Don’t do this. Don’t ever do this. There is one other small point to make, it occurs to me, regarding lasers and appropriate uses of same. One of which is that the Imperial Navy, by and large, uses carefully targeted laser weapons for short-range point defense, the intent
Frickin’ Laser Beams: Invisible. Recoilless. Travel at the speed of light. In short, just like actual frickin’ laser beams. (See Energy Weapons and Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better for where they are used, and why they’re not usually considered the primary weapon set in the Eldraeverse, which I didn’
Lucifer VI-class Starwisp Tender With the ongoing spread of the stargate plexus, it became rapidly apparent to the Imperial Exploratory Service that it would rapidly become impracticable to continue to launch trans-horizon probes from its existing fixed facilities, and indeed that to construct new launch facilities at the current edge
Freeze Ray: Hardly mainstream, but there are some temperamental, experimental weapons that play with cryogenic fluids and indeed Bose-Einstein condensates, yes. Success is somewhat variable, because it’s hard to pack adequate quantities of cold into such a small space.
419 Scam: Yes, these still happen – now with even more horrific variants! – much to the despair of, say, ConSec NetOps. (See: MAKE SOULS FAST, pt 1, and MAKE SOULS FAST, pt 2.)
Form-Fitting Wardrobe: While it’s not all tight-fitting – many clothing styles are perfectly loose and flowing – just about all clothing in the Empire and other advanced civilizations fits perfectly. That’s because it’s made to incorporate a whole passel of tiny MEMS, micromachines which ensure that it loosens and
Food Pills: Well, actual food pills don’t exist, because of all those inconvenient mass-and-volume constraints, the more so with high-energy metabolisms that need to support all that symbiotic nanotech, and suchlike. In terms of other things listed under this trope, though, there’s everything from traditional waybread (not a
The Fog of Ages: This didn’t so much happen to the natural immortals of the setting, but then, the natural immortals weren’t all that natural, having been designed into immortality by one particular group of Precursors, and it is generally believed that a few memory upgrades came with
Flying Saucer: Mostly averted. While most people do like to build their starships with a certain degree of unnecessary style (and thus, a bit less like an explosion in a girder factory than one might think), the saucer shape is actually not one of the ones that matches up terribly
From Storm-General Galen Claves-ith-Lelad, Warmain of the Dawn, Strategos of the 33rd Imperial Legion, the Fists of Lightning, to Ironlord Qorran Cieng, commanding the Third Army of Ochale, greeting. I have the honor to command the forces of my Empress, which even now approach the strongpoint you have made of
Floating Continent: Actually, there are quite a lot of these, whether you call them skyhomes, sky cities, or sky islands (in roughly increasing order of size). They are divided into the ones which hover over terrestrial worlds (which exist mostly because people think they’re cool, and why not?), the
Fling a Light Into the Future: A number of independent efforts, as well as cooperative efforts between the Imperial Emergency Management Authority and various bits of the Ministry of Progress & Prosperity are engaged in this – well, not quite this, since it’s still the present and doom hasn’t