Racial Technology Roleplaying

[Maltay (OP)]

Using SM mode, one can make research of Racial Technologies instantaneous.  From a roleplaying or game consistency standpoint, how many players do this?  I am currently on the fence and cannot decide which way to play.

[UnLimiTeD]

I personally do it per instance.
If I just researched a new weapon, and when it's finished, the new capacitor tech becomes available, I make the same weapon again with higher fire rate, why should that be prototyped for the full cost again?

If it's an entirely new weapon system, I normally research it.

[Hawkeye]

Never.
A situation as UnLimiTeD describes should not arise, as I usually check my other projects for progress and if the new capacitor tech is only a few weeks away, I simply wait for it to finish before designing a prototype weapon. If I overlooked it, well, apparently the engineers designing the new weapon made an OOPS and have to start from scratch

If I need the weapon ASAP, I am willing to pause a lot of other research projects in order to give the weapon one the max number of research labs, but I will not insta research it.

[Brian Neumann]

I only use the sm functions for reasearching systems where the background tech was my starting tech.  Even then I generally only do it for weapons systems that I didn't bother to use initially.  I just assume that I had the prototype done, but nobody had seen what it could do in the field.  I don't use it to change basic tech to be a better match to what I have encountered.  For example most of my active sensors have a resolution of 100 for spotting capital ships at longer ranges.  If my opponent uses a hull size of 123 for his most common ships I am not going to use the sm functions for a active sensor with a resolution of 120-130 just to make life easier.  

Where I would use it is if I decided I wanted to put lasers on my ships instead of mesons.  In that case it would make sense that I had sometime in the past designed a laser system and now I decide to use it.

Brian

[Andrew]

The only time I use it after creating my initial teach is if I realise I have designed something stupid , I just in game researched a C5 Laser and then realsied that a C4 Laser would have had exactly the same reload time and used less power si I awarded myself the C4 laser as i I had got it right first time I would have researched it.

[ZimRathbone]

The only time I use this as at initial startup - I figure if I messed up on tech, then the race messed up - maybe next time I'll learn!

[Father Tim]

Every time, with TN starts.  After spending my all initial RP on technologies, I then design the best possible version of everything (and usually two or three lasers, jump engines, and sensors) and grant those systems to my empire for 'free'.

If I made some sort of glaring error (10cm lasers with Capacitor 8 or something) I'd probably use instant RST to fix it, but I tend to notice such mistakes when assigning the project to a research team, which makes it easy enough to fix.