There is no such thing as a tech tree in the game, it's a card system that draws randomly from the techs that are available to you. There are small "saplings" of techs that require each other similar to how a large tech tree would work, but that doesn't mean that each one of them will show up. The game just picks 3 (or more, if you have bonus draws) random techs from the available ones, in a weighted system.
In this case, the game offered you Fusion Power - a tech that you can see in the screen shot: It's tier 1, and the only prerequisite is Fission Power, which is a starting tech - as well as two other technologies that you can find by scrolling down in the tech overview.
The game could also have offered you Blue Lasers or Improved Reactor Boosters from the screenshot, since you do fulfil the requirements by having the two prereq techs - which are also free starting techs.
The tech layout that you see in your second screenshot is just the vanilla tech layout that links you to a website, added by your UI mod, not the Extra Ship Components Mod. It does not represent things that you add to your game via modding.
Super helpful! Thank you. I'm quite new to mods and was confused by what came from the UI mod and what content was added by the ships mod. I removed the UI mod and thus the "tech tree disappeared."
My apologies for the anemic post. I wrote this way too early in the morning. What I failed to communicate was that I was using two mods, the UI Overhaul Dynamic and the Extra Ship Components 3.0 Actual. Yes, I can now see that the UI mod was providing me with an outlay of possible choices, though it must be based on a different version of the game since the tech requirements listed were quite low.
I think I was half asleep, because I somehow confused what I was seeing with the tech tree listed in the Extra Ship Components 3.0 Actual (picture below). I started playing a game and I was thinking that I should be seeing some of the alternative tech choices enabled by the Extra Ship Components mod though I had not seen any of them yet. Maybe they will appear later in the game? The fact that I had not seen any yet made me think that perhaps the mod was not compatible with the current build.
I had reached out to the author of the mod through Steam, which is another process unfamiliar to me, and to the best of my knowledge he did confirm that his mod would work with the current build. Thanks again for the help. I'll find some time to play soon and see if the tech research options start resembling what is pictured below.
Edit: Just heard from the author of the mod and he confirmed that it does work with 3.0.3 and that the nice tech tree you see below will be available somewhere around mid-game, so next time I have a chance to play I should see this tech tree a little later on. Here's the quote from the author's response.
--well, most of ESC techs are for modgame+ (2300 by default IIRC), so in all likelyhood you won't be seeing those for a while yet (basically, entry points into ESC tech trees are tier 2 research boost techs and either of the missile/laser/mass driver lvl 5 techs)--
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