Skill/Field: any skill or field which the item can be used in conjunction with; this does not mean that the item is necessarily appropriate to all tasks involving the field.
PM: a modifier to tasks making appropriate use of an item (eg. an artist could expect to use his camera's +1 PM to improve his photographs, but this does not mean the camera makes a good club). Similarly, if the equipment is required for a task, and has a detrimental PM, this must also be applied. An R indicates that the skill or field listed is used to repair the item rather than use it.
Mass: the mass of the item, usually in kg. A mass of '-' indicates an item massing a less than twenty-five grams. The units of mass used are: g, grams; kg, kilograms; t, tonnes (1 t = 1000 kg).
TL: the tech. level required to produce such an item.
Cost: price in SVU, with following suffixes: c, x100; k, x1000; M, x 1 000 000; G, x 1 000 000 000. (The last is not used here, and is listed for convenience).
Notes: some other aspect of the item; an example of such a device from today, or from fiction; notes on the item's use, etc..
Some other places to look:
Designer's Notes: there are an awful lot of weapons available in FS, which to some extent contradicts my desire to minimise the bloodier aspects of role-playing. This is not a reflection of my subconscious, I hope, but simply reflects two things: [a] weapons can be defined in a small amount of space; [b] man tends to think of new ways of building weapons faster than most other things, and so providing representative weapons from each TL requires a fair amount of space. A lot of primitive weapons are provided since if one wants to include swords (one may as well be thorough) and there will be a Fantasy supplement (HindSight ) covering other aspects of low-tech living. Source material in FS is, shall we say, sparse, but further information, by way of clarification is available from me, and by way of more detail from the FS sourcebook