Attack Drone: Hell, yes! From personal protection drones, through the combat drones that make up the larger part of pretty much any fireteam (half-a-dozen slaved to each mechagrunt), through the wingdrones accompanying aerospace fighters, to the Imperial Navy’s AKV-drones, the Imperial military (and mercenaries, and law enforcement, and private
Asteroid Thicket: Averted. Space does not work that way. Any time you see asteroids that close together, it’s because someone’s moved them there for a purpose – which means, if you try flying through them, your biggest concern is not hitting them, it’s local traffic control wanting to
TANEV (QUAVE REPUBLIC) – The government today refused the extradition of Ferlyn Kazesh, the Crescent Bioproducts executive responsible for the Taniris chemical disaster, to the Empire. [The disaster at Taniris earlier this year was the result of a faulty control computer in the Crescent Bioproducts factory outside Taniris City misrouting chemical
Thread 47.1008.183647.221 did not have a narrative thread of consciousness. It was a mere expediter, unconsciously sapient, originating from the point within the Transcend’s functional soup where certain collected data matched a template laid down by higher level routines – familiar to its constituents as aspects of
Posting this one out of order, too, because it may be useful to have it up here in future, and – well, because having fictional people and real people call each other names just seemed fun to me when I was writing it up.  So. Values Dissonance: In-world, plenty of it,
Asteroid Miners: Historically, yes. But the age of the hard-working, rugged asteroid miners, as opposed to asteroid settlers, was relatively brief – in the modern era, asteroid mining is the province of giant almost-completely-automated smelterships. Om nom nom.
FORKING. While under most circumstances – and where full dividuals are concerned – it is always correct to treat each and every fork of a given person as that person, as indeed will be the case after their remergence, there are certain special rules of etiquette that apply to the forks in
Asskicking Equals Authority: Played somewhat straight with the kaeth and their… kinesthetic leadership style, but subverted if you pay attention to the various underlying cultural mechanisms that ensure that asskicking gravitates towards the likely-to-be-competent-authorities.
“If you’ve come here to save the Galaxy, my innocents,” I said, “if you’ve come here with the illusion that you can save the Galaxy, or even so much as one single world, leave here right now. Cross the road, find the recruiting office, and join the Navy.
Ass In Ambassador: Sometimes – rarely – but usually intentionally. Which is to say, usually when dealing with those states who keep insisting that the Empire should, y’know, punish people for exercising their freedom of speech, or extradite people for committing something that no-one there would recognize as a crime, or
Ascetic Aesthetic: Used in a few types of places: Unprogrammed virtual reality, as a baseline to build on. Areas principally given over to industry or other automation, where simple, polished geometric shapes, curves, and suchlike (see: Alien Geometries) work well for the local AI; they don’t care about the
Public Exclusions Citizen Oversight Group to Melqar Riffym, greetings. Citizen-Shareholder Riffym, We at the Public Exclusions COG have been monitoring your reputation and meta-reputation scores (underlying data provided by the Exuberance Monitor COG [link]) for some time now. Are you aware, citizen-shareholder, that your amalgamated meta-reputation score is one of