Stars Without Number: Back in Black

Everything that a cutting edge iPhone or Android phone will do, plus much greater capacity in terms of battery life (a week of heavy use) and memory (all of it.) Like those, it is essentially a tiny computer. If you're on-board the ship or close to it, you can easily share data between the two.
The camera has decent zoom and at least HD quality, and you can take 3d photos of smaller things so long as you're willing to manually pan the camera around the thing until your phone tells you it's had enough.
It can tell you if the atmosphere has enough oxygen, and will chirp if that changes. This is not a foolproof way to tell if an atmosphere is safe or not. It will detect carbon monoxide and probably anything that is actually corrosive, but atmospheres can be toxic and still have oxygen, at it isn't sensitive enough to pick up, say, small amounts of nerve gas...essentially, it's not a substitute for real science equipment.
It will give you barometric readings, temperature, humidity, a smoke alarm, etc..
It will warn you if there's unsafe levels of radiation.
It is shock resistant and waterproof.
It has a transponder function that will let your friends find you, if you're still in a condition to turn it on. If you have a comm server, it can be set to give you the direction and approximate distance to the server.
It will automatically link up to any planetary or space station communication network.
If there isn't a planetary network, it can still let you talk to your friends like a walkie-talkie. If your crew has a comm server, the range gets much longer so long as you are within range of it. A comm server is considered sufficient to let you talk to your ship while it is in orbit, so long as you have LOS.
You can receive messages from your ship if you have LOS, even if you don't have a server and can't talk back.
If your ship has done even a basic survey of the planet and downloaded localize data into your pad, it can usually function as an altimeter, compass, etc., and perhaps a GPS.
I assume that if something can be done with an app (like using the camera flash as a flashlight) then you probably have that installed.

Armor and weapons have social implications, and you should consider what you're carrying around with you.

In general, armor is frowned upon more than weapons. Weapons might be worn to dissuade people from attacking you or for self-defense. People who are wearing armor are more likely to be assumed to be looking for trouble. You can get away with an armored undersuit almost anywhere outside of the most civilized places, and even there it's not a problem unless you're going someplace that will have weapon detectors set up (banks, spaceports, government buildings.)
Space stations are almost always a little rowdy, and you can usually get away with a sidearm and an armored undersuit, even if it's obvious you're wearing it. Many places will disallow pistols but allow swords, so monoswords are actually a very popular weapon with spacers
Pistols may be carried openly or concealed based on local custom. I assume PCs with guns have appropriate concealable and non-concealable holsters for them. Long-arms or SMGs are almost never carried openly. Having one "to hand," such as in a rack on an ATV, is just fine on more rustic planets. Actually carrying it around with you will make you look militarized in a way that's likely to make people uncomfortable.

Money

Electronic banking is common within the more civilized systems. However, there is no easy way to transmit financial information between systems. It must be carried by ships using spike drives. Because the mail-ships might take weeks to reach from one end of the State to the other, this isn't practical for anything less than major operations. As a result, physical credit chips are the most common currency. They are released by the central bank in the Nyx cluster, and are in common circulation everywhere that spacers go. They may or may not be accepted on the surface of any given world, and moneychangers at the space ports or stations may charge rates that are more or less ruinous. They come in many denominations, and so a character can potentially carry a LOT of credits. Of course, flashing around a handful of the 100,000 credit chips is a good way to get marked for robbery.

You might think of a credit as being worth five or ten modern US dollars. Yes, skilled spacers are VERY highly paid. A ship can be easily worth millions of credits, and it takes one bad jump for an unskilled Navigator to blow the whole thing up. Also, a spacer is typically not working every day. They work a week while the ship jumps from one system to the next, and then they're off for a week while it loads, unloads, etc.

History of the State

A long time ago, the Terran Mandate ruled a civilization vast beyond comprehension. They had legions of master psychics, impossible science, and Jump Gates that could throw a ship scores of light years in an instant.

Then The Scream came. A psychic shockwave echoed from one end of the galaxy to the other, and it killed the vast majority of psychics (of every sapient species.) It also wrecked the Jump Gates, not that they could have been operated without the Master Teleportationists anyway, and burned out most of the Spike Drives as well.

Whole worlds starved, descended into savagery, or were destroyed. The network of trade and communication collapsed. Without the guidance and expertise of the Psychic Authority, many worlds lost the capacity to reliably train those with psychic talent, and they were left unable to use their abilities safely or reliably.

Centuries passed. Much was forgotten. The location of Lost Terra is unknown. In the midst of the sleeping wreckage of the empire, a spark of light has risen again. A century ago, a highly advanced cluster of worlds known as the Nyx Federation rediscovered Spike Drive technology. Their Primus was a woman who is either brilliantly forward-thinking or merely psychotically ambitious, depending on who you ask. The Primus bent the strength of her whole civilization to regaining mastery over the wilds of space. They found other human colonies that had survived, and using their technological advantages they soon crafted a sort of hegemony, or federation. With the discovery of a long-dead psychic academy, they reconstructed the training regimens that allowed psychics to use their powers without dying or going mad. There is now a healthy and buzzing psychic academy, reconstituted fifty years ago and with growing enrollment every year.

The Nyx Cluster has now become the core of what is referred to as the State. Thirteen systems claim membership, with a varying number of worlds or colonies within each system. For those human colonies that are rediscovered, joining the State is nominally optional, but so far no one has refused too bitterly.

The great ships of years past are still unattainable. But the Nyx Cluster can churn out fighter and frigate-class vessels equipped with spike drives, and they are plentiful enough. A few of the more powerful worlds have a cruiser or three, and Nyx itself has a single Battleship which is widely considered invincible. Not that there is any great need so far for military vessels; no alien powers have been encountered that can stand up to a Human expeditionary force, even if it does only consist of a few cruisers and a double handful of frigates.

The State exists on a model far different from that of the Terran Mandate. Where the Mandate required control and centralization, the State is quietly fearful of a second Scream. No one knows what caused the first, and the risk of a second cannot be assessed. Every system is required to either be self-sufficient in the absence of spike drives, or to be working toward that goal. This requires at a minimum the agricultural capacity to support its population and the ability to manufacture and maintain in-system vessels that could serve any asteroid bases or similar.

There is only a single functioning psi-academy, the Black House. At unbelievable expense, the State is slowly equipping it with psi-shielding that might allow the teachers and students that reside there to survive a second Scream.

The term 'The Black House' actually refers to both the artificial world it is built on and the academy itself. The academy itself is "merely" the size of a large university, and is dominated by a central building that is like a cross between a medieval cathedral and Angkor Wat. The artificial world is a ring approximately three million kilometers in diameter, with an inner surface approximately two thousand kilometers wide. High walls at the edges keep the atmosphere in, and the rotation of the ring provides a normal day-night cycle and 1G worth of centripetal force. The habitable inner area has a surface area approximately 40 times that of Earth, with a normal mix of land and ocean area. However, it does not have tides.

The Black House could not possibly be constructed by State technology, and there is a healthy debate about whether even the Terran Mandate could have built it. The expert consensus is 'no.' It is assumed to be a pre-human relic. It is currently open for colonization, as the human population now consists solely of the Black House and its surrounding community, probably less than two hundred thousand people.

Tech Levels and Psychic Powers in this Campaign

I am setting the game "earlier" in the process of galactic re-conquest than the Stars Without Number default. Pretech items are very rarely available for sale. At the current time, there are NO planets able to manufacture much in the way of Pretech equipment. In some cases this is because the necessary infrastructure and knowledge-base has not been rebuilt, in other cases it is because the manufacture of Pretech requires certain specialized Psychic disciplines. The following is a brief introduction to what you should expect. Please note that some worlds may have either specialties or deficiencies, and so some worlds may have specific areas where they are better or worse than the baseline of their tech level. Nyx's anti-aging services, for example, are substantially more advanced than would be available in a standard TL4 world, and approach TL5 technology.

Tech Level 0 is approximately neolithic. This is pretty rare for human civilizations, because almost any colony that manages not to go extinct will at least retain the knowledge to work metal.
Tech Level 1 is medieval-ish. This is substantially more common than neolithic worlds, and there are worlds in the State that are still essentially at the level of Imperial China. Worlds like this can usually scrum up enough wealth to import T4 goods for the very wealthiest, and of course they can send their psychics to The Black House. This means that they may very well have an Immortal Emperor (anti-aging drugs) with a cadre of sorcerous viziers (trained psychics.) It is also not entirely unusual for them to still have access to recorded knowledge far above their tech level, or to have access to bio-engineered crops that make farming much easier.
Tech Level 2 worlds almost always have full knowledge and awareness that they came from the stars, even if the Scream originally knocked them down to TL0 or 1 and they had to claw their way back up. TL2 worlds have technology ranging from the very best of the ancient world or Renaissance to an upper limit comparable to the US in the 1950s, although of course culturally they could run the full range of human history, and beyond.
Tech Level 3 worlds are pretty similar to the modern day, give or take a few decades. TL3+ indicates there are a few areas where they have substantial knowledge and understanding in at least a few fields, enough that they can provide goods and services at that level. Also, they typically do manage to import a fair amount of TL4 goods, at great expense, of course.
Tech Level 4 worlds are signified by having access to fusion power and spike drives, which are the signature achievements of this level of tech. Also, most of the technology you can find in a Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun book is at least theoretically possible here (although since this isn't actually a cyberpunk milieu, some of it is inappropriate and it isn't really intended as a focus, anyway.) The only system in the State that is a true, full-blown Tech 4 society is the Nyx Cluster.
Tech Level 5 is pre-scream technology. TL5 Technology requires incredibly sophisticated techniques and often materials that have properties not available in normal matter. This paramatter or exotic matter must be crafted by psychics using disciplines lost to the Scream. There are a VERY few items of pretech than be manufactured in limited quantities in the Nyx cluster, but actually finding it for sale is difficult. More likely, TL5 items must be recovered and restored to working order. Even that requires jury-rigged tools, as the equipment to work on TL5 equipment has also usually been lost. The upper edge of TL5 equipment are the lost and destroyed Jump Gates that made the vast size of the Terran Mandate possible.
Tech Level 6 is crazy bullshit. The Orbital ring that The Black House is built on is TL6. Human civilization even before the scream only ever made a few TL6 items, and never in mass quantities.

Spacer Culture

Any PC with a spare Culture/0 slot might well consider spending it on Spacer, since spacers are the people you will have lots of contact with. There are spacers everywhere in civilization, since civilization by definition consists of the places spacers can get to. Spacers deny that there is any such thing as spacer culture. This is because spacer culture is often more about things and spaces than about [whatever people think culture is 'about'], because spacer culture is "just a common-sense reaction to living in space, not anything about mythology or rituals or taboos," and because denying that their culture is really a culture is a thing that people like to do.

Spacer culture is transmitted through, and takes its name from, the Spacer's Bible. This is a document that dates back to the Terran days, and has been expanded upon with commentary (and commentary to the commentary) over the centuries since then. The definitive edition pre-scream was known as the Little Blue Book, and it often was possessed in the form of an actual book with pages. It is now an app that is kept on the compad of almost anyone that spends much time outside of a planetary surface.

The Spacer's Bible is full of charts and useful data about how to maintain a vacc suit, how much oxygen a person needs in a given period of time and how long it will take them to deplete a given number of cubic feet of atmosphere. It has introductions to how pay should be calculated for different crew members and how votes should be conducted. It defines the standard division of duties on a vessel. It gives standardized answers to every kind of practical question, so that everyone knows the hand signals you use if comms go out, and how to secure lines if someone has to go out for a spacewalk across the hull. Even if you do not have any medical training yourself, the Spacer's Bible will give you a quick practical rundown on what a radiation leak will do for you, at least in terms of how quickly it will kill you.

It also has many practical pieces of advice and wisdom about how to conduct yourself aboard a ship. Spacer culture, and the spacer bible, was developed by people who had a lot in common with sailors and roughnecks. It is ruggedly practical and designed to function in times of high stress and pressure. It is intended to function as a lingua franca for people who might come from very different backgrounds.

Spacer Culture has as many tenets and practices as any other culture, but the following are major strains that run through it.

Spacer culture comes from an acknowledg

Stars Without Number: Back in Black

Contents

Adventurers

Companions Lost and Killed

The Ship

Loot and Salvage

Custom/Unique Items

Slush Fund & Assets

Maps

The Setting

Personal Equipment

Money

History of the State

Tech Levels and Psychic Powers in this Campaign

Spacer Culture

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