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Trope-a-Day: All There in the Manual
All There in the Manual: This category, the one you’ve been reading since late 2011.
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Trope-a-Day: Aliens Steal Cable
Aliens Steal Cable: Sort of true – despite the various technical problems mentioned in the trope, it is a very popular way to acquire a linguistic and cultural corpus from worldbound civilizations before making contact. But it involves both (a) studying their technology to figure out the signal encoding, and then
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Trope-a-Day: Aliens of London
Aliens of London: Well, since no-one ever speaks English, it’s a little hard to say – especially with regional variations – but I suspect a native Eldraeic speaker attempting to speak English without benefit of a translator – (Which depending upon locale configuration would probably produce either Broadcaster’s Mid-Western or Received
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Trope-a-Day: Alien Sea
Alien Sea: Obviously – not all oceans are water, y’know. Just look at Ă“lish, or GalinĂ©, with their golden-black hydrocarbon seas. Or the molten metal lakes on Eurymir’s day face, or the reddish salty brine of terraformed ElĂ©mĂre, or the literally wine-dark seas of rusty Talentar, or the colloidal
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Trope-a-Day: Akashic Records
Akashic Records: The Transcend remembers everything any of its constitutionals know, or ever knew. (And, quite possibly, anything that can be deduced or induced from that.) That may not be all knowledge, but it’s close enough for Deus Est Machina work.
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Trope-a-Day: The Ageless
The Ageless: Mature eldrae, galari, and anyone else who possesses the Lesser Immortality, such as everyone the aforementioned has sold immortagens to recently. See Immortality.
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Trope-a-Day: Affably Evil
Affably Evil: While there are those former Imperials and other eldrae that would qualify as evil – the Renegades – and more non-former ones that some other people would think of as evil (see: Blue and Orange Morality), there are very close to none of them who are prepared to be uncivilized
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Trope-a-Day: Adam and Eve Plot
Adam and Eve Plot: The colonization of Valiár (Thirteen Colonies), in which the catastrophic failure that destroyed the majority of the colonists in cryostasis aboard the Swiftrunner left a first-in team half-a-dozen strong as the only people around – and it’s not like in subluminal colonization you get to turn
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Trope-a-Day: Ace Custom
Ace Custom: Happens a lot, aided and abetted by the highly modular and modifiable nature of Imperial technology. (Indeed, both the Navy and the Legions positively encourage the practice – as long as you stick to the standard interfaces and thus do not muck up the supply chain, or drop below
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Trope-a-Day: Ab Urbe Condita
Ab Urbe Condita: The definition of the Empire’s Harmonious Calendar is this, counting from the founding – or, rather, counting from the winter solstice [1] that immediately preceded the founding (which was in the mid-to-late spring) in order that the start of the calendar year should be in a sensible
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Trope-a-(Yester)Day: Absurdly Sharp Claws
Absurdly Sharp Claws: …yes, of course someone applied mollyblade technology to a set of dar-bandal fighting claws. Notwithstanding that under most circumstances having claws that can slice happily through armor-plate is the very definition of Awesome But Impractical.
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Trope-a-Day: Absurdly Sharp Blade/Sharpened to a Single Atom
Absurdly Sharp Blade/Sharpened to a Single Atom: Mollyblades. With a single-layer graphene sub-nanometer edge with a perpetual resharpening system (proprietary – and very necessary, since an edge that fine will be blunted by damn near anything, including gases), if it is made of baryonic matter, it will be cut. Slash