Regarding those early life savers.
In first aid skin adhesives are used.
That is nothing more than sterile super glue,
For unmanageable bleeding there's fibrin glue which is basically poured into the wound.
Last but not least there are medical staplers.
Yes, that's precisely what I meant. Though I haven't yet decided.
I have spent some time thinking about the topic of weapon tiers. Gauss and Laser seem to be okay as Laser has extra non-random non-meta requisites. For rail though if you interrogate enough aliens you can essentially skip Gauss entirely which kinda sucks. Looking at the Gauss Rifle's description it states that Gauss weapons have problems with over-heating which might be due to the power system or whatever explanation.
So the first idea was to add an extra research for cooling systems which can be applied to the experience with Gauss weaponry to allow for more powerful but not over-heating weapons. That would have been another of those random meta research topics which wouldn't have solved the problem assuming you would interrogate enough aliens before.
That's basically how the tree already works. It is assumed that the anti-matter containment tech provides tools for energy management on unprecedented levels, which allows you to build a heat sink big enough. There could be an empty (meta) tech that like STR_SUPERHEAT_STORAGE gets unlocked with anti-matter containment and leads to railguns, but I'm not really keen on empty tech which gives you nothing - better incorporate it into the proper end research and make it more expensive. Unless there would be something else that STR_SUPERHEAT_STORAGE leads to, but I don't know what.
Following on those thoughts the second idea was to add more meta research which would be the requirement for more meta research. The idea boils down that you have to research items-based research topics first such as each item part of the Gauss Weaponry. Once all of them are researched you would get a topic with preliminary research to cooling components. The results would basically state that we need more cooling but we don't know how exactly to do it, but we have prepared a set of questions for the next alien engineer who visits us. This would be the prerequisite for obtaining the actual cooling systems meta research topic allowing the development of rail guns.
But I don't think that adding even more meta research is a good gameplay mechanic as the player probably wants to get something for every milestone.
Precisely. All it would accomplish would be making the tech tree much more complicated and harder to control, with plethora of research that gives you nothing. So I'm not convinced, unless there's more stuff to unlock or whatever.
The third and last idea is connected to that the UFO power generator has an efficiency of 99% and therefore hardly creates waste (=thermal) energy using Elerium-115. The Gauss tier would represent the first dabbling in advanced kinetic weapons while the Laser tier represents dabbling into weapons using E-115 which also deals with the temperature problem. With the experience made in both trees the scientists create a kinetic weapon which is using an extremely efficient power source with the lessons learned about cooling Laser weapons. They can get rid of the heat problem sufficiently to allow auto-fire on all rail-guns and beefing up the damage at the same time. In terms of gameplay one would have to research every Gauss and Laser item and then you get the rail-guns topic. Together with the antimatter containment there would be enough requirements which are obtainable before going to the Plasma tier.
So you basically mean adding all Laser Weapons as a prerequisite to Railguns? Sure, we could do that.
For something different: I don't know how Elerium fuel works but if the Sentinel really takes Elerium and it has a fuelmax of 400, does that mean it requires 400 units of E115 to refuel it completely?
Frankly? I never bothered to check.
