Flaunting Your Fleets: Even more than routine commerce protection and anti-piracy operations, this is why the Imperial Navy bothers to run patrols from the Core out to Fleet Bases Coreward, Rimward, Spinward, Trailing, Acme, and Nadir – and, not coincidentally, why every other Great Power, with the exception of the Photonic
Fixed Forward Facing Weapon: Ah, yes, spinal mounts. Mostly common on smaller ships as the primary weapon (railguns and other mass drivers, generally – a big advantage because you can run the rail the full length of the ship, for the maximum possible slug acceleration), but some larger classes have them
Five Races: Not terribly true for the Eldraeverse; for one thing, there’s a lot more than five species out there. A lot more. But let’s look at some archetypes, here: Stout (Dwarf): One of the few that does have an obvious candidate, the pseudosaurian kaeth, whose physical strength
Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Precursors and other elder races were, in their time. Whether or not they still are, or would be if they somehow came back again, is… debatable, and depends heavily on exactly how much physics lies between the current state of the most advanced known technology and
Older is Better/Lost Technology: Subverted in that while there are some awfully nice bits of leftover Precursor and/or elder race technology around, and piles of interesting things buried in the archives (assuming that some leftover perversion doesn’t eat your soul when you go looking for it), it’
Proud Warrior Race Guy: Some people think of the kaeth, the draconic pseudosaurians with the heavy-metal biology among the Imperials, as this, but while they are certainly violent (er, kinesthetic) enough, their sense of honor also is comfortable matching the Empire’s general Combat Pragmatism and eschewing of Martyrdom Culture,
Martyrdom Culture: Strongly averted by the Empire, who as firm devotees of Living Forever is Awesome consider this sort of thing absolutely, completely, utterly idiotic. It may be better to die for your beliefs than to die in bed for nothing, but whenever not absolutely impossible, it’s a damn
Fish People: Averted. While there are aquatic people in the Associated Worlds who can trace their evolutionary ancestry pretty directly back to piscids (“fish-analogs”), none of them are the least bit humanoid. They are, in other words, fish people, but not Fish People.
Fisher Kingdom: The Empire is a moderate example of the first type; while not involving any actual mental modification, or other self-integrity violations (unlike the mind-warpers of the Equality Concord or various pharmacrats, for example), it is a fully mature information society (much more information-dense than the high end of
First Contact Math: This is what the specialized Contact I – Contact XII family of languages are built of. They are, however, rather limited for any other use, so their principal use in practice – after you walk up from I to XII – is limited to passing along a real language to
In today’s random postage, something I just wrote on the worldbuilding mailing list, in response to the following: Do your worlds have a Peace town [city of refuge], where people can go in order to avoid the law? Not as such, or at least not officially. (Certainly people, like,
Firing One Handed: Works much better with the small examples of personal arms, pistols and such, whose vector-control recoil compensation is very good indeed at making it manageable, and come with an aiming system that plugs directly into your personal-area network, which is to say, brain. Nevertheless, averted for heavy