[douglas]

In stock, there are four ruins techs. They are:

1. Massive Planetary Shielding: gives the Massive Planetary Shield Generator, a facility that gives 5000 non-phased shield points. Generally considered far too weak to be worth a facility slot, especially when compared to heavily shielded weapon platforms, and does not block Phased Polaron Beams or shield skipping weapons.

2. Massive Shield Depleting Weapons: gives the Massive Shield Depleter, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 1000 points of shields-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal shield depleters.

3. Massive Engine Destroying Weapons: gives the Massive Ionic Disperser, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 500 engines-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal ionic dispersers, especially considering that anything beyond 120 damage of this type in one shot is worthless once the target's shields are down, and it's usually shot in the first volley where it usually acts as just a weaker version of the shield depleter.

4. Neural Computer Interface: gives the Neural Combat Net, which is supposed to give any ship that has it the benefits of having the same experience as the most experienced friendly ship in the same battle. If it actually worked, this would be extremely useful. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd be better off spending less resources on a fighter bay and never putting any fighters in it.

Which ruins gives which of these techs is determined at map generation.

Ancient Ruins can also give a number of randomly selected normal techs (1-3 in random stock maps). These techs are randomly selected at the time you colonize the planet out of all the techs you have the prerequisites for.

You can tell something about what you're going to get by the description of the ancient ruins on the planet:

1. "There are ancient ruins on this planet from a long dead civilization.": 1 random tech
2. "There are buried alien cities on this planet that have long been deserted.": 2 random techs
3. "Sensors indicate some kind of advanced technological devices left on this planet.": 3 random techs
4. "We have detected advanced technology present on this planet.": one of the ruins-only techs

Mods can change any or all of the details presented above, except the time of selection of techs.