ok dan new idear for you to ponder.
what if the current tech could be specialized. right now we just randomly get a random blue print witch is awesome, but what if each blue print could also be upgraded in an advanced lab further down the tech tree. this lab would be installed also in a higher bace lv, this sub lab would upgrade the current tech or blue print(BP) we have found.

for example take the flume scanner currently it does 90 scanning power. In this sub lab you would click on a already discover BP and spend RP, like we do now to randomly find one, to try to upgrade the item. Use the same success rate and same or similar scale for rp. so 1st attempt would be 5k rp to make it to a flume mark 2 which would increase the scanning power of it by say 5 or 10 points. and have each item go to lv 5 or 10 depending on the item, and for each upgrade it get more costly and harder to improve. So the flume mark 3 would take 10k rp and be harder to invent.