Deus ex Machina: Essentially averted – while the archai of the Transcend are arguably dei and quite definitely machinae, they abhor being anything close to this unsubtle. (Besides, if you’re the sort of person that is inclined to screw things up to the point of needing a deus ex machina,
Determinator: This is, of course, the essence of qalasĂr (see Blue and Orange Morality) – and while not every eldrae or Imperial possesses the degree of qalasĂr necessary to be the Determinator, some do, and lesser degrees of Determinatorism are positively common. (The sheer amount of not-staying-dead biotech around helps, but
Macrophage Militant; 2,000,000 miles from the Gal-kiderax stargate. The better part of a day later, the Flight Commander’s glare had hardly lessened at all. “Anything new?” “No status change on target. No halo, no trailers, and still decelerating into gate intercept – definitely not confident in his ability
Derelict Graveyard: Most major planets have one of these in high orbit, somewhere, where old habitats, satellites, starships and other space debris are lashed together in a rough mass of dead hulks waiting to be torn apart and reclaimed, or at least transported elsewhere by tugs for this purpose. The
…for the lack of updates over the last few days. Essentially what’s happened is that my wiki in which I keep my quarter-million words or so of current worldbuilding notes is no longer to be supported, developed, etc., which is something of a pain inasmuch as I’m going
It used to be, by my predecessors’ memoirs, that you could almost feel good about taking a slave ship. Kill the slavers, free the prisoners from the slave-holds and explosive collars, ferry them back to their homes, and chase down the next one; a good month. Those were more innocent
Landfill Beyond The Stars: No, just no. It’s hard to imagine the economics that would make it possible to haul junk across space for dumping. And that would make it worthwhile to waste an entire planet to store the stuff. But… …there are a couple of locations that specialize
“Yes, the Ley Accords do consider using ecocidal weapons on garden worlds a more serious issue than the self-genocidal use of strategic nucleonic weapons.  That’s because, in the big picture, the sort of chumps who nuke themselves to death are rather less valuable to the galaxy than the ecosystem
Deployable Cover: For this purpose – and assuming that people are firing material objects at you, which is, in fairness, most of the time – they do make portable kinetic barriers. (Don’t try and use them while you’re still carrying them, though. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere,
“Drop shuttle (n.): An armored crate flown by a maniac.” – The Unofficial Guide To The IN Flying a drop shuttle is a unique sort of piloting. You’re always deploying under combat conditions, and often before you’ve established orbital superiority, so people are shooting at you from the moment
Democracy Is Bad: This is the Imperial consensus view. Partly for the fairly obvious reason that in democracies like ours, where just about everything or everything minus a small list is up for grabs by vote, it’s just a tyranny with more tyrants. (See, thus, the Drowning of the
One week earlier, somewhere in the Gal-kiderax System, Theomachy of Galia. “I’d kill a soph in a fair fight.” The black-cloaked figure paced in circles, long stride carrying him from wall to wall. “Hells, even before I left my dear stuffy cousins behind, I’d kill a soph in