Yeah - I obviously went into the game blind as well.
I tend to be a collector in these things, but the Piratez early game is more than a little overwhelming for the new player.
There's tons of new things to discover - in general, but also when it comes to tech. And many familiar things aren't there to rely on.
You usually have like 20 items to research to chose from with no way of knowing that some of them actually belong into a different phase of the game (like when you accidentally run across a Doom, a mercenary or a Star Gods pogrom early on), some are totally useless crap, some can safely be put aside for a while, some lead to absolutely essential discoveries that will otherwise prevent the game from continuing properly etc.
Like I wrote earlier, from a newbie player perspective, I feel that the main game progression tech branch should be impossible to miss.
If you absolutely have to pull off stunts like making an esoteric interrogation mandatory for progression, I'd suggest you only progress from that phase of the game to the next when this mandatory operation has been performed.
Anyway, when it comes to capturing live specimen ... it doesn't help that you don't have reliable access to potent stunning options early in the game.
It took me a good while to get Stun Batons, which aren't reliable enough to make use of unless constantly save-scumming. Same goes for the Cattle Prod. Stasis Grenades are also a mixed bag and are unsuitable for unexpected situations cause they take an eternity or two to prime (I'm ok with that, just saying).
In this phase of the game, I generally used bows - which are also a bit of a newbie trap, as they train the wrong skill (throwing instead of shooting), but are just immensely powerful otherwise.
With many enemies, you end up accidentally stunning someone sooner or later with the bow, but appearently it was always lethal to the Megascorpions.
I was also overly cautious I guess, as I hadn't yet discovered that melee appearently doesn't work at all in the mod. No creature I encountered has ever performed a melee attack.
I even cornered a Chrysallid between a fridge and a door and prodded him with the Stun Baton for like 50 turns in a row (captured him alive in the end too). He never even snapped at me.
Had I known this earlier I'd surely have captured a Megascorpion alive.
Is there such a thing as a non-crucial capture? Who wouldn't want to capture and interrogate everything and everyone? Would that be any kind of proper play? You say strange things.
Btw., the mod even seems to encourage players not to always attack everything. For example, many bootypedia entries suggest to hold back for fear of reprisals (if we shoot one of those down, there will be consequences, we can attack these, but it will seriously hurt our relations etc.) - I never found a way to check such indivdual relations, and I ended up ignoring any such suggestions and just doing all missions whenever possible.
