McAllister's page

First, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreTools?from=Main.TropesA reNotBad

Second, some ideas.

- Killing evil is its own reward, and I shall put no other reward before it. I will not allow offers of payment to sway my determination of who lives and who dies. If I happen to accrue payment in the course of my work, I will invest firstly in my own effectiveness and lastly in my own comfort. (this character sounds kinda ascetic to me)

- Evil people can reproduce like any others. In the event that my work leaves a child or other vulnerable person with no caretakers, I will personally take care of them until a suitable replacement can be found.

- The perfect is the enemy of the good. I will not allow my zeal for a perfect world to impede my work. If I need to give an immoral person payment to gain access to a truly wicked one, the price will be worthwhile.

Also, for your first tenet, may I suggest splitting it? Because "I will only kill people who deserve it" and "I will kill whoever is necessary to prevent the most loss of life" are different ideas, and frankly, there are situations where they'll conflict. Which is good! Leads to nice drama. But it might be worth articulating them separately.

Is really weird, can confirm.

I'd support implementing a houserule that adds something to a PC's Intimidate DC. Options:

Skill Focus: Intimidate adds a flat +3 to Intimidate DC (above and beyond contributing to the Intimidate bonus, since that's usually not going to determine the DC to Intimidate a soldier)

A specific feat that gives a bonus to saves against emotion effects and DCs for Diplomacy, Intimidate and Sense Motive might be fun. It would represent a general refusal to be effected by anything that tries to elicit an emotional reaction.

...those are what comes to mind as decent options.

So this started with a thought: if I were running NPCs, assuming the PCs include one melee fighter who's obsessed with charging, what can I do that's neither A. focus firing the melee PC until they fall down every fight or B. being ineffective of the sake of being ineffective. So I arrived at C. apply crowd control to the melee fighter with some frequency, to justify NPCs shooting over their shoulder at the rest of the party.

Entangled seems like a good one. Moving at half speed, with charging prohibited and some -2s, means they may be able to limp over to an enemy and attack, or shake it off as a move action and have a standard to work with: it seems like a nice, interactive condition. It also imposes a penalty to Reflex saves, so I figured, hey, what else can I inflict out of a grenade?

Without further ado, the text for Blinded:

"You’re flat-footed, you take a –4 penalty to most Str– and Dex-based skill checks and opposed Perception checks, you automatically fail Perception checks based on sight, opponents have total concealment against you, and you must succeed at a DC 10 Acrobatics check to move faster than half speed or else fall prone."

So... flat-footed is a penalty to AC... Reflex saves are not a skill check, and have no requirement to see the attack coming or be able to move... do you mean to tell me a blind person can dodge grenades just as well as someone who can see?

What about the Inspiring Boost Envoy? Sure, they can't heal HP, but between the Envoy recovering lost stamina and using Resolve and medkits to get HP back up, would that be sustainable?

And reach may be even more valuable in Starfinder than in Pathfinder given that reach weapons no longer deny you the ability to attack adjacent foes.

As far as I know there's nothing printed in the entire game that allows someone to make more than one AoO in a round, so reach is nice for making that one AoO anywhere in a large area, but even with 30 foot reach you couldn't charge into a crowd of casters and swat them all for trying to fry you.

Because the scales are different. Starfinder did take into account a small bit of realism with their ships. They need to be big, heavily armored tanks to survive the rigors of outer space. You know, massive radiation pulses, extreme heat AND cold, a speck of space dust that hits your hull while you're going the speed of light, etc.

Okay, ignoring the fact that they're literally the same scale...

...no, I can't let that go. A foot is a foot. Like, understand that a Tiny starship is called Tiny because it's being compared to other starships, but if it's literally the same length as a dragon and you tell me "it's possible to target a 40 foot starship with this laser, but not a 40 foot dragon," we have a problem. And don't start with the "giant mass of metal" argument, I know dang well a starship can be made out of ironwood and panes of force, hell, it looks like a starship can be a space whale, so don't tell me all starships are so much denser than all space monsters that only starships can be targeted with starship weapons.

And as for radiation shielding, how hard do you think it is to protect a person from the hazards of space for days at a time? If you answered "such protection can be manufactured for under 100 credits and is ubiquitous on residents of space stations," you'd be exactly right!

Like, Pathfinder had some flaws, but do you know why incredibly large things didn't squash incredibly small things? Two reasons: first, it was very hard to hit them, with a large attack penalty and a large AC bonus (so maybe starships should have a quantified penalty when shooting at non-starships instead of a minus infinity): and second, actually, very small things DO get squashed by very large things. And maybe that's okay. Maybe PCs need to put getting shot by starship weapons up on the list of things like "falling off a cliff" and "getting thrown in the ocean while petrified" that will Kill You Dead, and they can deal with that. Because a number of discussions on the forums have shown that the intent is that starship weapons suddenly become unbelievable ineffective if they're shot at anything other than starships, and I'll tell you what, it's not how I'd run a game for a minute. I think bending over backward to make sure starship weapons are worthless when they're not being fired at starships has too many weird, awkward and/or unclear ripple effects emanating from it.

A 40 foot dragon is Gargantuan. A 40 foot starship is Tiny. A Gargantuan starship is about 10,000 feet. Why on Golarion would the Tiny starship be on the same scale as the second one and not the first one?

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You're mixing up your units here. The pistol does 3.5 hit points of damage, the paragon reactins cannon does 66 hit points of damage. A starship cannon does 50 hull points of damage. Hit points and hull points are almost for sure not the same size. If you pushed me to make up a number, I would say that a hull point of damage is about 10,000 hit points in damage.

These are intended to be whole different scales, not to be things you can easily compare.

Well, a starship light laser cannon does 5 points of damage to another starship. I'm looking at this sidebar:

Starship weapons and regular PC-level weapons work on different scales and aren’t meant to interact with each other. If characters choose to shoot at a starships with their laser rifles (or cast a Spell on it) while it is on the ground, the GM should treat the starships as an object (a particularly massive one, at that). At the GM’s discretion, if starships weapons are ever brought to bear against buildings or people, they deal Hit Point damage equal to 10 × their listed amount of damage. However, starships weapons are never precise enough to target a single individual (or even small group) and can, if the GM decides, be simulated as deadly hazards instead of weapon attacks.

The difference between a tactical semi-auto pistol (3.5 damage, on average) and a paragon reaction cannon (66) is larger than the difference between the pistol and a starship light laser cannon (50). A Soldier making three attacks with the reaction cannon will deal noticeably more damage than a starship railgun (200). So the idea that starship weapons are on a different scale than personal weapons doesn't really impress me.

The Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr was invented 99 years ago to shoot giant bullets through tanks, and there has been an effective, human-portable anti-tank weapon in existence pretty much ever since. It's absolute balderdash to tell me that the biggest character weapon isn't a threat to the smallest starship.

"There's no such thing as a dragon big enough for a starship to shoot at it" is absolute balderdash.

"Monsters should try to use break DCs to tear parts off the PC's ship" is not absolute balderdash, it's an honest attempt to help and I appreciate it, but it's not exactly playtested and seems pretty devastating to the ship.

Basically, I agree with Sauce and it seems like Paizo dropped the ball a bit on this one.

Pathfinder splatbooks. Starfinder has a larger potential design space, both by theme and mechanics, for new character options before you start pushing the boundaries of balanced play, IMO.

I agree. Pathfinder had a build-your-own-race system. Starfinder seems more controlled than that, seems to recognize that that isn't going to be good for balance.

TBH I don't think the general situational effectiveness of gear has changed that much

I'm gonna stop ya right there ;) and point out that selling gear is worth considerably less of its value in Starfinder than Pathfinder, so the relative utility of selling it vs. using it is different. It's much more tempting to find a use for on-level gear than sell it for peanuts if it's useful at all. Did you want a crossbolter? Well, if it's a few levels higher than your current weapon and a significant damage boost, sure, maybe you use a crossbolter for now.

I think they shouldn't stress themselves out with trying to make unique mechanics for all of them. For example, they could add gnolls to the game by saying "They're like Vesk, but instead of a bonus to saves against fear, they get a bonus to Intimidate and Athletics. Now, here's a full chapter of description, culture and so on."

That said, they really oughta cover all the +Physical/+Mental stat spreads.

I was not thinking of power armor for any class besides soldier. Needing a strength score or taking feats to get it is not part of my consideration. I don't think it is a particularly good choice for anyone who doesn't get it as a bonus feat.

At any rate, I don't think that power armor is a "trap" option. It gives some bonuses over normal armor, with some trade offs. The thing that makes it seem bad is that it would make sense to think that power armor means better AC. Instead AC is one of the things it looses out on in trade for strength and carrying extra weapons.

So what you're saying if that if you don't have to spend a feat and meet prereqs for PA proficiency, which is to say if you're an Armor Storm or Guard soldier of at least 5th level (or at least 13th, if this is your secondary specialization), then PA is not a trap option?

That's a ridiculously weak statement. Imagine if charging was so bad that Blitz soldiers and Stellar Rush managed to bump it up to the level of "not a trap option?" Or if Operatives did roughly the same amount of damage whether or not they used Operative weapons? We would be howling. I would, anyway.

Characters deserve to excel with the equipment they specialize in, and characters using equipment they don't specialize in should still be able to get some situational benefit from it. The Armor Storm soldier should be amazing in PA, and, as far as I can tell, it's just an unintuitively good switch-hitter whose punching and bull-rushing will help as often as enemies dramatically monologue on the lip of Mount Doom.

Plus, Powered Armor is in a uniquely bad position to benefit from someone saying "hey, we just found a suit of this, I guess I'll give it a try," because its proficiency is so hard to get, and even if you happen to have it, you'd really like to have a null-space generator full of space batteries to run most of them. So, given that people who aren't AS or Guard Soldier will loot a suit of Powered Armor and think, "is this really going to sell for enough credits to justify dragging onto the ship?" I'd say it should be impressive for the minority of characters who'd, you know, consider using it.

suppose there are any colonies inside the drift?

So, the most compelling interpretation of the Drift I've seen so far is that you have no control over where you enter the Drift, and where you travel in it has no obvious relationship to where you get out when you leave.

Which means that a Drift colony really needs to be self-sufficient, because nobody who leaves can reliably come back, and even if someone wanted to bring them necessary supplies, it would be almost impossible.

And, for similar reasons, it would be an awfully popular destination for people who don't want to be found.

But, given the self-sufficiency requirement, it probably started with a big colony ship: either one that crashed in the Drift and the crew stayed there by necessity, or one that intentionally left to found a Drift colony.

So, my theory is that people widely rejected by society, like Nyarlathotep worshippers, for example, probably have temple-colonies in the Drift where they keep to themselves. In fact, it seems quite appropriate for Nyarlathotep's devoted to pray to him from the one place that he's least likely to be able to hear!

Being devoid of magic, the other planes wouldn't need to worry about Drift cultists summoning a huge army of demons and unleashing it on reality, but if they found a sufficiently mineral-rich chunk of planet floating around, they might be able to do something similar with an army of robots.

Very nice research, gnoams. It also shows that maxed-out light and heavy armor are never more than 2 points apart, and it's usually in heavy armor's favor.

Frankly, I figured the battle hardness and the jarlslayer would have very competitive combat stats for their levels and the other frames would be relegated to a utility role, but if the jarlslayer is so consistently going to be hit by energy attacks... I mean, that's one of the low-endurance armors. It should be impressive, for all the power it draws!

3. My moderately strong advice is to save mechanical encounter generation for when the Alien Archive comes out. NPC design is not super intuitive for the game that Starfinder's developers intend it to be. You should not throw enemies built like PCs against the PCs. NPCs are not like PCs and you will benefit from many NPCs to use, and to use as examples, when building encounters.

1.
"The Hellknights are chasing a ship that claims to be innocent with intent to destroy it."
"Space evangelists decide the PC's souls are in dire peril, and will stop at nothing to convert them."

2.
"Late-medieval societies have formed and are shooting at each other with early gunpowder weapons in a bloody war."
"An underground installation is emitting a unknown radiation, but the ship's priest is unwaveringly certain that they intend to build a weapon that can kill gods.

Swoop hammer sure would be impressive without the unweildy property, and i guess it wouldnt bother me seeing an armor storm soldier, or PA solarian demolish an encounter with it, i mean the character is devoting significant advancement resources to be able to DO that. I feel like the player should be rewarded for that investment.

Okay, point taken. I understand how a Blitz Soldier wrecks enemies: ditto for Bombard and Sharpshooter, and theoretically Hit-and-Run, and Arcane Assailant is a weird, flexible kind of style. But how does an Armor Storm Soldier excel? Before level 17, they get a decent unarmed attack, PA proficiency, an extra discounted armor slot, better bull rushes, extra damage with bolted-on weapons, and KAC vs maneuvers. Which is a pretty long list, but frankly, most of it is situational and/or trash.

If we added something to PA to give it a wow factor, that might be what's necessary to make Armor Storm look like a legit specialization and justify the two feats anyone else would have to invest. Is removing unwieldy the right wow factor? Idk. But there's room for one.

I feel like taking away the unwieldy property is unbalanced, because then soldiers could grab a doshko or swoop hammer and just wreck everything

My first thought was oh my god yes, if this were an option, I don't know how I could make the choice to play anything other then a Soldier with a swoop hammer.

Then I thought, okay, putting aside the fact that there aren't enough armors and batteries are a pain, would I go Armor Storm and have to charge as a full-round action until level 9, or Blitz and have to buy proficiency? And could I really afford to dump Str and gimp my effectiveness outside the powered armor?

Probably it's still OP, but hey, I thought about it.

McAllister wrote:

Quote:

No one is going to run around with multiple armors (or rather it's excessively unlikely and wouldn't be beneficial).

But that's literally what we were just talking about doing with the charge-per-minute powered armors. I don't think this is a safe assumption, if we want them to be viable.

Huh?

I missed this conversation. And as it sits why would you have multiple powered armors rather than a null space bag full of batteries?

You miss this conversation because I got this mixed up with another thread, so mea culpa.

No one is going to run around with multiple armors (or rather it's excessively unlikely and wouldn't be beneficial).

But that's literally what we were just talking about doing with the charge-per-minute powered armors. I don't think this is a safe assumption, if we want them to be viable.

River of Sticks wrote:

DMW: To your third point about free armor, it's not actually free in terms of WBL... it still counts towards 15-25% of your WBL as its actual value, even if you didn't buy it at a station. RAW the GM should be reducing your treasure gains to compensate.

Absolutely! But only the newest, best, armor will (or at the very least should) count its full value towards WBL.

PCs having WBL value in equipment is a goal the GM should be aiming for, old armor nobody's wearing only counts its sell-price towards that.

Wait, so, from a player's perspective, I want to make the otherwise questionable choice of upgrade my armor constantly because my GM is expected to see that I'm dirt-poor and open the cash throttle?

The issue is, when deciding whether to spend the credits on PA or not, it seems like "not" is going to be the right choice nine or ten times out of ten.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that Starfinder GMs are expected to throw fistfuls of random items at PCs as loot. It sells for peanuts, so the PCs can pick a grab-bag of items off dead NPCs or out of lockers without making too much progress toward the next level+2 gun. It just seems like there's a lot of equipment that's interesting to use if you pick up, but you wouldn't keep leveled at great expense.

Now, people who invest one or more feats in PA deserve to see a payoff, so level 8/11/14/17/20 battle harnesses feel like a necessity, but for the rest, they might be cool if you wander into one, and otherwise, save your credits.

Here's how to apply a theme to a level 1 Character -

Step 1A: is the Theme skill already a class skill? If so, it gets +1 untyped forever.

Step 1B: if not, it's a class skill now

Step 2: +1 to a stat, bringing it up to 11 (or 9 or 13, if racial adjustments apply)

Step 3: easier Culture DCs to know about relevant things

Honestly, the reason I think most people default to the lone melee guy and not 2+ is because...well melee is simply much rarer in SF. Aside from Soldiers and Solarians, pretty much all the other classes "default" into ranged combatants/supporters and when constructing a "generic" 4 man party, odds are not great you're going to get x2 CC Soldier/Solarian or Soldier+Solarian.

True! Melee envoys are niche, operatives do better at range, and taking anything else into melee is masochism outside touch spell delivery.

Tidally locked planets with atmosphere have interesting possibilities. I can't say whether your astrophysical theorizing is accurate or not, but it does sound fun!

Cathulhu wrote:

Pick them up off of dead guys?

That's another great cost-saving measure, but if the GM takes my advice, they'd all probably be drained. :P

Surely empty batteries are nearly as valuable? So you can charge them all during downtime and carry hundreds of shots of juice around in the field (or your cheeks, as the case may be)?

Tactics are at most GM suggestions when in stat blocks. In APs, suggesting bad tactics (like don't focus the melee PC) is just the admission of bad design. Paizo made melee the hardmode of this game and they don't want their ap making that apparent.

If melee character design is bad because they get focused-fired and encounter design is bad because NPCs are state not to use focus fire... maybe these cancel out and the design is fine?

It doesn't matter if Paizo puts tactics as part of the CR in the alien archive. Dictating NPC actions to the GM to that degree isn't what pen and paper RPGs are about. The GM gets to play too and no amount of rules or intentions are going to stop that. If tactics are part of CR, then all that was accomplished was to make the CR meaningless.

CR is for GMs to build balanced encounters. GMs in organized play don't build encounters, they run printed encounters. So I'm not to concerned about the instructions in organized play violating the sanctity of the CR system.

Being given tactical advantageous position changes CR even if the GM chooses to not use that advantage. CR is calculated before actions are taken and any infringement on that truth just succeeds to muddle what CR means and any of its use.

So, CR is accurate on an infinite featureless plain, and less accurate when terrain and positioning come into play. I agree with that idea, I'm just not sure we're drawing the same conclusion from it.

Spells are so resoundingly useless in starship combat, I can only conclude it was intentional.

Yeah, it sounds like it may well be a trap, but it's more interesting if you look at it as an option for the drone to hide than as utility for the mechanic.

Or the GMs job is to create an awesome world and story. Those gangers that only care about their own hide should fight differently than the marines with an objective. They can have the same stats, the same amount but they will be different. If you play them each optimally then they become the same thing. If you want to pit your wits optimally against another person then you should be playing a wargame, not running an RPG.

Pretty much this. Life isn't fair, and there's no reason for encounters to have equal numbers or firepower on each side, so I don't see a reason for them to have equal tactical acumen.

Why not romance buddies?

But another thing to keep in mind that +0 Int vs. -2 Int with +2/+2 to two different skills seems pretty heavily weighted in favor of the former. Sure, if you're hard-maxing one of the specific skills the racial +2 is nice, but more ranks is more class skills that you can get the trained bonus in and better rolls at skills overall, plus you never know when you'll accidentally roll Culture or Computers.

That's a fair point. I chose small-arms because the bow in the book was most similar to a projectile small arm in terms of damage and range (just range x2).

Also, if you make it count as a small-arm, the operative becomes pretty good at the bow if they select it. I think the bow fits nicely with the operative class: stealthy, skilled, etc. Making it a longarm conflicts with many of the operative class features.

Just be careful with letting Operatives use trick attack damage or their improved full attack with anything that gets full Weapon Specialization bonus damage. That's one of the things they want most in the world, and it may be possible to balance it, but it would have to require substantial investment. Having different bows for small-arms, longarms and sniper weapons is fine, I'm just advising caution about the longarm bows.

If we're throwing anecdotes around,

Once a week, I get together with a club and shoot nerf guns at each other (map is made of cardboard box stacks). Usually, one of three things will happen

1. You're dying too quickly to do anything

2. it's predominately 1v1 engagements

3. Somebody you know is really good is on the field, and they will get at least half of all shots aimed at them. (they usually still beat you back by themselves anyway).

So, a group of untrained university students are capable of focus firing when they need it.

Granted, a nerf gun delivers its payload to its target only slightly faster than USPS...

I've participated in a similar activity, and, upon reflecting on how it could be improved, I thought, I just wish I were paintballing.

What they need to invent is paintballs that dissolve cleanly 5 minutes after being exposed to air...

I'm not a big fan of 'enemies could easily win but don't because they have make bad decisions' encounter design.

Think of it more as

'enemies will probably lose, but could, over the course of their loss, disproportionately drain the resources and endanger the life of one player's character over the others, and, to the degree that it doesn't strain credulity, they shouldn't, because it's not fun.'

So for those of us not privy to the dirty details, is this actually a personal thing because a party wiped when the opposition was played... intelligently?

'get 'em' is a move action. There isn't any reason the boss wouldn't also fire.

So is it a personal thing, or a complaint about badly balanced encounters that can yield TPKs if the enemies aren't played stupidly and suboptimally?

Conversely, plenty of people are stupid and suboptimal, so I don't have a problem with stat blocks spelling out exactly who is and how.

+2 Str, +2 Con
Seeing in the dark
Natural AC
Natural weapon

My dude, I hate to break it to you, but you're looking at refluffing a Vesk. Maybe swap out their Fearless trait for those skill bonuses you mention, and you're good.

As for their place in the setting, a settlement on Apostae and a lot of ship-dwelling nomads?

If it's the stat block that tell you how to play the NPC, then yes, balance IS the stat block. It's the ENTIRE stat block, including those instructions.

Overlooking, of course, the 85% chance that this is a reference to someone you don't feel the need to mention by name.

Currently working on the concept of an Envoy 14/Solarian 6 sprinter. Based with human to get two starting feats, Jet Dash and Mobility. Eventually taking Fleet and Unarmed.

Envoy gives a wide spread of skills and skill points, Solarian makes it so we have all the class skills.

Shield Solarian 6 gives a boost to AC and resistance, and grants access to some movement-based abilities such as Stellar Rush, Gravity Boost, and Blazing Orbit. Sidereal Influence can buff the envoy Bluff and Diplomacy/Intimidate.

This build has only been tested so far as a Envoy/Solar 1/1. The character can rush in and deal damage faster than other melee party members, and can often dispatch most enemies via AoO as they try to avoid ranged characters attacks.

Can you tell us more about Envoy1 contributes? Or, in fact, what Envoy14 plans to contribute to the sprinting concept?

I feel like level limits make huge hauls, well, not a complete non-issue, but not much of one. Medkits still have bulk (and advanced ones are level-limited), grenades rely on Quick Draw for full attacks... I'm just not to scared by the effect of dropping a million credits on any given party.

It makes me sad that there's no way to have a magic weapon that's better at being, well, a weapon. Most fusions just seem to bypass DR or change energy types, or add rare crit effects. And since fusions get more expensive based on the level of the weapon being enhanced, there's no real ability to stay up to date with magic weapons. I can't see myself actually using weapon fusions much as a PC.

I read the Arcane Assailant specialization for Soldiers, and I was like, this is not impressive.

Then I read about how fusions work, and I was like, actually, just making a weapon be magical for free is kinda nice. I'm not going to bother otherwise, likely as not.

That only applies if Stop action is "no motion at all", and not "no motion relative to the local reference frame". If one ship moves 5 hexes, and then both ships stop, what is happening is that they are both drifting at the same speed. If the second ship wanted to move away from the first, it'd be doing a different maneuver.

Or, "Stop" does not actually exist in ship combat. Only "Not Changing Relative Position".

There's no meaningful difference between "no motion at all" and "no motion relative to the local reference frame." I recognize that a starship battle could occur between two ships travelling at trillions of kilometers per hour in roughly the same direction, and they stay on the same map because they only move a little bit relative to each other. This isn't the issue.

The issue is, regardless of the frame of reference, if my ship moves away from another ship, it will continue to do so unless one of them is acted upon by an outside force. That outside force could be friction: if the interstellar medium requires the pilot to keep the throttle open in order for the ship to keep moving (RELATIVE TO WHATEVER ELSE IS ON THE MAP REGARDLESS OF THE MAP'S FRAME OF REFERENCE), that's fine, but they need to state that. If it doesn't, ships should be able to (/forced to) drift in the direction they were moving last turn, modified by whatever other movement they're making.

I personally strongly disliked that particular implementation, but I'm liking Starfinder's so far, and that can easily fit two or three non-spellcaster enemies on a page.

What was there to dislike about 4E NPCs? Was it recharge? I quite liked recharge.

No Prize: all movements in Starfinder are relative. A ship that doesn't move during its turn isn't stationary, it just might as well be relative to the enemy crafts.

If all movements in Starfinder were relative

and I move 5 hexes away from another ship during a turn

and then both pilots stop taking actions

then I'll keep drifting 5 more hexes away from that ship every turn until one of us is acted upon by an outside force

period.

I recognize that, if Starfinder admitted that vacuums don't apply friction, then we'd have the problem where a ship can accelerate for 5 hours, dump a bucket of sand off the side of the ship, and that sand hits a space station like a missile salvo. I think the easy solution to this problem is to say that Starfinder space is different from IRL space, that it applies friction to things, and that this, among other reasons, is why Drift travel is viable and other interstellar travel is not. Just please, Paizo, tell me that and I can be fine with starships maneuvering like they're boats in an incredibly thick ocean.

Skill Focus is an insight bonus because, rather than being mandatory on anyone who wants to excel at skills, that makes it an option for people without built-in insight bonuses to keep up.

Generally speaking, SF feats aren't for deepening your character's competence at their focus, but broadening it.

Mostly, thematics. However, theee are some minor mechanical benifits. It has more HP, and you can repair it much quicker. And worth remembering is that you can craft on your ship with the right setup. So if you're out in the vast and really need a particular item, that's when you're friendly crafty friend saves you a month long trip to absalon station and back. Just keep a pool of UPBs on hand to do this with.

I doubt people will typically be crafting weapons or armor, you'll want to get those first chance. But there are plenty of other items where this could be handy.

Being out in the vast is nice. Especially if you've bombed a diplomatic summit and escaped on the visiting ambassador's shuttle. Or even if that's not what happened at all, but somebody edited a few videos together and now the whole system believes it.

Yeah, I can imagine scenarios where it's worthwhile to be able to function as your own level+0 general store.

I would have liked to see a weapon upgrade system instead of "Laser Rifle MKI, Turbo Laser Rifle, Mega Turbo Rifle...".

More like Youbuy a basic weapon and can upgrade it, so it become a Tier 2, 3, 4.. weapon. Maybe something like the fusion mods.

This would have allowed for a bunch level 1 weapons which are really different and also allows the player to get a "signature weapon".

The first weapons in each category are fairly distinct. Sometimes it's only a different damage type (which isn't meaningless), but often it's attributes like AoE, overload, autofire, unwieldy, etc. Now, the first weapon in each category isn't necessarily available at level 1, because effects like AoE are hard to balance at that level, but I do feel they're really different.

As for signature weapons? Craft your new weapon out of the pieces of your old weapon. This doesn't save you any credits compared to selling the old one and buying a new one (you can fluff it as swapping out the barrel for a new, outrageously expensive, incredibly effective barrel or whatnot), but it's going to be, for all in-game intents and purposes, the same weapon with better performance.

MAD is no longer an issue. Every five levels, you boost FOUR ability scores by +2.

"No longer an issue" seems like an exqaggeration. "No longer crippling" would be a better way to put it. MAD classes are still stretching their initial points thinner, and by the time they're getting even with those +2/+2/+2/+2 boosts, they're facing harder choices than other classes about where to spend their personal upgrade credits.

Generally speaking I absolutely want to melt my brain, but for SF I'd be perfectly happy if ships kept gliding in a straight line if they weren't otherwise maneuvered.

Longarm Proficiency and Specialization are worth two feats, probably.

Then again, Heavy Weapon prof and Heavy Weapon spec are probably worth three feats if you have Str 13+.

This may change as feats are published.