[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Presumably the meaning of the paint job phrase, yes. Perhaps that's an attempt to address the proliferation of specialties, and a game could certainly use that as justification if they wanted one skill for everything.

It isn't "one skill for everything", it is "the skill that fixes one kind of thing", starships and bicycles are two kinds of things.

That literal reading does leave a mechanic oddly unable to understand or deal with the same system once you move it outside of the hull, but that's the way it goes. GMs can deal with that if need be. Or just call it a bang skill.

That isn't correct: "Mechanic specialities default to each other at - 4 although the GM may modify this for particularly close or distant systems."

But it is something that the Scotties of fiction can do,

If Star Trek isn't an example of wildcard skills in fiction, I don't know what is.

and it is a "repair" task that falls under a "design" skill which is used for starships.

Engineer (Small Arms) and Engineer (Starships) are two different skills.

Should you want the design / repair / use triad to be parallel and single-skilled, you'd wind up lumping them together. In RAW, those specialties aren't remotely parallel, nothing like the same breadth from skill to skill.

In the rules, Engineer (Small Arms), Armoury (Small Arms) and Beam Weapons (Pistol) aren't lumped with Engineer (Starships), Mechanic (Starships) and Pilot (Starships). These are two seperate sets of design/repair/use skills, all listed as available mandatory specialities in the Basic Set.

That was an example that ISW specifically calls out, to illustrate the "Starship" specialty is still useful and needed, even though that book is also calling out other Mechanic specialties also needed on starships -- so that setting, at leasleast, is not using a single Mechanic (Starship) specialty to fix everything on board. Basic RAW allows it; ISW RAW doesn't use it, so global-vehicle uberskill is evidently not a universal intent for Mechanic. As with many things in GURPS and especially Basic, there are options from which GMs need to choose.

I don't have that book, so I can't comment on it directly but I think that either is a misinterpretation or genuine errata. Mechanic (Starships) simply can't just be the skill of fixing the life support on starships because a) B207 is pretty clear that it includes the whole vehicle, b) why not take Mechanic (Life Support Systems) and be able to fix life support systems on submarines and habitats too and c) not all vehicles even have life support, so what does Mechanic (Bicycle) actually fix?

Suggesting that Pilot must also apply only to life support because they both use the word "Starship" for a speciality is just silly, and beneath you.

Mechanic literally says this, "one specific type of vehicle listed under a vehicle operation skill".

The "triad" is Engineer (Vehicle Type), Mechanic (Vehicle Type), and Bicycling/Boating/Driving/Piloting/Submersibles (Vehicle Type). That results in the same number of skills for everyone.