I am trying to do that also. There are a couple ways you might go about doing this.

1. You could have the weapon have the weapon do very little damage and have the research modify this, but with that the weapon will still fire.

2. You could restrict access to the ship completely until the research is finished.

3. I don't know if this will work, but possibly have the initial range set for the beam weapon be extremely low (1) and then have the research modify it to a normal range. Like I said though, I don't know if that is possible.

4. You could change the weapon to be an ability instead, but then it will fire from somewhere different and will remove another ability. I'd only do that if you were creating a ship from scratch, which is what I am doing, so I will be using this method.

Hope this gives you some ideas to work with.

I didn't even think about that affecting all the ships. Good point. I wasn't sure, but it was just a suggestion. I personally haven't tried it or plan to. Maybe, though, it will spark an idea for somebody that will figure how to do what the OP wants.

Actually. Where it says weapontype "Beam" for each of the different weapons, that usually means that there is a file out there somewhere that holds all the information for the different weapons. I can't confirm this, though. Maybe somebody could prove me right or wrong. If there is a file of that sort, could it be possible to add a research prerequisite line in there?

Your Welcome..Anything I can do to help...as limited as it may be.

So you actually got it to work so that it doesn't fire until you research it? Also, Say I have Advent beams on my TEC battleship. Are all beams the same, or will it still affect every other ship in the fleet? Besides, Is there even another TEC ship that uses beams?

From my experience I would say that they just use the longest range weapon, I base this assertion on the fact that a ship that has a low damage 11,000 range weapon will choose to use it over a high damage 976 range weapon.

Additionally remember that the infocard ingame displays all banks damage added together so isnt a good judge

Yes, I did get it to work, and no, I don't think there is another TEC ship with beams. (which kinda makes me wonder why they gave that one beams? but oh well) As for your other question, I don't think I understand it. I will explain what I'm doing in detail, and hopefully that will answer your question.

First, I will remove the research for individual ships. Then I will set it up (like I described in my previous post) so that each race only has one type of weapon that they can use without any researching (ie, lasers for the Advent). Then, I will create the research items that allow access to the other types of weapons. Any ships that do not have the one starting weapon will not be buildable until that ship's weapon has been researched. When it gets complicated is when I work with ships that have more than one type of weapon, like capital ships. Once I figure out which weapon is the ships primary weapon, I will make it so that once the primary weapon is researched, that ship can be built. And if not all of its weapons are researched at one point, it will simply not be able to fire with those weapons yet. For example, before doing any research with the Advent, you would be able to build a Radiance Battleship (if lasers are its primary weapon that is), but you wouldn't be able to build any capital ships for which lasers were not their primary weapons.

In addition to changing the way ships are researched, this also makes it so that not all of the capital ships are available at the beginning, and yet you can still get a free one early on before any research. This is good in my opinion, because it annoyed me so much that while you could only build 3 frigates and no cruisers, you could build all of the capital ships. I hope this helps you understand how everything will work. If you have an opinion on this idea, or have any suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to voice them.

Testing complete. Yep, it is the amount of damage, not the range. Thanks again.