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[sowolac904]

To summarize up the current version of the game we have several options to gain blueprints:
-tech mining
    not useful due the industrial slot's opportunity cost
-buying on market/black market
   I have no experience with that, it probably lacks the rarities
-exploration/surveys
    mainly research stations which are about to be nerfed
-raids
    go to an outer planet with orbital/heavy industries, small population (5), no station
    raid everyday for a month walk away with their most secret blueprints en masse   

Someone already mentioned before that basically cores and blueprints are the endgame currency and I agree with that. My problem is that with the current RNG based blueprint gaining options it basically leads to two, quite boring options. Go for research stations in fast ships or raid 15 times a month a colony without meaningful defenses. Even with the increasing strength of the defenders.

Let me outline my idea.
The goal is to give the player the  ability to gain blueprints passively and act as a serious investment even in the late game.

It'd require a building, say "hacker coordinator center" with an industrial slot (opportunity cost vs. additional income or stronger patrols) maybe with commodity demands. It gives a resource "hacking strength" that could give diminishing returns with the other hacker coordinator centers to make the building spam challenging at least.
The mechanic requires two steps.
First is the search, the passive data gathering part.
One option is that the hackers search for a new faction not known to you yet (all but remnants), expensive, one time investment, it takes long base time that can be reduced with more building.
Other is to unlock categories for the blueprints, like high tech, battleships etc. The price, time requirement can be something like price = const * sum blueprint base price in the category, similarly with time to prevent the unlock too early the endgame toys.

The second is the active research. The more specific the blueprint search the more expensive the hacking gets. Do you want a Hegemon battleship blueprint? Sure but it'll cost you a premium, because it's a battleship, aka important asset, it's Hegemon, main faction. Same with time. The key idea is to give the player the ability to narrow down the number of the blueprints that can come as option. This time actively hacking systems it could also give reputation penalties time to time or delays. After this part is done  the player could get a pop up with the results and accept or disregard the hack for the found blueprint, this part could have a higher, delayed penalty as it takes time to find the hackers, that also scales with the value of the stolen blueprints. It'd be nice to have a check box so a player can hack for everything in a given category and avoid pop up every second day when the category is filled with low value blueprints.

What do you think about it?

[Grievous69]

Just to correct some things. Raiding is getting a complete redesign in the next update (latest blog post) so there won't be raid-until-you-get-everything moves. And where do you see blueprints for sale in black markets? That definitely isn't a vanilla thing.

[sowolac904]

My bad, I only checked my colony and I sell blueprints there time to time, probably that's how blueprints appeared there and I've made the wrong assumption. Good to hear about the changes regarding the raids, I haven't read the blog yet.

[SCC]

I imagine that passive ways to acquire blueprints would be much more expensive than active ways (to dissuade you from using them). Blueprints are pretty important, it's good to make player agency important in acquiring them.
As for disappointment with raids, I share it, but I don't think it means we need alternative ways. It's the defenders that should be made stronger, with raids being less about defeating the defenders once and looting the colony until it dies, but more about sieging it, with easy raids achievable only through luck or stealth.

[sowolac904]

I agree about prices, time investment is also an option to balance it. I think that without serious investment, like many of colonies with such buildings to achieve end game items shouldn't be possible in reasonable time.

I rather imagine this system to make it possible in the late game to get certain builds a bit faster.
Like do you have millions of credits and want to experiment with large energy weapons? Ask the agency to get the blueprints. Maybe so need to sacrifice a part of your economy to expand your agency. It might lead to an interesting balancing issue as you increase your ability to get blueprints in a certain time window but in the end it encourages you to earn credits the active way again to make up the lost income. It depends on the prices in the end.

[Megas]

To summarize up the current version of the game we have several options to gain blueprints:
-tech mining
    not useful due the industrial slot's opportunity cost

It is also the time and money.  Player cannot build more critical stuff while it is building, then after it built, player must wait months for output.  Also, it is expensive to build when I need the blueprints.  When I finally have money to throw around and time to spare, I probably already have the blueprints from elsewhere.

Raiding stuff exclusive to Diktat and/or Tri-Tachyon is a pain.  Enough of a pain that I bring pure phase fleet to evade patrols.  For the rest, raiding New Maxios, Asher, and Raevsalg (the poorly defended planets) are good enough for most of them.

Small fleets with fewer marines (like pure phase fleet) probably will not work next release since it appears blueprints will have a marine gate before player can even try to (always) get a blueprint.

with easy raids achievable only through luck or stealth.

The easiest way to raid is through stealth.  New Maxios is really bad because ground defenses are low and no patrols because no one cares about transponder status (pirates, indies, free port TT).  Asher is also small and often ignored by Church patrols in favor of Gilead, so Asher is the next easiest place to smash-and-grab before patrols knew what hit them.  Valhalla is a mini-war zone and the small Hegemony planet is often left undefended.  The factions that are a pain to raid are Diktat and Tri-Tachyon.  I tend to save those places for last.  For Tri-Tachyon, pure phase fleet works wonders at shaking off patrols before player can stealth raid in peace.