[Suicide Junkie]

Popular Characteristics:
Intelligence (research)
- Don't worry about it.

Defensiveness
- Agressiveness is in the same boat as this. Should probably be pricier

Mining
- See below

Construction
- Don't worry about it.

Maintenance
- Definitely fix it. Currently, taking +10% reduction drops your maintenance from 25% to 15%.
I am changing this to be +10% reduction = 22.5% maintenance.
I can tell you how if you like.

Farming (unless you are organic, of course)
Refining
- The way to fix these is to balance the resource costs. In my mod, I have gone and added rads cost to all components that use energy. Shields and engines are the big ones. I've also widened the use of organics, anything that would involve people or computers can count as organics.

Repair
- making ships more likely to survive with damage would fix abuse of this trait very nicely.

Using the leaky shields from the TNG mod, or the leaky armor from the B5 mod, or some other similar option would do great.

The TNG model allows armor and internal damage to build up before the shields fail, leaving lots of lightly damaged ships after a combat. Every ship that gets hit will suffer some damage.

The B5 model encourages the enemy to NOT finish off your ships; a disabled ship, with most weapons destroyed can likely absorb 2 or 3 times more damage than it already has before it breaks up. Ships need to switch targets to the "live" enemies, or die, leaving the partially crippled ships to run or limp around firing feeble shots from secondary guns.

In P&N, I have armor that is as strong as shields. It comes in 1kt chunks, though, so a single BattleCruiser could easily suffer 100 components destroyed and survive.