It will be very, very cool addition.
Exactly! But balance is the root of evil here. What ever you give to player via research - it will make it more powerful, while AI will not get any. It would be great to have factional "research doctrine", that will grant factions a bonuses, player can potentially get, but a) it will make factions stronger to player in early game, as he didn't able to do research till the mid-late game to be in par. b) That is something far beyond this (or any) mod should implement, as potentially ruin the gameplay balance, IMO.
and maybe feature to unlock BP with this. Maybe via reverse engineering - like you bring ship hull to research station, and this will have some chances to give you BP of this ship (ofc if player even allowed to have bp of this ship) with cost of time, money and ship hull. But this too seems like very difficult thing to make.
I don't think this is hard
to make. Just an industry, that create custom ship storage and monthly check if there any hulls among stored, that is not in known ships list and has blueprints (and variant, and default ship role). If any - first one in a list is removed and reverse engineering process started. Duration is determined with a hull size, hull style and rarity (1 if nothing). At the end - blueprints added to a gathering point or just ship added to known list.
However, that is a thing I am not sure
it is relevant. And even if is, damn hard to balance - any not overpowered solution will be painful to player.
Is it possible to require a specific item besides just Credits, as a prerequisite?
If we here already©, it would be fair for advanced industries (kletka simulator and eisen division, or some arcology structures) requires a specific rare drop item similar to NF to function, so player can have only limited amount of them, instead of spam-abusing available now. DEA can not limit the number of industries, as single vast ruins archeology can supply literally infinite amount of DEA structures.