I'm pretty sure the flavor text in the weapons section explains pretty clearly why you can't trade in your progressive knife and pallet rifle for weapon upgrade points, since they're UN issue.<br/><br/>Also, you get them for free, so letting you swap them out would effectively be giving you 2 free weapon upgrades.  Obviously, you can leave them in base, but until the law about every EVA needing to have a boxcutter and a defective gun gets repealed, you'll be stuck with them.  You can still switch out your weapons every time a new angel appears, of course.<br/><br/><br/>Also, for some quick setting information, the Babylon base of operations will be run by Commander Katsuragi, while the science division will be headed up by her daughter, Ritsuko Katsuragi.  The operations director will initially be Major Mecci, but he'll end up getting replaced by Shihong's character early in the game.<br/><br/>In general, events happened as they did in cannon, but with the following differences:<br/><br/>-Shinji Ikari died in the second impact.  Yui Ikari did not; as a result, Gendo never joined GEHIRN.<br/><br/>-Asuka's mother, Kyoko Zeppelin-Soryu, (Kyoko von Zeppelin in this timeline) was happily married, and had several children, none of which were Asuka.<br/><br/>-Rei Ayanami was never created.  Kawrou Nagisa still exists, however.<br/><br/>-The geofront is located in Italy, instead of Japan.<br/><br/>-SEELE has more resources in this timeline, for reasons that will never adequately be explained.<br/><br/>-Gendo and Yui Ikari work as scientists for the JSDF.  They are currently working on Jet Alone.<br/><br/>-Kaji is an obscure spy infiltrating the JSDF.