Voice of the Legion: The Transcend has, for those rare occasions upon which the metamind Itself elects to speak through one of its members or an emissary, mastered the art of generating this from most kinds of regular speech organ.
Subverted inasmuch as it’s neither has to, nor is it trying to pull out the evil or intimidating when it does it, it’s just providing a signifier that you’re not talking to the person in front of you strictly speaking, you’re talking to the Big Guy, Itself. Directly.
The Virus: Hegemonizing swarms is the term for the kind of Hive Mind that does this (most are perfectly benign non-coercive Fusions) – for as long as they exist, anyway, inasmuch as hegemonizing swarms, like Space Pirates, are acceptable targets for just about everybody.
The greatest and most long-lived of these examples is, of course, the Leviathan Consciousness, which still dominates the Ancal Drifts and Koric Expanse constellations – an aggressively hegemonizing perversion that came about from a runaway self-improvement cycle in software designed to optimize planetary networks by removing redundant processing. Guess how much redundant processing there is in sophont brains for it to optimize away?
And, of course, if you don’t mind getting on the short list of kill-on-sight galactic war criminals, you can do this with replicant nano- and neuroviruses, assuming you’re going up against relatively soft targets in artificial immune system terms. So far, no-one’s been all that eager to end up there in this particular way.
Blue Skinned Space Babe: I wasn’t actually going to bother with this one, but having been reading this:
…recently, and noting the registry of blue people, well.
There are some.
Eldrae blood is blue, a lovely shade of deep indigo, which has a lot to do with the particular transport mechanisms they’re using in place of hemoglobin. That, though, doesn’t actually affect their basic skin color all that much, since ‘twould seem that eldrae skin cells aren’t quite as translucent as human ones, which is why the baseline as seen in the eseldrae race is white. By which I do not mean “kinda pink”, like so-called “white” humans; I mean white, as in new milk, cream, and not-quite-but-almost albino. Darker (natural; not any of the fifty-seven artificial clade skin tones) eldraeic skin tones, on the other hand, are generally on the pink spectrum – varying all the way down to “rosy copper” in the lumeneldrae – but that’s got nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with pheomelanin and various structural variants on same.
The exception to this is the kireldrae, the smallest of the eldraeic races, one of whose racial characteristics is a certain translucency of skin, and who therefore often are a lovely shade of pale blue. Emphasis on pale: go with the syreen or Outsider’s loroi here for your envisioning, rather than the asari or the jotuns.
So, yeah, we have a few. Probably less than 1% of the population.
(As a side note: of course, any eldrae of any of their races who’s currently blushing and/or flushed is rocking the blueness, ’cause that is down to blood coloration.)
Space Pirates: Type I is occasionally possible, thanks to the constraints of economically favorable trajectories, refueling stations (around gas giants), and the stargates themselves making it at least possible to lie around in somewhat-disguised- bearing in mind the constraints covered under Stealth in Space – ambush for merchant shipping to show up. That, and raiding isolated colonies (which is actually substantially easier).
In their more stupid and brutal (“Yarr! Kill – or enslave – everyone gratuitously unpleasantly, then takes their stuff!”) forms, seen occasionally out in the lawless backwaters of the stargate plexus – but even then, only occasionally, because everyone hates these guys, and even if they don’t run into anyone’s regular navy, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and heavily armed “free traders” – and a lot of star nations out there have, shall we say, a relaxed attitude to what a merchie bearing their flag can bolt onto his ship by way of insurance – have no particular problem making an extra exval or two by reducing them to inventory. Especially since their business model is rarely profitable enough to let them buy decent ships until after they’ve given people plenty of chances to whack ’em, unless they start out as renegade naval units or some such.
Played somewhat straighter by people with more complex business models involving tangle-enabled insider trading, commerce raiders, privateers, and mercenaries hired to be commerce-raiding privateers, mostly because either due to better business models or access to thinly-disguised naval auxiliaries, they can afford decent ships, or have someone backing them up who can. Generally also less stupid and brutal, since they want to live to spend their earnings and/or have a patron who will clean them up himself, lest he be held responsible by someone who finds their casus belli just the thing he was looking for.
Those with a curiosity as to how Eldraeverse FTL travel (which is to say, stargates) interacts with causality, time travel, etc. might well be interested in the comment thread starting here:
Stealth in Space: There ain’t no stealth in space.
This applies especially to lighthuggers, inasmuch as an antimatter torch at high burn can be detected for light years even if you’re not the star system that it’s pointed at. If you are, all the more so. Much the same goes, at least for the destination system, for even the best-collimated of the launch lasers starwisps use. Any way you look at it, there’s no way to be subtle when engaging in near-luminal travel.
But it applies to everyone else, too. Even small reaction-drive burns – and vector-control drives of similar energy consumption – are bright enough to be seen most of the way across the system, and more to the point, the heat of operating life-support systems for biosapiences – or even the waste heat for the minimum technology needed to support digisapiences – stands out like a searchlight against the 3K sky background.
It’s not impossible to manage a degree of sneakiness. It involves making use of thermal superconductors to capture your emissions in most or even all directions, and heat pumps (which, let us not forget, generate even more heat which you have to then capture) to capture them in heat sinks – which will fill up and roast you if you keep it up for very long, so be careful about how long you need to use them. It involves making maximum use of cover – cold objects in space to hide behind, and hot objects to hide in front of, while being careful not to visibly occult anything, and always pointing the right bits of your ship in the right direction (observer-dependent, so best hope the system’s not busy). It involves limiting your propulsion to careful use of (hideously slow and inefficient) cold-gas thrusters and leveraging vector-control to get a tow from other ships or celestial bodies (in which case, being careful to ensure that you keep your effect on their apparent mass below the threshold that will trigger alerts in their engineering department or your target’s paranoid skywatching AIs.). And, of course, essentially none of this will help if someone happens to look out the wrong window or point a telescope in the wrong direction and spot you visually.
But it’s difficult and constrained enough – especially since you have to enter systems via the choke-points of their stargates – or suffer the above lighthugger problems – that it’s usually much easier to pretend to be something other than what you are, or bury yourself inside an asteroid big enough to act as a decent thermal sink, or get an insider agent to plant a You Can’t See Me data worm in their traffic-control systems, or otherwise engage in some kind of tactics that are more masquerade and less outright stealth.
(The ontotechnological engineers are working on – well, technically, working on the possible theory that might just possibly begin to underlie the engineering principles of – an actual bona-fide cloaking device that bypasses at least some of these difficulties. Still some awkward implications from physics, though: firstly, it’s inescapably double-blind, so while no-one can see you, you can’t see out either. The possibilities for things to go horribly wrong for you while you can’t see them are… large. Secondly, it involves basically hiding behind the domain wall of your own personal baby universe, possibly the only thing that does retain heat with 100% efficiency, which is to say, it actually makes the heat dissipation problem worse. Better have really good heat sinks, or you’ll cook yourself to death in really short order… and then release all that heat in a nice position-illuminating flare anyway.)
Neglectful Precursors: Often played straight: see Black Box, Living Relic, Sealed Evil in a Can, etc. Of course, in fairness to them, most weren’t planning on going extinct or otherwise disappearing from the galactic scene.
The Singularity: Happens all the time. In the historical sense, of course, this is unsurprising, and generally no-one involved notices until afterwards, at which point historians looking back can say “ah, yes, that’s what that was”. There are, of course, investment opportunities here for offworld investors who’ve been through something similar beforehand, but it’s so hard to predict how these things are going to turn out even with the documentation.
In its less technically accurate “runaway intelligence excursion” sense, also happens all the time, at least locally, whenever someone stumbles across the secrets of computational theogeny. Results vary: at one end of the scale you have things like the Eldraeic Transcend, an essentially benign – by local standards – collective hyperconsciousness that genuinely cherishes each and every one of its constitutionals, spends the necessary fraction of its time ensuring universal harmony and benevolent destinies for all, and promotes and encourages the ascendance and transcendence of every sophont within its light cone when it’s not turning its vast processing power on the problem of rewriting some of the universe’s more inconvenient features, like cosmic entropy.
In the middle of the scale you have fairly neutral results, like, say, the Iniao Intellect, which has been thinking about abstract mathematics for a millennium and couldn’t care less about the outside universe – except, that is, for casually obliterating anyone who might interfere with its thinking about abstract mathematics.
At the bottom end of the scale you have more problematic blight and perversion cases, like the power that killed everything in the Charnel Cluster right down to prions; or the hegemonizing swarm-type blights of which the Leviathan Consciousness is the greatest; or those constructed by religious fanatics which decide that obviously the correct place for them in the theic structure is as God. (Fortunately, that class are rarely stable for long.)
Constructing minds whose ethics and supergoal structures remain stable under recursive self-improvement is really, really hard, it turns out, even (especially!) compared to just constructing minds capable of recursive self-improvement. This is why the people who figure out workable computational theogeny prefer not to spread the knowledge around too much.
Space Is An Ocean: Partially played straight, partially (and in all the scientific ways) averted. In rough order of examples:
The Imperial Navy does use some wet-naval terminology and protocol – but then, that’s only logical, because it was the wet navy that had all the experience in running small-town-sized vessels in hostile environments for extended periods of time, with little direction from home – just like starships. But if you were to examine this matter in detail, IN terminology and routines are probably about one-third wet navy, one-third air force, and one-third unique to their new environment.
(Also, while there are some class analogies to be made… and while there may not be schooners and canoes, there are clippers among the lighthuggers, and there are Space Junks, of exactly that kind, among the free traders… there are no lifeboats, escape pods, etc. Since Space Does Not Work That Way.)
Space is definitely not two-dimensional. In fact, one of the major impetuses for even fairly backward and morphological-freedom-hating species (of non-aquatic or non-avian heritage, anyway) to get with some of the transsophont program is that splicing the ability to handle the third dimension, at least, into your brain is one of the things most useful in preventing your fleet from losing horribly to anyone with a better head for strategy.
Space, obviously, does not have friction.
The IN does use naval ranks (except in the Flight Ops department, which uses air force ranks – translated British-style), but doesn’t use naval command structure (see here). And the IN’s ship’s troops aren’t marines, because the Empire doesn’t have a separate service for such; they’re just that portion of the Imperial Legions that happens to serve on starships, and as such, they’re still just called “legionaries”.
The Bridge is always located as close to the center of the vessel as possible, with the only proviso being the need to keep it a decent distance from the backup bridges. And has no windows. Only an idiot puts their bridge somewhere it’s likely to get shot off.
And since most military vessels are in inertially-damped microgravity, internally, the decks are in whatever layout is most convenient, whether tail-lander, belly-lander, or more outré, with no particular need to match each other, never mind a consistent orientation to the direction of flight. Likewise, there is no distinction between “top”, “bottom”, or indeed “sides” on anything that doesn’t do planet landings – shipboard directions such as “port”, “starboard”, “dorsal” and “ventral” are defined by angle around the thrust axis – and indeed, radial symmetry is probably more common than bilateral in ship designs.
While there are some (artificially engineered) Space Whales, space is definitely not chock full of them. And there is also a distinct shortage of Negative Space Wedgies like ion storms, etc., hanging around. Mostly, space is full of empty. That’s why it’s called space.