I want to talk about the force in Starfinder, and I'm not talking about solarians, who are TOTALLY NOT JEDI despite being lightly-armored mystics who fight with laser swords.

Instead, I want to talk about force damage. It's sort of in a weird place in Starfinder. In similar games (here, I'm thinking of Pathfinder First Edition, Pathfinder Second Edition, and Dungeons & Dragons 5E), "force" is just another damage type. It's a damage type that usually affects ghosts and other such creatures more easily than other types of damage do. Just how it does this varies; in 5E, "force" is one of the damage types that isn't in the long list of ghostly creatures' immunities or resistances. In Pathfinder Second Edition, "force" is a damage that expressly bypasses the high resistances ghostly creatures have. And in Pathfinder First Edition, it's sort of buried in the rules for what "incorporeal" means. But it's there.

In Starfinder, force isn't really a kind of damage. Or maybe it is. Most of the rules talk about a force "effect," which means other rules bits in the game talk about it: for example, the rule for incorporeal creatures says they take full damage from "force effects." For example, solarians can get a special crystal that makes their solar weapons a force effect, but doesn't actually change the type of damage it does. The magic missile spell specifically deals "force damage," but that seems to be an artifact of relying on the Pathfinder First Edition rules more than anything else. 

Other effects in Starfinder do the kinds of things you'd expect force effects to do, but expressly aren't force effects. For example, the ghost killer weapon fusion does full damage to incorporeal creatures (and can score critical hits on them, and can be picked up by them), but it doesn't change the weapon's damage type to force, or even make it a force effect.

All this came up in a recent Starfinder game I was running where I included a colour out of space, a very Lovecraftian creature that showed up in an ancient space station. A colour out of space has a staggering number of resistances; it's an ooze (and thus has ooze immunities), and it's incorporeal (and thus has all the incorporeal creature immunities and powers). It also has a susceptibility to force effects, taking 50% more damage from them. So it really mattered when:

1) The operative used a pistol with a ghost killer weapon fusion against it (full damage, but no susceptibility)

2) The solarian used a solar weapon with an apocalypse crystal that makes it deal force damage (full damage and susceptibility)

3) The mystic cast magic missile on it (full damage and susceptibility, but had to get past the creature's spell resistance of 21--yeah, like I said, staggering number of resistances)

This interplay is part of Starfinder's complexity, and Starfinder freelancers should keep it in mind!