Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Then as I stated above Mechanic (Starships) will let you fix _anything_ on a starship
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Sounds like a workable house rule in the "ruthlessly combining" category.
By RAW, Mechanic has a long list of required specialties. Power plants (of various types, separate skills for each) are one of those. ISW specifically calls out Mechanic (Jump Drive), Mechanic (High Performance Spacecraft) (used for life support), and Mechanic (Gravitics) in addition to the categories in Basic. They seem to be largely paralleling the Engineering specialities, though occasionally there are some separate skills with distinct names ("Electrican" instead of "Mechanic (Power)" or "Electronics Repair" instead of "Mechanic (Electronics)" to match up to some of the Engineering specialties.
Trying to build a matrix of comparable skills mentioned in RAW, I wound up effectively with specialties of Starship, Jump Drive, Gravitics, Power, Electronics, Computers, Heavy Weapons, Armor, and Small Arms. Design/repair/use means three of each. Existing skills means some of them branch more finely in some columns. For example, Armory has Body Armor, Battlesuits, and Vehicular Armor in RAW, while Pilot has existing categories for High Perf Spacecraft, Aerospace, Contragrav (all of which are usually "gravitic" engineering in Traveller), and Electronics Operation already has specialties of Comms, Sensors, Security, Medical, and Scientific (I lumped those last two together with others into "Application") along with Computer Operation all lining up as "use" for the broader "Electronics" specialty for Engineering and Repair.
If you're willing to declare the entire "use" column to be Spacer (along with sir_pudding), and the entire "Repair" column to be one Mechanic skill (along with Fred), then you might well just declare the entire "design" column to be Engineer (Starship) -- or perhaps call it "Naval Architecture". Then you're down to three skills, one of which everyone on the crew will have, so the engineer really just needs two broad skills -- Engineer (Starships) and Mechanic (Starships).
You can then go back and introduce familiarities if you want a security guy to be good at maintaining personal weapons (only) while the ship engineer doesn't bother with them. But once you start down the dark path of splitting skills, forever will it control your destiny, until you wind up back at something RAW-like. There's a reason they made all those distinctions in the first place. The right place to stop splitting is one of those things that's going to depend on the focus of the game and personal taste.
The problem here is just that some roles by RAW default have that splitting much further down the detailed and fine-grained path than others. You can equalize them either by lessening detail in some places, or adding it in others, but the main point, I think, is just equalizing the burden across your game roles. If the hotshot pilot can navigate and fly anything with six skills, and the brilliant leader can inspire his people and outsmart the enemy with six skills, and the badass Proud Warrior Race member can trounce anybody in unarmed, high-tech ranged, and obligatory ethnic melee weapon combat with six skills, then you probably shouldn't require the engineer to buy 20 to 30 skills to fix and repair anything -- but rather about six.