Skills

Combat Skills

These skills are all related to getting into fights.

Physical

Close Combat: Close combat covers both hand-to-hand (or whatever variation fits the character's limbs) and melee weapons use, as well as the use of weapons in grappling range.

Small Arms: Small arms are a catch-all for smaller guns like thin-guns, pulse guns, laser rifles, seeker rifles, needle guns, and so on.

Ordinance: Ordinance covers heavier weapons. APWs, rocket, missile, and grenade launchers, railguns, particle beams, and other heavy weapons are deadly against heavier targets.

Exotics: Exotic weapons include U-Space Missiles, DUSERS and USERS, DIGRAWs, Singuns, and other exotic armaments.

Electronic

Viral Attack: Viral attack is the character's expertise in offensive deployment of viral payloads.

Firewall: Firewall use is the character's expertise in defending against viral attack.

Jamming: The art of whiting out enemy sensors and communications with ECM.

Access Skills

These skills are used to get into places where you shouldn't be and get information people don't want you to have. Note that there are no separate skills for vehicle and non-vehicle combat to simplify things. This does lead to some unusual situations where athletes are also crack drivers, though.

Physical

Agility: Agility is a character's ability to move on the ground-whether by driving, running, or antigravity hover. Agility is used for defense in ground combat.

Flight: This skill represents a character's ability at maneuvering in flight or in vacuum. Piloting is used for defense in air and space combat.

Intrusion: This skill is a character's ability to break into physically secured objects, via lockpicking and fence-jumping.

Electronic

Decryption: This skill is a character's ability to break electronic encryption and eavesdropping on transfers.

Illusion: Illusion covers inserting false information into enemy sensor readings and false data into enemy communications.

Social Skills

Well, these should be self-explanatory.

Convince: The character's ability to convince people of what he's saying. Your standard-issue

Threaten: How to make friends and influence people (with the barrel of a gun). Threatening people's families/friends/loved ones is a quick method of getting information but may not always be a reliable one and certainly makes enemies.

Bluff: Everyone needs to know how to bullshit people, and this is the skill for exactly that.

Academic Skills

Academics (Field): Academics covers the liberal arts and social sciences. Economics, sociology, political science, history (of humans or alien races), art and music, literature, and more all fall under this field. Note that as Polity AIs tend to be the only ones with political power, social science educations are fairly rare in the Polity (outside of the aformentioned AIs).

Science (Field): Science covers the hard sciences. Physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, geology, and the like.

Engineering (Field): Engineering covers applied sciences. Medicine, biotech, robotics, aerospace, and so on.