You've been around mechanical work and equipment maintenance enough to have picked up some basic understanding of how to fix and modify machinery. Maybe you grew up around riggers and mechanics, or you just spent enough time in technical environments to absorb some knowledge.
You're not some master engineer who can rebuild starship engines from spare parts, but you know enough about mechanical systems and tools to handle basic repairs and modifications. Whether through helping out with family projects or just being naturally curious about how things work, you've developed some familiarity with practical engineering and problem-solving.
Choose one of the following skill boons.
You've spent your fair share of time in the grease pits and repair bays of space stations and ships. You have a knack for fixing all sorts of mechanical and electronic equipment, from engines and weapons to drones and robots. You may have learned this skill from a family member or picked it up during your time working odd jobs around the galaxy. While your expertise is invaluable to your crewmates, you've also developed some quirks from being cooped up in tight spaces and inhaling fumes for extended periods of time.
Legacy items for the Rigger background are being finalised. See Legacy Items for available Grey Tech devices.
The atmospheric processor was failing, the replacement parts were on a ship that wasn't coming for three weeks, and forty-seven people were going to start suffocating in about six days. You rebuilt the compressor assembly using a hydraulic pump from a cargo loader, a heat exchanger from the mess hall's refrigeration unit, and enough copper tubing to make a still. It ran thirty percent over spec and sounded like a bag of bolts in a tumble dryer. It also ran for twenty-four days without stopping.
You don't need the manual. The manual is for people who haven't already taken apart and reassembled the same type of actuator six times in different states of damage. Your hands know torque values by feel, your ears know the difference between a healthy servo whine and a bearing that's got about forty hours left, and your nose knows the particular smell of insulation that's running hot but hasn't failed yet.
The airlock seal on the Vagrant Star blew during an EVA rotation, and the proper replacement was in a supply locker on the other side of the seal that no longer sealed. You patched it with hull adhesive, structural tape, and a prayer; then pressurised it to ninety percent, declared it "field serviceable," and moved on. The patch held long enough. "Long enough" is a professional standard in your line of work.
The reactor on Bay 6 was reading nominal. Every gauge green, every parameter within tolerance, not a single alarm. You pulled the maintenance panel anyway because the deck plate was vibrating at a frequency that shouldn't exist if the magnetic containment was actually balanced. It wasn't. Two weeks from a containment failure. You found it with your feet. The sensors found it never.