Another thread derailed into a discussion of skills in general, so I thought I'd move it out to it's own thread 
Traveller is a game where characters do not generally have a lot of skills and those skills are quite broad. The result is that characters are simultaneously less skilled than people in RL and extremely overly broad in the things that they are skilled in. Which I think is fine for a game. Just something to be aware of when GMing and deciding how strict you should be in setting skill tasks and whatnot.
IMHO, when you design a skill based game you need to basically do three things with your skill list:
Core Skills: Determine what the core thing your gameplay is going to involve and make a wide range of skills for those things. In most games, it's talking to NPCs, investigating, and fighting. So you should have enough different skills that everyone gets to participate and feel like they are making a unique contribution. And maybe the party doesn't have some of them. Which is also fine.
Hat Skills: These are the things that come up regularly enough that a player might hang their character's hat on them. 'I'm the guy who does X". But they don't come up all the time such that you need to get all the players involved when they do. This is usually stuff like Pilot, Engineer, Medic, Wheelman, etc. These should be pretty compact so one guy can reasonably shine when that's the thing that comes up. So, in Traveller, like 1 or 2 skills. If one character needs like 4 or 5 skills/specializations to "do their thing" on top of being able to be part of the core game play, they are going to be unhappy.
Flavor Skills: These are the things that are not likely to come up very often. But it's cool if the players can fit a few of these in without hosing themselves on the above two categories. So you can have that occasional moment where the rest of the players look at you and go: "Wait, you can speak Swahili?" Or "When did you learn to ride Kians?"
Obviously, what skill goes in what category is going to depend on the campaign specifics. If I am running "Space: Above & Beyond" as my campaign, I'll want a bunch of Pilot skills because everyone is a pilot and we'll want to differentiate them. But most campaigns, when there is a cool thing to roll pilot for, it's fine for everyone to look at Bob for that. Other characters might have gotten some Pilot, but they aren't THE PILOT.
Depending on your campaign, spaceship crew skills might be Core (everyone's a steward on a luxury liner, so who is the tailor vs who is the cook might matter) or they might be flavor (we are running an Earth 2 game about colonizing a new planet). But most often they'll be Hat skills. So the CRB should design them as such. And if you need to differentiate your Engineers, you can expand the skill in whatever way suits your campaign.
Traveller is a game where characters do not generally have a lot of skills and those skills are quite broad. The result is that characters are simultaneously less skilled than people in RL and extremely overly broad in the things that they are skilled in. Which I think is fine for a game. Just something to be aware of when GMing and deciding how strict you should be in setting skill tasks and whatnot.
IMHO, when you design a skill based game you need to basically do three things with your skill list:
Core Skills: Determine what the core thing your gameplay is going to involve and make a wide range of skills for those things. In most games, it's talking to NPCs, investigating, and fighting. So you should have enough different skills that everyone gets to participate and feel like they are making a unique contribution. And maybe the party doesn't have some of them. Which is also fine.
Hat Skills: These are the things that come up regularly enough that a player might hang their character's hat on them. 'I'm the guy who does X". But they don't come up all the time such that you need to get all the players involved when they do. This is usually stuff like Pilot, Engineer, Medic, Wheelman, etc. These should be pretty compact so one guy can reasonably shine when that's the thing that comes up. So, in Traveller, like 1 or 2 skills. If one character needs like 4 or 5 skills/specializations to "do their thing" on top of being able to be part of the core game play, they are going to be unhappy.
Flavor Skills: These are the things that are not likely to come up very often. But it's cool if the players can fit a few of these in without hosing themselves on the above two categories. So you can have that occasional moment where the rest of the players look at you and go: "Wait, you can speak Swahili?" Or "When did you learn to ride Kians?"
Obviously, what skill goes in what category is going to depend on the campaign specifics. If I am running "Space: Above & Beyond" as my campaign, I'll want a bunch of Pilot skills because everyone is a pilot and we'll want to differentiate them. But most campaigns, when there is a cool thing to roll pilot for, it's fine for everyone to look at Bob for that. Other characters might have gotten some Pilot, but they aren't THE PILOT.
Depending on your campaign, spaceship crew skills might be Core (everyone's a steward on a luxury liner, so who is the tailor vs who is the cook might matter) or they might be flavor (we are running an Earth 2 game about colonizing a new planet). But most often they'll be Hat skills. So the CRB should design them as such. And if you need to differentiate your Engineers, you can expand the skill in whatever way suits your campaign.
Engineering is Life Support, Jump Drives, M-Drives, and Power Plants for starships. If you are running a game about the engineering crew of a giant ship, that might be useful. But how often do you need to differentiate two different engineering characters or find it useful to tell your player who wants to be Gordi LaForge that "oops, you put all your points in J-Drive, so really, your chances of fixing the life support are minimal."? Are Engineering rolls really going to come up often enough that this is useful?
