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I know Action Hero and Bombard have been getting most of the attention but I felt the Close Quarters fighting style had something interesting to offer. I got a chance to play one the other day in the level 5 adventure It Came From The Vast.

Character: Littlehorn Minotaur with Electrician background who notionally started with 3/3/3 physical scores, 1 Int, -1 Cha, boosted to 4/4/4/2/0/-1 at level 5. Took the Stretching Reach ancestry feat at level 5 and had Whirling Swipe, Shot On The Run, and Stock Striker as class feats. For weaponry he had an advanced stellar cannon. He also had a tactical fangblade but that was irrelevant to the adventure. He couldn't afford to have a second Advanced grade weapon and missing that damage die meant that he did more damage with Stock Striker for the time being. Other adventurers in the party included Iseph the Operative, Dae the Solarian, and a healing connection mystic.

Going back to how things were in SF1, Advanced Melee is analogous to what we call martial melee these days. It's just the step above basic melee. Soldiers and Solarians both came with advanced melee weapon proficiency. The equivalent of what we call Advanced these days was called Special, and those were pretty uncommon and quite niche in usage.

That's basically the core paradox of the Soldier class as written. It's an area attack class that grants single target strikes as a major pillar of its power budget.

Looking back on first edition, most sniper rifles held multiple shots. The thing that kept you from spraying bullets with sniper weapons was the unwieldy property. Given that the means to limit weapons to one strike per turn exists, how necessary is it to impose an action tax on top of it?

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Additionally, the fact that area weapons take two actions to fire, limits the wielder's ability to dash forwards into an optimal firing position, further exacerbating the range issue.

That has been a tradeoff for spellcasters using 15 foot cone spells like Burning Hands/Breathe Fire, Color Spray/Dizzying Colors, etc for a long time.

Of course spells work differently from weapons in numerous ways. Spellcasters usually know multiple spells, don't have to pay to upgrade all of their spells separately, and can choose which spell to cast without having to spend an action switching between them. A caster caught with no enemies in reach of a 15' cone just casts something else. A martial likely won't bother equipping such a weapon at all. Just keep shooting the stellar cannon.

I'm reminded of how weapon fusions work in 1e. 1e weapon fusions aren't damage adders. Instead they change the damage type of your weapon or add critical effects. The damage adder in 1e comes from the kind of insane damage dice progression on high level weapons. A level 20 longarm could be rolling something like 9d10 or 16d6 for its damage dice while also adding the user's level to damage. Of course that exact progression shouldn't be copied over for 2e since that scaling was designed for 1e characters with two health bars.

If the energy damage modules just gave your weapon the versatile or modular property that would drop their power level to bring them in reach of lower level characters and at the same time make them much less mandatory for high level characters.

A tangentially related idea hit me a minute ago that if damage at low levels seems too low across the board we could try rolling two dice at level 1. This is admittedly a radical change but it does have some benefits. It dilutes the Strength to damage advantage that melee gets and makes the first striking upgrade a less dramatic power difference. Upgrading your lasgun from tactical to advanced currently doubles your damage whereas going from 2 to 3 dice is only +50%. It does however make things substantially more lethal at low levels unless other numbers are adjusted across the board.

After finally playing the first session of Cosmic Birthday I asked myself, what's the purpose of having certain weapons that expend more energy? For example, why energy weapons like an arc pistol have a magazine of 10 charges that you spend 2 each time you shoot instead of just having a magazine of 5 charges that expends 1 per shot? I assume there's a reason for this like having ways to reduce expenditure but its seems a little pointless honestly.

It's how you get reduced effective magazine sizes when batteries come in standardised sizes.

Kickback deals additional damage more consistently than backstabber. Backstabber only works on enemies who are off guard and not immune to precision. Kickback applies on all attacks and isn't hard to negate the drawback.

I'd agree that the semiauto is on the strong side of simple one handed ranged weapons. When I was shopping for sidearms for my soldier it seemed to be the clear favored choice. There being only one martial pistol at the moment may have been a factor here. Semiauto outranges the boom pistol and both do 1d6, though the boom pistol is sonic. At level 1 the Boom Pistol has the same effective ammo capacity as the semiauto and the price of a spare battery would buy two spare semiauto magazines. I was specifically looking for a cheap sidearm (point in favor of semi-auto) that I could use when it was inappropriate to bring out the cannon (neutral) or when the enemy was out of range of the stellar cannon (point for semi-auto). Semi-auto is tied for highest damage among pistols and has easily the longest range. This is a change from 1e where the laser pistol had an 80' range increment and the semiauto was a short range high damage option.
And incidentally, it's kind of wild that I can be out of range for my stellar cannon and still inside this pistol's first range increment.

I have mixed feelings about the targeting part of the Bombard's features. On the one hand it's much needed when your main attack is a particular AoE and it's expensive to do anything else. On the other hand aiming an explosion to exclude specific people is a really hard to impossible feat of arms and most spellcasters can't do it either.

Having a look at the melee weapons. Pathfinder has a mature melee weapon ecosystem so there's going to be a lot of room for comparison.
Simple:
Baton: 1d6 Finesse and parry with one hand. Interesting. Pathfinder doesn't have any 1d6 one-handed finesse weapons. And the only Pathfinder one-handed weapon with both Finesse and Parry at 1d6 is the martial Exquisite Sword Cane.
Battleglove: Renamed gauntlet.
Knife: Renamed dagger
Puzzleblade: 1d8 on a 2-hander with questionably useful trait. Damage is fine for a simple two-hander.
Shock Pad: 1d6 with free hand. Nice.
Zero Knife: A knife you can't throw, but it does cold damage. Yay?

Martial:
Aucturnite Chakram: Comparable to a trident with a shorter throwing range. In return your critical specialization effect is stupefied 1 instead of clumsy 1.
Battle Ribbon: One-handed reach is rare and valuable. Add finesse and trip and no wonder it's only 1d4. But when you compare to archaic weapons the Scorpion Whip and Thorn Whip both do the same thing plus disarm.
Bone Scepter: 1d10 on a one-hander. Remarkable even without powerful traits.
Cryopike: 1d10 two-hander with reach. No particular traits aside from doing cold damage. Normal damage for a polearm, though a few come with addtional traits like trip or disarm with the same damage.
Doshko: Has been discussed before. Questionable whether parry is worth unwieldy.
Dueling Sword: Renamed longsword
Fangblade: 1d10 two-hander with backswing, like a greatclub without Shove
Force Needle: Only 1d4 damage, but that's a lot of traits (backstabber, concealable, injection, thrown 20. Doesn't have Finesse), and two more upgrade slots than usual. That could be breakable.
Hammer: Like a warhammer that takes up two hands. Seems fine as a simple weapon.
Nano-edge Rapier: Renamed rapier.
Neural Lash: A weird weapon. Telepaths treat it as simple and can selectively ignore nonlethal and unwieldy. 1d8 in one hand is unremarkable for a martial, but high for simple.
Painglaive: 1d10 with reach. You could just get a guisarme. Archaic guisarmes have trip, don't need batteries, and are immune to glitching.
Phase Cutlass: 1d6 is a little low for a martial weapon without significant traits. Being able to switch to void damage seems to be counting for a lot.
Plasma Doshko: 1d10 two-hander with sweep, like a greataxe that does less damage. But it's fire damage, so I guess that's worth more. Is this a carryover from 1e where energy weapons did less damage to balance out how they're rolling against the generally lower EAC?
Plasma Sword: 1d8 one-hander with no traits beyond the damage type.
Polyglove: Couldn't you just use a Shock Pad, and shouldn't this have Free Hand too?
Pulse Gauntlet: Gauntlet that does sonic damage
Shock Truncheon: 1d6 one-hander with the interesting modular (arc or nonlethal) trait.
Shooting Starknife: It's a starknife
Singing Spear: 1d6 two-hander. Besides damage type and crit spec the only trait is thrown 20. Is this really supposed to be two-handed for that damage? Aside from the damage type being sonic this is just a trident that does less damage and takes two hands.
Tailblade: 1d4 agile finesse free hand, implicitly requires a tail. Nice gimmick.
Talon: 1d6 one-hander with versatile damage. Another case of energy damage being valued as worth a die size. A versatile physical martial one-hander would do 1d8.

A few gems in there, but a lot of these are a little on the weak side.

Add Kickback to some of the former heavy weapons, and if we're still on Con as primary add that to the list of things Walking Armory does.

AoE manipulation feats.

I like the idea of bringing in the existing Scatter trait. Interestingly, in SF1 the only weapon type that had enemies rolling reflex saves was explode (which the playtest calls burst). Lines and cones still made attack rolls against AC. Attacking with area weapons wasn't a special action and you could theoretically do it more than once a turn using the full attack action like any other weapon - unless the weapon also had the unwieldy trait, which the vast majority of area weapons did. The exception was automatic fire, which was a special kind of full attack that basically let you decide to do a cone attack in place of using it like a regular gun, which the playtest rules translate into PF2 language pretty faithfully.

Getting a little into the weeds of how 1e combat worked, that made area weapons unattractive to Soldiers. They had class features for attacking more than once that didn't play well with those weapons, and explode weapons didn't take advantage of their high attack bonus. These were the weapons you'd give to someone who wouldn't normally be rolling full attacks. Technical classes with busy move actions and likely not maximizing dexterity. I can certainly see the motivation behind wanting to change that up a bit, though the current draft is a little weird.

My big issue with the Soldier class so far is that it is too specialized as a base class. Pretty much every Soldier made will be an artillery piece on the battlefield, with a secondary with two-handed melee weapons. Not a single one of the base class abilities will work with, say, a standard laser rifle or dual-wielding boom pistols. Even the various specializations released in the playtest are all about aoe weapons.

I'd like to second this. My main concern with the playtest soldier is that it's a one trick pony, and discussion of how good that trick is comes in second off of that.

A spinoff from a thread in the Operative subforum. Obviously the Soldier has some issues when removed from Starfinder's material culture, what with a lot of the class's kit revolving around weapons that don't exist in the Lost Omens campaign setting. So, how would we go about this if we had to?

Right off the bat we can narrow the top two fighting styles down to Armor Storm or Close Quarters, though Bombard has its uses. Action Hero has nothing to recommend it in a setting without automatic weapons.

Armor Storm gets us a kind of interesting Athletics tank. You can do athletics maneuvers hands-free while whirling a greatsword around, plus suppressed enemies do less damage to you.

Close Quarters is a Punitive Strike tank. You can also poach some of what Armor Storm does with the right choice of weapon. A Gnoll soldier with Chomp and a war flail can grapple, trip, and disarm while losing only one die size of damage compared to greatsword, and if you want trip and reach we all know about the guisarme.

Finally Bombard's features actually work with Whirling Swipe. It basically lets you use reach weapons without a care about hitting your allies and applies the suppression debuff more reliably.

Feats: Beyond the obvious Whirling Swipe at level 1, melee soldier is really lacking feat support. Most soldier class feats assume you're using a gun. You're probably going to be taking an archetype. Wrestler is a strong choice, particularly for Armor Storm.

I want to like Primary Target. The action and MAP compression is really powerful. The way it works with automatic weapons is intuitive. However, the way it works with area weapons is so counterintuitive that I've seen people assume the feature doesn't work at all with them. That's a problem. A major load-bearing mechanic of the class is hard to reconcile with what the character is meant to actually be doing.

Constitution as key ability score is awkwardly tacked on. There are class features that exist solely to paper over how Con doesn't do things the character needs. The class still works but there's no reason why it should be written like that.

The class is uncomfortably constrained in gear choices and play style. Everything revolves around two-handed aoe weapons. I'm hoping that this is just the part that they really want to concentrate on testing out and the actual soldier has more options.

Semi-auto pistol is straight up better than a hand crossbow. Identical statline except that you have to reload the hand crossbow after every shot instead of every five shots.

The standard 24x30 flip map represents a 120x150 foot area, and many of them are open outdoor spaces. The scenario Data Breach of the Dead takes place in a single 24x30 room. And let's not forget that Pathfinder adventures being set in cramped dungeons with primarily melee characters and doesn't stop the shortbow having a 60' range increment. The arbalest is up there with the best sniper rifles and the arquebus outranges everything Starfinder has to offer.

I had a game the other night where another player had Obozaya. 20 foot cone aoe that takes two actions to use was really limiting their ability to do soldier stuff on open maps. At least they could still do ranged strikes since it was a machine gun. It's hard to imagine trying to use a flame thrower for any serious purpose. I haven't had chance to actually play a stellar cannon yet. It looks like 50' should be enough to be reasonably functional at the ranges we've been playing for all that it's laughably short.

My group just did Shards tonight with a bit of field test 5 as a chaser. Iseph was prominently performing well. My mystic's Vitality Network had a big wow factor. Obozaya has mismatched subclass and equipment. If she were an action hero to go with her machine gun or had a stellar cannon to go with her bombardier fighting style I think she'd have had fewer issues getting into range to actually use her class features. A 20' cone with only one action left over to bring it to bear is really painful. Dae was inconvenienced by enemies being so spread out but was still reasonably functional.

I can answer that. Starfinder modules hand out grenades like candy and items sell for 10% of list price.

Since I already had the first edition core book out I had a look at ammunition costs. Small arms bullets used to cost 40 credits for 30 rounds, longarm was 75 credits per 25 rounds, and heavy weapons ammo was 90 credits per 20 rounds - yeah, first edition pistols and cannons used different ammunition. Obviously that doesn't tell you much oh its own since the worth of a credit has changed. In first edition you'd start with 1000 credits. At 3 credits per shot, firing a longarm once will cost you 0.3% of your starting wealth. A level 1 rifle cost 240 to 425 credits. Hunting rifle and 25 rounds of ammunition costs 265 credits, laser rifle with an extra 20 charge battery costs 485, less than half your starting money.
You now start with 150 credits. A simple rifle costs 60 credits, plus 10 for 10 rounds of ammunition is still less than half your starting wealth but if you want to shoot more than ten shots it's going to get expensive fast. 1 credit out of 150 is proportionately twice as expensive as 3 credits out of 1000. Even at heavy weapons rates reloading a playtest weapon costs 50% more of a character's starting money than in 1e.
On battery sizes, I've said this before in another thread and I'll say it again here. Escalating battery sizes made sense in the table gore of first edition. Advanced energy weapons would use more charges per shot, forcing you to buy expensive high level batteries in order to keep shooting as long before reloading. An Azimuth artillery laser held a 20 charge battery and used 2 charges per shot. The Aphelion artillery laser held a 40 charge battery and used 4 charges per shot. Battery costs were also nonlinear, unlike the playtest. A playtest 20 charge battery costs only twice as much as a 10 charge battery. A first edition 40 charge battery cost five times as much as a 20 charge battery, because getting more shots before losing an action to reload is priceless in combat.

I just now noticed that burst weapons must place the center of the burst within the first range increment. With the star cannon's 50 feet being the longest range of any burst weapon, if you're close enough to shoot someone with a cannon you're also close enough to take a double move and punch them in the face. This actually does give you a use case for the grenade and missile launchers. They can shoot more than 50 feet, at a cost of 10+ credits per shot.
Meanwhile in first edition a plasma cannon has a range increment of 100 feet and you can shoot up to ten increments away with the escalating penalties you'd expect.
The auto fire rules are largely unchanged but first edition machine guns and automatic rifles at least had 60 foot range increments, giving you a 30 foot cone. Zero cannon gave you a 60 foot line instead of 40. Some of these weapon ranges being oddly short is an actual change between first edition and playtest.

Perpdepog wrote:

While I don't think I'd mind soldier and solarian swapping their key stats, there is something else to consider.

These classes are intended to be the first classes new players to the game see. I don't just mean folks swapping from PF2E to Starfinder, but also people new to either of these games, or TTRPGs in general. Strength is meant to be the melee-centric stat. If you make a melee class, then swap it away from the stat that is intended to be the melee stat, it's going to confuse some people coming into the game for the first time and muddy an already somewhat daunting new player experience.

Frankly this is by far the best counter to my initial argument. Solarian is a core class, it's good to instill the idea that melee is strength in new players. It's why I'm hopeful that they can sort out strength Solarian and con Soldier instead of having to swap their key stats to fundamentally make them make sense.

That's also part of my thinking for why Soldier shouldn't be Con. Soldier is the basic core martial class. It shouldn't be the testbed for experimental features that switch up what basic rules like what ability scores do. Maybe none of the core classes should be Con?

In particular I'm thinking about destroying cover. Depending on the circumstances, blowing up someone's cover could be less bothersome than trying to shoot past it round after round and it could possibly even happen incidentally if you're using area attacks. I know exactly how to determine an object's armor class and saving throw bonus in SF1 (page 409) but I don't know the corresponding rule for PF2. I found the table for object hardness and HP but couldn't find the rules for object armor class or saving throws. The Creative Cover operative feat gives you an object providing cover that has its own AC so that seems to be a thing at least in principle. The feature doesn't say anything about the cover's saving throws, and that's actually the part that I'm most interested in.

I was going to advocate for waiting for the Vanguard to roll out something as out there as a con-based martial, but I'm coming around to letting the Solarian have it. It's mainly historical reasons that make the Vanguard seem like a better fit than the Solarian.

I'm not overjoyed about the idea of Soldier getting only strength without a dexterity option, but I think it's more sensible than constitution.

One way to hedge the options would be to let the soldier take their pick of str, dex, or con. That way even if the constitution based mechanics don't work out the class is at least no worse off than a regular martial. This then raises two questions.
1. What constitution based mechanics?
The soldier gets a limited ability to use its constitution where you'd normally use strength. If you played a soldier that maxed strength and dumped Con right now you'd lose out on little more than class DC, and only because that's locked to the key ability score. A high dex soldier right now loses armor penalty offsets that they don't need because they're using light armor anyway and the bonus to athletics maneuvers that they weren't planning on using anyway. And this leads to the follow up question.
2. Would you still pick constitution as a key ability score if there were other options?
If we had Strength or Dex as options we'd still have the same class DC, but now matched with better strikes in our chosen score. What we have in the soldier is a square peg being hammered into a round hole. We're being pushed into spamming AoEs now because our features make us particularly good at that, but because we aren't much good at making regular strikes. And that leads into a central conflict to the soldier's design. The basis of constitution as a KAS is that relying on class DC area attacks frees us from having to be good at strikes, and then the signature boost to our area attacks is a free strike against the primary target. It makes me feel like I'm buying three of something during a buy one get one special. It might actually still be a good deal but it feels bad anyway.

Pathfinder's kineticist addressed this by enabling Constitution to attack rolls. What happens if we do this and then drop Walking Armory and Fearsome Bulwark? Obviously the soldier gets more SAD because now they're always using Con for all attacks. In fact that makes them awesome switch hitters all by itself. They still end up needing Dex and Strength to be able to get the most out of the armor of their choice, and absent special rules may end up slightly behind on armor class at first level due to having neither dex nor str favored. The easiest/laziest patch over the armor class issue would be to grant expert armor proficiency at level 1. These guys are supposed to be tough anyway, right?

What does Con for strikes get us? Soldiers would become as good as any martial at making conventional strikes, and would be equally capable in melee as at range. I consider the first part of that good. The second part is possibly more powerful than intended, though we already get a bit of that in Whirling Swipe. Strength and Dexterity remain valuable secondary scores. Strength gives you melee damage and athletics. Dex gives you stealth and lets you get away with using lighter armor. The idea still bugs me a bit since it's just more of poaching things that belong to other ability scores.

When I was sketching out character builds I too noticed that a bombard soldier doesn't get any really exciting level 1 feats. Burst of Strength is more of an Armor Storm or Close Quarters feat. A Bombard has little use for Pin Down, as you say, though in a possible oversight the current text of the rule doesn't say you expend ammo. Quick Swipe and Whirling Swipe are both melee options. Ready Reload is mainly for machine gunners, at least with the current weapons list. A Bombard soldier is basically picking their first level class feat based on which one is least inapplicable.

The magazine capacity issue gets addressed if you're using an energy weapon but projectile weapons don't get the same benefit. SF2's equipment list has more advanced batteries with higher capacity like SF1 does, but unlike SF1 its more advanced energy weapons don't have increased usage values. For example, an Azimuth artillery laser could take a 20 charge battery and had a usage of 2 while a Corona artillery laser took a 40 charge battery and had a usage of 4. This introduces an imbalance to higher level weapons in SF2 that I don't think was intended whereby higher level energy weapons have to reload less frequently.

Whirling Swipe allows soldiers to use two-handed melee weapons as area weapons. You gain a two action activity that gives the two-handed melee weapon you are wielding the area and unwieldy traits until the end of your turn, and then as part of the same activity you make an Area Fire attack. Since quite a lot of what soldiers do involves area attacks, it's important to see how this interacts with other features involving area attacks and examine whether this is intended.

Suppressing Fire: Yes. There is nothing preventing Suppressing Fire from working in melee and this appears to be functioning as intended.
Primary Target: No, or yes in a really weird way that doesn't look intentional. Primary Target grants a ranged strike, not a melee one. While it isn't fundamentally impossible to make ranged strikes with melee weapons, that looks inelegant at best here. Suggestion, drop the word "ranged".
Bombard fighting style: Yes. This feature works just fine in melee.
Pin Down feat: Yes. Whirling Swipe is an Area Fire attack and your weapon retains the area trait until the end of your turn.
Warning Spray feat: No. Your weapon doesn't gain the area trait until after you've used Whirling Swipe on your turn, which happens after you've rolled initiative. I don't see any great harm in allowing these feats to work together.
Shot on the Run feat: No. Your weapon doesn't gain the area trait until after you've used Whirling Swipe. These are also two separate two-action activities, so you can't do both in the same turn. It would be really nice to be able to use Shot On Run with Whirling Swipe considering how important movement is for melee users, but the rules don't line up.
Punishing Salvo feat: Same as Primary Target, Punishing Salvo specifically grants a ranged strike.
Shoving Shot feat: No, for the same reasons as Shot On The Run. Shoving Shot also assumes your weapon has a range increment.
Stock Striker feat: Special. This allows you to use firearms as melee weapons. For our purposes, this means that as long as we're willing to settle for this not very good melee weapon we can satisfy the requirement of wielding an area weapon without having to attack with Whirling Swipe first. While this doesn't affect the action economy conflicts with most of these feats, it does open up a few.
Widen Area feat: Mostly no. Your weapon doesn't have the area trait until after using Whirling Swipe unless you're also using Stock Striker. There is a subtle difference in wording between Widen Area and Brutal Barrage that appears to make Widen Area usable with Whirling Swipe once you find a way to satisfy the wielding a weapon requirement. Brutal Barrage specifically requires either Area Attack or Auto Attack while Widen Area simply requires an action to make an attack with a weapon that has an area.
Covering Fire feat: No. The one-action usage requires a ranged strike, while the two-action usage requires a weapon with a range increment.
Fog of War feat: No, for the same reasons as Shot On The Run.
Concentrated Shot Feat: No. Same as for Shot On The Run, plus assumes a ranged weapon. Since your melee weapons can already make strikes without using area effects, the benefit of doing this if the rules allowed it would be the ability to make a strike with a bonus to damage at the cost of an extra action.
Deflect Missile Feat: Mostly no. Your weapon loses the area trait at the end of your turn so this could only work if someone shoots a missile right next to you during your turn. Deflect Missile also assumes your weapon is a firearm.
Overwatch: No. Requires a ranged weapon. Overwatch is form of ranged reactive strike. Curiously, reactive strikes at range are a soldier feat while the melee version is limited to the Close Quarters fighting style.
Run Hot feat: No, same as Shot On The Run.
Brutal Barrage: No. Requires the next action to be an area fire or auto fire. Whirling Swipe isn't one of those actions.
Shell Shower feat: Yes. Descriptive text aside, all the feat requires is for you to make an Area Fire or Auto Fire attack. Maybe you're smashing up the ground with your melee weapon to generate that difficult terrain.
Rocket Jump feat: No, same as Shot On The Run. I could see reasons to want to rocket jump with a melee weapon, though it is also reasonable not to allow it.
Fanning The Hammer feat: Yes. Your weapon retains the area trait until the end of your turn and Fanning The Hammer only costs one action.
Run, Cowards! feat: Yes. Works just fine with no complications.
Scattering Fire feat: No, same as Shot On The Run. Shame, this looks like it would be useful and fun in melee if worked.
Special Delivery feat: No, same as Shot On The Run plus it assumes a range increment.
Terror-Forming feat: No, same as Shot On The Run. Since we're talking about melee range anyway you should just use Shell Shower which somehow does work with Whirling Swipe.
Excavating Bombardment feat: No, same as Shot On The Run.
Light 'Em Up feat: No, same as Shot On The Run.
Overkill: Yes, except for the parts involving Concentrated Shot and Primary Target. Though this has nothing to do with Whirling Swipe, I note in passing that this feat will cause weapons that deal fire damage to inflict persistent bleed damage. Propose to change the persistent damage to the type matching the weapon's damage type, bleed for physical.
Coordinated Fire feat: No, same as Shot On The Run.
Damoritosh's Grip feat: Special. This allows you to wield a two-handed gun at the same time as a two-handed melee weapon. This unlocks the same options as Stock Striker while letting you use a much better melee weapon.
Spread The Love feat: No, same as Shot On The Run, plus Spread The Love's effect pertains to Primary Target.
Hybrid Technique feat: Yes, in a weird convoluted way. Combine with Stock Striker or Damoritosh's Grip to satisfy the requirement of wielding an appropriate weapon. Now you can use Whirling Swipe and combine it with one other soldier feat of the sort that take two actions and require a weapon with certain traits.
Living Typhoon feat: I don't think so. My reading is that this only affects the regular area fire and auto fire actions, not any of the special area attacks granted by soldier feats.

Two conclusions:
First, Whirling Swipe doesn't interact with Primary Target as written and I think it should.

Secondly, a matter of Whirling Swipe's place in the soldier's repertoire. The soldier's feat selection includes a lot of feats that take two actions and require you to wield a weapon with the area or auto fire trait, granting a special area attack. As currently written Whirling Swipe is one of those feats, making it impossible to combine with any of the others. This makes it frustrating to build on. Trying to make a melee soldier locks you out of a lot of options not because those feats shouldn't work in melee, but because unlocking the ability to do soldier stuff in melee takes up the space for doing any of those other options. If it worked like a stance or something it'd be easier to build around.

To me it seemed that the only reasonable interpretation was that the strike granted by Primary Target was an exception to the usual rules for area weapons. The designers obviously intended for the feature to be useable with area weapons since the description lists them among the weapons you can use it with. You also don't get an additional area fire since Primary Target specifies a Strike.

Also, looking further down into soldier class feats there is Punishing Salvo. Requirements: Your last action this turn was an Area Fire attack. As an action make a ranged strike against your primary target. Ignore the unwieldy trait. This does not make a new area attack, and is treated as a Strike made using primary target.
Clearly this feat is intended to be used with area weapons since it only works with area weapons and it spells out clear as can be that you resolve the attack as a Strike even though the weapon has the area trait.

Gaining even root access to any given appliance or terminal doesn't grant access to everything that talks to it, and anything meant to be secure generally won't be on a network. The reason why the module doesn't tell you the DC to take over unrelated systems is because you can't do it from there. Door locks have no business talking to the security cameras. The office coffee maker can't set the main reactor to overload. If you want to tamper with life support you will need physical access to the life support computer so you can use its user interface or affix a hacker kit. Successfully venting the atmosphere would incidentally only kill anyone not wearing armor, so the guards would be fine but you could manage to kill all the prisoners and office workers that way.

1. The core book has about a page's worth of description of the station. For a bit of detail about the interior, factions, neighborhoods, and such the adventure Incident At Absalom Station (part 1 of Dead Suns AP) has about a dozen pages worth of appendix devoted to it. The setting book Pact Worlds also has a fair bit.

2. I think the second most important book for players would be Character Operations Manual. It really opens up a lot of character options. For DMs Alien Archive 1 is pretty important for telling you how NPC design works. For setting information more than rules I think Pact Worlds and Near Space are good to have but not essential.

3. Yes.

D&D 5th edition made some effort to flatten their numbers so if that's what you're used to then Starfinder numbers (and Pathfinder, and 3e D&D) will seem pretty crazy. Things that you're used to seeing scale with a proficiency bonus that maxes out at +6 will instead scale with level. Even at low levels the bonus structure is set up with that wide of a scaling in mind. The result of this is that there is more difference in capability between a character who is built to be good at a task compared to one who isn't.

Character Operations Manual has an alternate class feature that lets you fake having more magic hacks at some cost. Hack Capacitor acts a little like the Adaptive Fighting feat but for magic hacks, and you have to give up the cache capacitor and resolve attunement class features to take it.

A Skittermander with the Add Leverage feat can wield a combat knife with six hands and knock opponents back 30' with a successful bull rush.

Darkvision is one of the easier traits to replace with equipment so it's not a big deal to lose it. I would note as a caution regarding Infosphere Integration that it doesn't grant any skill ranks and that Skill Focus doesn't scale with level. You get the most out of it if you take lots of random cross-class skill ranks and even with it you'll struggle with higher level skill rolls.

I don't have a definite answer to question 1 but I think as a reaction to getting dropped prone would at least be reasonable.
Taking a swift action means you can't use a full action on the same turn. I believe the main benefit of this is being able to stand up and full attack.

I'm still in progress on a detailed read through. I haven't gotten to the actual section yet but I did get the ones buried in the race options.
Ambusher: Terrible. Not strictly useless but it's too closely tied to sniping with sniper weapons and can't overcome the inherent weakness of trying to fight that way.
Fourfold tactician: More a grab bag of things you can do with four arms than a coherent fighting style but the benefits are ok.
Battlemaster: It was probably written under the assumption that the user would be wielding a Doshko so they'd have that move action available due to not using full attacks. However you're not getting much for it.
Squad Soldier: Very nice team-based melee tank. Combines well with the Ysoki alternate racial trait Swarmer if you were so inclined - that way you can use the feature that boosts flanking and the feature that aids adjacent allies at the same time. Shame they hid it under Half Elf racial options where nobody is going to read it.

Mystic connection, Crusader: An attempt at representing a Paladin. I'm no expert at the Mystic class but it looks pretty weak. You're granting a bonus to recovering from disease when other connections are raising the dead, calling meteor showers, and teleporting between planets and you've had access to Remove Affliction for some time.

Vanguard Aspect Insight (Ex) Improved Combat Maneuver pages 53 -55

Vanguards as they level up can pick up two different Aspects. Each Aspect can give a Improved Combat Maneuver. What happens if they grant the same Combat Maneuver?

As is, both Boundary & Cascade Aspects give Improved Combat Maneuver: Sunder.

Expecting future Vanguard material to have new Aspects so some type of answer is needed.

My copy of the book says "If you already have the bonus feat granted by the aspect insight, you can instead select any other feat for which you meet the prerequisite." Page 53, Second Aspect Insight. My reading is that if you already have the feat from any source, including but not limited to your first aspect insight, you just pick a different feat.

That's not a Kasatha, that's Two Ysoki Under A Coat! You need two melee PCs, at least one of whom must be a Ysoki with the Swarmer alternate race feature and at least one of whom must have the Scurry feat. They can occupy the same space and count as flanking anyone who enters their threatened area. Still works if one of the characters is a Ysoki with both of the listed requirements and the other character is any other melee character.
You don't actually need the Scurry feat since it isn't necessary to occupy the same space to use Swarmer, it's just more fun that way.

You can combine the Scurry feat with the level 6 feature of the Street Rat theme to squeeze through spaces one eighth the size of your normal space (7.5 inches?) without the usual penalties for squeezing, but when is that going to come up.

Aid Another appears in the skills section. As a special application of skills it is covered by "Use A Skill" as one of the Other Actions.

Right. I see. If you find a fusion as loot, can you whack that on a weapon for free using 10 minutes and an arcana skill or does that still use a cost?

If you find an unused fusion you can have a character trained in engineering or mysticism affix it to an eligible weapon for the cost given in the table. There's no cost savings compared to making the fusion yourself but it does mean you don't have to have as many ranks in mysticism as the fusion's level like you would if you were making it yourself. Given how equipment levels work in Starfinder I wouldn't expect that to be much help.

A drone could grapple using a weapon with the grapple property. Those don't require a free hand. Otherwise I'd expect them to be terrible at it.

I say no on this. Drone weapon arms are fixed mounts that take an hour to change out. Putting a battleglove on the weapon mount gives you a boxing glove on a stick, not a fully functional articulated hand. Manipulator arms are a separate mod.

Character creation (and advancement) and actions are really important things to understand and differ significantly between Starfinder and D&D 5e. You'll have a lot of trouble playing if you don't know how to create a character or use actions. After that it's details. It's worth going over how attacks of opportunity work since it's much easier to provoke in Starfinder than in D&D 5e. Like in 5e managing threatened squares can be a major part of a martial character's job.

When I switched my game from 5e to Starfinder I included these tutorial videos from the Basics4Gamers channel in the reorientation packet:

Actions work differently in Starfinder than in 5e. Make sure to read pages 244-249. This video covers essentially the same information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7VapCH2-z0

It is much easier to provoke opportunity attacks in Starfinder. See page 248-249 for details. This video is also helpful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-mvDv0Rrik

In Starfinder’s high tech setting most intelligent enemies have ranged weapons and accordingly cover is of greater importance in this game. See page 253-254 for details. Ignore the diagram at the bottom of page 253. It conflicts with the rules text. You might also wish to view this video, which describes clearly how it all works with good examples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlCzJGDvkT0

Make sure the players know the objective is to win the race. It's fairly common to get the mistaken impression you only have to beat Ratrod. Related, one of my players got super fixated on sabotaging Ratrod's racer even after I told him how hard it would be to gain access without any of the pit crew catching him and he'd get tossed out of the competition if he got caught even once. He got caught so I had him maintain the distance tracker during the race. Basically I had note cards with the names of all the racers and little miniature ships on them and had him add up and record the distance each had travelled each round, repositioning the cards as necessary to keep them in order by placement. I intended to have a scaled down strip map of the track with distance markers to advance the racers along but I didn't get around to it.

The NPC racer with the supercharged engine blew up right out the gate. For PCs, I'm pretty sure using the supercharger right away is the worst possible strategy. Blowing up early virtually guarantees a loss while activating it later will reduce the amount of distance you might have to cover at half speed. NPC racers also tend to target the front runner so the lead you gambled for will erode even if you don't blow up. The most important thing is to consistently pass your piloting checks while having a decent base speed.

You can slightly increase the number of people rolling dice during the race by letting a copilot use Aid Another on the piloting checks.

"Most of the recharging stations that replenish devices, such as batteries and power cells (see page 234), also recharge armor’s environmental protections, and using them to recharge suits is typically free of price." page 198. Solar sheeting's description doesn't call it out as an exception.

Characters who wear heavy armor could reasonably buy a flight suit at some point so they're more comfortable day to day on the ship rather than wear their cumbersome heavy armor all the time. The point of the stationwear line of armors is that people wear them pretty much all the time.

I got a bit of sticker shock from how much grenades cost and I've seen someone else mention it too. Prices tend to line up so that the cost of a handful of grenades will buy a weapon of the same tier, and that would tend to discourage people from buying them. Is that an actual problem, and if so what cost would make people use them more?

My thought on how to do more realistic shotguns was to borrow the bit about ignoring concealment from the existing blast rules while otherwise rolling attacks against single targets the same way you do with rifles, then balance that advantage by giving a poor range increment and perhaps slightly lower damage than rifles of the same level. I'd consider going into special rules to represent terminal ballistics of shotgun pellets versus bullets to be excessive complexity.