Rank and Age

[weswood]

I've been working on my bastardized gaming system trying to come up with an easy method of determining a characters rank & age. The system I've used for a base is Top Secret/SI. More of a spy genre than a militery genre. The basic idea is the characters have a pool of skill points, based on their intelligence. These points are used to purchase skills (duh..).

So I got to thinking about having the players purchase rank out of the pool.

Age is 16 plus a roll of 1d4 for a base age. Using 18 as an average, this is the rough chart I came up with.

Skill      Enlisted Age       Average
Points     Rank     Modifier  age     
Enlisted 
0           E-3      0         18
1           E-4      2         20
2           E-5      4         22
3           E-6      8         26
4           E-7     12         30
5           E-8     16         34
Officers     
0           O-1      4         22
1           O-2      5         23
2           O-3      7         25
3           O-4     10         28
4           O-5     14         32
5           O-6     18         36

Characters may be officers if they have a college degree, or be prior enlisted (having met certain attributes scores), thus the age difference. I topped out the avaulable rank so the character's couldn't order around everybody they met.

I'm not sure of "average" ages that go with ranks, expecially after E-5, and no real clue on officers. So basically, does this look about right? Should I change the ages per rank? raise the skill point costs?

Thanks for the info.