[Puke]

now, i dont think this can be done, because i think we thought about thinking about it before (confused yet?), but heres the regergitated idea anyway:

can we make a tech that is only available through trade / shipcapture + analysis? (i dont think so.)

if so, you can make a monstor scanner that can detect monsters and their homeworld, but you can only research it after caputring a monster ship and analyzing it. or starting on high-tech, of course. but i dont think that can be done normally, because the tech (or its pre-reqs) would always show up in the tech tree, unless it was racial, and if it was racial, then it couldnt be gained through analysis / reverse-engineering.

what you COULD do though, is make it super-expensive, so it would take 100 million research units or something. then the only practical way to gain the tech, wouild be through analysis. unless you run into max-int problems, but i think research costs use long-int. so it should be okay.