Don't use blue equipment upgrades

Short version: the blue 'improved' upgrades that you can craft at an R&D level of 10 are a total scam. I compared a blue and a purple upgrade on my MACO shield:

[attachment=2533]upgrade-blue.jpg[/attachment]

Blue: costs 950 dilithium, yields 5000 (4%) tech.
Mark upgrade costs 20900 dil (22 items)

[attachment=2534]upgrade-purple.jpg[/attachment]

Purple: costs 1075 dil, yields 12800 (12%) tech.
Mark upgrade costs 9675 dil (9 items)

For a hot minute, I was really happy that the new equipment upgrade system would give us something not completely useless to do during the 3-month wait to get an R&D school to level 15. Turns out that even at level 10, you're more than doubling your dil costs. Back to those oh-so-exciting research projects, then.

To add to the warning, the green ones at lv5 are even worse than the blues, at least at high level projects.

Also, the upgrades are Exchange-able, so you aren't bound to crafting (and there's no dil cost in crafting them, so once demand slows a bit, the price should level off).

One good thing about the upgrades, is that they give more r&d exp than most ways, so you can farm them for the exchange.

uh. 75, 150, 225, and 225 XP respectively, when I just looked on holodeck - that's with the R&D weekend buff. The Tribble numbers were omgwtfbbq borked, apparently.

Yeah, when I checked earlier on Holodeck, the upgrade projects gave the same XP/sec as any other non-research project.

Sorry I was going by what Al "gecko" said on P1.

No, sorry, I was in a "why are you on the internet" mood yesterday. The upgrade projects had been at 6000+above when on Tribble.