Ruins of Alien Suns: Research and Exploration

Overview

Exploration

Remnants

Standard Remnants

• Scrap/Bits/Glimmers: Discrete non-functional objects which are expended when subject to reverse-engineering research.
• Salvage: Remains of alien or advanced human technology which can be made partially or fully usable. They can be wielded as normal or subject to reverse engineering. In most cases (roll a 1d10, 10 is a pass), attempting to pick these relics apart will destroy them.
• Limited Sites: Semi and non-functional ruins with a scale that makes their relics exhaustible. Limited Sites have a rating that determines the number of successful yearly tech results each can yield, demonstrated as 'Limited Site (X)', X being the number of techs it holds.
• Active Sites: Mostly functional ruins which provide nearly inexhaustible advancements to states that research them.

Unusual Remnants

• Artifacts: Devices of unexplained or unexplained (Solarian vernacular, paracausal) power or function. Alternatively technological wonders from the peaks of fallen civilizations, improperly documented and created under such rarefied conditions that they are impossible to reproduce. Examining such devices provides further secrets as to their function, but they can never be reproduced.
• Bracewell Probes/Mimics: Civilization hijack devices left behind hostile alien species. They provide powerful technologies which guide the development of sentients in order to win internal conflicts and ultimately replicate the biology or sociology of the creator species, or function as beacons to signal the harvest or destruction of the target species at a pivotal moment. The difference between a Bracewell Probe and a Mimic is primarily one of scale: the latter can consume civilizations while the latter is a ship-eating menace at worst.
• Guidestones/Rosettas: Uplift devices left behind by benevolent aliens, which provide 'keystone' technologies that open entire new avenues of physics or engineering. The difference between Guidestones and Rosettas is primarily one of effort: Guidestones lead their finders to hidden caches or lost battlefields, Rosettas simply provide an inter-period bridge to new fields of understanding. The MERLIN Device found by the ISA is a typical Guidestone, while Quon Archives from a dynastic Interregnum gave much of humanity access to the practical principles of plasma and antimatter weaponry.
• Survivors: Actual functional alien technology in the hands of those who created it, minimally patched with 'modern' engineering to make it useable. Quon PAVs, and much of what was stolen from Havuon by humanity after the sack, as well as the great hosts of Quon warriors who have begun to trickle into various Verger armed services are survivors. Their equipment can be decommissioned to be researched, in which case it's treated as Salvage and will most likely greatly annoy their original possessors.

Research

Labs

Standard Labs

• Spare Network Cycles: 'Temporary' labs, typically a Great Power reward or the result of a random event. Useable for one research roll or exploration mission. Cost: 1 Prestige
• Labs: The maximum amount of computing power that can be linked together on a single network based on limitations set forth in the Berlin Treaty, and enclosed in basic netwar protections like a faraday cage and 24/7 overwatch by a specialist. Cost: 5 Prestige
• Safelabs: Research blacksites or specialized laboratories in otherwise inhospitable areas. Safelabs are immune to 'corruption' from ambient Titan or SoV levels and have double effectiveness if used to protect technologies on XX and XX missions. Cost: 10 Prestige

Illegal Labs:

• Hyperlabs: Any particularly large computational bloc that goes over Berlin compliance limits. Hyperlabs are typically not airgapped in order to steal clock time from civilian networks and self-fund by mining cryptocurrency, folding proteins for designer medicine for the wealthy and other onerous brute-force applications of processing power. Many contain a single or entire groups of noncompliant self-aware artificial intelligences. Depending on their scale they may have names like Matrioshka Brain, Jupiter Brain, Hyperbrain- or pejoratively: Skynets. Cost: Created by 'burning' 1d10 Labs and 1d3+1 Stability, guarantees a yearly tech strike in a field in addition to whatever is rolled. The cost cannot be refunded after declaring Hyperlab construction. Good luck.