I'm sorry if these questioned have been answered before, but I was not able to find the answers with a quick search.

First, the full descrition of Jury Rigged is slightly confusing due to the semicolon after increasing the weapon damage by one. It then states that you can decrease the Advantage cost of the Critical, or any single other effect by one to a minimum of one.

Question: Does this mean that a character can use Jury Rigged to increase their weapon damage by 1 and decrease the Critical cost by one or any other effect by one? Essentially what I am asking is will a sinlge rank in Jury Rigged allow a character to do 2 things to his weapon (one of which has to be increase the damage by 1)?

Second, if a character is wearing Armored Clothing with the standard Soak value of 1 and takes the Armor Master talent raising his overall Soak value to 2, would that allow that character to then take the Armor Master [improved] talent and increase his defense by 1?

Just looking for a general consensus on these questions. I won't debate the answers. Thanks in advance for any help.

The reason for the semi-colons is to distinguish between the options. There is a comma in the middle of "...decrease the Advantage cost of its critical, or any other effect by one..." Thus you do have to pick one of those choices. (It is also usually thought that you can't apply Jury Rigged twice to the same item.)

The Improved Armor Master talent specifies that the armor must have a soak value of two or higher. The Armor Master talent provides a misc. bonus to total soak value, not to the armor's soak value.

If you're asking because you want to wear armored clothing and make use of improved armor master, you can make it work. Armored clothing has one HP, with which you can make it superior, increasing it's soak value to two. It's not any cheaper than Heavy battle armor, but it's not restricted and doesn't attract attention.

Since you're dealing with Bounty Hunter talents, it might be worth mentioning that in the fluff an IPKC grants the bearer the right to possess weapons and equipment that are otherwise illegal, including by local ordinances.

I'm just asking the above questions for clarifiaction purposes within our home group.

What does IPKC stand for?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Peace_Keeping_Certificate