Radio Interferometer

Description
Your talented team of engineers and scientists have come up with a way of bugging one band of the transmission spectrum so that you can spy on the messages being transmitted on that bandwidth by a rival agency.

C
- One FUNDAMENTAL ALGORITHM research and one FUNDAMENTAL MATERIALS research Radio Interferometer does not requires a free hardware slot - it is an upgrade to the existing interferometry equipment

Impact
Once purchased, you must IMMEDIATELY specify a band of the transmission spectrum over which you have Spectrum Control, to which the interferometry applies. This band becomes, to all intents and purposes, 'bugged' - meaning you get a plaintext copy of the first message sent over this band of the spectrum each turn. Once the 'bug' is exhausted for that turn, the Spectrum Control continues to function as before

Future Research
With an absolutely enormous investment of resources it may be possible to take the existing interferometry equipment on the ground and use it to aggressively intercept messages from the shuttle. With this Active Message Cloaking technology, you could conceivably alter a few characters of an incoming message from the shuttle before anyone else saw it!

You could also repeat this research to 'bug' a different part of the spectrum or to bug the same part of the spectrum again; if bugged again you are able to read another message sent across the channel before the 'bug' is exhausted for that turn.