X Universe / Tropes S to Z

Tropes 0 to F | Tropes G to L | Tropes M to R | Tropes S - Z | X: Beyond the Frontier | X: Rebirth

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The X series through Albion Prelude provides examples of the following tropes:

S

• Sacrificial Lamb: In Terran Conflict, Jesan Nadina is a mercenary fighter pilot who brings the player aboard for Operation Final Fury, a privately funded effort to finish off the Kha'ak before they can mount another invasion. He is killed in action offstage two missions into the plot.
• Sapient Cetaceans: The X-Encyclopedia mentions the Wenendra, a sapient whale race on one of the Boron planets. Its location is a state secret for said cetaceans' protection.
• Sapient Ship: Terraformer CPU ships.
• Save-Game Limits / Save Token: Until you buy Salvage Insurance, you can only save when docked at stations. Salvage Insurance lets you save anywhere, but each time you save, you use up one Salvage Insurance. The player is also limited to ten save slots (and 3 autosave slots, which are made when you dock at stations).
• Save Scumming: Almost a requirement when attempting to board enemy capital ships. Especially Xenon ships, where The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard — to the point where there is an achievement for capturing a Xenon frigate, something that people spend hours training their marines for.
• Scenery Porn: Massive planets, huge stations, sleek spaceships... let's face it: the latest installments are Crysis IN SPACE. Even better in X Rebirth.
• Schematized Prop: Every ware has a very detailed preview shown in the freight window, and some of them have in-depth descriptions as to its function or how it's made. Advertising signs that one can sometimes find outside of stations show schematized hamburgers, foodstuffs, and satellites.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty:
  • The "Difficulty" shown on mission menus is based on your combat rank, and often seems completely random. At higher level combat ranks, an escort mission with a difficulty of "Easy" might end up spawning dozens of enemy frigates to kill a single freighter. Said freighter will outrun your own capital ships, forcing you into corvettes or fast frigates instead of a proper destroyer needed to deal with the swarms of enemies.
    • Yet another reason why players avoid escort missions like the plague.
  • Any "Covert Operation" mission that involves the target traveling through a Xenon-infested sector: the robots will either kill you or kill your target and cause you to fail the mission. Thanks to this, CO missions are the second most hated missions among players next to Escort Missions.
  • In-Sector versus Out-Of-Sector combat, particularly in Terran Conflict. To save on processing power, OOS reduces combat to ships taking turns firing a single, point-blank^note 650 meters or thereabouts volley from all guns at once at a single target. All other variables (area-of-effect, weapons recharge, and so on) are taken out of the equation. This skews combat in favor of Wave Motion Guns to the point where recommended loadouts are often drastically different for IS and OOS. OOS is also skewed in favor of weight of numbers, to the point where a mob of M5 Jaguars can kill an M2 Python with about 20% casualties, something that Artificial Stupidity makes impossible IS. Albion Prelude rewrites the algorithm to make OOS and IS results match up better.
  • Even scripted plot missions follow no clear difficulty slope. A combat mission with a supporting NPC squad against a pack of heavy fighters and a frigate can be easily followed by a "patrol" mission on your lonesome against several heavy carriers. And then it's back to killing fighter squads again.
• Scientific and Technological Theme Naming: The X-Universe series Terraformer ships use a hexadecimal string (#deca, #fade, #cefa).
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • In all the games, maps are at most hundreds of kilometers across (I'm looking at you, Sol System). But the ships are so horrendously slow that they actually require a Time Dilation device to cross them in a reasonable amount of time. Unless the kilometer was redefined at some point, this suggests spaceships in the game are far, far slower than they have any right to be — raising the interesting question of how any of the spacefaring races actually managed to become spacefaring races when they don't seem to have any ships that come anywhere near escape velocity for a planet with a mass similar to Earth. Some of the slowest ships can actually be outrun by a basic passenger car, and that's before you account for air friction, making you wonder why the races in the setting even bother with spaceships for gate travel — they could set up a cable/rail/something public transit network, or tow the gates closer together and build a single space station around them. Oh, and your ability to hail other ships and stations is cut off abruptly at 25 kilometers.
  • Shipboard weapons and shields are much weaker than anything in a sci-fi setting has a right to be. Most transport ships and fighters as of Terran Conflict have no more than about 100 megajoules of shielding. Burning a gallon of gasoline releases about 130 MJ. There is, of course, a difference between releasing 130 MJ over the course of burning a gallon of gasoline, and releasing it all at once, but the point remains. A somewhat better comparison: 1 MJ is about the energy released by a current-generation hand grenade. No M5 has more than 5 MJ of shields. The most powerful weapon in the game, the nuclear-tipped Hammerhead missile, releases 1.2 gigajoules (enough to destroy fighter swarms and all but one M6). By contrast, Little Boy, the nuclear fission bomb that demolished Hiroshima in 1945, released somewhere between 54 and 75 terajoules (at least 45,000 times more). The major powers of the X-Universe would lose to modern-day Earth.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: High reputation with a race lets you get away with an absurd amount of murders. You can capture their flagship, murder the crew, then sell the fighter pilots into slavery, and you'll often take only a minor reputation hit unless you started slaughtering everything else in the sector.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Some user-made scripts allow you to bribe enemy ships to make them neutral.
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: Hard to avoid when the range of the longest-ranged anticapital gun is only two to three times longer than the ship is, and that the effective range is often a kilometer or so shorter. Missile frigates can blow away large targets from nearly 80 kilometers away, but thanks to the sensor range cap, typical engagement range is about 30 km unless you use another ship as a spotter.
• Self-Deprecation: The achievement for getting 2 billion credits in X3: Albion Prelude is called "It Was About Time!" in reference to the fact that the player's bank account had been previously capped at that level to some players' annoyance.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Earth State is rabidly anti-AGI (even having an entire fleet dedicated to hunting down AGI producers) after their artificially intelligent terraforming fleet went haywire and started "terraforming" inhabited space stations and planets, nearly destroying human civilization. When Earth is reunited with its Lost Colony, the Argon Federation several centuries later, the Argon Federation doesn't show the same aversion to AGI testing that the Earth State shows. Therefore, Earth's United Space Command and AGI Task Force begins to implant spies into the Argon government to steer them away from reverse-engineering Xenon AGI. The Argon Federation finds out and is unsurprisingly very angry, then surprisingly, blows up the Earth's Torus Aeternal killing millions with de-orbiting debris, then declares war while intensify their AGI research to make up for the Terran technology being far in advance of anything possessed by the Argon. The Terrans begin to lose the war against the AGI Zerg Rushes and are pushed back to Earth, which is only saved by the Ancients shutting down the Portal Network to stop the genocide and to stop the spread of the now-uncontained Xenon fleets.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Experienced players often set these for themselves. They range from "I'm only allowed to use one faction's ships" to Pacifist Runs to going to war with a faction to wipe them out.
  • Nuklear-Slug wrote a thread about the exploits of Squiddy McSquid, a Boron playthrough whose Self-Imposed Challenge was to fly his starting ship deep into Terran space, then set the self-destruct and eject. He then floated his way to a shipyard to buy himself a new ship and started from there.
  • StarSword made it a goal to build an impenetrable blockade against all Xenon sectors, a strategy that involved devoting a considerable percentage of his profitsss to the construction and equipment of Osaka destroyers.
  • Spaceweed Adict wrote a thread chronicling a war he waged against the Terrans. He succeeded in taking and holding every sector save Earth, where The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Arguably the Terran Conflict. As the Argon start The Big Push into Sol, the Ancients shut down the whole gate network to corral the Xenon, leaving everyone in the known universe trapped where they are.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: The Paranid ships are basically flying mirrors, and the Terran ships are blindingly white, more so if you have Glow/Bloom enabled in the options.
• Short Titles: A single character! As such, the series is usually called the X-Universe, or the name of the latest numbered version (X3).
• Shout-Out:
  • Almost all of the Aldrin sectors in the Xtended Terran Conflict mod are named after the Apollo program astronauts - (Buzz) Aldrin, (Neil) Armstrong, (Pete) Conrad, (Dick) Gordon, (Alan) Bean. This is an expansion on the planets in Aldrin and Aldrin 2 in basic TC being Aldrin and Armstrong.
  • The X3: Albion Prelude achievement for forcing another pilot to eject is "It's Cold Outside". This may be a Red Dwarf reference.
  • The sector Black Hole Sun shares its name with a song by Soundgarden.
  • Ringo Moon, one of the core Argon sectors, is named after Ringo Starr, and according to the lore, the planet it orbits is called Sergeant Pepper, and the other moons of it are named after the rest of The Beatles.
  • In German, the sector "President's End" is named "Trantor"
  • During the Aldrin Plot, you talk with a Terran called Gen. Don Hammond. Said plot is about exploring new sectors as Terrans rediscover old Jumpgates near Aldrin.
• Sinister Geometry: Where fighters used by the other factions look airplane-like to varying degrees, Khaak fighters are sets of tetrahedrons in various combinations (fighter, interceptor, scout). Their space stations are clusters of dodecahedrons on sticks, and their capital ships have spider-like arms around a spherical core. Then there's their stationary defense platforms.
• Sink the Lifeboats: The AI will shoot at the player if he ejected from his ship, and tries to spacewalk to safety. In Xtended Terran Conflict, the player can shoot down the escape pods that flee from destroyed capital ships and corvettes, though you don't accomplish much of value by doing it.
• Snipe Hunt/Urban Legend of Zelda: New players are often recommended to find the elusive UFO base, the source of the UFOs that players sometimes see flying around at high speeds. The UFO base allegedly sells every ware in the game (and especially the ones not in the game) and all ships at dirt cheap prices.
• Space Battle: Ohh, maaan. Despite frequent cases of Artificial Stupidity, the games feature some spectacular fights. Special mention to the Battle of Aldrin (end of the Terran plot), Operation Final Fury, and the Aldrin Expansion in TC.
• Space Clouds: Very dense nebulae show up in many sectors - in some sectors, visibility is less than 10 kilometers. Albion Prelude gets rid of most of the visibility restrictions on nebulae, instead making it an atmospheric effect that doesn't limit your vision. The nebulae have no effect on your ship's sensors.
• Space Cold War: Terran Conflict. The Terrans distrust the Argon, and the Argon fear the Terrans' extremely advanced technology. Goes hot when the Argon blow up the jewel of the Solar System, Earth's Torus Aeternal, in Albion Prelude.
• Space Elves: Concept art for the Split in the X-Encyclopedia gives them a strong resemblance (though the guy who designed the in-game character portraits apparently didn't get the memo). One forum thread speculated that it hearkens back to the original Germanic myths that inspired the Tolkien elf, but there's no official word on the subject.
• Space Fighter: All the races have their own set of Space Fighters. They have good speed, decent cargo bay, and can operate autonomously without the need for refueling or pilot rest. Most of the game starts have you start out in a fighter of some sort. Space Fighters come in several flavors:
  • M3+ Heavy Fighter: Like the M3, but slower with more guns and shields.
  • M3 Fighters: The most well rounded and arguably the most useful. They have good cargo capacity, mediocre speed, good firepower, and good protection, with the ability to mount jumpdrives.
  • M4+ Heavy Interceptors: Like M4s, but with a bit more firepower at the cost of speed. Bridges the gap between the M3 and M4
  • M4 Interceptors: Midway point between M3s and M5s. They don't have much firepower, but they have good speed and can mount jumpdrives.
  • M5 Scouts: Pathetic firepower and shielding, but ridiculously fast top speeds. Only a few are capable of mounting jumpdrives.
• Space Friction: The universe has the viscosity of maple syrup.
  • Most Boron sectors also have the visibility of maple syrup.
• Space Is an Ocean:
  • Normally avoided apart from Space Friction and Space Clouds, but there is the odd quirk that the majority of capital ships have their anticapital guns on the forward and flank batteries, with the flak guns above, below, and astern. Certain forum members also have a tendency to use nautical terms like port and starboard.
  • Also avoided in that the Terrans use army ranks for their space forces instead of navy. Kyle Brennan, the Player Character of X: Beyond the Frontier, holds the rank of Major, while X3: Terran Conflict's Terran plot has you working under the overall command of General Ishiyama.
• Space Is Cold: Albion Prelude has a Steam achievement titled "It's Cold Outside" for forcing another pilot to eject.
• Space Is Noisy: Weapons and explosions make noise (and a lot of it, too).
  • In a minor case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, the opening cinematic for Terran Conflict is silent.
• Space Madness: Flavor text for the Oort Cloud in Terran Conflict mentions that those who work there sometimes fall victim to "Oort's Curse", a madness with no known cause or cure.
• Space Marines: Starting with Terran Conflict, you can train these as units for boarding ships, and can only use them while piloting an M7M ship; the thing is, you're going to have to devote yourself spending hours in real time to get them trained to five-stars, because due to how the RNG works in boarding operations, especially against Xenon ships, you're very likely to lose your marines and have all that time spent on training wasted in one fell swoop.
• Space Mines: In several flavors. SQUASH mines are your standard explosive mines, Ion mines deal damage only to shields, Tracker Mines... track stuff, and Matter/Antimatter mines are like SQUASH mines but with more boom. Except that in the game there is no difference between all of them beyond the name. None. One of the most effective tactics with mines is to get a huge swarm of enemies chasing you, drop all the mines, and order one of the mines to self-destruct. Big bada boom.
• Space Navy: The Terran United Space Command and the AGI Task Force, its special forces equivalent. All of the Commonwealth races as well as the space-based MegaCorps have their own Space Navies for self-defense and empowerment.
• Space Pirates: Swarms of them, and they have space flamethrowers. The Pirates paint up their ships with spiffy flame paint jobs and graffiti, then start slapping on all sorts of weapons on them, such as the aforementioned flamethrower. Some of their communication portraits even have the stereotypical eye-patch. Composed of all the races (yes, even the Boron and Paranids. Except for the Terrans, who remain vehemently isolationist, and the Xenon/Kha'ak, who both operate as a Hive Mind bent on destroying anything that isn't them).
• Space Police: All the main races have Border Patrol and Police ships. They buzz about, scanning ships for contraband, and they harass pirates (and lose terribly, because they have peashooter weapons.)
• Space Station: Loads and loads of them. There's mines, factories, solar power plants, military bases, shipyards, and warehouses, to name a few. And the player can build and own most of them.
  • They're the only thing in any of the games that the player can actually land at. Which sort of justifies the fact that none of the ships can reach escape velocity (as mentioned above).
• Space Whale:
  • Well, space flies, actually. Think golden insectoid Energy Beings which communicate through birdsong.
  • Xtended Terran Conflict adds several new life forms; a Space Dragon, a space rock-eating beetle thing, and space jellyfish that feed on energy cells.
• Spam Attack: Fighter drone swarms. The player gathers hundreds or thousands of fighter drones into a freighter, flies into a enemy sector, drops every one of them into space and orders all of them to attack enemy capital ships. For the enemy, this counts as an almost-instant game over.
• Spare Body Parts: Paranid have from 1 to 4 eyes (this even determines status and rank in their culture). Many of the Paranid the player talks to have 4 eyes in the communications video, however.
• Special Effect Branding: Ships and weapons follow this. Every faction that builds ships does it differently. For example, Teladi love ballistic weapons and have yellow, junkyard-esque ships,while Terrans fire brilliant white electromagnetic plasma bolts from their blindingly white ships. Each race has their own set of ships, and as of Terran Conflict, their own unique weapon set, which typically only usable by their own ships and their allies - Argon and Boron, Paranid and Split. Teladi buy their stuff from everyone, so they can mount schizophrenic loadouts. Terrans are independent, and cannot use any non-Terran weapons in their ships. However, there are generic weapons that can be used by any race, such as plasma throwers or photon pulse cannons.
  • Argon fighters look vaguely like diesel punk fighter jets (M3 Nova), while the capital ships are gray and boxy (M1 Colossus).
  • Boron ships are bright green and organic-looking, resembling fanciful sea creatures (M7 Thresher).
  • Paranid ships are grayish purple with lots of sweeping curves (M1 Zeus).
  • Split ships are rusty red with lots of sharp edges and flat panels (M7 Panther).
  • Teladi fighters are basically bluish slabs of metal with stubby wings (M3 Falcon Hauler), while the capitals are frequently likened to "flying junkyards" (M1 Condor).
  • Terran fighters resemble space shuttles (M3+ Cutlass), while the capital ships are big, white, boxy contraptions (M2 Osaka).
  • ATF ships tend to be spiky and angular, with lots of silvery gray (M1 Odin).
  • Kha'ak fighters are purple and pyramid-shaped (M4 Interceptor), while the capitals resemble giant insects (M1 Carrier).
  • Xenon ships are gray and boxy with Spikes of Villainy (M2 K).
• Spectacular Spinning:
  • One forum member discovered that corkscrewing, or flying in a spiral by putting his joystick to the stops on all three axes, was a pretty effective evasive maneuver in a fighter. He was even able to survive a mob of Kha'ak fighters in a Split Mamba Vanguard.
  • Many ship models have spinning components, just because. Some (like on the OTAS M2 Boreas) are justified by looking like sensor dishes, or by being an engine turbine in the case of the Boron Megalodon.
  • Back in the days of the first game, both the Terran capital ship you start from and the planet-killer you have to destroy in the endgame have unreasonably huge spinning parts for no observable reason.
• Spikes of Villainy: Xenon capital ships typically have dozens of spike-like antennas scattered across the surface of the black and red hull. Split capital ships also have a large mass of spike-like antenna mounted on the nose of the ship.
• Spiritual Successor: The series has been described as one to Elite and Privateer.
• Splash Damage Abuse: Area of Effect weapons deal damage based on how many of their damage "squares" touch enemy ships. In other words, larger ships take exponentially more damage than a small ship. As such, capital ships take absurd amounts of damage from Phased Shockwave Generators. The good news is, PSG are strictly short-range weapons (as well as capital-only from Terran Conflict on), so unless the player is at the controls of the PSG-armed ship, a ship with dedicated anticapital guns (PSPs or PPCs) can keep them at arm's length long enough for this trope not to matter.
• Squid People: The Boron.
• Squishy Wizard: M8 Bombers and M7M Missile Frigates. Both have mediocre/bad amounts of shielding (for their size), mediocre speed, and pathetic point defenses (Boron M7Ms don't have any point defenses). However, both have the amazing ability to put out hundreds (or in the case of the frigate, thousands) of missiles which can easily wipe out sectors.
• Sssssnake Talk: The Teladi, full stop.
• Stalking Mission: One of the optional, randomly generated missions that players can take in Terran Conflict. A few pop up during the game plots, but they're usually mercifully short.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Scouts, Interceptors, Fighters, Corvettes, Frigates, Bombers, Destroyers, Carriers, and 4 different types of freighters (Space Trucker, Space Yacht, giant freighter that can carry entire stations, and freighters with most of the cargo bay ripped out fighter docking ports).
• Standard Sci-Fi History: The X-Universe has gone through The Cycle of Empire twice. In both cases, the Decline and Fall was due to somebody creating artificial general intelligence. The first time around, the Terrans nearly destroyed themselves, only surviving because the commander of their space navy lured the terraformers through the Earth jumpgate, which was destroyed behind them. The survivors of said commander's fleet created a new civilization in the X-Universe, the Argon Federation. In the 2940s, under threat from Earth, the Argon created AGI warships and unleashed them on the Terrans, sparking an interstellar war that forced the Community of Planets the Argon were a part of to divert the military forces holding the terraformers (now called the Xenon) at bay. The Xenon went out of control, forcing the Ancients to shut down the jumpgate system. This caused Galactic/Societal Collapse. X: Rebirth is set during the Interregnum about thirty years later.
• Standard Time Units: Many in the Community of Planets use "Zuran Time", the time measures used by the Teladi, named after their homeworld, Zura. It is measured in Sezuras (1.7 seconds) Mizuras (96 Sezuras; 2 minutes and 43 seconds) Stazuras (96 Mizuras; 4 hours and 21 minutes) Tazuras (7 Stazuras; 1.27 days) Wozuras (7 Tazuras; 8.89 days) Mazuras (7 Wozuras; 62.23 days) and Jazuras (8 Mazuras; 1.36 years). Many players did not like this, so X3: Reunion has a ratio to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) units used in Real Life.
  • In Terran Conflict, the "Zuran Time" system was dropped in favor of the Argon/Terran time units.
    • The XTC Mod (Xtended for Terran Conflict) brought it back again.
• Starfish Aliens:
  • The Boron◊. They're aquatic, squid-like aliens whose home planet has an atmosphere of ammonia.
  • The Kha'ak are so alien that the Commonwealth races are physically incapable of communicating with them. They're Bee People that have characteristics of both birds and insects, are roughly 75 centimeters in size, and communicate by gestures and pheromones.
  • The Encyclopedia mentions that the Ancients cut off aliens that are starfish to each other, presumably for their own safety. One species known as the "Won" is given as an example; apparently somewhat close to Earth, but completely cut-off from the jumpgate network due to being utterly incompatible with all other forms of life. Their reasoning turns out to be well-founded: the Kha'ak slipped through the Ancients' safeguards by unexpectedly inventing Gateless Jumpdrives, and look how well that turned out.
• Starfish Language/The Unpronounceable: "Boron" bears no relation whatsoever to what the native sentient race of Nishala actually calls itself. That would be kind of difficult when you consider that the Boron language consists mostly of clicks and pheromones. Similarly humans can only approximate Paranid words because our vocal structures are different (Paranids have 3 larynxes, and use all three of them at once to speak their tongue. However, Paranids are perfectly able to speak the Argon/Terran languages). The Split are close enough physiologically to humans that we can speak the spoken language, but the sign language that complements it requires six digits on each hand, which is a very rarely functional mutation in humans.
• Starter Equipment: The different game starts available from X3: Reunion and later games change your default starting ship, gear, and reputation. Typically, you're given either a M5 scout ship (a Discoverer in X2), M4 interceptor (a Buster in Reunion, an Elite in X4's Argon start), or a TS small freighter, along with a small amount of credits, a few guns, and poor or neutral reputation with the various races. Terran Conflict offers a few better-equipped starts, such as the Bankrupt Assassin, who starts off with a M3 fighter (a Split Mamba), or the Terran Defender, who gets a M4+ heavy interceptor. Albion Prelude goes even more extreme, with Terran start start off with a Katana and 200k credits in bank.
• Static Stun Gun: The Ion Disruptor will temporarily stun any Spaceflies hit by its arcing lightning long enough to be scooped up and sold to the Split to power their ships
• Strawman News Media: All of the race specific news sources in Xtended Terran Conflict have a dose of this, but it's most readily apparent in the Terran and Aldrin news sources, which are essentially flanderized Fox News in space. The Terran news source constantly reports on how inferior the Aldrin colonies are, and the Aldrins report that the Aldrin military is the most well trained in the universe.
• Stupid Evil: Pirates will try to blow up pretty much every ship that enters their sector, even if said ship is trying to sell much-needed resources to Pirate stations.
• Stupid Sacrifice:
  • Bret Serra does one at the end of X2: The Threat, who rams the Kha'ak doomsday weapon to destroy it. All well and good, except that his kamikaze run doesn't seem quite as noble when you've got three capital ships, laden with multiple Wave Motion Guns and entire squadrons of fighters, sitting in firing range.
    • Or, y'know, if it wasn't actually possible to remotely control any ship you own even while extra-vehicular. Sure, by all means send your ship to its destruction, but there's nothing in the rules that states you have to be in the damn thing, y'know.
  • Saya Kho's destruction of the Torus - the colossal ring station around the entirety of Earth - in Albion Prelude intro may arguably fall into this category from a political standpoint. The Argon and Terrans are locked into a cold war with localized conflicts. The Torus was a hybrid military and civilian installation, providing defence for Earth, but it did not threaten Argon interests directly. Blowing it up constitutes something between Hiroshima bombing and 9/11 in space, as it had a staggeringly high casualty rate among both military and civilian personnel, not to mention those killed by debris falling to Earth. Naturally, this incident became the spark for a full scale war. Saya Kho is previously portrayed in the series as a reasonable person and is said to show remorse for the deed (she could evacuate the Torus in time but chose not to), but no justification is provided for her deed, other than Fantastic Racism.
• Subspace Ansible: In addition to allowing starship travel, the jumpgate network acts like a subspace ansible, allowing lightspeed radio signals to travel across the galaxy fast enough for real time communication. (This is mainly because a sector's gates are rarely more than 100 kilometers apart.) The fact that this is not true FTL communication becomes a plot point: after the gate network shuts down following X3: Albion Prelude, interstellar communication in real time becomes impossible and all organized interstellar governments in the X-Universe^note except the Earth State, whose population is mainly confined to the Sol System break up instantly, although a couple have managed to pull themselves back together by the time of X4.
• Subspace or Hyperspace: Many ships make use of "subspace compression" to store vast amounts of stuff in relatively tiny spaces. Special life-support units can make it possible to store living creatures in this manner (otherwise the compression is instantly fatal), but it's nevertheless quite unpleasant.
• Subsystem Damage: Ships with critically damaged hulls will have their on-board cannons, missiles, cargo, and software suites destroyed. Some weapons are designed specifically to do this, such as the Ion Disruptor.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Any ship will attack you if you shoot it, even if you're in a superheavy prototype fighter and they're a tiny scout craft whose weapons caress your armor more than they hurt it. This can scale up to hilarious levels, with light fighters attacking your capital ship. For the Xenon and the Kha'ak, it's nothing but pure instinct; for non-Xenon/Kha'ak pilots, they act like they want to be the biggest badasses around by thinking they'll overcome any odds and any opposition while smugly taunting their opponents at the same time.
• Super-Persistent Missile: Unless they're of the unguided dumbfire variety, missiles will always continue to pursue their targets, so long as they have fuel. The only way to stop a missile is to shoot it down or outrun it. Missile Frigates fire especially long-ranged missiles which are Robo Teching, recursive, and will target new enemies upon the destruction of their original target; which can lead to fighter craft spinning around wildly, attempting to avoid the hundreds of missiles spinning around them furiously and attempting to out-turn the fighter.
• Super Prototype: "Prototype" ships in Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude are almost always superior in almost every way to the standard production models. They can only be gained by capturing them, or by doing plots (such as the Corporation missions). Their rarity and power are usually handwaved as being too costly for mass production. In practice, despite their rarity, they actually can be reverse-engineered in the Player Headquarters, contrary to what most players think. The only problem after reverse-engineering these ships is the humongous amount of resources needed to produce a single ship, and depending on the ship it will take about more than a full day in real time to both reverse-engineer and construct it, which proves the 'too costly' explanation is more than just a handwave.
  • The Prototype Terran weapons built by the Aldrin colony, on the other hand, are actually inferior to the mass-produced (and more advanced) versions.
• Superweapon Surprise:
  • The Boron Campaign, the first time the Commonwealth governments had a full-scale war. The Split invaded Boron space and pushed the squids all the way back to their homeworld Kingdom End. Then the Argon, needing a new ally after having a falling-out with the Paranid, came to the aid of the Boron, throwing most of their fleet at the Split and driving them back.
  • By the time of the games, the Boron have become respectably badass by necessity. It's not uncommon to see a Split strike force enter a Boron sector and promptly get shredded.
  • The Paranid in Reunion build a jumpgate in Heretic's End. When an enormous Kha'ak fleet comes into the sector they activate it and run, resulting in a Terran fleet coming through and stomping the Kha'ak.
• Suppressed History: the Argon Federation erased all records of the period prior to 0 NT (2170 AD) and presumably created a new history to replace it, in order to keep anyone from leading the Xenon back to Earth. Earth eventually became a fairy tale kept alive by the Goners, a pacifist fringe sect, who were proved right in X: Beyond the Frontier when a Terran test pilot suffered a jumpdrive malfunction and landed in the X-Universe. Nathan R. Gunne himself disagreed with this, and opposed it until his death in 45 NT/2215.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The "Mercenary" Information Network in Xtended routinely puts out articles like "How to set up your base" or "How to spot a good haul", with a vehement denial written at the bottom of every article stating that they are not telling you how to set up a Pirate Base / Pleasure Palace, how to raid traders, or how to spot police informers.

T

• Take That!: Xtended Terran Conflict's in-universe news system has a report on a new cult of Split who believe that "The Eve" is coming, which will cause the collapse of all governments and cause people to begin to constantly murder and backstab each other with no second thought. The newscaster calls it crazy.
  • This becomes an amusing Brick Joke in X: Rebirth where the new cult turns out to have been correct.
• Target Spotter: In Terran Conflict and beyond, M7Ms' Macross Missile Massacre has a range of a little less than 80 kilometers, but the ship's sensor range, even with the best scanners available, is under 30 klicks. To get maximum range out of the missile frigate you need to use another player-owned object (ship, satellite, space station, whatever) as a spotter.
• Tele-Frag: Ships travel between different sectors of space through jumpgates. Jumpgates are two-way, meaning that ships both enter and leave sectors from them. Meaning, you can use your jumpdrive to jump to a distant sector for a mission... right as a five-kilometer-long vessel is entering the jumpgate's event horizon (where you are). The Terran sectors in X3: Terran Conflict are notorious for this, as they have very active military patrols which fly between the smaller Terran gates very often. The gates do have some "traffic light" code in the later games that queues up incoming ships so they can fly through safely, but it only works for the player if you're traveling through the gate on autopilot.
• Teleportation: A couple different varieties:
  • The Portal Network allows interstellar travel.
  • Ships can be equipped with a Transporter Device that allows you to transfer people and cargo from one ship to another (provided they're no more than five kilometers apart) without needing to dock both ships at a station. X4 takes this even further, allowing the player to teleport to ships in other star systems.
• Teleport Spam: Possible in the Xtended Terran Conflict mod for... Terran Conflict. Battleships / Motherships (M2+) mount Point-To-Point jumpdrives, which lets them jump anywhere in a sector after 10 seconds of charging. This allows players with enough energy cells to jump in circles around enemy ships, whittling them down while taking almost no damage. The Xenon and the Kha'ak developed the technology on their own, and the Gateless Jumpdrives the X, the Getsu Fune, the AP Hammer, and the AP Providence had were all reverse-engineered or modified Xenon Jumpdrives.
• Theme Naming: Nearly all ships oddly use names from Earth mythology, biology, or geography. In X: Rebirth, this is explained to be the case because alien ship names seen in-game are actually monikers devised by the Argon military not unlike NATO reporting names, not the true denominations in the original languages. For example, the real name of the Split Raptor-class carrier is revealed to be the much less picturesque "Gangrene Chaser". The full list of naming conventions is as follows:
  • ATF (Terran): Norse mythology e.g. Thor, Odin
  • Argon (Other humans): Fighters appear unthemed; mostly Greek mythology for everything else, with non-frigate capital ships being giant beings (e.g. Colossus, Mammoth, Minotaur); a few miscellaneous ones use Stellar Names (e.g. Eclipse, Magnetar)
  • Boron: Aquatic organisms e.g. Barracuda, Shark
  • OTAS: Greek wind gods and regional winds e.g. Boreas, Venti, Mistral
  • Paranid: Greek gods, demigods and heroes e.g. Perseus, Zeus
  • Pirate: Age of Sail vessel classes e.g. Brigantine, Galleon.
  • Split: Land animals, often predators and/or reptiles e.g. Python, Tiger
  • Teladi: Flying creatures, primarily birds e.g. Condor, Falcon, Kestrel
  • Terraformers: Hexadecimal numbers e.g. #deca (57,034 in base 10), #cefa (52,986)
  • USC (Terran): Swords for fighters, Japanese cities for capital ships e.g. Cutlass, Gladius, Tokyo, Osaka
  • Xenon: Letters e.g. J, L
  • Yaki: Japanese Shinto deities and demons e.g. Susanowa, Akuma, Moreya, Kuraokami.
  • A few races (specifically the Argon, Boron, and Xenon) share names with chemical elements, but it is only a coincidence in-universe.
  • It applies to missiles too:
    • Commonwealth: Insects (e.g. Mosquito, Hornet) or weather-related (e.g. Thunderbolt, Typhoon, Firestorm).
    • Kha'ak: Pointy things (Sting, Needle, and Thorn), referencing their insectoid nature.
    • Terran: Mythological ghostly beings (Poltergeist, Ghoul, Spectre, Phantom, and Wraith), with the exception of the Shadow (which anyway could refer to a Living Shadow).
• The Theocracy: The Godrealm of the Paranid is ruled by the Pontifex Maximus Paranidia, with each Paranid settlement having its own Priest Duke.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: The Boron are a pacifistic race (though not in the same manner as the Goners), but due to constant conflict with the Split, they've taken a slightly more militant yet defensive stance in their culture. If they get threatened with death, they will not hesitate to pay back their offenders with the same price, all in the name of peace and their Queen.
• Time Dilation: Every ship can mount a "Singularity Engine Time Accelerator" which can speed up the flow of time up to 10x, depending on the game settings. Activating the device at high settings is heavy on the CPU and tends to cause Artificial Stupidity.
  • In in-game lore, malfunctioning SETA drives can supposedly crank up the effect to several thousand times normal speed: back in the days of X2 and X3 when stations had bulletin boards that featured news articles, one story covered a pilot who lost a year's worth of time when his SETA device went haywire and took several hours for him to shut down.
• Time Skip: All sequels skip some time to show the advances of technology:
  • X: Beyond the Frontier was set in 742 NT (New Time, the Argon time measure)/2912 EY (Earth Years, used by the Terrans).
  • Its standalone expansion, X-Tension was set in 743 NT/2913 EY
  • X2: The Threat in 764 NT/2934 EY
  • X3: Reunion in 765 NT/2935 EY
  • X3: Terran Conflict in 768 NT/2938 EY
  • X3: Albion Prelude in 778 NT/2948 EY
  • X: Rebirth in 803 NT/2973 EY
  • X4: Foundations in 825 NT/2995 EY
• Timed Mission: Most missions have a time limit of some sort, after which they fail automatically.
• Too Awesome to Use: The X Shuttle is available in X-Tension and in Terran Conflict. It's one of very few ships that cannot be reverse engineered at the Player HQ of the latter. You'll fly it around the universe once, then park it someplace safe and never touch it again.
  • Or, you can invert this trope and use it as your personal fighter like some players do. After all, compared to other heavy fighters, it's very fast, heavily shielded, and has a large cargobay. Not to mention the compatibility with the Pulsed Beam Emitter.
• Took a Level in Badass: Each race's military in Albion Prelude. In previous games, they'd sort of ignore the player unless he got very close to them. In Albion, they'll jump around the universe to respond to threats to their space. If you jump into a Split system and start blasting civilian ships and the stations, they'll send ships to kill you. The more damage you cause, the more likely they'll send something big to kill you, like a destroyer, or in the Terrans' case, the ATF Valhalla or USC Kyoto.
• Too Dumb to Live: Ships generally take the shortest route to their destination. Even if said route lies directly through a Xenon sector and they don't have a jumpdrive to hop over it with.
• Tractor Beam: In X3: Reunion and later games, tractor beams are a player-usable weapon, used mainly for towing ships and moving stations around. In a symptom of those games' broken economy, the factories that create them sometimes disappear before the player can buy one, forcing one to build a factory for an item the player only ever needs one of.
  • Interestingly, tractor beams are programmed to be incapable of locking onto non-player-owned objects. This is mainly to prevent the obvious exploit where the player drags enemy vessels into stationary objects like asteroids. This restriction can be modded out.
• Translation Convention: All the races speak in Neo-Japanese (it's written backwards), but the player hears them as English (or whatever language they have selected).
• Tron Lines: Pirate Buzzards have orange neon lights lining the hull panels. All Kha'ak ships have purple glowing lines in their surface, especially the fighters.
• Try and Follow: A decent pilot with a small enough ship can invoke this trope. Simply fly through tight gaps in space stations (the bigger the station, the better), or (if the opportunity presents itself) make like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back and fly through an Asteroid Thicket. The AI's collision avoidance software will force your pursuers to give the obstacles a wider berth, while you open the gap.
• 20 Bear Asses: One category of missions for the corporations randomly picks up to three types of missiles for you to deliver to them. About half the possible missiles are only available as random drops from destroyed ships.

U

• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The starship race course in X3: Reunion's plot, which in early versions was extremely buggy and difficult. As of the final patch, it's still a pain in the ass because the NPCs are able to fly the course flawlessly every time. Reunion also has an on-rails mission set on the planet Sandwell, where the player uses a hilariously overpowered cannon to blast the Yaki ships chasing them through a futuristic city.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Put only five energy cells in your cargo bay and fire the Unfocused Jumpdrive. Then blow up the crate of energy cells the devs stuck in the random sector for exactly that eventuality. You are now trapped GoD-only-knows-where with no way back home.
• Unique Enemy: The Hyperion corvette and Agamemnon frigate in Terran Conflict only spawn once, and are both very potent ships in their class. The only way to acquire them is to board them with marines. In-universe, their rarity is attributed to them being one-off prototypes whose production was killed off due a recession. Several other unique ships only spawn once, like the ATF Vidar, but they are typically rewards given to the player. Xtended also has the Xenon Raven, which is a Pirate Tepukei frigate which has been converted to fire Xenon weapons, with the flame paintjob replaced by a gray fuselage lined with glowing red lines. The Raven only spawns once, deep in Xenon sectors, making it extraordinarily difficult to capture.
• Universal Driver's License: Kyle Brennan in X-Tension and all player characters after him (Except for Ren Otani) are capable of piloting almost anything they come across, be it a tiny scout ship, or a massive carrier.
• Unobtainium:
  • Nividium is a valuable mineral mined from certain asteroids (rumored to be fragments of the Kha'ak homeworld). What the NPCs use it for is unclear.
    • X: Rebirth reveals that Nividium is just a fancy space word for... Platinum.
  • Teladianium is a ceramic used mainly in structural components.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Orbital Weapon Platforms, AGI Task Force fighter craft, and Kha'ak capital ships cannot be acquired normally by the player; ATF ships never bail, and Kha'ak ships and weapon platforms cannot be boarded. Xenon and AGI Task Force capital ships in Reunion were impossible to capture normally as boarding did not exist at the time. Albion Prelude fixed the ATF issue by having all of their ships purchasable at Terran shipyards.
• Unwanted False Faith: During First Contact the Wenendra thought the Boron were at least affiliated with their creator deity, due largely to the Boron being Sufficiently Advanced Aliens compared to the primitive Wenendra. The Boron had some trouble convincing them this wasn't the case.
• Used Future: Many of the Teladi and Pirate capital ships ships as well as some Pirate stations are crude and worn-down in appearance, and some look like random bits and bobs and ship hulls were duct-taped together. (In the case of most pirate ships and stations, they actually are.) Argon fighters use this to a lesser extent, as most of them have rust spots (in space) and scorch marks from welding, despite being bought brand-new from a shipyard...

V

• Video Game Caring Potential: NPC raids on players' shipping lines have been known to spark a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the part of the player. (Granted, there's also a practical aspect to this: a ship that destroyed one of your ships will destroy others.)
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Lampshaded by Mahi Ma at the end of the Hub plot. Said Big Dumb Object lets players link up to three gate pairs at their discretion, which lets them shorten the voyage between major regions of their trade empire. It also lets them give four Xenon sectors free passage to a populated area.
  • If another pilot ejects from his/her ship (whether because you bought it from him/her, or because s/he offered his/her ship in exchange for you not finishing him off), they'll start floating towards the nearest space station in their spacesuits. You have the choice of leaving them alone, using them for target practice, or scooping them into your cargo bay and enslaving them at pirate bases.
  • A work-in-progress script allows you to utilize slaves for a variety of useful tasks, like ship repair. When they repair the ship, you eject the suited-up slaves into space, and they start repairing your ship with repair lasers - sometimes they'll break away and try to escape, and you can just slaughter them or kill them. You can extort slaves for money in exchange for their freedom - or you can just extort them, promising them freedom, then keep them anyways.
• Video Game Long-Runners: Eight games spanning two decades.
• Villain Protagonist: Foundations has no official goal for the player to work towards, but almost everything in it revolves around making as much money as possible. The most profitable venture is building shipyards and letting the AI empires build their ships there, most of which are warships. And what better way to boost warship sales than, y' know, war? How fortuitous that pretty much every plot line allows you to goad two or more factions into a vicious Forever War that'll make your bank account go supernova faster than you can blink. Nothing forces you to become the galaxy's worst war profiteer, but the game sure makes every attempt it can to push you into this profession.

W

• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Xenon squad at the end of the first mission of Terran Conflict's main plot seem to be there to show that, no, it is not a good idea to rush in and engage the enemy. The Xenon's powerful lasers can shred you in seconds, and its far better to stick with your squad and work together to defeat the enemy.
• The War of Earthly Aggression: The Second Terraformer War of Albion Prelude is the culmination of a decade of rising tensions between the Earth State and their long-lost brethren in the Argon Federation. Earth fears the Argon are researching artificial general intelligence, which caused the war that cut them off from each other in the first place, and deploy an extensive spy network into Community of Planets space with the intent of influencing the future course of their governments. The Argon discover it, see it as an act of war, and turn to AGI to give their navy a fighting chance against the Terrans, who have better ships. The Terrans send a fleet to the border, and the Argon use their AGI drones in a preemptive strike. Then, one year prior to Albion Prelude, an Argon Secret Service operative blows up the Torus Aeternal surrounding Earth to open the way for an invasion, killing millions of Terrans. Things go From Bad to Worse.
  ** Note most of this is All There in the Manual: in-game the Argon and Terrans seem like Designated Heroes and Villains respectively.
• War for Fun and Profit: Foundations has No Ending but a whole bunch of faction-specific mission chains, most of which can be used to goad the various factions into declaring war on at least one of their rivals, sometimes even on everyone else in the galaxy except the player's empire. If you play your cards right, you can get pretty much the entire galaxy to fight each other while you just happen to own several well-supplied shipyards ready and willing to supply warships and munitions to whoever is willing to pay for them...
• War Was Beginning: Terran Conflict's opening cinematic tells the roots of the titular Space Cold War. Albion Prelude's cinematic tells how the cold war turned hot.
• Warp Whistle: The Jumpdrive is a relatively expensive module fitted onto ships that allow them to jump to any known jump gates while expending some Energy Cells. The jumpdrive works anywhere and has a set charge time of ten seconds, though one should be aware that it can be destroyed if the ship's shields go down while trying to escape. The Unfocused Jumpdrive gained through the Goner plot will dump the player into a randomly generated sector in intergalactic space, giving them a breather from combat or allowing them to find the Goner Aran. The only limitation to the jumpdrive is that it cannot warp to Terran Trans-Orbital Accelerators, as they're glorified Gauss guns that shoot ships between points of interest in the Sol system. The Xtended Terran Conflict mod adds Point-To-Point jumpdrives for the M2+ super-destroyers which can jump anywhere in a system, but requires good relations with the sector's owners, locks the ship's controls for several seconds, and drains energy cells at a phenomenal rate.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Boron M7 Thresher can mount ten photon pulse cannons on its Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon slots. PPCs are normally mounted only on M1s and M2s. In OOS combat, this gives the Thresher absurd firepower since weapons energy is not an issue. IS, it's something of a Glass Cannon because the PPCs drain its energy fast, and the Thresher is larger than class average and has weaker-than-average shields.
  • The Terran Asgard battleship mounts a massive spinally mounted Death Ray that can melt capital ships and even space stations in no time at all, plus an assortment of smaller but still extremely powerful supporting bow guns.
• Weak Turret Gun: Lasertowers in Terran Conflict. In theory they can defend locations quite effectively: good range, very small target. In practice their DPS is comparable to heavy fighter lasers, and they traverse so slowly that they often can't target faster ships especially at close range. Couple this with their weak shields (bomber grade at best) and they're only effective in huge numbers, and then only during in-sector combat. They got a major buff in X3: Albion Prelude to make them useful in their intended role, at the cost of a lengthy setup time that makes them difficult to use in the alternate niche developed in TC: a Superweapon Surprise for pursuing ships.
• Weaponized Teleportation:
  • Stations pop out fully-built from TL ships - and always exactly where the player orders it built, regardless of distance. Cheap factories like Wheat Farms are commonly used to "station-bomb" enemy capital ships - by building the station inside the enemy. Foundations removed this tactic by making station modules take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to build, and only in a plot you own.
  • Because gates both receive and send ships through the same portal, one can easily wipe out entire squadrons of Pirates or race ships as they enter or leave a gate, by ordering a capital ship to jump through the gate right before the targets cross the event horizon, causing the ship to go barreling through the gate and telefrag anything in its way. Terran Conflict (thankfully) made this more difficult, as smaller ships approach from the rim of the gate rather than the center. In Foundations, XL ships always warp in behind or beside a gate while anything smaller exits from within the ring, making this a non-issue in this game as well.
• We Are as Mayflies: Varies by race. The X-Encyclopedia says the average Boron's life expectancy is about 35 years, whereas the average human, whether Argon or Terran, lives to about 110. The Split males generally don't live more than 50 years, whereas their womenfolk usually top 80. The Teladi average 250 years with the record being 400.^note The Teladi are actually functionally immortal, but tend to get tired of life around the middle of their second century and choose to die. No word on the Paranid.
• Welcome to Corneria: Non-plot NPCs regardless of race usually have one or two lines to communicate with the player when hostile. This can get rather annoying when you keep hearing the same lines over again when you attack them, especially if they're flying a capital ship and you keep pouring shots at them until they die.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The Teladi backed the creation of the unified currency between the Commonwealth races. Prior to that each race used its own currency. The Terrans presumably changed to credits between the events of X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict.
• What the Hell, Player?: Hit non-hostile ships or stations enough times (whether accidentally or on purpose) and the sector police will warn you that if you keep it up, they'll attack. Continue, and you'll get a message saying the Space Police are coming after you, after which The station or ship will turn hostile and the sector police will attack. This becomes fairly annoying during station defense missions, where friendly fire to the station you're protecting is a constant hazard.
  • And then you can usually prevent an encounter with the police by opening a comm channel with them and blaming the weapons' targetting system. Thankfully, stations gone hostile from friendly fire while you are protecting them become friendly after completing the mission.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Very wide open. So much so that the devs included options to disable the plot altogether, so the players can have their fun merely by interacting with the open universe. The X series is practically the very definition of this trope.
• With This Herring: The majority of the games start the player out in a poorly equipped (or just plain bad) ship, with a pittance of credits to your name.
  • Terran Conflict's Goner Witness starting scenario takes this to a ridiculous extreme. You start out in a Goner Ranger, the worst ship in the game, with 350 credits. Seriously.
• Word Salad Title: X3: Albion Prelude. "Albion" refers to the player ship of X: Rebirth, the Albion Skunk, while Prelude is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a prelude to the gate system shutdown that gave the dev team an excuse to do a major timeskip.
• Worker Unit: Transport (Small) and Transport (Large) are the basic workers for the player's empire once it's sufficiently built up. TS class ships (both the player's and the NPC traders) ferry wares between factories, are the only way to mine Nividium, and are the generally the best way to pick up salvage after a large battle. TL class ships are the only way to build space stations, though it's possible to hire a NPC TL to construct your stations for you. Both classes of ships can be armed - and with TLs, often decently - so it's possible to turn them into an Instant Militia if needed.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: The intro to the Encyclopedia says that it is designed to set the canon in stone. It does that for the most part but introduces a couple new problems. For example, page B-29 says that the Torus Aeternal was blown up in February 2948, then the next gorram page says the gate network shut down in December 2947. So either the Argon Fleet can teleport, or somebody got a date wrong.

X

• Xtreme Kool Letterz:
  • The 'X' stands for "Xperimental Shuttle," which was the name of your ship in the first game.
  • Many human names are recognizably modified from present-day names. One example from Terran Conflict is Jesan Nadina, whose first name appears derived from "Jason".
  • Torus Aeternal.
  • The ultimate combat rank is X-TREME, and likewise for the ultimate trading rank.
  • X-Tension.

Y

• Yakuza: The Yaki are heavily based off of them in-universe.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: The forums get a thread about these every so often, such as this one. Highlights include:
  • JoeVN09 ordering his passenger transport to "collect astronauts" after a boarding op, while he himself was EVA. The TP included him in "astronauts" and ran him over.
  • Spaceweed Adict heading off to board a Cobra missile frigate in another Cobra, and forgetting to equip it with shields.
  • StarSword accidentally station-bombing himself.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • Played straight for Terran test pilot Kyle Brennan (the Player Character) in X: Beyond the Frontier. He is stranded in the X-Universe after the prototype gateless jumpdrive on the Xperimental Shuttle goes haywire.
    • In X3: Reunion, three games and several dozen years later, the Solar System is reconnected to the X-Universe's Portal Network at the end of the main plot. By this time, Kyle Brennan has a grown son in the X-Universe, is a war hero, and is the head of a multibillion-credit company (Terracorp). At best, he'd likely be a Stranger in a Familiar Land.
    • According to the X-Encyclopedia, Kyle Brennan did eventually return to Earth, and tried to work towards improved diplomatic relations between the Terrans and Community of Planets. It didn't help much.
  • The Xtended Terran Conflict mod takes place in an entirely new gate system — the only preexisting sector is Aldrin. The Terrans allow races to send their ships into the gate system, but they refuse to let them go back to the original gate network. As such, every ship in the new gate system can't go home again.
• You Nuke 'Em: The Hammerhead missile is a miniaturized nuclear missile, which can be fired by any ship larger than an interceptor. It's the single most powerful weapon in the game (aside from the Torus defense cannons), and can be used to kill entire squadrons of enemy fighters or corvettes. The Hammerhead is balanced out by making only occasionally Random Drop from killed Pirate and Xenon fighters, and by making it extremely dangerous to fire at close range - one lucky shot from an enemy and you'll have a nuclear missile detonating 10 meters from the nose of your ship
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Wares can be broadly defined into Energy, Minerals, Bio, Food, Tech, Military (weapons, shields). There is also Secondary factories. Each race has their own unique Bio, Food, and Secondary wares, which are used by their own stations. Some Tech and Military factories are race-exclusive.
  • Energy is made by Solar Power Plants, which have no ware requirements to build Energy Cells (Except for player power plants, which need Crystals). All stations require energy cells.
  • Minerals (Ore, Silicon) are mined by breaking up asteroids and picking up the debris, or by placing a mining station on them. They only require Energy to work. Ice and Nividium asteroids are also present, but Ice is only used by the Terrans, and neither type has mining stations available to the player.
    • Not legally, anyway. Sometimes TLs labeled "Terran Ice Miner" have ice mines in the hold. Capture the ship, and you've got a mine.
  • Bio (Meat, wheat, etc) are used only by Food and Secondary factories. They only require Energy to work.
  • Secondary factories (Warheads, food spices, etc) are usually not essential to the economy except for a few Tech factories. They need Energy and Bio to work.
  • Food (Space burgers, MREs, etc) requires Energy and Bio.
  • Tech (microchips, crystals, etc) requires Energy, Food, and Minerals. Some require a Secondary resource in place of Food.
  • Military (lasers, missiles, food) requires Energy, Food, and Minerals. Military equipment is bought by Equipment Docks or installed on ships.

Z

• Zerg Rush: Common Xenon and Kha'ak tactic. The Khaak Cluster is a self-contained Zerg Rush; upon approaching it breaks into about a dozen scout ships and a heavy fighter.

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