GridTechs, compression and HD space.

[Suicide Junkie]

As you may or may not know, Grid Techs are where one component has multiple tech areas that improve it.

For example, you might make an armor component where research into 'industry' makes it 5% cheaper to build per level, and 'armor design' which gives it 10% more hitpoints per level.

With my tech gridder program, it is easy to make really big tech grids, and the multiplicative nature of them starts to show.

For my GritEcon mod, I was thinking of doing 3 dimensional tech grids. 10 levels in one area, and 20 in two others.

10x20x20 = 4000 levels of a component (turn on 'show only latest' )
4000 levels of DUC, for example equates to 4.7 megabytes of text file.

If I did this for all of my planned weapons, the components.txt file would end up at approximately 160 megabytes in size.

However, due to the magic of compression algorithms, the download ZIP of the entire mod would be only 2.5 megs in size, enough to fit on just 2 floppies.