Alien Sky: Well, yes. Particularly of note: Eliera’s weird not-a-horizon on account of being just flat enough; the cool accretion-disk effects of MÃrlan, which has a pulsar in the same system; Revallá, which is a gas-giant moon and has that in the sky; Galáré’s planetary ring; the double
Lions and Tigers and Humans… Oh My!: Courtesy of uplifting and theriomorphic bioshells, albeit not hugely common.
Alien Arts Are Appreciated: There is an entire industry involved in selling the ultratech equivalents of opera glasses necessary to perceive the really alien arts, and teaching courses in their proper appreciation. Which may, under some circumstances, involve having new perceptual routines, background information, and indeed, gnostic overlays containing entire
Lightning Gun: Electrolasers. Commonly used to stun (which is not as harmless as it might sounds, because, y’know, high voltage doesn’t just stun) and to screw up electrically based machinery. Work on actual physical principles, involving laser-ionizing a path through the atmosphere for the electricity to be dumped
Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Enter the aerospace cruiser, a sub-class of assault cruiser specifically designed to get low enough in orbit that aeronefs and mostly-air-breathing vehicles can sortie from it – because once you’ve captured the orbitals, air supremacy may very well be the next stop in the orbithead-to-ground maneuver plan.
The Library of Babel: The Repository of All Knowledge, which arguably is the Empire’s equivalent of the Library of Congress, except that it’s been around for long enough – millennia – that it’s also the unburnt Library of Alexandria; and is available to the general public, under the conditions
AI Is A Crapshoot: Deconstructed. Actually making regular AIs is pretty much entirely safe. They aren’t any more likely to turn evil or go crazy than any other person. The problem comes in when the manufacturers try to raise them as slaves, treat them as slaves, or hard-code a
Least Common Skin Tone: Firstly, there are no humans. Second, if they ever make a live-action version of the Eldraeverse, just to make sure that all the other special-effect characteristics don’t get ignored in pointing out, y’know, only very distantly related to humans as we know them, they’
Learnt English From Watching Television: While it’s not nearly as simple as that – as mentioned above under Aliens Speaking English, there are no universal/self-teaching translators – people’s EM transmissions, and indeed Internet, if any, are one of the places from which those highly skilled linguists get the information
First Contact: Happens quite often. Not so much of a big thing these days for the Empire, who’ve really grown quite blasé about such things since that colonization mission discovered that Galáré was, oops, already inhabited back in the day, or other been-unbound-for-a-while star nations, but still the full-blown
(Of course, First Contact in turn depends on this one…) Corralled Cosmos: Partially averted, since while the game is played, for the most part, within the wormhole nexus that defines, for the most part, the Associated Worlds, relativistic starships do let you go pretty much anywhere, albeit at tediously subluminal
(Properly speaking, this should be a non-repeat, but in this case, the non-repeat happens to be Learnt English From Watching Television, and as this refers back to a couple of the repeats, this one and First Contact, I’m going to adopt a general policy of moving those up in