There is no 3.5 rating, and since the good outweighed the awkward, in my opinion, I weighted the review at "4". The system is a great homage to various others of the 70s and 80s, most notably Traveller.
The basic mechanics are streamlined and forthright. The game is written intelligently, and it seems the author has a good feel for what is important in the Golden Age Imperial science fiction genre. The rules are reasonably well laid out in the table of contents, and, while they are not indexed, do have references of the "see p. x" variety that almost always point to the correct spot. They are hyperlinked in the PDF version.
However: the rules set (in fact all the books) are desperately in need of decent proofreading. Many sentences and paragraphs look as though partial changes were made to different galleys and then not reconciled. There are errors in grammar, syntax and, quite simply, bit that read like two different sentences were spliced together. This detracts from the whole.
The rules also make much of being generic enough that one may graft them onto any system, a plus. There is a fine line between that and insufficient information, however.
For example, when one has price lists of items, and costs for starships, this suggests that these would be relative to some sort of economy, and none is given. Costs of travel, lifestyle, ship maintenance and so forth are entirely up to the users. Of course, our group again made them up and I referenced some other games for inspiration and suggestions, but while we are following the rules example of keeping things functional and not too granular, the setting does suffer form a complete lack of "what goes on in ordinary life and how do people live"?
Nonetheless, we will use this system, rather than others, because it allows one to get on with the adventuring rather than bogging down in granularity and, if more sourcebooks are forthcoming for the author's own setting, these may address some of the shortcomings.
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