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This idea intrigues me, but I am confused by your suggestion. It appears to me that you would have to create a parallel set of components and tech areas that are equivilent to standard fighters, but with the bonus of having fighters right off the bat. (Not a bad thing, in fact I am thinking of making a mod to do this exact thing. But it sounds like you are saying there might be an easier way.)
What I was saying was that doing it by racial traits is easier than trying to change the starting tech levels for each player, or having the GM play the first 20 turns just to research tech.
To keep things simple, we should allow "Starting tech 3" plus research in the normal tech to add.
Starting propulsion 4, + propulsion 3 should give Jacketed Photon Engine I's (level 7).
Note that purchasing starting techs will lower your research costs in that level! (That is offset by racial point expenditures)
You would have to duplicate all the components, and you might have the odd effect, such as analysing a "medium fighter (+1 level)" would only get normal races the small fighters.
What you need is one new copy of every component affected by each racial starting tech option.
Having "Fighters +1", +2, and +3(max), would involve making 3 new copies of the fighters plus the carriers (if you want). Going into dangerous detail, you'd also have to copy the fighter engines, the small weapons, etc.
It would be best to write a program to do this for you, since anything with multiple tech requirements will explode into lots of copies. (eg: four fighter engines. These split into 16 due to the four levels of fighter tech. Those split because of engine tech into 4*1 + 4*12 + 4*12 +4*12 = 148 fighter engine components.
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Ion engines require only engine tech level 1, so they are independent of engine starting tech. 4*1.
For CT engines, each fighter-tech copy requires 3 new copies for engine starting tech 0 to 3. We still need 9 more copies with no propulsion requirement, for the starting tech traits 4 to 12.
Same with the more advanced engines.
Writing a program to do this would not be too hard. Given a list of the tech areas you wish to make purchaseable, it will scan the txt file, and copy anything that requires the given tech, adding the racial trait requirement and reducing the normal tech requirement.
I could write up a utility to do all of that (modify racialtraits.txt, components.txt, facility.txt, intelprojects.txt, techarea.txt, vehiclesize.txt), but the main problem might be an overflow in SE4 (we can only load 65,536 components, right?)