Analyzing Ships (SEIV)
Once you've captured or purchased an alien ship, you can take it to a space yard and analyze it. You may be able to get new tech like Rock Colony etc, but racial techs like organic and temporal will remain a mystery unless you've got those traits.
To analyze a ship, move it to a spaceyard (or move a spaceyard to it) and make sure the ship to be analyzed is not in a fleet. Now click the scrap/retrofit/analyze button, or use the keyboard shortcut 'g'. You can now select the ship and the screen will tell you whether there is any tech on the ship that you don't already have.
You do NOT receive any scrap value for analyzed ships.
Contents
Tech Levels Received
You get 1 level of technology for each "unique" component or hull size that you don't have. Therefore if you haven't researched Point Defense yet and analyze a ship with 2 Point Defense Cannon V's, you only get 1 level of PDC for analyzing that ship. However, if the ship had 1 PDC IV and 1 PDC V, you would get 2 levels of PDC for analyzing that ship because PDC IV and PDC V are different unique components. For this reason, you can make rapid tech advances by analysing carriers: The carrier hull gives you one level, and the fighter launch components another. Some mods split the fighter tech tree into different branches to avoid this.
Analyzing Racial or Unique Components
If you analyze a ship that has racial components, you will not get the racial technology unless you have the same trait the original owner has. You will not get unique technology from analyzing. (Challenge Space Yard 00:09, 15 September 2006 (BST))
Damaged components
If the components you need to analyze are damaged, you will not be able to analyze them, and you will not be able to repair them either. For best results when capturing ships for analysis, try to simply disable their shields and board the ship directly without causing any damage to its components. Obviously, if you don't need the weapon or engine technology from the ship, feel free to use ionic dispersers to knock out the engines, and tachyon projection cannons to knock out the ship's weapons. Of course, if you can't safely and cleanly capture the ship, you may still get occasional opportunities to grab valuable technology from ships which have been partially crippled in conventional combat.
Note that the ship's hull is always an opportunity for analysis if the enemy has developed a new class of ships ahead of you.
See also
| Preceded by: Capturing Ships |
Manual (SEIV) Section 6.5 |
Followed by: Attacking Planets |
