Yeah, Zrbite is only 'terrestrial' if you consider the Cthulhu guys to be natives.
And those Tormentor costs are pretty bonkers, too. I doubt these ideas will make it into the main mod, but I suppose you're always free to do your own submod.
I do kinda like the idea of a Zrbite-based intermediate fighter craft.
Since it's an ion-beam, I assume that water is most likely turned into ionized gas. (The colder version, of water being somehow "charged" becomes too much of a sci-fi stretch to me; but then again, why not consider that, if only for the sci-fi sake?).
How is making the drive
vaporize water, which is
grossly inefficient,
less 'sci-fi'?
...becomes competitive to the technology that the stellar civilization had brought with it, when played upon the terrestrial realm. The terrestrial technologies have no to limited use in space (though, not really in the near space), and certainly in the stellar realm. However, they excel particularly in their own realm.
Are you sure you're not playing Xenonauts instead of XCF?
That game indeed had such reasoning for why bigger UFOs were delayed from appearing for a while. X-Com and XCF can happily lob Battleships your way without warning, and the only ramp-up is that the UFOs become more numerous as time goes by.
I don't think this ramp-up has been 'officially' explained, but at least TFTD flirted with the idea that the aliens were slowly awakening from their slumber, and I think I recall some fanfinc saying similar things about the UFO invasion, i.e. the Brain is slowly increasing Battleship production either on Mars or maybe the Moon. No clue how the wild conspiracy theories of XCF interact with all this.
...controlled fusion reaction in the fusion power cells...
I don't think Earth factions have access to fusion in XCF, outside of whatever scraps they can get from the aliens.
I think, there are some notions of using 1-10 GeV neutron streams to initiate fission in a wider range of nuclear fuels, and enable advanced reactor designs.
You mean fertile isotopes? I don't think these are a gain from an efficiency POV, which we'd need for super-science weapons and vehicles.
Alien Electronics vs the Optronic Parts.
Personally, I made UFO Navigation give out a single Alien Electronics as well. Although that might have been a carryover from days before Optronic Parts were a thing.
