Editing Skills and Implants (section)

===Skill Hardwiring===

Implant slots 6 through 10 are for skill hardwiring implants, and they work almost exactly like they sound. If there's a trainable skill, there's probably an implant that corresponds to that skill. If you have the skill trained already, the implant increases the benefits gained from that skill, just as if you had trained additional levels. If you don't have the skill trained, you still get that skill's benefit as if you had. There are even a few skill hardwiring implants that give benefits that aren't available as trainable skills. 

So, skill hardwiring works for you in two important ways. For one, you can upgrade a skill to a certain extent without spending the training time. For another, if you've already trained an important skill to the maximum level, a hardwiring implant will let you gain more benefits over and above the ordinary cap of the skill. 

The skill hardwiring implants that tend to be the most useful for explorers are the Poteque "Prospector" series for increasing scanning and hacking skills, and the Eifyr and Co. "Rogue" series for navigation. 

The "Prospector" implants are available in a few different strengths (and of course higher prices) for Astrometrics skills, as well as for hacking and archaeology. The hacking and archaeology implants will only increase your virus coherence by 5, though, which is not very significant for the generally high price.

The "Rogue" implants provide a full range of benefits to navigation skills, but especially of note are the Evasive Maneuvering implants. As discussed earlier, higher levels in Evasive Maneuvering will shorten the ever-elusive align time, freeing up fitting slots for other uses. The Rogue implants also provide options to increase your warp speed, which is not available as an ordinary trainable skill. 

Also worth mentioning is the Neural Lace "Blackglass" implant for hacking. The "Blackglass" implant has the interesting effect of increasing your virus strength at the cost of losing virus coherence. It's an interesting trade-off: if you run out of virus coherence, you fail the hack, but with enough virus strength you can often destroy a defense node in a single hit and never lose coherence in the first place. The "Blackglass" implant only provides benefits for data site hacking... but if you use an integrated analyzer you can get those benefits for relic sites as well.

It's important to note that you'll need to make more trade-off decisions when selecting skill hardwiring implants than with attribute increasing implants. There are five attributes, and five implant slots for attribute enhancements, and they don't overlap or conflict. Skill hardwiring slots are not so simple, so you'll often find yourself needing to choose between implants that require the same numbered slot.