Annihilator... Pleaze stop your useless flood... Let's play perpetuum!

Lupus you are not trying to extrapolate game.
In addition to my post above:
Assuming this game is for lot of players. Sooner or later this game will get few thousandths players online, because its designed for it. If alot of players will play this game, market will be rich with kernels because most of new players are "great pwners" and they need to sold a loot for money, what they can use to buy a gear.
Before kernels will rise in price, alt of prototypers will buy large ammount of kernels. After this moment first t2 prototypes will appear on market, because according to the theory of probability at least few percents of freshly developed prototypers want to get some money for their investments.
After new players will enter a beta, after players will establish new alliances, market will got highlevel kernels, what will got first high level mech kernels.
After high level kernels will stabilise in price, first t3 prototypes will appear on market, because more solo prototypers will be able to compete on market. Finally, one of the capitalistic corp will sell first t4 prototype, because they will need some money. Capitalistic corporations, who will research t4 modules will do it. Im sure you.

Yes, for now you will not see alot of prototypes in the market, but the game designed to be NIC based and full of market orders , so sooner or later this will happened.

And if research system will be adjusted for current players, it can have hard consequences for new players and wide playerbase.

To clarify some confusions. YES prototypes will be available at some point, and they already are to some extent. But they are and will be expensive. I maintain these trade won't be cleared that much via the market as the prototypers prefer to know who buys it, and they want to avoid the taxes on the large transactions.

However, they are priced based on the income stream they can generate rather than the cost of making them (which is similar to the T2 BPO's in eve I guess). But, with you're reasoning that market prices are far too high, you wouldn't be willing to accept something even remotely close to this price. If you are expecting to get prototypes at close to cost-of-making, I think you're hoping for too much (unless you want T4 medium autocannon!).

Alexadar, indeed, when research is widely attained prototypes will be much easier to buy. However, I only said they wouldn't be available for high-end items (or at least in very restricted amounts). Just because T4 is high-end today, does not mean it will be in 2 years, so then you can't apply my logic. However, then there might be T5 items, for which my logic indeed holds.

All the above is really besides the point, prototypes can currently be attained, at the right price. The essential question is whether the research system should be changed. I would really want caution here, this is really a core-feature, and making big changes here can really have significant impacts (potentially very bad).

this is difficult ... since there are NO prototypes on the open market, there is not way to actualy get a price estimate.

T2 BPCs were never realy expensive, because you could control the quality of the copy (and the runs that one can make). T2 materials were the bottleneck in many cases. the situation is not exactly true in PO.

any well researched BPO was expensive. it took time, SP and money to get there. also research slots were a premium from a certain point in time.

Hugh, yes of course it's difficult to get an estimate, but just contact people who can make them if you're so interested. You can't just say there's none of the market so therefore it's impossible to get. If you were seriously considering it, think about how much it would be worth to you and make some offers to people who has the research.

And to clarify the analogue, prototypes are like a very high-quality long-run T2 BPC, and so is really quite valuable.

Annihilator - I agree with you that trading CTs would be a good thing, and they would require a different platform. However, as far as this discussion goes, sharing a prototype and a CT is fairly similar (only a decoder between!).

I mostly agree with you Arga. However, as a prototype seller it is difficult to ensure the CT will only be used for internal use. And even assuming such trust could be established, I don't personally feel like subsiding their internal demand (as otherwise they'd be forced to buy from market). All this of course changes if you know each other well, but I don't think that's the assumption we should work on.

The current system is far from perfect, but the suggested changes make bigger problems than the current ones. For the most part, leave the current system alone.

The one thing I would suggest looking at is the staggered rate at which research items (particularly nexus modules) become available for research.  I don't remember the specifics, but the following has happened to me several times, most recently the other day with some T3 assault kernels I traded with Mouse Tiger (my green for his blue).  I only had 2 T3 items left to finish with blue T3 assaults (T3 demob and a T3 nexus module).  The 100 I got from Mouse Tiger finsihed off the T3 nexus module, but also STARTED another T3 nexus module that had never been available to research before!! (where was this one when I ate the first 1k+ kernels?).  The current system of finishing the research on a "trigger" item opening research on another item of the same tier is terrible.  All items currently in-game of the same tier and class should be available for research at the same time.