Scientific Facility

Test subject holding pens, and/or test floor?

 

warehouse off to the side?

garage with vehicles, delivery location?

first aid station?

 

I think it depends on whether you're going for a sci-fi science lab, or something more contemporary. Either way, it should have multiple labs of various sizes testing multiple things. For a sci-fi one, some examples could include: a particle accelerator; an FTL prototype; a large, open area for testing flying/hovering devices; a wormhole or teleportation experiment; an anti-grav chamber; it could be anything.

If you really wanted to get into it, you could make it a multi-floor facility, with a large lobby/rotunda, a director's office behind glass (looking out into the lobby), and a series of labs. If you've ever seen Eureka, that's pretty much what I have in mind in my suggestions (though perhaps not full-scale). Might also be interesting to have a hidden, hard-to-find room, like a top-secret area (like Section 5 in Eureka).

 

A fallout room? Aka, a panic room?

 

I have a few ideas for those. For an anti-grav chamber, you could set it up so that it looks like something is suspended between two or more grav lifts or man cannons ( a crate, a vehicle, some forged aesthetic, whatever). It could even be a human test sort of thing, where the player walks onto a grav lift and just sort of "floats around" over several lifts. Something like that might work best if the grav lifts where far enough below the player that the effect was fairly gentle. Basically, anything sort of creative use of grav lifts/man cannons and/or one-way shields could demonstrate some sort of anti-gravity technology.

For a wormhole test, you could set up two active camo powerups on opposite sides of a room (to be the wormhole openings). A pair of teleporter nodes could match each powerup, either with the nodes turned upside down (so as to hide the fact that it's a teleporter), or else turned sideways so that the teleporter effect becomes part of the wormhole visual effect (with the powerup at the tip of the teleporter beam). Then of course the effect would be that the person steps up to the wormhole opening, and traverses the wormhole to the other side of the room (could be used in conjunction with a vehicle test as well).

For a particle accelerator, I think a cyclotron (a circular type of particle accelerator) would be best. Imagine this; you have a circular track with a large hole in the middle (sort of like a racing track going in a full circle), with each section of track made up of an upper and lower half. There would be a "channel" or gap between the upper and lower halves (it would be like if the track were made of bridge pieces, the channel would be the space left in between the rails). Lining this "inner ring" would be a bunch of fusion coils. At one end of the circle, there would be a "trigger coil" the player could shoot, which would set off a chain reaction in the coils, going in opposite directions around the circle, and meeting together on the opposite side. At that end, there could be a larger cache of explosives to represent the particle collision. There would need to be at least some opening between the two halves of each track section, so that the fusion coils aren't sealed off. Same idea could be done in a straight-line sort of accelerator. If that doesn't make sense, I'll see if I can forge up a demonstration and upload it.