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Drugs Are Good: The Empire’s culture has no problem with hedonic, et. al., drugs. You have, after all, the right to do anything you want to yourself, and really, they’re no worse than any other form of entertainment. Especially since you buy them from legitimate businessmen, not “legitimate
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Drop Pod: The Piton-class drop pod and Fist-class triple drop pods, specifically, the former of which drops a single heavy legionary from orbit to ground, and the latter of which drops three light legionaries likewise. A modified Fist is also used to drop equipment packages. (Unlike many variants on this
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Do Not Adjust Your Set: The obvious canonical example is the Emergency Notification System, run jointly by the Watch Constabulary and Emergency Management Authority, which can send out a signal across the IIP mesh network preempting every device to deliver an emergency notification. Subverted inasmuch as it can be overridden
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Doing in the Wizard: Played straight in the most literal sense possible: if there’s magic, miracle, or straight-up literary conceit around, you can be absolutely sure that there’s someone *there* figuring out how it could work and/or how it can be reverse-engineered, because that’s how you
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Measuring the Marigolds: Should you, gentle reader, ever find yourself transported by some magical tornado to one of the locales about which I write, don’t try and explain this one to the locals. Really. Just… don’t. Expect a lengthy lecture on how The World Is Just Awesome, but
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Do-Anything Robot: High-end utility spiders are like this – albeit not all the way there – thanks to effectors, self-reshaping “smart tool” nanotechnology, and modular parts.
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Distress Call: <breedlewheep>. Vessel in distress, vessel in distress. Cycle 214. Free trader More Money, More Propellant under attack by forces unknown. Reaction drive disabled. Point-defense laser not responding. Atmosphere venting from multiple compartments. Message repeats. <breedlewheep>. Vessel in distress, vessel in distress. Cycle 215. Free
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Digitized Hacker: Most of ’em. When it comes to wrestling for control of systems in cycle-time – especially where security AI are concerned – speed is a definite advantage. As such, digital crackers and their counterparts, digital sysadmins, are both very common; even if they habitually inhabit bioshells and just run a
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Detachment Combat: A staple of modular technology – certainly any morphmech or modubot that is equipped for combat may well be equipped for this technique, as are legionaries with their carried drones and swarms. In starships, some models of AKV and other small starships (multivector attacks being handy in the furball)
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Designer Babies: Of course. That’s called responsible parenting. What sort of parent leaves the health and future of their children up to the random genetic lottery? One might say that’s akin to child abuse! (And the chief reason one wouldn’t say that is because legally, it is.
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Descriptively-Named Species: Not commonly found among sophont species, who rarely feel the name to describe themselves and the convention being to transliterate their name as literally as possible, even if that occasionally leaves other species struggling to pronounce the correct vowel distinctions in sssc!haaaouĂş. More common in other lifeforms,
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Deep-Immersion Gaming: Sort of an inevitable consequence when the standard gaming rig involves full-sensory virtual reality of such quality as to be indistinguishable from reality, except for necessary departures of awesome. Although most people put together more imaginative avatars than looks-just-like-themselves. (Now, the real deep-immersion gaming comes when you add