Creative Director
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That, and the fact that you can control how many uses the PCs get out of their technological items by limiting their access to chances to recharge them, or by giving out timeworn technological objects (which can't be recharged and only have limited uses before they're used up).I don't want to limit their tech though, as that's one of the things they (and I) are most excited about. As a group we all want to lean in to the sci-fi aspect of this so a couple of the players will be focusing on using guns and I don't want to tie their hands.
I'm debating introducing an armor material that negates the "touch" ability of tech guns. Perhaps use glaucite, as the AP references it often enough. If it's strong enough to make ship hulls out of I would imagine it could handle small arms fire.
There are already tech items in the Technology Guide that do this, but honestly... if you and your players are eager to play with these things, I'd suggest just running Iron Gods as written. It's got a slow introduction of technology into the game that is mirrored by foes that have proper defenses against them... but now and then, being able to use the right weapon for the right foe is a good thing.
Seriously, the limitations on recharging are the most restrictive. Unless the party has easy access to a generator (which are not mobile), the recharge spell costs 500 gp per casting (1 charge per level to a battery or 1 charge per 2 levels directly into a technological item); this gets expensive pretty fast. Also, batteries have a 20% chance of being destroyed each time they are recharged (regardless of the source).
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For my party, recharging is not the problem. They are in the Choking Tower and have enough batteries to choke a behemoth hippopotamus. Granted, they haven't used guns much, but even if they had, I doubt the batteries would have run out. The actual problem was that they had bigger expectations from tech guns. They looked at the 1d8 damage of the pistols, and started complaining about exotic weapon feats and energy resistances.
I tried to remind them that even with the nonproficiency penalty, the weapons still attack touch AC and most can be fired in the semiautomatic mode. But the lack of damage bonuses (no gunslingers here) turned them away. Robots have hardness, and they expect most competent enemies to have energy resistance 10 or so, which would make beamers useless. I'll have to see if this changes when enchanted versions of these guns become available.
Most of the tech stuff they find they either sell or sit on (without using it), with the curious exception of veemods. They frequently panic when the CLW stick drops to single digits, while sitting on about a dozen vials of hemochem. I have not done a good job on selling them the wonders of technology. What can you expect from a bunch of kellid savages, though.