The book then goes on to state, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you gain actions each combat round to spend on your player turn; by RAW you can take actions outside of your player turn, so it logically follows that the allotment must come at the start of the combat turn.
As a result, since you gain your actions at the start of the combat round, but can't start your player turn with more than 1 Major and 5 Minor, and because the rules state that "players can trade minor and major actions" but doesn't specify when this happens, I would infer that trading can be done at any time during the combat round.
I agree with all of this. The trading (to my mind) happens whenever the player wants, on-demand, and doesn't even need to really be explicitly declared as such. It happens implicitly when the player uses their second Major action. Or doesn't happen if they don't, or if they use too many Minor actions.
I don't understand why this limit of "5 Minor Actions" exists, particularly as (as far as I can tell) there's no way to get above 6 anyway. I assume it's just a guardrail against future buffs that do stack. I also think it's daft that it's 5, which means Wireless Reflexes IV are weirdly nerfed compared to III. I don't see why the text is "cannot start turn with more than 5" and not "no player can ever have any combination of initiative boosts that take them beyond 5d6 / 6 minor actions." Like, we all agree that the 5d6 boost is intrinsic and eternal, it's not something that we only calculate at a specific point in the combat turn. So why is the cap on minor actions not applied the same way?
RAW also states that unused actions are lost:
Note that actions cannot be carried from one round to another unless that is specifically allowed in a rule.
This has the interesting connotations for dodge/block/full defence; in so far as, if you act really early in the turn and choose to keep some actions back for defence later on, they could easily be wasted. Not sure if that's fun tactical decision making or annoying analysis paralysis, though.
Ah, I may have misunderstood what you were asking about penllawen. If you were asking about not being able to trade in minors for a major until your Player Turn begins being RAW...
Yes, that's what I'm asking, and I don't agree with your take because (as I said above) I think it's unintuitive to allow characters to act out of turn in other ways (ie Anytime actions) but not do their Major/Minor trades.
Consider another example: A character ends their turn and keeps a Major action back. Later, someone attacks them, and they want to do a Block Minor Anytime action to defence themselves. Are you going to tell them "no, it's not your turn now so you can't to major/minor trading"? Or are you going to let them trade the Major for a Minor action and defend themselves?
This is good Rules Lawyering 101: "It doesn't say you can't" is trumped by "It doesn't say you can." Not only is it prima facie that you can't do things if it's not your turn, things you CAN do when it's not your turn explicitly say so. Trading actions isn't one of them, ergo "it doesn't say you can."
That depends on if you think trading Majors and Minors around is "doing something" or not. It's clearly not, in itself, an action. So I see it as something that happens outside the turn ordering.