Once you have picked a Chapter and Guild, and the basic setup of the game is complete, anything goes from there. Mainly because the choices that the player makes during the game affects the outcome dramatically. For example, if you decide to research only the transport systems, excluding weapons, expect to take a serious beating about the head and shoulders when a battle starts. Therefore, as you'd expect, the choices for technology advancement are crucial to your success as a Chapter and Guild. There are eleven different areas of technological research, along with research that can be performed on the different spaceship hull types, of which there are ten.
Weapons have many different attack abilities, but basically break down into three types.
Beam Weapons, Cannons, and Missiles. In total there are acutally eight different attack types for these, which makes for quite a mix. As I said before, each Guild is better at certain things, and that applies to weapons and technology as well. There are three tech level advancements for each of the systems, and between three and six tech level advances for ship hulls. Since research is a rather long and laborious process, your first tech increases are crucial ones.