Trope-a-Day

Trope-a-Day: Drop Pod

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Drop Pod: The Piton-class drop pod and Fist-class triple drop pods, specifically, the former of which drops a single heavy legionary from orbit to ground, and the latter of which drops three light legionaries likewise. A modified Fist is also used to drop equipment packages.

(Unlike many variants on this theme, these drop pods aren’t intentionally used to damage the enemy, although if one does land on someone’s head, that’s a bonus: it’s hard enough to get a legionary safely to the ground, through flak, with a suicide-burn flight profile as it is without having it try and double as a KEW. Besides, you can always throw a few actual KEWs out in front of it…)

Trope-a-Day: Do Not Adjust Your Set

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Do Not Adjust Your Set: The obvious canonical example is the Emergency Notification System, run jointly by the Watch Constabulary and Emergency Management Authority, which can send out a signal across the IIP mesh network preempting every device to deliver an emergency notification. Subverted inasmuch as it can be overridden freely at the receiving end, on the grounds that if there’s a gorram emergency going on, people might need to use those devices.

(There is also is counterpart, the Emergency Monitoring System. Separate from the basic functionality in which devices that perceive an emergency happening locally will report it of their own volition, the EMS permits a code to be sent out instructing all devices within a specific area to activate all their sensors and report what they perceive to the WC/EMA. Again, this is optional functionality – no-one has to participate for obvious privacy and property reasons – but rather depends on the authorities being trustworthy and individuals being mutually responsible citizens…)

Trope-a-Day: Doing in the Wizard

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Doing in the Wizard: Played straight in the most literal sense possible: if there’s magic, miracle, or straight-up literary conceit around, you can be absolutely sure that there’s someone *there* figuring out how it could work and/or how it can be reverse-engineered, because that’s how you go about increasing the universe’s net awesome, belike.

(As a culture that downright inverts Measuring the Marigolds, they don’t feel that this in any way reduces appreciation for them; indeed, the entire notion that understanding in some way reduces or destroys appreciation or sense of wonder can surely only be the product of the most profound intellectual confusion.)

Trope-a-Day: Measuring the Marigolds

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Measuring the Marigolds: Should you, gentle reader, ever find yourself transported by some magical tornado to one of the locales about which I write, don’t try and explain this one to the locals. Really. Just… don’t.

Expect a lengthy lecture on how The World Is Just Awesome, but can only be appreciated at a very shallow level by those who don’t even try to understand it, and how substituting mere numinous neural self-pleasuring for truly grokking the wonders of the world is grossly inadequate, and frankly the world deserves better of you, Mister So-Called-Sentient-Supposedly-Sapient-Being, than such flagrant and feth-witted mystagoguery.

Or, y’know, a truly spectacular contemptuous snort.

 

Trope-a-Day: Distress Call

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Distress Call:

<breedlewheep>. Vessel in distress, vessel in distress. Cycle 214. Free trader More Money, More Propellant under attack by forces unknown. Reaction drive disabled. Point-defense laser not responding. Atmosphere venting from multiple compartments. Message repeats.

<breedlewheep>. Vessel in distress, vessel in distress. Cycle 215. Free trader More Money, More Propellant under…

So, yeah. Kind of like that pretty much everywhere, on the standard frequencies you’ll find in the Accord on the Law of Free Space or your local astrogator’s handbook, or if all else fails, on the guard/hailing frequency defined by the hydrogen line.

Not much else to say ’bout it.

(Side note: except maybe the fine custom that has evolved to deal with false distress calls – namely, very politely and insistently salvaging your ship anyway, then letting you have all the fun of navigating the Admiralty Court to get it un-condemned.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Digitized Hacker

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Digitized Hacker: Most of ’em.

When it comes to wrestling for control of systems in cycle-time – especially where security AI are concerned – speed is a definite advantage. As such, digital crackers and their counterparts, digital sysadmins, are both very common; even if they habitually inhabit bioshells and just run a hot fork of themselves in parallel while on the job.

Trope-a-Day: Detachment Combat

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Detachment Combat: A staple of modular technology – certainly any morphmech or modubot that is equipped for combat may well be equipped for this technique, as are legionaries with their carried drones and swarms. In starships, some models of AKV and other small starships (multivector attacks being handy in the furball) can pull it off. And, of course, one can make a technical argument for essentially any carrier or fleet carrier.

 

Trope-a-Day: Descriptively-Named Species

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Descriptively-Named Species: Not commonly found among sophont species, who rarely feel the name to describe themselves and the convention being to transliterate their name as literally as possible, even if that occasionally leaves other species struggling to pronounce the correct vowel distinctions in sssc!haaaouú.

More common in other lifeforms, from Eliéran tubefish and Phílae’s handfish through air plankton, asteroid potatoes, bursters, carrier bats, chime oaks, crystalplants, ice weasels, songleaves, sweetfungi, etc.

Trope-a-Day: Deep-Immersion Gaming

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Deep-Immersion Gaming: Sort of an inevitable consequence when the standard gaming rig involves full-sensory virtual reality of such quality as to be indistinguishable from reality, except for necessary departures of awesome. Although most people put together more imaginative avatars than looks-just-like-themselves.

(Now, the real deep-immersion gaming comes when you add a gnostic overlay that makes you believe that you’re your character and suppresses the memory of having been you, for the serious authenticity devotees. Ultimate realism, with only a slight to moderate chance of mental trauma. Personality shifts not included.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Depopulation Bomb

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Depopulation Bomb: Two, in eldraeic pre-history: the asteroid impact preceding the Winter of Nightmares, which wiped out almost everyone, and the Gray Wasting, a Precursor bioweapon that got out of its bottle a couple of hundred thousand years later and only managed to kill one-half to two-thirds of everyone. There are also some ruined planets out there to remind everyone that this is not a local phenomenon, either.

In the modern era, this is why people are encouraged to be careful with their bio/nanoweapons, because it’s frighteningly easy to create one of these by accident.

Trope-a-Day: Data Pad

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Data Pad: The slate, a once ubiquitous accessory before the advent of the fob terminal, the wearable, and the neural lace, and still quite common because it’s useful to pass data around (of course, smart paper does just as well for this, but…). Also, people kind of like working with their hands.

Also note that this is a way to share one or more documents on one person’s device among multiple people having a coffee together, not a stack of one-document-per-device data pads ending up in in-trays, this not being Star Trek:

picard-padds

Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever committed in television SF. Except possibly the baryon sweep, or the temperatures a couple of hundred degrees below absolute zero, or the cutting of holes in an event horizon, or… well, okay, those were all bad science. This is just total fail of common sense.

Trope-a-Day: Creating Life is Awesome

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Creating Life is Awesome: …do you really have to ask?

Of course creating life, and sophoncy, and sophont life is awesome! It’s the perfect blend of science, art, unfettered seizing of the power of the gods themselves, and kicking entropy recursively in the wing-nuts by creating an ordered order-creator! What could be awesomer! (…yet.)

Just remember, you’re creating living beings and children, not tools – these aren’t bioroids, for example – and minions. We have, um, certain ethical rules (the Prime Rule of Genesis: “You have the right to be created by a creator acting under what that creator regards as a high purpose.”) and laws about that (see Article XIV, for example) – although, one notes, there remains absolutely nothing unethical about the act of creation itself, as long as one’s motives are sufficiently pure.

(Yes, For Science! qualifies as both a high purpose and a pure motive for these purposes.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Courier

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Courier: Once common, taking messages everywhere in the planetary Empire where routine caravans didn’t run. Still common today doing the same job on a rather larger scale, because there are lots of exclaves, small colonies and outposts that aren’t regularly visited by anyone in particular, and while the extranet can get a message there, it can’t get some types of physical goods – those which can’t be sent as a recipe and reconstructed at the far end for whatever reason – there. (And also because certain very-high-security data is, by intelligence organizations of appropriate paranoia – never entrusted to any device connected to the extranet, and thus has to be hand-carried wherever it’s going.)

And since they travel through lightly populated or unpopulated regions, often alone, bearing goods of high value… why, yes, they do tend to be notoriously badass.

Trope-a-Day: Cool Key

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Cool Key: Quite a few of them, historically – between the locks made to key, in various ways, off people’s signet rings to the keys which are themselves intricate pieces of clockwork machinery, thus making locks hard to pick because substantial parts of the lock are, in point of fact, part of the key. And even regular house keys tended to be made quite fancy – even though it only comes up occasionally, having a key worth handing over in the various ceremonies of the hearthmistress daressëf often took priority over the practicality of the key, inasmuch as most of Eliéra has never had the kinds of crime rates that encourage people to bother locking their doors.

Of course, these days, most keys are electronic codes stored conveniently in people’s Universals.

In specific example terms, one might consider the keys that form part of the Imperial Regalia to be Cool Keys. Not really, though – while awfully symbolic, as unlocking the covers of the master copies of the Imperial Charter when used together with the keys given to the Curia and the President of the Senate, they aren’t really anything more than symbolic. The really cool key is the electronic one inside the Imperial Seal that has all manner of specialized high-level ackles in it…

Trope-a-Day: Continuous Decompression

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Continuous Decompression: Averted in exactly the hard-SFnal ways one might expect it to be. Specifically, among other things:

(a) Explosive decompression be explosive, yo. Specifically, the air doesn’t hang around producing wind and blowing things around; it leaves. But also:

(b) Most decompression is not explosive. Mostly, the air just leaks out the hole until the hole is plugged, and does not in fact lead to immediate inability to breathe (although the pressure is continuously dropping) or air currents big enough to such everything through a hole smaller than it is. It just sets off alarms and makes unpleasant shrieking sounds while people get patch kits and close spacetight doors.

Especially if it’s, say, a bullet hole in the window of a cylinder habitat, which even if left untended with all the doors open would lead to complete depressurization in, y’know, a few days.  At the fastest.