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Given that the rule in question does not say that you add the calculated value separately, the simplest reading to me is that the cost of a weapon with an added quality is simply the cost of the weapon with that quality's multiplier. A starship weapon with the Mystical quality added in costs 1.25 its base cost, total. An array weapon costs exactly the same number of BP as the original weapon, but takes 2 weapon slots instead of 1.

Given the way multipliers work elsewhere in the system (Multiplying More than Once), you would add the decimal portions of the multipliers together for multiple upgrades rather than taking the total product. Then multiply by the final quantity and round as normal.

By ripple effects, I mean that fiddling with the budget changes the entire system. If you increase MP per PC level to match minimum MP per tier, party budgets increase by an additional third. The overall power level of mechs thus increases. If you instead decrease the minimum MP to match MP per PC level, you increase the rate at which mech tier increases from APL to APL+1. You also functionally increase everyone's power by letting them have more mechs at APL, but that's a direct and entirely intentional consequence.

They'll probably have to fiddle with things and rebalance accordingly anyway, but it's important to be aware of this.

As for multiple mechs vs a single one, the basics don't really change. Yes, 4 tier 20 mechs can probably do some things better than a single tier 20 mech. You won't be able to customize them as efficiently though, since the budget is split between them, and more of it is taken up on basic necessities like frame and limbs. The way operators give their actions to mechs also means that while the four mechs have an advantage in terms of mobility and reactions, they're not really much better off in terms of offensive capabilities.

4 mechs could be more effective overall, but I don't think its enough to automatically go with them instead of a smaller number of larger-budget mechs.

Conclusions
In summary, the basic points boils down to the following.

If you build a mech with 20 MPT, you end up in a situation where progression is purely numerical. If you do not actively change the mech's design over time, there will be no change in the scope of its abilities no matter how many tiers you give it. While you can invest 20 MPT and not immediately spend all of it, there's very little reason to do so because everything has a cost per tier. The only reason I can think of for this is that the extra could let you upgrade your weapons to tier+1 level eventually, but you're losing out on the benefits of the unspent MP until then.

If you build a mech with more than 20 MPT, you will eventually hit a point where it has enough MP to be tier = APL+1 instead of tier = APL. Whether or not you are forced to increase the mech's tier when you reach that point changes how mech advancement is handled. If a mech automatically increases in tier whenever it has the budget and APL cap to do so, then many designs will be forced to make some dramatic cuts to stay under budget at some point in their progression. Once that happens, your budget will expand again as you continue leveling up until you reach level 20; I expect but have not confirmed that this will usually result in them reaching the same MP per tier budget that they originally started with. If you start with a large enough investment in a mech that it is always at APL+1, your budget per tier will expand at every level through 20.

If you allow mechs to remain at tier = APL instead of automatically upgrading to APL+1 when their budget gets large enough, you effectively just end up back at the first point.

If everyone in the party wants their own individual mech, everyone will have a mech with a lower tier than the party level. This means you can't do it at level 1. The PCs will also have to constantly redesign their mechs, because costs rise faster than budgets and they need to continuously cut their expenses as a result. On top of that, the PC eventually ends up outright stronger than the mech.

Feedback
To be clear, I think the basic ideas behind the system are wonderful. Major costs scaling per tier gives an easy and immediate way to gauge how much you can reasonably invest in any given system. However, I think it would benefit from having some costs that aren't directly tied to tier. Auxiliary bays would be a great place for this, letting you pay some flat amount for additional capabilities that don't necessarily need to scale in cost or effect with your mech's tier. And much like starships have "systems" distinct from any other major component or expansion bay, mech systems could also be introduced that provide benefits that don't quite fit anywhere else, but that would still be worth paying for.

If there are some fixed-cost options around that are just expensive enough to force an actual, meaningful decision on whether to have them or not, then you now have a way to encourage people to adjust their builds as they level up when they might otherwise have no reason to. They could spend 5 MP or something at level 1 to get the fancy new thing, but that's a pretty significant investment for some builds! Come level 5 or so, maybe not so much.

As for trying to give everyone in the party their own individual mechs, how best to handle that really depends on what the vision of the system is. The easiest way to fix that specifically would be to have the MP per PC level and the minimum MP per Tier be the same, but that has major ripple effects throughout the rest of the system. I do think there needs to be a better way of handling it than constantly redesigning and cutting the budget every single level, but how best to achieve that depends entirely on the desired balance point.

Perhaps the single most significant thing Paizo is trying with this mech playtest is the mech point (MP) system. While clearly related to how they've handled starship budgets, the actual details of the system differ rather dramatically. Given how central the budget is to mechs, since it directly or indirectly influences everything about them, it's worth taking some time to thoroughly analyze how it functions in various contexts. I'm going to go over how it changes as a party levels up given a few different ways of distributing it so we can all have a better understanding of how this system actually works.

MP Cost and Budgeting
Every component in the mech playtest has its cost determined by tier. Everything costs some multiple of the mech's tier; 1 MP per tier, or 2, or 0.5, and so on. Weapons technically have their own level separate from the mech's that can be higher or lower, but for the moment we'll ignore that.

Because all mech components have a cost per tier, the mech's total cost can be expressed in MP per tier. Given the same equipment, the absolute number of MP spent on a mech will change with its tier, but the MP spent per tier will remain constant. A tier 1 mech built with 20 MP and a tier 10 mech built with 200 MP both cost 20 MP per tier. Adding or removing components to either mech will take or give different amounts of MP in absolute terms, but will have the same effect in terms of MP per tier.

MP per tier (MPT) is thus a way of looking at the budget without needing to think about the actual tier of the mech. For instance, instead of thinking about how much a gatling gun costs at a given tier, we can simply consider that it costs 3 MP per tier. If we want to build a mech with 20 MPT, this tells us we will have 17 MPT left over if we give it a gatling gun.

Some of this may seem obvious after a moment's thought, but it really is a very useful thing to keep in mind. To see why, imagine a mech built at tier 1 for a level 1 party. It has however many MP spent on its features, and has a certain starting MP per tier. If you increase the mech's tier as the party levels up but make no other changes, its MPT tells you how your budget is changing. If the MPT is constant, your mech's cost is increasing at the same rate as your budget, and you have no MP left over after upgrading it. If your MPT is increasing, your effective budget is also increasing, and you'll have MP to spend even after fully upgrading your mech's existing equipment. And if your MPT is decreasing, this means your mech is over budget after upgrading it, and you're going to have to make some cuts to make it affordable.

Depending on how many mechs your party has and how you split the budget, all three of those cases are possible.

Assumptions and Implications
There are enough possible variations within this system that a genuinely comprehensive analysis is well beyond anything I am prepared to do within the 3 days or so we've had the playtest. In order to keep things manageable, I'm using the following assumptions.

Unless otherwise stated:

• The party consists of 4 PCs
  
• Each party member has the same level.
  
• All party members level up at the same time.
  
• The party will tend to prefer that their mechs each have as high a tier as possible, and invest in each of them accordingly.
  
• MP invested in each mech per level is constant; if a party starts by investing a certain amount of MP in a mech, they will invest that much MP in it every level.
  
• All weapons are the same level as the mech's tier.
  
• The rounding of fractional values and its ability to make costs rise and fall over budget at odd and even levels is ignored.

APL is the same as the actual average party level with 4 or 5 PCs; while I could have gone with either, 4 PCs makes the math a bit cleaner in some areas. This is the basic reasoning behind the other assumptions as well.

Given 4 equal level PCs, the party has 60 MP per level that can be distributed across 1 to 4 mechs. There is still an enormous variety of possible combinations, so I'm only going to consider a few representative cases.

• The party invests all 60 MP per level into a single mech, with tier = APL+1.
  
• The party evenly splits the 60 MP 3 ways to maximize the number of mechs at tier = APL.
  
• The party evenly splits the 60 MP 2 ways, for a pair of stronger mechs, with tier = APL or APL+1.
  
• The party evenly splits the 60 MP 4 ways, for 1 mech per person, with a tier that is 1 to 5 below APL. As mentioned above, this is not possible at level 1.

A party does not need to evenly split its budget between its various mecha, but I believe the trends that emerge from these four cases will largely cover the remainder.

From here, we can examine how the MP budget actually behaves when trying to advance mechs in each of these cases.

The maximum age listed includes an element of randomness to reflect the capriciousness of death, and it is the assumption for the race’s longevity without magical or technological intervention — with the right life-extension technology, individuals of all races can become nearly immortal.

From Core, talking about vital statistics and 'maximum' age specifically. Existing content may or may not make much use of that last line, but there's more than enough openness that a GM could say extreme life extension is commonplace. If there aren't enough people with extremely extended lives around to make that feel comfortable, just remember that the Starfinder setting has a nasty little habit of routinely producing potential catastrophes that could have massive body counts, as evidenced by basically all of the APs.

Kasatha and other extra-armed races can wield extra weapons at once, in that they can have them ready. They can attack with any weapons they are wielding. They simply cannot make additional attacks beyond the norm, because that actually would upset game balance.

You can hold as many weapons as you have hands. You can choose to attack with any combination of them, up to the normal limit of however many attacks you can make. You just don't get to make more attacks with them.

If you want to tweak the rules to more mechanically accommodate this, substantially increasing the number of expansion bays on larger ships - which players typically won't even have access to, if that's the particular concern - is unlikely to break the balance of the game. I believe it would be more preferable to increase the capacity of the relevant expansion bays with ship size, though, either instead of or in addition to increasing their number. Apply further ad hoc modifiers as desired to increase the carrying capacity of truly dedicated transport craft.

Increasing the capacity of a bay rather than only increasing their number will allow (relatively) low tier cruise liners and other transports with the hundreds of passengers that such a ship would be expected to carry, without also demanding high tens to hundreds of BP and PCU invested in guest quarters. Naturally, the precise balance between increased capacity per bay and increased number of bays is a matter of taste.

I would say the rules are more based around a specific kind of small to medium player ship, rather than large. If you don't optimize a deck plan too much for carrying capacity and are a bit generous with how much room people and systems get, you can easily fit genre-reasonable layouts into the limits of those size categories when dealing with player-centric designs.

The system breaks if you move away from those constraints. This isn't anything new, unfortunately. For a topical example, we only have to look at the Opulos Drift Cruiser from Pact Worlds, which by a strict mechanical reading is a huge (800'-2000' long) ship with a total combined passenger and crew capacity of somewhere in the lower double digits.

This is incredibly silly.

The easiest solution is to simply handwave it as stated; a ship carries however many people would be reasonable for that role, and if you really need to stat it out explicitly, don't bother worrying about whether it can fit enough guest quarters in. In fact, don't bother giving it more than one of those bays, because bay capacities in general are a bit silly.

I imagine you could fit an appreciable cruise ship number of people into the deck plan for a large ship. Maybe even the upper end of medium, if you're willing to play with less conventional ship shapes.

First, a note. Ship tier is determined by APL, and a party with more than 6 characters is treated as APL+1. 8-9 level 1 characters would thus by RAW get a tier 2 ship. You would still need to make some difficult design choices, but it's technically enough to get a functional 'destroyer' if you really wanted to. Not all ships are new ships, after all. Not all ships are in good condition either. Maybe they got it at a discount. Maybe there's a reason it had such a nice price.

Pact Worlds give us the launch tube, which lets a medium or large ship carry a single tiny ship. If you don't have Pact Worlds, you can get almost the exact same effect by just letting them carry a shuttle bay that can only carry a tiny ship; they function almost identically, save that the launch tube has special rules for in-combat docking. In either case, a medium frame with a tiny support ship gets you 8 crew slots, so there's only a problem if you actually have a 9th person. And if you really wanted, you could stick another launch tube on, though you've now used four expansion bays. Alternatively, as you noted, you might just give them a pair of comparable ships rather than a larger and smaller one.

In either case, you're now dealing with the problem of how to build multiple PC ships. There are a couple ways to handle that, if you'd like to go that direction.

Another option would be to just ignore max crew size for the party, at least on their initial ship. If you don't want to hand them a technically-functional but underwhelming destroyer, you can just let them cram a couple extra crew actions into an explorer or transport. If you're the GM, you can just do that sort of thing if you want.

I wish we knew what languages the new races spoke, what their naming conventions are like, and their typical age, height, and weight ranges were.

While languages, naming, and more details of that sort in general would be nice, we do have the vital statistics for the new races listed quite plainly at the start of the section. Now, since the theme of the moment seems to be critiquing the races...

The astrazoans are good. Solid concept with good mechanics from what I can see. I have no issues with them, though I do hope they will cause some things (reptoids) in Alien Archive to be reconsidered. SROs are mechanically good, I think, and strike a reasonable balance between construct properties and normal playability. I would have liked at least marginally more lore for them, but I can tolerate what we have since they can cover a far broader class of creatures than any other race so far. I like the idea of the khizar, though I'm very wary of the 30 foot blindness problem. I would have preferred them to be actual plants, but that's mostly a quibble.

I find bantrids almost wholly uninteresting as a playable option, but there are enough people with more enthusiasm for them that I can just shrug and move on. Strix don't do much to capture my imagination narratively, but I can at least appreciate them mechanically.

And then there are the borais. I don't particularly care for them. I can appreciate the basic concept behind them, and don't object to them existing as such, but they're frankly quite disappointing. They were billed as the undead race, but they feel more like a watered down equivalent to the androids, which are themselves similar to but not actually constructs. Their mechanics are questionable as well, primarily because Old Talents as written generates absurd results. Undead androids need to breathe. Undead ysoki grow a size. Perhaps they simply start bouncing around on their tails instead of walking?

If the mechanics were cleaned up a little, I wouldn't have any problem with borais as a second undead race, since I do appreciate the conceptual niche they're designed for. But they're terribly underwhelming as the first offering of a playable undead option.

Two good, one maybe good, two apathetic, one disappointing. Mixed bag leveling out to a slightly positive neutrality.

I do not believe there is a clear and explicit answer to the first question in the rules as such, though there are examples. The Novaspawn in Alien Archive has a completely different set of systems than normal ships, reflecting its nature as a gigantic spaceborne creature rather than a vehicle. It accordingly has a different table for when it suffers critical damage.

I believe the implicit answer is thus to roll on the special table provided for the special ship. In instances where that has not been prepared in advance, I would either reroll or follow the rule for critical effects on wrecked systems; apply it to the next system on the table instead.

As for the second question...

Randomly determine one arc containing weapons...

If an arc does not contain weapons, it cannot be randomly selected to suffer the effects of critical damage on the weapons array. Reroll until you get a valid result.

Wrong, the Dragonkin's land speed in 40 ft. There is no sign that it is 30 ft. I've look everywhere and no change to speed.

Considering they feel the need to specify the goblin has a 35 foot land speed as a PC race when it already has a 35 foot land speed as a monster, I'm inclined to think the dragonkin follows the general principle of not having any benefits it is not explicitly granted. This includes a land speed other than the default 30 feet. The shobhad is another example, if you want a large PC race where its higher than normal speed is explicitly noted.

As a more immediate example, the author of the dragonkin's entry felt it was necessary to specify that the playable version also has darkvision and low-light vision. A curious waste of space and ink if it's implicitly inherited from the monster entry.

As for the original question, while I'm not sure any of the PC race options are mechanically underpowered as such - though I too am a bit disappointed by the breath weapon - I do think some of them have been tweaked in such a way that it is somewhat more difficult to reflect what they are nominally supposed to be capable of. A PC Sarcesian will never spend all day out in the vacuum simply by virtue of race. A PC Reptoid will never have any long-term infiltration ability with a 10 minute per level time limit.

I'm not convinced either of those two examples need to be true for them to be balanced, but they are.

Yes, that's right. The SRO receives a bonus to its save against Charm Person, because Charm Person specifically targets "one humanoid," rather than "one creature." The SRO would receive no bonus from Robotic against, say, Fear, or Mind Probe, or Disintegrate, because while these all target "one creature" and can target humanoids, they do not target only humanoids.

Robotic looks like a strong trait, yes, but it's not nearly so strong as that reading would make it. If it actually was a blanket +4 to anything that can target humanoids in general, that certainly would be ridiculous.

No such limitations are spelled out for starship construction, and the level+2 purchase limit isn't relevant anyway since none of the individual components have an actual item level; mk x is not the same as level x. Some of them could be converted to an equivalent fairly easily, but it's not RAW. A GM is within their rights to impose restrictions on what systems can be bought at what times and at what levels, particularly since it's not a given that the players have free reign in design or even much influence over it at all, but it's not mechanically enforced.

Shields are limited only by budget, yes. Medium ships in particular can take advantage of this since they can mount an extra power core if they invest in it, so the main limiting factor is really the total BP of the ship. You can comfortably achieve the full Superior Shields 600 relatively early on depending on your weapon choices, and I'd be surprised if combat-minded groups put it off much later than maybe tier 10 if given free reign in design.

You could ask them to redesign, mandate it, or even do it yourself, but that might not go over well if you've given them free reign to do as they wish within the rules thus far. If you have time for it, redesigning the ships they fight might be worthwhile... or, as you say, just skipping the starship combat for a bit instead of dealing with that headache.

The Ring of Sustenance can be largely replaced with the clear and iridescent spindle aeon stones, which together cost 985 credits and remove the need for food, water, and breathing; you're only missing the sleep reduction. For food and water specifically you need only the clear spindle, which costs a mere 245 credits on its own. An aeon stone is slightly more vulnerable than a ring as it orbits your head instead of staying on your finger, but they do not take up magic item slots.

Given that food and drink can be ignored entirely for so little investment, I don't think that aspect of survival has gotten any harder to deal with so long as you account for it. If anything, it's gotten easier; anyone can pick up a clear spindle immediately if they can budget for it, and no casters are necessary. In Pathfinder, Create Food and Water requires a cleric, oracle, or shaman of at least level 5 or 6 depending to have reliable, perpetual access to it.

You can still arrange a survival scenario despite this, but I think the general feeling that the battle against the elements and starvation has been trivialized by default are fairly justified.

At least until you start making the elements you're battling against rather more exotic.

I don't see this as being substantially different from the holographic amusement chamber option already provided by the recreation suite expansion bay, save that it's substantially more expensive and can double as an environmental chamber. Though I suppose the total lack of any meaningful description leaves some room for ambiguity. Beyond that, your starting cost feels rather excessive; the only other bays that hit double digit PCU are the hangar at 30, and then the shuttle bay and fully upgraded, DC 50 smuggling compartment at 10. BP cost could potentially be cut by a point or two as well.

I'm not sure you're really proposing anything that's not already covered, but I'd be happy to give more thoughts if you can explain how it's different.

Neither the Surprise rules nor the Charge rules allow such a thing, so as a general rule, there are no "partial" charges. However, both Solarians and Soldiers have access to abilities that allow them to charge as a standard action, so the primary melee combatant classes still have that option as early as levels 2 and 5 respectively.

CeeJay has touched on this, but there is something that should be made very clear here. Spell slots are limited. They are extremely limited at level 1. A Technomancer has 4. A Mystic has 3. When another character attacks, they are sacrificing their ability to attack later by using up their ammunition. When a Technomancer casts Magic Missile, they are giving up the ability to do anything else with that spell slot. This is a much higher opportunity cost.

Every cast of Magic Missile or Shooting Stars is 25-33% of your daily spell slots at level 1. Every casting is a spell slot you can't use for Charm Person, or Mystic Cure, or Share Language, or what have you. Every casting is a spell slot you can't use for Comprehend Languages, Disguise Self, or Holographic Image. If your Mystic or Technomancer exhausts their daily spells on Magic Missile to get that 30-40 guaranteed damage, then they have completely sacrificed their ability to use those spell slots for anything else in favor of pure damage.

If someone ever feels like they can do that without worrying about the opportunity cost, that is a problem with the adventure design, not the spell.

It was probably not intended to boost unarmed strikes. Conceptually, it would make sense for it to boost unarmed strikes. Mechanically, it doesn't.

The Electrostatic Field runs into a worse version of the same problem the Ring of Fangs has if you allow this. Ring of Fangs and Improved Unarmed Strike together outperform basically everything until around level 17, with the drawback being that it takes a magic item slot and can't use fusions. IUS with natural weapons and the electrostatic field outperform the RoF by a couple points, and while the combination has a higher up-front cost, you'd arguably want the field anyway for the energy resistance. It also takes an upgrade slot rather than a magic item slot.

Allowing electrostatic field to boost unarmed attacks means it would also apply to the Ring of Fangs, at which the combination has untouchable damage for most of the game and does not suffer nearly so dramatic a drop-off even at level 20.

Applying the electrostatic field damage to unarmed strikes would be sound conceptually, but not at all mechanically. Which is a pity, because I'd like to see something that makes unarmed strikes competitive as a primary damage source without being outright better.

If this is for an NPC specifically, ignore that clause; it's for the PC stat block and you have no obligation to even acknowledge it exists for NPCs. That said, the time limit is completely ridiculous, and I don't understand why they thought it was necessary. Given that the time required to select a new form is likely to be quite considerable for many campaigns, I can't imagine it would be that easily abused. As it is, throwing that clause into the ported Reptoid means a PC will be completely incapable of actually matching the fluff of race.

It's almost as bad as a PC Gray getting a cantrip rather than even limited telepathy.

Unrelated to the riveting discussion about creature and vehicle size on a grid, CRB P.408 provides statistics for various walls, doors, and materials. A "starship bulkhead" wall is typically 5 feet thick and has a hardness of 35 and 2400 HP for each 10x10 section. If you want to treat it as a material, it has a hardness of 35 and 40 HP per inch. A GM could reasonably use the slightly stronger nanocarbon or slightly weaker adamantine alloy instead, if they wanted to stick with roughly comparable numbers on the table.

The "starship interior" wall type has the same HP per inch, though it only has a hardness of 30, making it identical to adamantine alloy. This may be a more suitable option for smaller ships than the sturdier numbers provided by the reinforced starship bulkhead.

These numbers can help figure out how ineffective your attacks are against the hull of a starship, but they won't help you figure out how ineffective you are against its shields. I would recommend skipping weapons and simply casting Disintegrate if you have a shot at the hull, but that's not a practical solution for most characters.

The short version is that you should ask your GM if they're willing to go with whatever you have in mind for the situation as it comes up. If you are the GM, pick the model you like for handling it and wing it from there.

Conceptually, how does a character with a +23 Computers modifier take 10 and force a stolen comm unit to acknowledge them as a root user in 6 seconds?

Conceptually, how does an Exocortex help the Mechanic hack faster by contributing its own actions instead of just giving a static boost earlier than level 11, when you get Coordinated Assault? What is it doing that another hacker could not do with some effort, represented by nominally having to roll?

If you need concepts, don't think about it as anything resembling real hacking except superficially; this is a ruleset where your smart phone equivalent can have an arbitrarily large number of memory modules but cannot have both an alarm and a lockout screen without upgrading it. Go full Hollywood technobabble nonsense if you have to. Aid Another? They hook their hacking kits together and the secondary hacker(s) adjust what their computers are doing on the fly to maximize the collective processing power. Or they come in with some alternate plan of attack that's simply meant to compromise some sort of defect in the code and expose a weakness that requires a different computer to properly exploit. Or they bang on their keyboards, and with the collective power of multiple users typing they make more text appear on the monitor and therefore get more hacking done.

Or you can say Aid Another simply isn't applicable to hacking computers, because none of those are satisfactory, though this will mean it becomes nearly impossible to gain root access to a computer of a tier appropriate for your level or CR. At quite a few levels, it will in fact be completely impossible without both a password and a physical key, save for an Envoy getting lucky with their Expertise die, or a Lashunta ExoMech taking advantage of Coordinated Assault. And even that will only succeed by the narrowest of margins at some levels.

Which I suppose is fine if you want your game to be like that, though I am skeptical of that actually being the case.

Do you have the source on that? I want to be prepared for our game.

Here.

While something will eventually be done about it, no time frame was provided. An official fix will exist at some point in the future, but I do not think it likely it will exist soon enough to warrant preparing for its arrival in the short term.

Naturally, I would not object to being wrong.

There is a way to make Unarmed combat work. There is a way to make an explosion-oriented build work, rather than grenade oriented. They do not readily combine, unfortunately, but I'll lay them out anyway.

For unarmed combat, it's very simple; you need a way to make your unarmed strikes do lethal, non-archaic damage, and you need Improved Unarmed Strike. The most obvious way to get the former is race choice, which will get you a +1.5*Level specialization.

If you have a GM who will allow it, however, Dead Suns 2 introduces the 315 credit, level 3 Ring of Fangs as an item associated with one of the antagonistic groups there. It gives you a bite attack with 2*level scaling, and is the most powerful "unarmed" option available combined with IUS. Be warned, however, that it is extremely powerful; it can full attack normally, but competes with the unwieldy doshko until level 11. It beats advanced melee weapons at most levels until level 17, at which point it falls significantly behind them. It is rules legal, but doing as much as 5 to 6 more damage than people who are paying to keep their weapons up to date by biting things may make others somewhat unhappy. I frankly expect a nerf at some point.

Racial natural weapons won't compete with advanced melee weapons like the ring, but they're a safer and fairly reasonable back-up weapon combined with IUS.

You could also abandon what is mechanically unarmed combat and go with either battle gloves or fluff a Solarian's Solar Weapon as being mystical fisticuffs, though the latter has no real grenade support. If all you really want to do is punch people with soft, humanoid fists, however, I'm afraid you're out of luck - even with Improved Unarmed Strike, bare fists simply don't have the damage to work as a primary weapon, and by RAW currently cannot even get rid of the Archaic or Non-Lethal qualities without third party support. Or maybe even then, depending on what has been published.

As for explosions, grenades are probably not the best way to go here. You can use them, certainly - Hijiggy has provided one way to do it. I don't think you'll be able to rely on it as a primary thing, but it is an option. Another approach to making everything explode is to focus on Mechanic with maybe a quick dip in Soldier, get heavy weapons, and then Overcharge a Shock Caster or Plasma Cannon. Unlike Line or Blast, Explode does not prevent you from boosting its damage with things like Overcharge, and unlike grenades, you can apply Weapon Specialization too. You likely don't want to try to focus on both at character creation, so I would personally prioritize Dex and Int, while bumping Strength up later and simply using the natural weapon as a deterrent in melee. You don't need to shift your grip to bite people with IUS.

Unfortunately, I expect that may deviate from whatever ideas you might have in mind. Still, it's an option worth considering.

Because both size-based carrying capacity and size-based item weight were deliberately cut, presumably for simplicity. There's no reason for Paizo to bring them back after making that design choice, though you are of course free to do so in your own games.

Larger creatures such as Sarcesians and Dragonkin will have additional problems to deal with by virtue of their size, yes, particularly in dealing with species that are not merely smaller but actually Small. But this is hardly new. It's simply one more thing to consider during character creation, and it's not without its benefits. Reach, for instance, and not merely in the purely mechanical sense. A Sarcesian won't have trouble reaching the top shelf in a human store, and that arm length could be quite handy in any number of other situations.

The Alien Archive species aren't even guaranteed to be options anyway, so it's something you'd ideally be bringing up with your GM at the start.

Personally, I hope we see Tiny races at some point as well, and are given the opportunity to approach the problem from the other side.

Designing a ship to have enough spare power to charge a Drift Engine without needing the power tied up in the thrusters is an exercise in wastefulness, and the 75+ PCU that are being reserved for that could be better used by actually using them. That said, it is worth noting that the Vagabond cannot run its Drift Engine on the power it gains by turning off its thrusters; it has 3 PCU to spare normally, increased to 73 when thrusters are off. One more system must be disabled; probably the recreation suite.

In any event, the Vagabond is a decent ship. It'll get its job done, and let players learn what they're doing. It could be better, though, even without sacrificing any of its non-combat functionalities and amenities. You could replace the particle beam with a coilgun and move the flak thrower onto the turret and come out with 2 BP to spare with only .5 less damage on your main turret weapon. You could cut the flak thrower out entirely and upgrade the turret to a heavy weapon; the heavy laser cannon would give you a little bit of BP to play with, but you could fit a twin laser on if you don't care. Both of those options involve doing nothing but changing the weapon selection and arrangement, so the crew quarters, expansion bays, etc., are untouched.

But I think it's a decent starter ship. It's alright for it not to be "perfect" so long as it works well enough, and its main job is to let players figure out what they're doing both in combat and in ship building.

Glancing through the main AA bestiary, I see 9 monsters with Spell Resistance, plus the Chromatic Dragon templates. In the monster building section, I don't see any mentions of SR in types or subtypes. Further on, I see the Shadow Graft for summoned creatures grants SR. One of the others might as well, while I simply missed it. I don't see any other instances of SR, so let's look at what we have.

Most monsters with Spell Resistance have SR 11+CR. The three exceptions are the Drow Enforcer and summoned Shadow Creatures, which have SR 5+CR, and the SR 10+CR Void Hag, which at CR 10 has SR 20; 1 less than the CR 10 Anhamut Inevitable with SR 21. Starting at CR 10-12 depending on color, all five Chromatic Dragon templates give SR 11+CR. Of the already made creatures, the lowest CR ones with SR are the Drow Enforcer at CR 1 with SR 6, for 5+CR, and the Barachius Angel at CR 7 with SR 18, for 11+CR. Not terribly helpful for establishing whether there's a level where it's supposed to switch.

So for Drow other than those provided, go with 5+CR for weaker SR, or 11+CR for stronger SR, as appropriate. Or eyeball it, as suggested above.

Ideally things like SR would be given explicit formulas for applying as special abilities, but that is unfortunately not the case for the time being.

... Cybernetics are not subject to any effect or attack that targets technology unless it specifies that it affects cybernetics.

Cybernetics have one specific weakness that biotech does not; they can be targeted by effects which target technological items, if such effects specifically target cybernetics as well. As biotech is a separate type of augmentation, biological augmentations would not be valid targets of such an effect. You might ask what effects specifically target cybernetics, but at the moment I couldn't say; if there presently are anyway, finding them would require a more exhaustive search than I am prepared for.

The one place I know of where it matters is that the verthani in Alien Archive can have one additional augmentation in one slot of their choice, but only if it is cybernetic.

Beyond the fluff reasons, biochains are a 10% price increase for future-proofing against potential, eventual problems.

Yes, the starships at the upper end of the scale in Starfinder are extremely light. With enough magic and science fantasy involved, that's not necessarily wrong in and of itself. The numbers are still completely nonsensical, but it is not just because the ships are light.

The short version of that post is that ship mass and ship length increase with no consistent pattern and do so completely independently of each other, resulting in a blatant, inelegant violation of the square-cube law and thus basic physics. This is a problem even for smaller Starfinder ships, as it is merely most pronounced with the largest ones.

Serum of Appearance Change is permanent. This means it's likely dispellable, and detectable by Detect Magic. Uncertain what it means to drink a second one because the first one would remain active too. Funnily enough, one could have several layers, something an elite spy might be able to make use of.

"Upon drinking this elixer, your coloration and the general form of your features instantly and permanently changes."

The SoAC does not go on to further emphasize it is impossible to dispel the way the SoSS does, so this is ambiguous from a mechanical perspective. "Instantly and permanently" is an utterly nonsensical phrase from a strictly mechanical perspective, since those are conflicting durations, so this shouldn't be read as a purely mechanical statement. I suspect the duration of this is most likely intended to be Instantaneous, and the "permanent" is to emphasize that this is not some cosmetic change that will go away in a few days, weeks, or months the way hair dye might.

This isn't the only possible reading by any means, but I think it is consistent with the intent behind the SoSS. Though if that is in fact the intent, perhaps it would have been clearer if they'd simply combined them into a single item.

I'm glad to see some explicit numbers from an actual, professional background on how this could be handled, but it may be worth considering an alternate approach as well. Rather than inflating the number of expansion bays on larger ships to accommodate a larger number of cargo bays, it might also be worth scaling the capacity of an expansion bay with the size of the ship. The two approaches could even be combined, with larger ships having more expansion bays than they do now, and each expansion bay having a higher capacity as determined by the size of the ship. Extend this to guest quarters and you can now properly house suitably large numbers of people without it demanding an immediate, substantial BP and PCU investment.

The app that provides advice on negotiating tactics would end up giving you a +X on certian of your diplomacy/intimidate/bluff checks, but could also provide some interesting, perhaps useful intel.

Note that this is already roughly possible with the Artificial Personality computer upgrade, which can make checks for those skills and Sense Motive with a bonus equal to twice its computer level. Several of the others can be roughly handled with things like data modules, though the actual mechanics involved there may not be adequate for your ideas.

The flavor of Improved Unarmed Strike implies you can automatically deal lethal damage, but the actual mechanical benefits do not state this. Unfortunately, this means it is ambiguous at best, and that your attacks remain non-lethal at worst. Not only that, they are still archaic, and thus deal -5 damage against anyone in normal armor. You can still deal lethal damage with them, but it gives you a -4 attack penalty, as per P. 252.

The vesk get around this, as the Natural Weapons racial ability explicitly removes both the nonlethal and archaic qualities from their unarmed strikes.

Weapon Specialization is explicitly given in the form of bonus feats by all classes. There is no mechanical reason to ever take it as a normal feat instead of Versatile Specialization. Similarly, there is no mechanical reason to ever take Weapon Focus more than once, as Versatile Focus exists. Unless you're gaining multiple proficiencies beyond what your class gives you, though, this is a relatively minor difference to the point of being nearly inconsequential. The heavy weapons technomancer who takes Weapon Specialization rather than Versatile will feel a bit of a sting if they're ever stuck using a rifle instead, but there's not a meaningful difference if you only take one proficiency feat.

Though I see that while I was typing all this up that was already largely covered.

In comparison to their equivalent heavy weapons, longarms have lower damage but are lighter, cheaper, and typically have a better usage to capacity ratio, which means more shots before reloading. They have no strength prerequisite, whereas heavy weapons demand a minimum of 12 strength even if you gain proficiency directly rather than through a feat. And from a more narrative perspective, longarms will likely be slightly less prone to attracting attention. Space is often lawless, but a bigger gun is a better eye-catcher.

In comparison to their equivalent small arms, longarms are more expensive but have higher damage, range, and frequently match or best them in in terms of usage to capacity ratio, which means more shots before reloading. This damage increase is also significant; as Ventnor points out, small arms apply only half your level for specialization, while longarms apply your full level. Damage dice are not only larger, but also scale to larger pools.

A level 1 character with laser weapons will average 2.5 damage with a pistol, 4.5 with a rifle, and 5.5 with an artillery lasre. At level 6, they can get the next tier of each and have specialization, which changes their damage output 8, 13, and 15. The next tier at 9 is 11.5, 19.5, and 22.5 per shot. Extending this to level 17 when the laser pistol caps out, you have averages of 28, 45, and 48.5. Laser rifles and artillery lasers both have level 20 equivalents, so the loss in damage is even greater from that perspective.

For kinetic weapons, you start with averages of 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5. At level 7, these averages rise to 10, 16, and 18. At 10, these are 15.5, 23.5, and 26.5. And much like with laser weapons, the gap between small arms and the other weapons will only continue to grow.

It is not necessary to go for longarms as a ranged combatant, if you have other ways to contribute meaningfully. But from a damage perspective, longarms will be a substantial damage increase over small arms as long as you're actually attacking with them. Heavy Weapons in turn will have a still larger average damage value, though the gap between them and their equivalent longarm is not as large and not always as consistent.

Spellshot does not work with Supercharge Weapon because it specifies an area spell, which Supercharge Weapon is not. This is also why a sniper rifle cannot be used to fire Disintegrate from two miles away.

Profession says nothing of the sort. It's simply a check to make a living using a skill, with the flavor of the activity entirely dependent on the skill and the GM. Anything beyond that, such as the legal nature of the work, is entirely at the discretion of the table.

Otherwise you will have groups who will sell their ship to get way over-leveled gear, which would be a big deal since weapons are the majority source of damage in Starfinder.

Yes, it kills realism. But it's 100% necessary.

I would think that the restrictions on purchasing items above your level would rather mitigate that. The GM can allow you to buy items well above your level, beyond even the written default maximum of level+2, but the GM can also deny you a buyer for your ship. And if players would want to downgrade their ship for better gear anyway and the GM couldn't accommodate that, then perhaps that group as a whole needs a discussion about what they want out of the game more than they need the rules of the game to stop them.

I don't think you need to go with that clause to rule it out anyway. You just have to remember the lovely madness that comes from the distinction between fluff and mechanical terms. At no point is a starship's laser cannon defined as a Laser weapon, and it's in a completely different chapter of the book inside a completely different subsystem. So given that the lasers are not called Lasers, it's doubtful that they even are Lasers, and thus Laser Accuracy does not apply to lasers despite them being lasers, as they are probably not Lasers. Their damage is also untyped, so if you manage to find yourself under fire from starship weapons, your armor's energy resistance won't help you at all!

And before you get too tempted to dismiss that as merely pedantic, hair-splitting, rules-obsessed madness - after all, even if a laser (narratively) isn't a Laser (mechanically), obviously it's still going to do Fire damage when relevant - keep in mind that we have such lovely things as the gravity gun. Or vortex cannon, if you're so profoundly unfortunate as to be faced not just with heavy weapons, but capital weapons on foot. Neither of those have a listed damage type either, so there's no easy way out of that uncertainty.

Shocking as it may be, a high level character actually can survive both of those if the gunner rolls exceptionally poorly.

As for the broader issue, I too am fairly disappointed by the lack of not just Soldier support in starship combat, but the broader lack of support for certain things in general. Mysticism has no place in space, apparently, once you're dealing with the actual vehicles themselves.

Even a level 1 NPC will have 12-14 in something if you assume they start with an 18 in one of their ability scores, a theme that complements it, a class that supports it, and skill focus. That is, if you assume the level 1 NPC is optimized to have the maximum possible modifier for that level. Or perhaps they're using NPC skill rates, in which case they can still get a +10 or so... if they've mastered the skill. And I would hesitate to make the assumption that any given NPC has necessarily mastered a skill. If we're more conservative about it and accept merely that they have a skill they are good at, their modifier is a rather lower +5.

In any event, here are some baseline assumptions going into this. First, we'll simplify the bookkeeping and say that a 30 day block is a month, and that a month is four weeks. This isn't perfectly accurate, but it keeps things a little shorter. Second, we'll be considering the discounted lodging prices - half to a quarter of the listed price for buying a month's stay at once in advance. Third, our food baseline won't be the generic "meal" items. Rather, we'll consider the much more efficient RtE meals, which contain a full day's worth of food for a single credit. If RtEs don't appeal, we can even treat that as an approximation of the cost of buying ingredients and cooking for yourself for a day. Restaurants have to have a mark-up, so the actual food itself should be a bit cheaper.

So we're now considering a baseline 30 credits per month per person. First, the sleep pod is right out; we're looking at long term habitation, not just crashing in a hole in the wall. Our baseline is thus efficiency housing, which is designed for one or two people. A month is 90 credits, so half is 45 and quarter is 22.5.

A +5 modifier gets 15 taking 10, and thus has a weekly yield of 30 credits, and a monthly yield of 120. After food, that's 90, which evenly covers efficiency housing even at full price. At half price, that's 45 surplus, or 67.5 at quarter price.

A +7 modifier gets 17 taking 10, and thus as in the first post gets 34 credits per week, and 148 per month. That's 118 after food, for surpluses of 58, 103, and 125.5 credits per month for full, half, and quarter price housing.

In both cases, your savings increase substantially if you have a roommate or partner. And you can get more with the equipment mentioned above.

Efficiency housing is entirely doable, so next is Suite housing. 5 per bed per night is going to run 150 credits a month, cut to 75 and 47.5 at half and quarter price. That base 150 is out of reach for both a +5 and +7, but getting just half off puts it comfortably in reach of a single person for both even after food! And if you're willing to share a bed, you can still get a second person's income on top of that.

The key to survival is to actually purchase long term rather than paying hotel rates every single night, and to eat more efficiently than going to a restaurant three times a day. Which isn't terribly surprising, since you'll burn your wallet pretty effectively doing that in the real world too.

There are many areas Starfinder's 'economy' will break down if examined too closely, but the ability of a random commoner to survive on a day to day financial basis does not appear to be one of them right now.

Alternatively, abandon Absalom and join the Veskarium. They explicitly strive to provide a decent standard of living for all their citizens. You will of course be second class compared to the vesk themselves, but at least they'll take care of you. Just do your job and don't get in the way of the conquest.

The answer is no, but I'll break it down a bit more than the earlier responses. A tracking weapon projectile has only four values - its position, its speed, its damage, and the DC point defenses roll against derived from its speed. This is very specifically a DC, not an AC; it has neither an armor class nor a target lock, so there's nothing to roll against to hit with a conventional attack. It has no hull points or shields, so there's nothing to reduce even if you do hit it. It doesn't even take up space - a projectile is present within a hex, but does not occupy it the way a ship does. Fundamentally, as the rules are written, a tracking weapon projectile is not an object that can interact with starships outside of the very specific framework of being fired, either missing in transit or eventually reaching its target, and then either being shot down by a very specific reaction or impacting the target and dealing damage.

You can't fire on tracking weapons outside of the point defense reaction because they do not have the statistics necessary to interact with the rest of the system that way.

Now, if you wanted to move beyond RAW and homebrew it a bit, basing things like AC and TL on their speed much like the point defense DC is would be a reasonable starting point. But keep in mind that tracking weapons already have a very significant trade-off built into them. The more damage they deal, the slower they are, and the slower they are, the easier they are to shoot down. If you start letting people fire on projectiles en route, then you need to be very careful or you may very quickly declaw tracking weapons that do anything except hit on the turn they're fired.

Despite being called "Skill Synergy," its +2 bonus actually has no synergy with the bonuses most of the classes provide. The Operative and the Envoy at least get another ability from Skill Focus once their class provides them an equivalent or better modifier. This is particularly important for the Operative, who gets theirs to every skill and thus invalidates Skill Synergy's +2 at level 3. It wouldn't invalidate Skill Focus, though it would tip the balance somewhat depending on your focus. Either way, they're both woefully inadequate for keeping pace with DCs at higher levels.

A Soldier's maximum base ranged damage per shot is achieved with a Paragon Reaction Cannon for 12d10 damage, average 66, +20 (specialization) +6 (Bullet Barrage gear boost), boosted further on a full attack with +2d6, average 7, against the first target (Focused Damage Sharpshooter technique), for an average value of 99. A Soldier's maximum base melee damage per swing while still being capable of full-attacking is achieved with a Dimensional Slice Curved Blade, again hitting for 12d10 damage. +20 specialization, +9 strength, +4 Melee Striker (gear boost), or +33 total for 99 average damage.

Other notable mentions are the Dimensional Slice Longsword, which loses only 3 average damage and the bleed critical effect to the curved blade in exchange for being cheaper, one-handed, and analog rather than dying in 20 swings. And of course, there is the level 19 Dimensional Blade Doshko, which has the single highest damage per-hit in the game of 114 assuming the same optimization, but is unwieldy.

All of this can of course be further boosted by Deadly Aim... for what it's worth.

While I completely agree that the starship DC scaling is unacceptable, I think it's disingenuous to say that an Operative with 18 Dexterity is screwed off the ship.

In an ideal system, I think most starship DCs would actually be disconnected from ship tier, and rely on the actual equipment in use, and how it's being used. Moving at speed 14, for instance, imposes a penalty for piloting checks. But should merely having a speed 14 thruster impose that penalty, even if you're moving more slowly and carefully? The current answer is "yes." The ideal answer, to me, is "no."

I suppose we'll see just how much is actually fixed whenever it happens.

I think that one thing which has been lost in some of these discussions is that part of the problem is not just that Starfinder's ship masses are low, and increasingly disconnected from ship size as they grow larger. It's a more fundamental problem than that; the ship scaling is not just dubious, but inconsistent. There is no clear reasoning there to me beyond each size category having larger numbers than the last. And given that Starfinder is borrowing from the conventions set by Pathfinder and D&D 3.x before it, and taking the names of creature size categories for its ship sizes, I find that incredibly disappointing. It's throwing out an elegant approach in favor of... this.

Within a creature size category, the largest possible creature would be twice the height or length of the smallest one. In accordance with the square-cube law, its mass - and thus weight, as it was presented - would in turn increase by a factor of 8, sometimes rounded off a bit for convenience; rather than have the base 16 tons of a gargantuan creature multiply to 128 tons, for instance, it's rounded off to 125. But even with quirks like that, creature scale follows a fairly elegant progression in Pathfinder and D&D 3.x.

Starfinder's ship scaling, by contrast, follows no apparent pattern beyond each category having a larger number than the previous one. Tiny starships have a length range that ends at triple the start, small doubles, medium is two and a half, and it never really settles anywhere. Mass also increases inconsistently, disregarding both the ranges of previous categories and the actual lengths of the ships with which the masses are associated. There is no method or pattern apparent in ship scales. They simply are, with no concern for any sort of consistency.

Personally, I find this to be one of the greatest disappointments of the system. It is less significant for normal play than the starship DC scaling, which was thankfully acknowledged as a problem. But I think the sizes are no less broken than the starship combat DCs, and in some ways is the worse problem of the two to me. The lack of cohesion apparent there ripples across the rest of the chapter, resulting in the bizarrely low cargo and creature capacities of ships as they get larger, and ultimately creates a set of mechanics that I do not think can model a reasonable setting.

Sticking with the apparent intent to make the weapon level matter, the cleanest fix would be to simply pay the difference. This would require some additional rules to allow you to strip fusions from higher level weapons and put them on lower ones as you currently can, but I think that would be doable. Or just don't address it, and make it either implicitly impossible or a source of free money. A very inefficient source of free money, but a source nonetheless.

The Veskarium attempts to provide its citizens with a high standard of living, regardless of species. However, it does so through the lens that the Vesk are inherently superior to the species they have conquered. There is no actual contradiction here; you can offer the people you conquered good things while still denying them access to even better things. And for a society that wishes to think itself honorable while still holding to a tenet of innate superiority, this is reasonable, and implied in Damoritosh's description. The inferiority of those who have been conquered is no reason to mistreat them. You've conquered them. They've submitted. If they stay in line and know their place, take care of them and keep them productive.

The Veskarium's government is probably leaning Lawful Neutral at best, and perhaps more likely Lawful Evil given their patron god. But I think that here it is the evil of an autocracy that enforces its rule through strict stratification and heavy-handed punishment rather than the evil of outright slavery. Of course, slavery is still conceivable in such a system. I think it would be somewhat at odds with the reasoning and stances given, but there isn't enough information to concretely rule one way or the other.

The ksarik has cover because they're on opposite sides of the line.

No, this isn't spelled out anywhere explicitly. Yes, it sounds slightly absurd when put that clearly. But that's really what it is, and it's terribly explained. The ksarik doesn't have cover because the line shown runs along a wall; the ksarik has cover because the line runs along a wall, and Obozaya is on the 'other side.'

Consider this. Extend the wall further along the line being drawn. In the example in the CRB, this will completely block Obozaya's line of sight and line of effect. Consider doing this with your example now. What has changed? Nothing. In your hallway example, both opponents would be on the same side of the line being drawn to check for cover, and therefore it does not intersect the wall. Thus, the wall does not provide either of them cover.

I believe this is the basic, fundamental logic behind the example given in the core rulebook. I don't think you'll find it spelled out explicitly anywhere, nor will you readily find a more eloquent explanation. But that's what it is.

I think this makes some sense when you actually stop and consider it. But they also should have actually explained this detail, given the examples they chose.

Let me try to break this down.

Each weapon fusion has an item level, and a fusion can't be placed on a weapon that has a lower level than the fusion's item level. Once it is attached to a weapon, a weapon fusion uses the weapon's item level for any of the weapon fusion's level based effects.

Alright. The only specification here is that a weapon fusion cannot be placed on a weapon with a lower item level than the weapon fusion's. Continuing into the next section...

You can place multiple fusions on the same weapon, but only if the weapon's item level is equal to or greater than the combined total of all the fusions' item levels. A weapon cannot hold or benefit from additional fusions beyond this limit.

So, we have two things. First, there's no mention of a weapon fusion having an item level that is in any way modified by the weapon into which it is placed. Second, you can't put a fusion into a weapon with a lower level than the fusion. So you can't put Vorpal, a level 10 Fusion, into a club, which is a level 1 weapon. Moving on...

The price of a weapon fusion depends on the item level of the weapon into which it's being installed. Installing a fusion into a 7th-level weapon costs more than applying the same fusion into a 6th-level weapon, for instance.

And for price, there is no mention of a weapon fusion's item level. There is only mention of the weapon's item level.

So, looking at these rules, it looks to me like you can put a fusion into any weapon with an item level that is equal to or greater than the fusion's item level. Further, no matter what fusion you are putting into the weapon, the cost of installing the fusion is based purely on the weapon level. Finally, beyond setting a minimum item level for the weapon into which it is being placed, and setting a functional maximum on how many fusions can be combined in a single weapon, I see no other limitations on weapon fusions based on the weapon fusion's level.

Now, in addition to all of that, you have the rules I quoted earlier, about being able to transfer fusions.

Taken altogether, where do the rules in any way disallow transferring weapon fusions into a weapon of a higher level? Have you perhaps confused fusions with fusion seals? I would completely understand if so. The terminology here is perhaps less than ideal, and could very easily lead to such a misunderstanding.

It's also possible, though difficult and fairly expensive, to transfer fusions from one weapon to another. Any character trained in mysticism can transfer a fusion; this costs half as much as it would to initially purchase the fusion, using the level of the new weapon to determine the price.

There is no restriction on what sorts of weapons can be transferred from others, nor any restriction on the level of any weapon beyond those imposed by the fusions themselves. Converting a fusion for a level 10 weapon to a fusion for a level 20 weapon is part of the process of transferring the fusion, and accounted for in the price of transferring it to the level 20 weapon.