Warning! Untested personal oppinion (as usual) I think the goal of the "research level" is only to set up the order you get the thingies. There is an other value (not editable with RebEd) that in my opinion directs how easy or hard the research will be. (Maybe the probability of the research mission to fail or the number of succesfull missions required ...) To see, whether this is true or not would require very extensive testing: (based on a completely unedited Rebellion or where the editing does not affect the research) at least 10 - 10 games (continued to the point when the tester gets the second new ship type) with the following settings: - unedited research levels, no research, - unedited research levels, one researcher (edited character to have a fix known research rate), counting the succesfull and unsuccesfull missions separately, and writing down when the character actually started the mission, - repeating these with actually replacing the research levels of the Tie Bomber and that of the ISD II with each other (so the ISD II would be the first ship to get). The main part of the result is a list showing when the tester got the first and the second ship types in the different situations.