As the horde of new players encroaches upon level 20, you will soon find yourselves with the option to pick a tradeskill! There are 6 to choose from (HELP TRADESKILLS).

To those of you who are interested in WeaponModding, ArmorModding, and ShipModding, some things to be aware of:

First of all, the way these skills work is that, in order to learn the schematics to create them on your own, you have to reverse engineer existing mods. Each schematic will require you to reverse engineer anywhere from 5 to 20 of the same mod... which means you need to get your hands on a LOT of mods.

Mods can be obtained from drops when you are bashing, or sometimes as rewards from other things. But you will find that there just aren't going to be many at the moment, mostly due to demand vastly outstripping supply with everyone leveling up at roughly the same rate. This, naturally, will course-correct after the initial rush, but we don't have that mass of available drops right now.

So feel free to select those tradeskills, but be warned that you aren't going to be able to do much with the skill. I would advise holding off investing many lessons into it right now. And if you do choose to invest lessons, be aware that it will probably be a while before you are able to create any mods.

TL;DR -- if you really want to be a Modder, you'll need to be patient while the rest of the population bashes to get mods!