You know...with the correct research you can find it out by yourself. And even use it yourself.
It is a magic/psionic attack.
I guess we just enjoy the game in different ways (nothing wrong with that!). For me it would take away a lot of the exploration and the mystery if I knew all the things immediately.
Some tipps for your next playthrough: produce alcohol to sell it for a profit. X-Grog is fine and when you have apples and the tech for it Chateau is even better. Get more runts to increase profits and reduce the neccessary time for important stuff that you build for yourself. You can autosell from the workshop menu. Get more brainers, there is a lot of research to go through in this game. Sell credit chips. Those that are in bags and boxes should be extracted from them first, it gives you some more money. I prefer to wait until a prisoner told me about it, so I won't have to waste one for research. Speaking of prisoners:
Capture enemies when possible. You need some of them for certain breakthroughs and can interrogate a lot of them to learn the answers to most of the questions you ask here. You can always sell them for a profit, most can be turned into slaves when you have the tech(s). Slavery is not very far down the techtree. Slaves give you a little bit of monthly money and more storage room.
Melee is strong and stays so throughout the game.
Don't wait too long to build your 2nd base. When you can build a workshop and a still it is about time, so you can produce even more alcohol to nobly help the general population forget about the crap world they live in.
