I wrote programs a while back to create research trees and calculate manufacturing profitability.
The research trees were very big and convoluted, and I ended up manually pruning them a bit to eliminate irrelevant details and simplify things like "any live alien". I think the manufacturing profitability one still has some ugly special cases in it, as I first wrote this for Piratez, and Piratez' assembly/disassembly system can lead to infinite loops. That said, I'll post more after work (in about 8 hours).
The most profitable projects in vanilla:
Name Profit per engineer-hr Profit per engineer-month
Laser Cannon $61.94 $44600.00
Fusion Ball Launcher $46.53 $33500.00
Tank/Laser Cannon $43.61 $31400.00
Psi-Amp $24.68 $17768.00
Motion Scanner $18.01 $12963.64
Medi-Kit $9.33 $ 6714.29
In Equal Terms 1.998:
Name Profit per engineer-hr Profit per engineer-month
Convert Alien Heavy Plasma $70.33 $50636.36
Pulse Laser $55.28 $39800.00
Laser Sniper Rifle $52.78 $38000.00
Enhanced Light Rocket $48.61 $35000.00
Fusion Ball Launcher $46.53 $33500.00
Enhanced APFSDS Rocket $45.28 $32600.00
Tank/Laser Cannon $43.61 $31400.00
Laser Marksmans Rifle $40.28 $29000.00
Laser Assault Rifle $38.01 $27363.64
Grenade ^ $31.94 $23000.00
Sniper Plasma $28.61 $20600.00
Laser LMG $26.39 $19000.00
Magnum Laser $25.28 $18200.00
Laser Pistol $25.28 $18200.00
For Piratez, my output looks silly right now (going to have to look at it after work), but all of these are much more profitable than Finely Distilled Rum:
Drakkar
Crab
Hunter-Killer
(Likely most tanks)
Ripper Cannon
ARG Clip (24x10)
Royal Boomersaurus Steak x5
Heavy Flamer Clip (5x5)
Fried Reaper Innards x5