The last step of upping your faction rating can bring you above 7.00. This is stupid if this is a inteded mechanics as it intensivices you to fail back to under 7.0 and then take the biggest leap possibl eto arcieve the biggest max possible.

I have tried to experiment with explosive devices and they don't that much fill niches I tried to use them in.

In particular bombs are hard to use in combat. This is mainly because of the long triggering time. The detonation delay is pretty fine. I would actually want it to be even longer. It would be great if I could set a timer when the bomb goes off. This way you could try to bait / manipulate enemy formation to spesific spots or use them as area denial.

Also proximity probe + chemical bomb have all the components of a mine but you can't wire them together.

There is also missing a mid-yield explosive. This bombs speciality could be quick arming time but longer minimum time to detonation. So you could drop it below your feet to cover your retreat.

It would also be pretty cool to remotely trigger a bomb explosion ie a wire mine.

This is a little otrhogonal to the normal warfaring. But would it not be pretty easy expansion to the variety of the game?

When I was reading up on spark costs it made sense that alpha1 costs 1 slot alpha2 2 slots and beta 3 slots. It made sense costs increase as you get to the outer islands and futher away from the branch point of the differnt arms. However by that pattern I would have expected the gamma cost to be 4. Instead it is 2. What is the reasoning behind this spark cost?