I love the concept of this mod, and hate the idea of technology being advanced by one guy just sitting at their desk pushing papers around for days until suddenly you can build new things. Some of the implementation of this mod, however, is so frustrating and ponderous that it winds up being better just doing most of the research by pushing papers around a desk for 60% of the research rate, anyway.

Currently, I'm researching fabrication, which takes 4,000 research points. I unlocked prototyping after my scientist fiddled with some steel and components for the 800th time. Prototyping has a 300% research rate by default, and it's worth up to 400 research points per project I cap out. I have my constructor build a prototype assembly bench and... fails to construct it, wasting a really painful 50 steel, 2 components, and 1 advanced component. But hey, at least this is good research, right? You learn more from failure than success, right? HAHA! NOPE! 10 research points, the same as a few seconds of pushing around papers at 60% research rate.

But OK, this system just doesn't reward failure, it only rewards success. Let's try again and this time it succeeds. (Although the thing is built broken and needs another component to get working - did I mention I'm focusing on fabrication because I need components?) Surely, this will give me the 400 research points I need to really get a leg up on this research project, right? HAHA! NOPE! 42 research points for all your trouble, sucker!

Apparently, by the default settings, I'm supposed to make TEN fabrication benches and TEN assembly benches and 10 components to max this out. (For a total of 3,120 steel, 160 components, and 40 advanced components... which I don't have and can't make. I suppose if I made 10 components, I could reduce that down to needing 150 components in stock, but I have 5 advanced components and no ready way to get more.)

I went into the mod options, intent on making prototyping give ten times as many points, but the default was already 300% and it caps at 500%, so I can't even do that. There's also no way to increase the value of a botched construction compared to a successful one. Again, you learn more from mistakes than successes, and it also makes the wasted resources sting a lot less if you at least got research from it.

Meanwhile, the scaling is utterly painful on the other end of the spectrum, as well. If you get a 300 research point project (or especially a 200 research point project like basic mechtech), you have your scientist run to the shelf to grab a piece of steel (again), run back, and research it for... 2 research points. They then drop the steel, run to the storage room again to grab one silver, and then a gold, then a plasteel, etc. Then they have to reverse engineer lightbulbs and conduits again, running around for less research than if I just told them to sit still and shuffle papers around.

In the end, the way things scale in this mod are so extreme that the optimal way to play winds up just being to suck up a 40% penalty to just shuffling around papers, and not to use any of the actual features. These numbers need to scale non-linearly to make up for the amount of time any scientist has to take to find new materials they'll inevitably sprawl across their research desk, or to make prototyping worth doing at all.

Likewise, I wouldn't mind if things like materials studies or information exchange was made significantly slower if they just had significantly higher caps so they're worth the time it takes to walk to the shelf and pick up the item. I can up the "importance" but if I do that, I'm just sucking out the value of other ways to research. It's generally better to just set the materials studies target iterations down to 1 so they only waste time on one trip to grab some steel so that I don't have to keep fighting their prioritization of material studies over just doing other research.