Charre's page

And an envoy can do the same thing, yeah?

The 1.5X scaling of DCs is just broken. At level 20 your soldier won't be able to intimidate anything close to his level. Need a skill monkey class to reliably use skills at high levels for any scaling DC tasks.

The effort to reward for enforcing copyright on publicly available information makes that nonsensical, and people would figure out ways to fool it quickly (admittedly they wouldn't be free to develop) so that sounds like handwavy GM dickishness. To make you pay like 10-100credits.

Icon makes you famous in a profession of your choice. So step one: choose a profession. Step two, decide why you are famous in that profession, noting that your celebrity at level 1 will be fairly minor. So you could be a video icon and be a version of jackass. You could be a smuggler and famous for pulling off (or failing to pull off) a difficult smuggling operation. Any of the many other things mentioned in this thread would work too obviously, but tying them to the mechanics of the theme shouldn't be an afterthought, imo.

You can have the brain implant without the data jack at first level, and it is free. When you get a datajack later, you can modify the data jack to include it (presumably prior to installation) for free.

I happen to agree with the OP that the current system of balancing DCs for level appropriate challenges makes it so that you must focus on skills for them to remain useful (for level appropriate challenges) and that this is bad design as it limits useful choices. Frankly they would have been better off removing all the scaling bonuses from the skill based classes and lowering the DCs to scale at 1 X vice 1.5 X. Then choices wouldn't be between "useful for everything" and "useful only for things that really aren't challenging anyway." And characters would have meaningful choices to be the "Best of the best" rather than it being a class feature.

I see literally no reason you should have to pay anything for it if you want it unsecured. If it is available for free online and you have a computer skill, you can store the information on your computer for free, regardless of whether the operator of the site wants you to be able to do that. This is all trivially easy to do, you would just need to specify what specific thing you were getting info on and obviously the GM could rule that some info isn't available (even taking 20 on the knowledge check doesn't mean you know everything). So if you want to be able to look up culture and profession info for your icon (for example) you just store the data on your computer, this would take some time, but honestly there is no reason you wouldn't have that info preloaded before adventuring begins as it is information vitally important to your livelihood. Asking you to pay for it is just "I don't understand how computers work" stuff.

Basically everything about space combat in this game makes zero sense conceptually and the system exists to let you tell compelling stories. The structural integrity field idea is what I'll go with, for my sanity. Otherwise I'll just have to reinvent the system from the ground up where armor is another set of damage absorption that comes into play after shields and I really don't feel like doing that right now.