Engineering
Engineering Methodology
There are two streams of engineering in the Empire; Legacy Tech design and Empire Tech Design.
Legacy Tech Design involves getting a bunch of Legacy Tech components and playing around with them until they seem to achieve the effect you were hoping for. Because so little about the working of the Legacy is understood, this is often more a matter of following one's intuition than of genuine scientific experimentation.
Empire Tech Design represents the painstaking application of the scientific method coupled with small leaps in understanding that most of us would associate with the process of invention.
Enough about the design process though - most of you probably just want to know how long it will take to build your Death Star...
The Tech System
The answer is...it depends.
Design costs will be based around a number of factors such as your relevant skills, the materials you have available and how ambitious your project is. Furthermore if your rank in the relevant skill isn't high enough then certain projects may just be beyond you.
After looking at these considerations the GMs will assign the project a number of effective action points (EAP). The number of actual action points (AP) you must then spend is the EAP divided by your rank in the relevant Tech Development skill.
Let's take an example case of two Technologists:
Fred has Legacy Tech Development Rank 3, Machine Empathy and Influence 3 in the Guild of Technologists.
Jim has Legacy Tech Development Rank 1 and only Influence 1 in the Guild.
Both Fred and Jim approach the GMs saying that they want to upgrade their laser pistols to be more powerful.
The GMs take a look at Fred's impressive portfolio of relevant skills and inform him that it has an EAP of 3 and hence he can achieve the upgrade for just 1 AP.
In Jim's case the GMs note that the task will be substantially more difficult. Jim's knowledge of Legacy tech isn't that advanced, and with his limited influence in the Guild he won't have the full access to components that Fred enjoyed. Given these difficulties the GMs assign an EAP of 5, so it will cost Jim 5 AP to make the upgrade.
Next turn Fred and Jim again approach the GMs with the same proposal; each of them wants to create a moon sized space station capable of destroying a planet.
The GMs recoil in horror at the prospect, but eventually get back to Fred with a figure of 90 EAP, which means it will cost him 30 AP to complete the project himself. They point out to him that this could be significantly reduced if he could lay his hands on a pre-existing moon sized space station.
Jim is told that his character has no idea where to start on such an ambitious undertaking, and that he might want to find another Technologist to help him out.
As you can see then design costs are very circumstantial- the more factors in your favour the faster invention occurs.
Broadly speaking however, the GM team is in favour of engineering being a relatively swift process, so if you're going to play a dedicated techie then expect the majority of projects to take only one or two turns of attention.
You may be wondering why we're using this complicated EAP system instead of just telling you how many AP to spend.
The explanation is that EAP makes it a lot easier to cooperate on a project when there is a disparity in the skills of those involved.
If Fred and Jim decided to work together on the space station then they know that each of Fred's APs is worth 3 EAP and each of Jim's is worth just 1 EAP.
So to reach the total of 90 EAP to build their Death Star, Fred could contribute 25 AP and Jim 15 AP, or Fred 20 and Jim 30 and so on.