Like i said, it was messed up.
The idea was you were a military academy cadet and could get killed "in training", before you completed the character.
I went through THREE attempts to roll up a charecter before the GM finally said, "Ignore that roll! You lived, regrew your skin for 8 months from the burns and graduated late".
Half the crew died within the first half-hour of actual PLAY. ( Several other people had tried in vain to roll up characters... by the time we were ready to run, we had lost seven or eight hours and some of us had class the next morning)
By that time i was just PO'd, and didn't play much in that campaign.
I always tried to avoid that problem in D&D by using the best of 4d6 method to generate the stats and giving the players a background which justified some decent equipment to start with, that way they would at least survive the early adventures. And then I could have fun killing them later :)