The Gunnery combat skill is used in three cases per the skills section: vehicle/starship weapons, defensive emplacements like turret-mounted weapons, and weapons with targeting computers. However, in the equipment section most explosives and ordnance use the Gunnery skill. I'm not sure how mines fall into one of the three cases in the skills section.

Now consider what careers and specializations list Gunnery as a career skill. The Ace career and all three of its specializations have Gunnery as a career skill because of the vehicle/starship case which makes sense. Other than that, the Squad Leader specialization is the only other career or specialization with Gunnery as a career skill.

This doesn't sound right to me. I would have expected the Soldier Career to offer Gunnery as a career skill or maybe just the Commando specialization. In addition, a character with the Infiltrator specialization might need to go behind enemy lines to perform sabotage which might require the planting of mines.

In general I would expect more characters in AoR to have the option to select Gunnery as a career skill as compared to EotE. AoR characters are more likely to have had formal military training which would lead to a lot more characters trained in Gunnery.

While I'm OK with the gunnery skills and specializations, I don't like it as the skill for mines. Mechanics, or Skullduggery seem like a more appropriate option, especially considering the fact that the saboteur spec makes Demo Charge a weapon that is kind of required.

My favorite example of handling explosives (disarming in this case), so far in this system was outlined in the "Under a Black Sun" module in EotE. At one point the module called for players to disarm a rigged explosive, it had the players use the cool skill to see if the character disarming the bomb could keep a level head while he figured out if he needed to cut the red wire or the blue wire.

I think the above example is one of the reasons why I like this system so much.

If I wanted to make cool my go-to skill for disarming bombs, I might have it used intellect instead of presence as the base characteristic when handling explosives. This would represent the character's

ability to keep a level head and steady hands while also working the necessary brain-math to disarm the bomb. This makes a little less sense for arming, but I suppose it takes a certain amount of intellect for knowing the best place to set your land mine.

We'll probably see more info about demolitions in the up coming "Dangerous Covenant" splat book.

[Delete] sorry, double post.

While we will most definitely get info on explosives in Dangerous Covenants, I don't think that's a good excuse for us not to receive some basic mechanics for them in Age of Rebellion, where campaigns have a strong likelihood of consisting of warfare elements. Additionally, I feel like a mechanic for explosives would really need extensive playtesting to get right, especially since a good number of players are likely to build their characters around that ability. Therefore, I am hoping that the developers include some sort of explosives mechanics as a addition to the Gunnery, Skullduggery, or Mechanics skill in the upcoming beta updates.

Additionally, I agree with you that either Gunnery needs to be extended as a career skill for the Saboteur specialization and at least some, if not all, the specializations in the Soldier career. When I'm building a heavy weapon specialist, the type that uses a heavy repeating blaster or missile tube, I don't want to have to pay a premium or switch to the Ace career specializations to buy ranks in my basic skill. And if Gunnery is going to be used for mines, and by extension other explosives, then making those sorts of switches will be even more important.