Strictly speaking, if your GM permits it, you can also use items as parts for crafting similar items, contributing 10% of their value to the crafted item's UBP cost. Your overall wealth is no different than simply selling and buying normally, but you could fluff the process as upgrading your original armor, or weapon, or whatever else. 'Upgrading' an item in such a way would still simply turn it into a different, presumably higher level item, though. You can flavor your crafting as upgrading your level 3 graphite carbon skin into something mechanically equivalent to, say, the level 5 estex suit II, but mechanically you're not upgrading the carbon skin's stat block - you simply use the estex suit's stats.
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NO, ACTUALLY, You can UPGRADE an ITEM. p205 of the Core manual, bottom left column, "Upgrade Slots" which you can buy if your item has a slot for it. I take it that you can buy these "Upgrades" and Install, attach, apply, or what ever needs to be done with minimal amount of effort-not needing a specialist for it just yet.
I chose TENSILE REINFORCEMENT as my upgrade, thinking this would be as easy as applying "armor" to my motorcycle jacket: all I had to do was put pads that look like football pads in the elbows and shoulders; VERY MINIMAL TASK a .25 on a scale of 1-10.
Having done that the instructions upgrade says "treat as if it's item level were 5 higher" and go to p409. After reading several formulas that I'm not going to type here, I came up with 15 for the hardness and 30 fort the hit points IF ALL IS CORRECT.
The question still remains, if it is correct, in what column do the scores appropriately go in??
Armor Upgrades are specific kits that are installed into armor. Other items do not use the Armor Upgrade/Upgrade Slot system, hence the other posters confusion when you said upgrade items.
To use an upgrade the armor in question must have a free upgrade slot or slots listed in its specification on the armor table and be of the type (Light, Heavy, Powered) to which the armor upgrade applies. Some upgrades can only go into certain armor sizes and when that is the case they are clearly listed in the armor upgrade table and/or the upgrade description.
Once you have the upgrade, installing/uninstalling it into/out of the armor is a ~10 minute job that requires no special tools or skills.
If you GM is letting you pattern the armor your character is wearing as a motorcycle jacket that is fine but normally such would be considered clothing and would not have any armor upgrade slots and therefore no ability to use armor upgrades.
The Tensile Reinforcement upgrade does nothing to change your AC's. It only increases the armors Hardness and HP when someone tries to sunder the armor.
So if your 'Motorcycle Jacket' were some type of level 1 light armor, you would use the formula's on page 409 and after you installed the Tensile Reinforcement upgrade your armor would have Hardness: 17 and HP: 33. The upgrade would make it effectively a level 6 item for the purposes of Hardness and HP. A level 1 armor would have Hardness: 7, HP: 18.
If you ever purchase new armor to something different and it has slots, you can uninstall the Tensile Reinforcement from your old armor and install it into the new armor and you would then recalculate Hardness and HP of the new armor based on the new item level of the new armor.
Those values would come into play if someone targeted your armor with a sunder combat maneuver and how that works is explained in the relevant combat maneuver section in the core book.
All this is detailed in the armor upgrades section that you quoted earlier.
Does that answer your questions?
The Tensile Reinforcement upgrade does nothing to change your AC's. It only increases the armors Hardness and HP when someone tries to sunder the armor.
It may be worth noting that the rules for sundering don't specifically call out worn armor as being a valid target for the maneuver. :P
since that is the case is there any real purpose for the tensile reinforcement upgrade? I can't think of any...
since that is the case is there any real purpose for the tensile reinforcement upgrade? I can't think of any...
To protect your armor when you're NOT wearing it? An errant grenade detonating in your locker, perhaps?