well.... I did say that I was talking out of my back end about Steltek tech
I was just trying to figure out how is it that Retros, who should have the least familiarity with technology, managed to reproduce a weapon that has the ability to work "out of the box" after having been sitting there for longer than there's been life on earth, and on top of that work with a completely alien wiring scheme etc.
So, either Burrows was channeling McGyver when he was in Delta Prime and figured out how to put together an interface for the Steltek Gun out of one of his normal guns (you do lose a gun when installing the Steltek afterall) and the gun's operating principle was in itself simple to copy, or the Stelteks have extremely good self-repair technology.... just my two cents. I guess it kinda snowballed from there.
About Neph ships: I think that they work like the Stingers in LEXX in that the hull is grown rather than built, but the weapons and flight systems etc. are then built in the normal way inside a hollowed (or semi hollowed in case of the Lexx itself) shell. It's possible that a Neph ship is mostly a hollowed shell with mechanical components installed in, and maybe an organic life support system for the pilot (do we have ANY idea what an individual Nephilim looks like?). The Prophecy manual seems to corroborate the "organically grown" theory at least for hulls.
The reason why I assumed that Steltek machinery can self-repair is that YOUR ship has a repair droid, and it's not even that expensive considering the amazing job it does, so they probably either have (had) some sort of equivalent mechanism, or they just build stuff so tough that it doesn't need maintenance. And since your Steltek gun never seems to take damage in the game, well, maybe it does fix itself.
Also, the Steltek scout upgrades your gun without ever touching you; I personally believe that what happens is that the scout uploads some firmware into the gun's repair systems (nanobots or something similar) and those reconfigure the thing in such a way that it can punch through the drone's shields. So here we have a gun which is self contained enough to:
* Be upgraded remotely.
* Last practically forever.
* Be extremely simple to interface with systems that have been designed by a completely different civilization.
* Not take visible damage compared to other guns.
(Sounds a bit like a Linksys router).
Sorry but I would think that this thing is smarter than your average pea shooter internally.
Of course another possibility is that the Stelteks were so amazingly clever that they built a gun that's very efficient, very simple to build/replicate, in fact simple enough that one would look at the design and think "Of course! Why didn't our engineers ever think about doing it this way, oh, here's where the power goes, it's obvious".
Sorta like the story on how the Americans spent millions on developing a space pen and the Russians figured they'd just use pencils.
To (mis)quote Terry Pratchett, the rarest kind of genius is that which produces stuff that everyone could have thought of, except nobody else did....
actually yeah Chris, this is a much cleaner explanation
you got me.