trope-a-day
Starship Luxurious: Played straight in the Empire, even to a large extent with military vessels. Part of this – see Flaunting Your Fleets – is advertising, much as the brightwork on Age of Sail ships used to be, “look, we can afford to do this with our naval vessels”, but a lot
Darkness Within
MET-187-5+13 et. seq. That will go more easily if I can get in behind it and push it out, but that means exposing the forward maintenance compartment. Which will be a job in itself; a Nelyn’s a lot of spacecraft for its size, which has the unfortunate corollary
trope-a-day
Star Killing: The theory exists behind several nova bombs, anyway, and ontotechnology shows the way to interesting possibilities like twist-pinch bombs. (These are essentially the same type of nova-inducing weapon that we see at the start of Charlie Stross’s Iron Sunrise.) And one probably could induce a nova with
Darkness Within
MET 187-5+3 Or possibly I don’t need a new plan. Since I can’t think of a new plan, just a variation on the old plan, it would be very desirable that this is the case. To make it to the stargate, I would need a vector-control core,
trope-a-day
Excessive Steam Syndrome (was: Stanley Steamer Space Ship if you wondered about the alphabetization): Even those reactors that use other principles to extract energy still harness the thermal differential they produce, because it’s there and not to be wasted. Meanwhile, spacecraft require their own complex cooling infrastructure, and often
trope-a-day
Okay, let’s try this again, with much more saving of drafts… Standard Sci-Fi Army, eh? Well, not sure how much I have to say about that that’s new, because of all the things I’ve already written about the Imperial Legions elsewhere, but let’s see what I
trope-a-day
…I wrote an entire post. Then I posted it. Then it vanished into thin bytes. Bugger. Apologies, but it’s late, so I’ll be rewriting this tomorrow. Dammit.
worldbuilding
Reminded of this by a comment on G+, I thought I’d put together a list for y’all of the various terms used here and there in the Eldraeverse for concepts (mostly, but not universally, sciency) that match up to concepts we have here on Earth, but which for
trope-a-day
Stable Time Loop: The Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem (see: You Already Changed The Past) does appear to permit these kinds of predestination paradoxes (at least, the informational kind; the object paradox may also be possible, but testing it is dependent on finding an object that won’t age during the
trope-a-day
You Already Changed The Past: While extraordinarily limited, time travel does exist in the Eldraeverse – as it must, because so does FTL travel. This is all you can do with it, however, because the Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem is very firm about that, and the universe is even firmer. (And
Places To Go
Teralu Startown: The single-system Teralu polity, in the Magen Exodus, once signed a contract with the Empire to maintain a starport on the populated world of their system, Teralu Actual, making the usual concessions with regard to starport extrality and to freedom of passage. Later, after the coup of 5942,
trope-a-day
The Spymaster: In the Imperial governance, the people who sit on the Imperial Security Executive, the council that runs Imperial State Security, which is composed of the heads of the five directorates, the admirals in charge of the Shadow Fleet, its military intelligence counterpart, and certain others, whose identity is