Paul, You would use the detailed skill-check system. You have to realize the publication history of the game. STAR FRONTIERS started out in 1982 as a box designed to be cast out into the mass-market bookstores, to teens who hadn't even roleplayed before (with great notes about that to steer them right, by the way). The original box came in a laser-blue colour first, then a pinkish box labelled "Alpha Dawn" to distinguish it from the supplement starship and starship combat box "Knight Hawks". In the original box, there was a 32-page Basic Rules Book and a 64-page Expanded Rules book, a big sheet of maps, a TSR advertisment flyer and two cheap plastic d10s with a CRAYON for you to fill in the number spaces yourself (they were not acrylic plastic dice then and the numbers were not pre-inked). In the Basic Book they of course wanted a gentle introduction and defined things very loosely and had no skills, just half your DEX to fire guns with. But they wanted to fire the imagination and suggested the real charm of tabletop RPGs, that you can make rolls for situations not already covered. The text you see is a loose "suggestion" of covering situations which weren't covered in the Basic Book, but were in the Expanded Rules book. Now it's re-edited as one big book for the existing players, only one system of doing things, the original "Expanded Rules". But they left that blurb in from the old days. If you can find a particular sub-skill that is relevant you should actually use that. If you can find the .pdf of the Basic Rules book by the way, you can toss it to younger children, especially those with a liking for science-fiction. They'll go bananas over it! Suggested age 10 and up for the sake of doing arithmetic. For the slow, plodding work of defeating security (hacking passwords, altering logic-paths in the programming) you should use the skill system which came from the Expanded Rules book. You may still have a character make some checks on the LOGIC ability for special, crucial realizations about the structure of a computer program, for example: that security camera-feeds are sent as digitized streams through the same network you're trying to hack, so instead of defeating visual-recognition security that triggers an alarm, you might choose to hack the streams and insert FALSE images of "nothing there"! A smart guy will think of it more often than a dumb guy, so that's what abilities are for. I think of amazing science consequences all the time (which is why I hope to be a killer referee for this game if it gets off the ground at all!) but the INTuition and LOGic ability-checks will help a player make realizations a character trained in a sci-fi field would make even if the player has no such background. On the basic ground-work of practicing a skill, though, they have no effect.
