I was reading the manual, and I was thinking about weapons, and armor to a degree, and I had an idea. Using the beam weapons as an example, once you research Laser 1, you should be able to research Laser 2 or Plasma 1. All the 2-whatever do is make the inital weapon smaller, so in theory you should be able to research a new type of weapon. However, you could tie in the idea where the more you research to make the previous weapon smaller, the quicker it becomes to research the next weapon(perhaps you get new ideas on how to focus the laser or whatever). That way, if you research plasma 1 after laser 1, it may take 40 weeks, but if you research all the lasers, it only takes 10 weeks or something. Just an idea.