Yes and no.
Writing scripts, applications, and actually establishing a connection to an information network are all explicitly something you need to have the computer skill for and AToW backs that up in the description.
...Yes? That wasn't what I was talking about. Were you? Because I thought it was entirely about use of ready-made applications.
Relevant citation:
As someone with a BS in Computer Networking and having lots of experience helping people do simple tasks I'd say a much better break down(and how I'd run it at my table) that isn't too far off that description would be:
Untrained: How much the character struggles to do rudimentary tasks depends on dice rolls and relevant attributes.
0-3: The character can do the basics on up to being able to do some basic trouble shooting.
4-10: Now the character can start putting together your own applications, circumvent virtual security, establish new connections to information systems, and even assemble a computer from relevant parts.
Here's where we get to a vital disconnect - my perception and preferences of game design have it so that the skill just covers everything, rather than siloing off certain functions by skill level, because that eats up word count and cognitive load, and given the superhuman skills sidebar, the progression isn't even guaranteed to go up all the way in every game. Better to say that the basics don't require the skill, and that the skill involves complicated applications of the field. For people that want a character to be really in the dark, use Gremlins?
Also I do have some slight experience with the differences between hand to hand combat and using a weapon. The skills/techniques are actually really quite different.
Not what my gripe was in this instance, and a number of other people on the internet have given dissenting opinions on that matter. I'll break it down as such:
Neither skill as they are now seems to present the kind of comfortable learning curve where tiering them differently would make sense (though, as noted above, this setup is rather a bit of an alien approach to me). Especially not given the textual description, which seems to dump on certain methods of gaining experience in fighting in favor of some nebulous formal source that couldn't have existed if there weren't some way to get there without it existing in the first place. The game only cares about the bonus size, anyway.
(in this context, it seems like the window of tiering can be moved toward whether or not you have an aptitude in a skill or not).
Moving on to the other gripe I had addressed earlier regarding fusing the two together, we have a number of very disparate weapons combined into various ranged skills. I'm fairly certain that a laser is going to be very different from a slugthrower, which in turn is drastically different from a gyrojet, sonic stunner, min-flamer, or gauss smg. It doesn't matter; they're all under Small Arms, and their bigger versions are under Support Weapons or a vehicle-based Gunnery concentration.
This is not strict reality*; it is often reality-checked, but reality doesn't get the most say in it. Game design does, and game design is mostly concerned with character niches. That's why we have separate divisions of Piloting and Gunnery for different vehicles, and why, in past editions, there was substantially less differentiation in things not 'Mech (one Gunnery skill for any type of conventional vehicle, for example), and why there was a holistic Technician/'Mech to handle any systems commonly found on 'Mechs instead of different callouts for Myomer, Jet, Nuclear, and Weapons.
That's why you combine Unarmed and Armed into just one. It's a particular niche common to infantry and spec ops, and maybe some intelligence operatives. It's used to incapacitate or kill people without alerting guards immediately due to explosions or muzzle flashes, and to that end, it matters very little exactly what means a character uses to do it, much like how the game just wants ground pounders to get out and shoot, hence one Small Arms skill.
*Much like most of BT.
