TEK
Tigereye's Kneeboard, or "TEK", is an updated tool made by, you guessed - Tigereye. What does it do? Well, expanding on _Fox_Four's SneakyFox program, it allows for the simulation of the Allegiance environment, giving back useful information based on the game engine. Things like effective scan ranges, realistic time to kill, range to target, and MANY other facets of this complex game are conveyed through this program.
Allegiance doesn't have a technology tree so much as it has a technology shrubbery. The mutual tech dependencies are virtually impossible to map out on a 2D plane. At least, not without the mish-mash of intertwining lines telling you things about your subconscious that you probably didn't want to know about. TEK stands between you and some potentially embarrassing revelations.
On top of that, as mentioned above, TEK allows you to pit two factions together and work out, say, how many Anti-Base 2 missiles you need to kill an IC garrison if you are Ga'Tarraan and have a killbonus of 17.
If you want a handy, off-line tool to explore the effects and dependencies of different technologies, TEK is what you need.
TEK extracts data from a core file, and simulates the way the game handles that data. It's graphical user interface allows you to control it like you would control a generic database application, and comes with pretty detailed pop-up descriptions of what each control does.
TEK arrives in a .zip format. Unzipped, it is a standalone program a little more than a megabyte in size.
TEK is not a perfect simulation. Under ship info, "Rip Cost (J)" is incorrectly reported, and while "Total Damage (hp/s)" works for guns, for missiles it reports damage per missile. Hull GAs affect the comparison window but not the info window. TEK does not take fuel limits into account when calculating top speed while boosting. The comparison feature is limited to a single ship carrying two racks of missiles, and lacks any means of calculating damage from minefields or armed probes such as plas gens. It is not compatible with some cores, for example cores with per-unit costs for equipment other than missiles.
