including one that allowed Engineers to upgrade the healing rate of the bomb cart. Of course! The bomb contains a miniature dispenser! Fairly obvious that one, really, especially since there’s half a dispenser built into the bomb cart. Go on, look closely, there is, see!

Number 5 – How comes Engineer only has one sentry at a time?
Apart from the obvious reason, that it’d be blatantly overpowered (as seen on Saigns servers), the fact is that it takes a lot of time and energy and metal to keep multiple sentry guns alive. Remember, it takes 570 pieces of metal to fully upgrade one sentry, and our little dispenser friends simply cannot cope! Even when you grab ammo kits and the like, it’s still very tricky to look after them all with all the Spies and Demomen around. Of course, you can just build more dispensers but that costs more metal and so on and so forth. Also, the strains Engineers must get from repeatedly whacking buildings…

Anyway, that’s it for today. More soon. Hopefully.