[Kana]

The whole thing on progression thing is only important, if you want to be able to sort the components by what is 'obsolete'. In SEIV, you could view obsolete weapons and then place them on a ship either to gift older tech to someone, or maybe some form of cheaper alternative, and many other strategies. The problem with the whole 'level' progression of components, there is no way to regress back to a lower level of a component, if you wanted to. So if you have a level 10 backscratcher, you can't go back and produce a level 1 backscratcher if you wanted to.

So if you want to go by the 'rulebook', then research will be relatively simple. You have the master Tech Area, which is the Tech Level, starting with the Industrials, and moving up to the High Tech, these open up the individual components and other Tech areas. Since all components only have one level you still have to research that one level to actually put the component into use. When its done you can use it, and it sticks around. If you have Basic Gun, and then get a high enough level to get Gun then you have access to both, because they are seperate areas of research, the Gun is better, and you will probably use it. Basically the looks exactly like what you have done for the SFTC. Now we just need the option to flag a component as obsolete manually, so that we have control what components we can see available to add to the hulls.

So my question is why do you even need levels in the formula? If the individual component doesnt need to get progressively better, or smaller, or cheaper, because a new and better one is high on the TL research track, then I don't see the need.