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Spare Body Parts: The poster-people for this are the kaeth, who come from the kind of… robust ecology (see: Had to be Sharp) that makes a selection of extra backup organs very useful indeed. And a special shout-out goes to the myneni, who have a kind of this by default
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Space Western: While, not being historically connected to Earth culture, many of the traditional trappings of the Western are absent, the attitude persists throughout much of the Expansion Regions, where central authorities are distant and frontier colonies fairly rugged by necessity, and even in the outback regions of colony worlds
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Space Police: There isn’t any overall police service for the Associated Worlds – the closest thing is probably Conclave Security, which does answer directly to the Conclave of Galactic Polities, but whose jurisdiction is limited to just the Conclave Drift itself and its containing star system, and possibly the Operatives
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Space Station: Lots of them, as residence, lab, factory, outpost, city, farm, cageworks, starport, skymall, border station, and just about everything else you can think of by way of uses. After all, in the modern day, three out of every five Imperial residents lives in space, not planetside. The gamut
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Space People: Well, about three-fifths of everyone, actually. That would be “about” principally because it’s really hard to determine, say, exactly where one draws a line between people who live on large asteroids in “habitats” and people who live on small moons in “domes”. And depending on how you
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Spaceship Girl: Every time a female-presenting digisapience uses a starship as a cybershell, yes. Of course, they can equally well be the resident operating intelligence of a habitat, or other vehicle (Spacestation Girl), and by no means all present as female (Spaceship Chap?), so it’s also subverted a fair
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Space Nomads:Â Several kinds, ranging from perpetual wanderers (say, the remnants of the londian), through long-range explorers (say, the spinbrights), to people like the residents of Imperial city-ships, skymalls, empire ships and other large starships, some of which travel with a purpose, and some of which just stuck an engine
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Space Navy: Well, yes, albeit crossed with Space Air Force. See any number of related tropes, including – probably especially – ÂStandard Sci-Fi Fleet. Even better, since there’s been a whole lot of articles about this written recently and not so recently on the blog, go here and scroll back as
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Space Mines: There are any number of practical problems with the general notion of minefields in space, including gravity making them clump up (meaning that your mines will need station-keeping drives), the difficulty of interdicting large three-dimensional volumes, the lack of choke points to mine and the tendency of those
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Space Is Air: Averted, because it really, really isn’t, and all our spacecraft move nothing like aircraft, promise! The only vague seeming non-aversions are the following: * Some starships do in fact run their engines all the time. That’s because they have astonishingly powerful and efficient engines that let
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Space is Cold: Averted. You need matter to have a temperature, and guess what space doesn’t have? You’ll freeze to death eventually, sure, thanks to the slow process of radiating your heat away – in the absence of any form of conduction or convection – into that giant sky heatsink
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Space Elevator: A standard fixture on most moderately developed planets – while shuttles and lighters can make easy ground-orbit transfers in any direction, and ground-based mass drivers can shift arbitrary amounts of mass upwards and downwards quickly, once a world’s passenger and freight volumes increase to the point that it’