My suggestion to the downtime while another player is doing their turn is beer.  In the group I play with, the players who are not involved chill out with a couple of brewskies and some light-hearted conversation.  Just don’t let the alcohol sway your tactical decisions too much.

These are great ideas!  They really balance out the techs very well.

In our group, we don’t mind that some techs are better than others within the same chart because that is all just a part of luck.  Heck, you can throw tons of IPC’s in and never get any tech.  What we have issue with is that the nations that can justify spending money on tech always choose chart 2.  What our group has done to rectify this is to allow each nation to roll one free attempt to get a tech on chart 1.

This has worked out surprisingly well.