Use of education characteristic outside char gen?

I'm looking through the books, and I saw in a few places that education may be considered by the gm/referee... But I never saw a strict mechanical benefit to education. Is there one that I missed? Specifically I'm talking about after leaving character creation.

Well we just got done doing some training, and we could only learn certain skills if we had we enough education but that was kinda a special circumstance

That's actually decent. I think one of the reasons you can upgrade edu a lot, quickly, cheaply, and permanently, is because of balance vs the utility of other stuff. As long as we're on the topic of CT design, any idea wtf is going on with the fast pill vs anagathic (sp?) pills... it seems like if you can pop a pill in 3-5 seconds, then just carrying an antidote and having one guy hit an alarm should result in everyone taking the pill in 180-300 seconds, and having some time to react within the approach time of a ship or within even a single (ship) combat turn, and the cost favours the fast pills. Now that said, you'd have to find a reason to sit on your ship for 60 days (tough when you have bills) and there would need to be some lonely person at real time to hit the alarm, and it would slow training... and... and...  etc. But I'm interested in discussion on the matter. Initially it seems as though it's poorly balanced. I guess another thing is that I can't conceive of having 200k income per month... like, damn.  You'd need a fleet or something and that fleet would run out of items to trade pretty quickly, and have bills, etc.

A ship earns Cr 1,000 per ton of cargo transported.  A standard "Fat" trader carries 200 tons of cargo.  The route from Quartermark to Mensah and back again produces a minimum of 117 tons of cargo each way.  That's minimum.  Chances are a cargo hold will be filled by a skilled crew.  And this doesn't even take into account income from passengers which could be as high as another Cr 80,000 per trip.  Two trips are made each month.  With three or four ship's in a fleet it's would be difficult not to make more than Cr 200,000 per month.  The problem is finding drugs and the tech level involved.  Starships really are money magnets.

Nice, thanks man. :) That's pretty nuts but given the costs of everything for a starship it still allows for a nice gear progression for the ship, awesome. :)

Understanding the rules is important but I would suggest you spend time reviewing the campaign handouts.  There is a lot of information the group has learned that is expressed in those documents.  In the long run, knowing the campaign will help you more than simply knowing the rules.

Yeah I'll make sure to read up by my next entry, two games from now. It's definitely most important to know this world to fit in. That said, I'm writing a character generator in python, using the sheets that you've provided. It's a decent educational project, using pandas and creating classes dynamically for the first time, and I'm interested in understanding the mechanics to the extent that I can simulate them to see their effects. Also I just like game design in general, so I want to understand the rules as close to RAW as possible, even though no one really uses them that way.