After the very lively debate on whether tech scanning should remain and what form it should take, I have decided to go back to basics for v4.1.
Active sensors will no longer be able to gain tech from scanning alien ships. This ability will not be passed on to fire control systems (not yet, anyway). The obvious result of this is that active sensors will no longer be a hostile act so the only downside to active sensors will be giving away your position. This is pretty much the real world situation.
Active sensors will still be able to monitor weapons fire, etc and determine armour strength, weapons capabilities, etc. As before, any information gained will be displayed in the Tac Intel window.
Because of the removal of tech scanning, I have considerably upped the potential gain from salvaging wrecks and scrapping captured ships. Instead of gaining specific systems from wrecks, you can now gain research points towards background tech, just as you did from tech scanning. When a wreck is created, it will have data from one to as many as seven technologies stored within it. The chances are 100% chance for one, then 50% for a second, 25% for a third etc.. The number of tech points for each technology will be a random amount between 1% and 20% of the amount needed for the next level of that tech. These background techs are randomly selected from all the systems of the ship class and there may be duplicates, in which case you will gain from 2% to 40% of that tech.
When salvaging a wreck, you will gain access to all the tech contained within it. However, that tech will be no use if you already possess it so you may salvage a wreck and effectively find nothing. If the wreck contains a much higher level tech than your own, for example 30cm lasers when you have only 12cm, you will instead gain points towards the next achievable tech, in this case 15cm lasers.
All of this means that scavenging the battlefield becomes much more important, both in terms of learning about the enemy and preventing him from learning about you. There are also a number of old precursor wrecks floating around the universe which will often contain higher level tech. To find them, active sensors are likely to be necessary but of course that might attract the attention of their still-intact siblings
If you manage to capture an alien ship intact, the potential rewards are much greater. If you scrap the ship (take it apart to learn its secrets), a random number of background techs from one to six will be selected (using the same process as above). In this case though, if you find a tech you don't possess you will get the whole tech level, not just a percentage. At the moment the only way to get hold of alien ships is when a population or even the whole race surrenders, in which case you may get most of their tech anyway from the pop. However, I hope to add additional situations that might result in a surrender.
Besides the above, it is still possible to gain tech from espionage and from interrogating captured crew and officers from lifepods.
Steve
