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Some widespread skills:

• Astronavigation:
• FTL Pilot:
• Spacer Lore:  "They say that no man, nor alien, has ever come back from Gamma Puppis."
• Starship Engineer:
• Translight Radio Operation:  it's a very arcane art, really.
• Translight Theory:  not required, but useful for babbling about high-tech stuff.

And of course languages:

• Sirian:  an old natural language, spoken mostly by humans; native tongue on many worlds of the Principality.
• Imperial:  an artificial language, used by the Empire for communication with biological forms, and by a few human and ara-human worlds within the core as a native tongue. An excellent language for logic and math, but a poor choice for poetry, emotion, or confidence games.
• Interworld:  the official language of the Bavanii Confederation, but used only for commerce and government; easy to learn and use, and a common trade language in the Confederation.
• League Standard:  a conglomerate of half-a-dozen or so non-human languages, used only for commerce and government within the Vrogan League. It has some common vocabulary with Interworld, and is the basis for the structure of ...
• League Trade (or just Trade):  a definitive "trade pidgin", ill-suited to the needs of polite society, legal nit-picking, or formal oratory. It contains a large number of obscenities, not all obvious to every speaker. Vocabulary is largely from Interworld, League Standard, and Sirian.
• Federal:  second language in the Rim Federation, with roots in most of the major "cultural" languages in that region. A full language, with literature, etc.; some roots in the ancient Marintek language.
• Mech Command Code:  a structurally complex binary language, very difficult for biological sorts to learn or speak; the vocabulary has few words about emotion and other "illogical" activities. The more important the Mech, the more of this language it knows. This is both a programming and a conversational language.
• Magellan:  native language to many of the inhabitants of the mysterious Magellanic Clouds. An invented language, easy to learn, and remarkably poetic.
• Marintek:  a dead language, but still encountered in the regions of the long-destroyed Marintek Radiant. A very old trade and commerce language.