Ockham's Spoon

People do like confident doctors I suppose...

I feel this applied not only to my students but to me as well...

And what exactly is the average budget for sex? Asking for a friend.

Cherry Bomb by the Runaways from the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Great movie, great use of music with it. (Can't You) Trip Like I Do? by Filter & The Crystal Method from the Spawn soundtrack. Not such a great movie, but this song and John Leguizamo as the Clown were good. Does Scott Pilgrim vs. the World count as a superhero movie? Bit of a stretch, but it had some good music including Getting Boring by the Sea by the Blood Red Shoes and Black Sheep by Metric.

I can't imagine anything growing in these clown planters looking good, but the choice of cacti was particularly unfortunate

The usual suspects...

Airframe by Michael Crichton. Basically how are airplane accidents addressed and investigated written in terms of a mystery story where company politics and corporate backstabbing conflicts with the push to find the truth about an airline incident. The plot is not Crichton's best although reasonably good given the premise, but the research and descriptions of the interior workings of the airline industry were excellent.

Archer is absolutely on target (pun intended) with the STR boost of some type to offset encumbrance. I have been backpacking/camping often enough to know that this would be extremely useful.

I'd look at Life Support for protection from temperature, poison, extended breath, and reduced eating & sleeping, all of which would make survival easier. They might also have some combat benefit against venomous creatures or NND attacks with LS as a defense. And I know you said not combat oriented, but I could also see buying a point of Resistant Protection to avoid small injuries one might sustain in the wilderness due to scrapes, bruises, and cuts from aggressive trekking through thorns, branches, and rocky terrain.

Well I stand corrected. Thanks for the analysis.

"Adequacy achieved!" This needs to be on a T-shirt

The problem with AP is that it doesn't scale well across different power levels. The +¼ advantage works fine if you are playing a lower level campaign, and is particularly appropriate when you want to boost the effectiveness of a handgun or a sword without adding extra DC which would be conceptually unreasonable. But against the large defenses you find in a high level campaign AP becomes much too cost effective. I can understand wanting to break up Hardened so that it isn't the catch-all defense, but given Hero's general concept that the defense should be cheaper than the attack I was surprised that it happened, especially in light of the AP repricing. I don't play a lot of cosmic level campaigns, so the AP cost hasn't been a huge issue for me. When I need a character to be tougher without having defenses that are implausibly high, I have turned to Damage Negation - usually based on the general toughness (for a character like Wolverine) or massive size. The prevalence of Damage Negation has resulted in a corresponding increase in Negation Reduction but because they are adders instead of advantages, there is less of a scaling problem.