Can't research laser weapons anymore

[Ijustwantmylaserrifle]

So here is the thing,  normally at a new game you can research three different things: Motion Scanners, Medkits and Laser Weaponry.
I used a clean UFO defense folder, The newest nightly: openxcom_git_master_2018_03_03_0246 and completely wiped my user folder in the ''mydocuments'' file. (Since my last playthrough on this was with final mod pack).

Starting a new game blatantly omits the option to research laser weapons for some reason. I've already tried opening research.dat; which just gives me gibberish with notepad, notepad++, word and excel and starting a new game with it deleted so it generates a new one.

None of these methods seems to fix my issue.

I really hope someone can help me with this because I can't imagine getting back into this game without my trusty laser rifles.

[R1dO]

My first thought would be ... did you activate some mod that gate the lasers behind some other research?
Perhaps you can post a starting savegame, it usually holds some clues on why something is not available (no guarantees though).

As for editing:
The original game files are only required because we depend on some assets from the original game. It is however not recommend to edit/alter them [1].
Anything moddable in openxcom (including research) is defined in ruleset files from the  standard/xcom1 or standard/xcom2 folders (there is also stuff under common but those are not important for this post).
Those are plain ``YAML`` files, and can be recognized by the file extension ``.rul``.

[1]
  The only exception is patching them with the files from downloads page.
  Although if you use the windows installer those will most probably be applied during the process (unsure since i use linux myself).

[Ijustwantmylaserrifle]

Well, iirc the final mod pack puts the laser tech research behind other weapon research techs. Thing is, those earlier researches from that mod don't show up aswell since it's not installed right now. In addition, both the mod folder and the install folder are fresh installs with (to my idea) absolutely no traces of that mod left.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

When you say mod folder, do you mean the user folder? Make sure you check the openxcom section of the user folder. But if all mods are switched off then it should give you the vanilla experience.

If you can't figure out how to make it work, you could check your base ruleset for the laser weapons research projects and see what's going on. Make sure all of the topics are in place and that there aren't any delete: lines in which would remove them. Another thing to do is install a mod that rewrites the laser weapons tree from scratch, such as pretty much any total conversion mod, probably Final Mod Pack or Area 51, I know that XCOM Files and Robin's Apocalypse mod do this, as does my own megamod if you want something closer to vanilla feel.

The solution is probably obvious and staring you in the face, but based on what you've said, I'm at a loss as to what could be causing it. I feel like a fresh install should definitely fix it. Just double and triple-check that you have no mods running. They can be installed, they just need to be set to off.