I have no idea how I did it, but I was able to skip Energy Deflection Theory and go right into later techs. There is no tech trading allowed, so I was not given the tech through any means.
Oh this should be in bug reports, apologies. Moderator could you move it please.
There's an anomaly exploration event that lets you discover a random tech, could you have done that?
that's possible, I don't pay much attention to the anomaly descriptions.
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