Thanks for the help in advance!

The Mentak Racial Technology allows you to build a ship you destroy in Space Battle if you win. If you destroy a War Sun but you do not have the War Sun technology, can you produce it? The Racial Tech gives you permission to build a ship you destroy, which is a new effect, so I assume it would supercede your passive inability to build War Suns, but I'm unsure.

No, you cannot - this is covered in the FAQ.

It's the same reason that stops you scavenging a 6th Dreadnought or a 5th Carrier. You just can't, even though thematically you probably could.

Thanks. I ctrl-f'd the FAQ for all things Mentak and I got no hits so I assumed it was a no go. Thanks for clearing that up.

possumman said:

Well, with War Suns, it still could thematically make sense. Without the technology, the Mentak may be able to scavenge the remnants of the War Sun, but wouldn't have the slightest clue how to put something so big together correctly.

Yeah, I suppose so. I suppose it depends how banged up it was.

sigmazero13 said:

I can accept that reasoning. The Mentak did enough damage to take this ship out of the fight. At a minimum I would expect that means weapons and propulsion are offline. Without having the technical know-how to build their own War Suns, I can believe they'd have trouble salvaging one that far gone.

I want to say that I do not endorse the idea that game rules should be realistic. Rather I believe that we should try to understand the reality that the game is trying to present to us within the context of the rules we are given. I make this distinction to ward against all those claims that it doesn't make sense how one hit from one fighter can blow up one War Sun or how this rule or that rule makes no sense.

The mentak ability still costs the full resource value of the ship (minus the two trade goods worth of ship you are collecting from the wreckage). Effectively that means that the salvage operation is as intensive as building the ship strait up, it's just that by using the wreckage from the battle that you are able to complete the salvage without a space dock.

Effectively this means that no less than 10 points of production are being mobilized to reconstitute the War Sun. One cannot imagine such a monumental project being undertaken without a complete understanding of the thing you were repairing and refitting. Further, if the Mentak could salvage War Suns one would expect them to be able to backwards engineer them too, which implies that they could recieve the War Sun tech for rebuilding War Suns, or Type IV Drives for rebuilding a Cruiser with said improvement, or Assault Cannons from a Drednaught in a similar situation.

If we want to imagine what is technically happening, then we should consider salvaging to be limited to the technology of the Mentak, thus explaining why they don't gain these techs or at the very least why the ships they salvage don't posess the abilities they formerly had under the other player's control.

The Fist of Ferrum said:

Or we can just imply that they replace the parts they are unable to replicate (i.e. those lacking the appropriate technology card) with less advanced versions. For example, the Mentak are salvaging a Dreadnought with Type IV drives, the engines are damaged but they lack the know how to make them working again - due to the more advanced nature of the drives - so they simply replace them with standard Dreadnought engine.