The technology tree is incredibly deep, branching off in several areas and containing hundreds if not thousands of levels of technology. The trade off is that some of the resulting technologies are broken or useless, rendering some of them no more useful 25 levels in than they were at level 1. They fixed many of them in patches, but still some things are completely useless. Missile technology I deem useless in its entirety, since ships equipped with them in my games seemed to be completely incapable of actually firing the missiles at an enemy despite meeting every requirement necessary for its execution.