Questions about research

[chairman yang]

I'm wondering if there's a way to tweak it so that tech advances *up to a point* are much easier to achieve, or are maybe even automatically available. One of the sillier aspects of the game is that relatively basic things (for a space-faring society) like aircraft aren't available for a long, long time. It would make a lot more sense to have it unavailable simply due to expense/need, rather than having to "rediscover" it. I'm fairly certain I could personally rediscover at least low- to mid-grade air power with a decent research team in perhaps ten years, and I'm no Astronaut / Colonist / Engineering type... it isn't like the basic principles of flight are particularly daunting once you know it's possible. But I digress. For anyone who's messed around with the modifications... is this something that sounds "doable" with the available config settings?

[St Leo]

I suggest you mess around in alpha.txt and make the aircraft chassis available earlier.:-)

[TBox]

Okay, this is one of my pet peeves. You aren't "rediscovering how to fly." The details of flight are all safely stored away somewhere. What you ARE doing is convincing your military generals that air power is not only possible, but practical and necessary. Another person in another forum brought up the strangeness of having lasers b4 missiles. Again, it's not that we don't know HOW to build a missile, but that missiles are powered by fossil fuels, and those don't exist on planet. Thus, you need synthetic fossil fuels. I could go on, but I'll spare you.

[Felan]

Col. Santiago is also quoted in the game mentioning that it amazes people that they are just now getting satellites or somesuch when they had completed an interstellar journey previousily. She says that what they don't understand is that it is not a feat of invention of engineering. Another faction leader (forget which one off-hand) mentions that you must make crude tools and with those tools more sophicasted tools and so on and so on. Not that a game with aircraft early is wrong per se, but then neither is aircraft later.

[Pythagoras]

T-Box - In response to the missle thing, there are no fossil fuels on planet, and its probably REALLY inefficiant to put a reactor on a smaller one, so when you develop "Sythetic Fossil Fuels" the ability to mass produce large quantities of these missles is very helpful. One volley of missles, which can be mass produced and used in excess, is probably a great deal more powerful then a single laser blast. Also, the missles dont require any energy from the unit itself, it has its own supply.

I think all of the Doctrines (ie Doctrine Air Power) are more or less reassertions of a strategic need, so your'e not really rediscovering how to make planes, your'e at the point where it is economically viable to start producing planes, or rovers, or foils again, and adjusting them to the rigors of planet. If you norice all the chassis from "Doctrine" techs are all available now, here on earth. The new ones like Gravship or Hovertank are not listed as "Doctrines."