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1[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/770fFTL_logo-613x613_798.jpg]]
2[[caption-width-right:250:Here's your MacGuffin. Here's your [[BreakOutTheMuseumPiece rustbucket]]. Here's your [[AdvancingWallOfDoom enemy]]. [[YetAnotherStupidDeath Good luck!]]]]
3->''The distress beacon appears to be coming from a TV Tropes page for FTL: Faster Than Light. \
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5[[https://tvtropes.org/Videogame/FTLFasterThanLight?action=edit 2. Make edits to the page.]]\
6[[TakeAThirdOption 3. (Advanced Wiki Navigation) Read one of the other subpages.]] ''
7
8''[[https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html FTL: Faster Than Light]]'' is a "{{Roguelike}}-like" spaceship simulation game developed by Subset Games.
9
10The player controls the crew of a lone spaceship affiliated with TheFederation, which is currently on the losing end of a [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized massive rebellion]]. The objective is to deliver important information to the remains of the Federation fleet in a distant sector. Unfortunately, as those familiar with {{Roguelike}}s will suspect, this is [[NintendoHard far, FAR from easy]]: the galaxy is an extremely dangerous place for a lone vessel, filled with dangers such as pirates, [[NegativeSpaceWedgie deadly environmental hazards]], rebel scouts, hostile alien races, and others. Not to mention that the vast rebel fleet is in hot pursuit...
11
12''FTL'''s gameplay involves the player's ship "jumping" between waypoints in a randomly generated galaxy, most of them containing a RandomEvent. The main game interface is a cross-section view of your ship, showing the layout of rooms filled with crewmen and various ship systems (helm, engines, shields, weapons, etc). During combat, the player must juggle various aspects of the ship — from crew assignments to power allocation and weapons targeting. Certain systems gain bonuses from being manned, but you may need those crew members to repair damaged systems, repel boarders, or simply evacuate dangerous areas. Meanwhile, all ship systems need power to function, but your ship's reactor may not be able to supply them all at once, leaving the player to decide which are most important at any given time. Along the way, you'll collect scrap, the game's currency, and use it to upgrade your ship's systems, get repairs, and purchase things like fuel and — if you're lucky — some fancier things like new weaponry or whole new systems such as cloaking devices and teleporters.
13
14''FTL'' was officially released for purchase from the developers, UsefulNotes/{{Steam}}, and GOG.com on September 14th, 2012, although early beta access was granted to its Website/{{Kickstarter}} backers. [[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light It is one of the first completed games spawned from a completed Kickstarter.]]
15
16In November 2013, the developers announced ''[[http://www.ftlgame.com/?p=598 FTL: Advanced Edition,]]'' a free ExpansionPack that adds new equipment, events, weapons, ships (for both the player and enemies), and various other goodies, as well as an [[UsefulNotes/IOSGames iPad]] port. Both ''Advanced Edition'' and the port were released on April 3rd, 2014.
17
18Not to be confused with Creator/FTLGames, a video game development company that has been defunct since 1996, and was best known for its own roguelike, ''VideoGame/DungeonMaster'', and its sequels. Also not to be confused with the trope FasterThanLightTravel, even though this game uses it for getting around.
19----
20!!''FTL'' contains examples of:
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22[[foldercontrol]]
23
24[[folder:A-C]]
25* AbnormalAmmo: Crystal weapons fire, well, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin crystals]].
26* AbsoluteXenophobe: Several of the factions are vehemently opposed to alien lifeforms, including the Rockmen and the Rebellion.
27* AbsurdlyLowLevelCap: In general, crew posted to a system will reach the max rank of yellow (two levels) by the midpoint of a run.
28* AchievementSystem: The game has an internal system for achievements that also acts as the mechanism for unlocking new ships and ship layouts as they are completed.
29* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: Played straight with repairs, which cost more scrap in later sectors. Averted with equipment of any kind, as well as missiles, drones, and fuel, which always cost the same no matter when they're purchased. This is balanced with randomized store inventories and limited quantities of resources for sale at any given shop. You can also get to buy things for better or worse prices than you would at a shop via random events.
30* AdvancingWallOfDoom: After three jumps, the Rebel fleet moves across each sector from left to right, replacing any jump beacon it overlaps with a fight against a powerful rebel ship that gives only one unit of fuel when defeated. Certain events can slow the wall or speed it up; don't let those rebel scouts get away!
31* AerithAndBob: Crew names range from normal names like Alex or Elizabeth to stuff like Luaan Ti and GM Faux. A lot of those names are taken from the game's Kickstarter supporters.
32* AIRoulette: The AI targets its shots at random rooms on the player's ship, with there being a slight preference for hitting systems: on Easy, the AI is guaranteed to target a system room 20% of the time, on Medium, it targets systems 33% of the time, and on Hard it has a 50% chance to target a system.
33* AlienBlood: When Slugs and Mantises die, a pool of green blood can briefly be seen.
34* AlienInvasion: {{Inverted|Trope}}. The antagonistic, [[FantasticRacism human-supremacist]] Rebels are trying to destroy TheFederation, which comprises many different alien races alongside humans.
35* AnAlienNamedBob: Names are picked for random crewmembers out of a pool shared between species, so you get aliens with human names and humans with alien names. Specific named characters usually have names specific to their species like the [[ProudWarriorRace Mantis thief]] Kazaaakplethkilik, with the notable exceptions of a [[TheBigGuy rockwoman]] named Ariadne and a Mantis named Robert Smith who was raised by humans.
36* AlliterativeName: [[EnforcedTrope Enforced]] with the Rock ship achievement, "Defense Drones Don't Do D'anything!"
37* ALongTimeAgoInAGalaxyFarFarAway: While Earth is mentioned in an event, it is otherwise ignored by the game, instead focusing on the Federation and Rebellion as the main facets of humanity.
38* AlphaStrike: A common and often necessary tactic for overwhelming the enemy. Assuming that a ship's weapon systems are upgraded so that it can power several weapons simultaneously, carefully timing their shots such that they happen closely together in a tight salvo can knock out shields, overwhelm defense drones, and leave the enemy crew dealing with more damage control at once than it can comfortably handle. This is also a necessary tactic to employ beam weapons, which usually have little-to-no ability to penetrate shields. The Weapon Pre-igniter ship augment lets you launch one the moment a battle starts, and there's an achievement for using it to blow up an enemy ship with the first volley. Your enemies will rarely do this, since they normally fire each weapon the moment it is charged, even if waiting for the rest of their weapons to charge would be a lot more effective. However, cloaked enemy ships will sometimes charge all their weapons and hold their fire while cloaking, so that when they uncloak, they release a barrage of fire.
39* AlmostOutOfOxygen: It could happen to you, or to the enemies, if someone's oxygen generator gets busted. Short of sending Lanius crewmen through a teleporter, oxygen starvation is typically too slow-acting to take a ship's crew down.[[note]]With the notable exception of the enemy Slug Interceptor, which lacks a door to the Oxygen system and therefore can't repair it ''at all''.[[/note]] Enemies will tend to flee rooms that have no oxygen (since they take constant damage), even if this means allowing your crew to destroy their systems.
40* AlwaysAccurateAttack: Beam weapons will always hit their targets. The tradeoff is that shields will mitigate beam damage, up to and including outright blocking damage if the beam's power is less than or equal to the number of layers the shield has.
41* AlwaysChaoticEvil: Averted — you can find reasonable and friendly members of all races. Even some of the rebels aren't too happy with the situation and [[PunchClockVillain are just following orders]]. Perhaps the closest you get are the telepathic ConMan Slugs, who were shunned in the Federation because of their incessant exploitative antics. Even then, individual Slugs may work for the Federation regardless and you do come across the occasional trustworthy one.
42* AntiFrustrationFeatures: As hard as the game is, it does have a few features that prevent it from getting really bad.
43** Your teleport, cloaking, and FTL drive charge instantly when you're not in battle, and ionised systems become deionised when jumping from a safe beacon. This can help avoid situations like your boarding crew burning to death or suffocating in an otherwise empty ship, as well as sparing you the wait to bring your crew back, charge your engines, or have your systems come off cooldown if you defeated the enemy quickly. The exception is levels with environmental hazards like asteroids or solar flares, but even in those, your FTL drive will charge at an increased rate after the battle.
44** When preparing to jump away with your crew still on board the enemy ship, the game will ask "Are you ''sure'' you want to jump away? Your crew is still on the enemy ship!"
45** Once a ship is considered defeated by surrender or crew death, any and all weapons you might have fired at them prior will automatically miss. This keeps you from accidentally killing your crew with a stray shot when you've already won. The same doesn't hold true in reverse, though.
46** If your teleporter gets knocked out while your entire crew is on board the enemy ship, and you defeat the enemy crew, your crew will take a shuttle back to your ship to prevent an unwinnable state.
47* AntiGrinding: The [[AdvancingWallOfDoom Rebel Fleet]] forces you to go to the further, more difficult sectors, even if there are unexplored places in the current sector. If you jump to a node that the Rebels have either reached or completely taken over, you'll be faced with a ship that's disproportionately powerful for the sector, and defeating it only yields one unit of fuel to jump to the next node. There are no other rewards of any kind, except in specific circumstances (if you have no fuel, for example, you'll usually get several for winning). The best you can do is maximize the time you spend in any one sector through careful jump selection. ''Advanced Edition'' further upped the ante by adding a shield-piercing WaveMotionGun that even goes through Zoltan shields, causing three damage and a hull breach, which regularly fires on your ship if the Rebels have secured that node. This prevents all but the fastest methods from being practical for grinding fleet beacons for more score.
48* AnyoneCanDie:
49** Those crew members that you've been with since the start of the game, trained up from skill-less {{Mooks}} with no abilities whatsoever into vital parts of your ship, can be killed off at a moment's notice. And the game carries on, expecting you to toughen up and find a way to continue. Avoiding losing any crew is difficult enough that there's actually an achievement for it, aptly titled "No [[RedShirt Redshirts]] Here".
50** In ''Advanced Edition'' in Clone Bays, a purchasable replacement for the Medbay, can revive your own units should they die, although the cloned character gets a penalty to their skills. Even then, a unit killed while the Clone Bay is offline or broken will not be coming back unless you get it back online ''immediately'' (unless you have the Backup DNA Bank augment).
51* ArbitraryHeadcountLimit: No more than eight crewmembers on a ship. That's not to say that there can only be 8 friendly people on the ship, but any passenger is only ever described as being in the "cargo hold" if their presence is mentioned at all.
52* ArmorPiercingAttack:
53** Missiles, bomb teleporters, boarding drones, and hacking modules can bypass shields entirely, as long as you have the ammo to use them.
54** Crystal weapons and piercing lasers can pierce a single layer of shields. Not as versatile as a missile, but they have unlimited ammo.
55** The Federation Cruiser A and B variants are equipped with a high-power artillery beam that can't be dodged and cuts straight through any defenses short of Zoltan shields, as long as it has [[NecessaryDrawback enough time to power up]]. It also can't be aimed manually by the player, which can result in less than optimal shots.
56* ArtificialGravity: Crew members are never shown floating inside spacecraft; they're always either standing, walking, or [[CriticalExistenceFailure collapsed over]].
57* ArtificialStupidity: A necessity in this game; it's NintendoHard even with the simple AI. If the AI could do half the stuff a player can, the game would be unplayably hard.
58** Enemy ships pick targets at complete random, leading to things like trying to use a beam on a shielded ship that can NoSell it, teleporting to the airlock whereupon they'll be treated to the vacuum of space and asphixiate, or hacking the medbay - which does nothing unless your crew happen to be in it.
59** Enemy beams will only travel from the center of one room and towards the center of another room, meaning that they end up doing far less damage than what player-controlled beams can do.
60** Enemy ship designs can be laughably dumb, particularly on easy difficulty, such as ships with all beam weapons that are helpless against you so long as you have a single shield bubble. You'd also think the rebels would program their shieldless autoscouts to stay out of astroid fields, which can and usually will obliterate them in seconds.
61* ArtificialBrilliance: Although the enemy normally targets systems at random, on hard mode they have an increased chance of targeting any system that is currently "important", such as oxygen if you're almost out, artillery if you're about to fire, or shields/weapons at any time.
62* ArtisticLicenseBiology: The Mantis Pheromones augment should only increase the speed of Mantis crew, since pheromones by definition only affect one species, but that would make the augment less useful.
63* AscendedFanboy: "Robert Smith", [[ObliviousAdoption the Mantis raised by humans]], mentions that he always wanted to serve in the Federation, and you are able to recruit him onto your ship.
64* AsteroidMiners: You can do this in certain events with the Scrap Recovery Arm. You can also find sites left behind by other miners, some of which may be crawling with [[GiantSpider giant alien spiders]] (which are no joke).
65* AsteroidThicket: Some jump beacons lead to them. Your ship is pelted with rocks, taking out one layer of shielding with each hit and causing damage if they hit the hull. Thankfully, they usually don't come fast enough to beat more than one layer of shielding, but it does make fighting enemies more difficult. This damage also applies to the enemy vessel, making any fight very easy if you can take out their shields. Early on, it's possible to destroy certain ships without firing a shot! Alternatively, sometimes you can get resources by escorting damaged vessels out of them or salvaging supplies left by AsteroidMiners.
66* AttackDrone: Can be used once you have the Drone Control ship system. Comes in either laser or beam varieties, the former being useful for suppressing shields or doing heavy but random damage to unshielded enemies, and the latter being useful for doing even heavier damage to unshielded targets at the cost of being completely ineffectual against shields. Other drones can defend against incoming fire (especially missiles), repair damaged systems, repair your ship's hull, repel boarders, or be sent over to board the enemy. Advanced Edition adds more drones, including ones that board the enemy and release ion bursts to knock out systems and crew, steadily generate a Zoltan Shield around your ship and attack enemy combat drones.
67* AttackItsWeakPoint: An implicit variation of this trope works for beam weapons. They deal damage for each ''room'' they touch, even barely. As such, it's entirely possible to deal three to five times the nominal damage if you swipe the beam over a cluster of small rooms.
68* AuthorityEqualsAsskicking: The [[FinalBoss Rebel Flagship]]. Justified, in that it's a ship built to protect the most senior staff of the fleet.
69* AutoDoc: The [=MedBay=] explicitly works by automatically pumping the patient full of healing nanomachines, no human (or alien) operator required. The Engi ship comes with an augment that allows these nanomachines to be pumped into the ship's life support system and offer (somewhat slower) healing throughout the ship, and [[HealingShiv a weapon system]] can be found that packs the nanomachines into a ''bomb'' that can be teleported onto an enemy ship to heal boarding parties mid-operation. {{Inverted|Trope}} if your [=MedBay=] gets hacked, at which point its doors lock and the nanomachines [[CruelAndUnusualDeath start tearing crew apart at the molecular level]].
70* AutomaticDoorMalfunction: The hacking system can send a drone to target one of the enemy ship's systems, additionally shutting the doors leading to that system, forcing the ship's crew to [[ShootOutTheLock use firepower to breach them]] while opening for potential {{board|ingParty}}ers. Using a hacking drone on the ship's door system allows for applying that effect to all the doors on the ship.
71* AwesomeButImpractical:
72** The Mk. II Defense Drone fires faster than the Mk. I and can shoot down any kind of incoming projectile, including laser bursts and ion blasts, not just missiles and boarding drones like the Mk. I. However, like all drones, it's computer-controlled and has no threat priority system, meaning it will often prioritize a closer, weak laser over the more dangerous missile that will go right through your shielding. It also requires three bars of power to operate, compared to two for the more reliable Mk. I. It's good, just not as good in practice as it is on paper.
73** Almost any weapon that costs four bars of reactor power to use, and even some that cost three. They are very easy to disable, since they're power hogs, and often have prohibitively long charge times. A series of weaker, less power-intensive weapons can often do more overall damage.
74** Type B Stealth Cruiser, [=DA-SR12=], is this. A sleek, shiny vessel, it sacrifices the engine power, the Titanium Systems Casing augmentation, and the efficient combo of a Mini Beam and Dual Lasers used by the Type A for a Glaive Beam and level 2 cloak. The Glaive Beam has the highest damage per shot ratio in the game; its obscene damage output can often kill pretty much any ship in the first two sectors in a single shot. However, it takes so outrageously long to charge that the enemy is practically guaranteed to get at least one clear shot off before that happens, even if you time your cloak perfectly. If that shot hits your weapons room and you haven't upgraded it (and you likely haven’t if you're saving your scrap to buy a shield system), [[ShootTheShaggyDog your Glaive Beam goes offline and you have to start charging it all over again]]. God help you if the enemy has [[AlwaysAccurateAttack beam weapons]]; if they have [[BeamSpam beam]] ''[[EnergyWeapon drones]]'', YouAreAlreadyDead. Put together, this basically makes the first sector a LuckBasedMission until you can upgrade your defenses.
75** The Flak II fires 7 shots, the most shots of any single weapon in the game, but it takes 3 power bars to use and 21 seconds of charge time. As such, the Flak I, with 2 bars of power and just a 10 second charge time is generally more efficient, even though it only fires 3 rounds.
76* BackFromTheBrink: The rebels are steamrolling TheFederation so hard, they're represented in-game as an AdvancingWallOfDoom. But by the time you've made it to The LastStand, you can have upgraded your ship enough to defeat the best ship in the enemy fleet ''three times over'', turning the war around.
77* BeamSpam: Several weapons fire multiple shots. At the extreme, if you're lucky, you can have a ship that can fire 12 lasers at once, easily overwhelming just about everything. The FinalBoss has a triple-barreled laser cannon and a triple-barreled ion cannon, [[spoiler:but will lose the second after its first loss. In the second phase, its Power Surge ability launches numerous anti-ship drones that are capable of tearing through your shields in seconds, on top of the drones it has already and its lasers. In the final phase of the battle, its Power Surge move launches a somewhat meager barrage of seven 1-damage laser shots at you.]].
78* BeefGate: Inverted; the super-powered enemies prevent you from advancing ''backwards''. As the rebels take over the galaxy behind you in an unstoppable flood, beacons they've claimed will no longer have random events, only a fight with a Rebel Elite; they're stronger ships than anything else you'll fight in that sector, they're backed up by Anti-Ship Batteries, and the only potential reward is a single unit of fuel.
79* BeehiveBarrier: Shields have a hexagonal texture on them. The shield gets more opaque with additional layers.
80* BegoneBribe: One encounter with pirates has them offer to split the bounty with you if you don't interfere.
81** Ships will often offer you their remaining stock of missiles and drone parts and some fuel if you don't kill them. If you're lucky, they'll toss in a weapon they have but can't use. May work out to a ComicallySmallBribe if they only have two rockets and a single box of drone parts.
82* BenevolentArchitecture:
83** The Rebel flagship, if you're planning to board it and kill the crew. All of its guns stations except the triple laser are in isolated rooms, making it easy to destroy those systems, and none of them can be repaired as no Rebel crew can get to them. In Hard, however, both the missile launcher and laser are connected to the main area itself.
84** The Slug Interceptor's Oxygen and Engine rooms are completely detached from the rest of the ship. This means that you can easily asphyxiate them to death with no fear of them jumping away (though you still might need to fear their missiles). Even in Hard mode, where a crew member is placed in the Engine room, you can achieve the same effect by killing the crew in the main part of the ship.
85* {{BFG}}:
86** Some weapons, like the Glaive Beam, are several times the size of their more basic counterparts, with damage output to match. The final boss has no less than ''four'' {{BFG}}s: triple-barreled missile, ion, and laser weapons, along with a long two-damage Halberd-like beam.
87** The ''Artillery Beam'' system on the Federation Cruiser. In exchange for having no target control over the weapon, as well as taking up an entire system slot, you get a beam that can pierce all shields except Zoltan shields.
88** The Vulcan is a 4-power GatlingGood chain-laser introduced in ''Advanced Edition'' that increases its fire rate with each consecutive shot, eventually becoming fast enough to rip through any number of shields.
89** The Flak Mk 2. Introduced in ''Advanced Edition'', it is very inaccurate, but is able to fire 7 projectiles in a single shot. Plus, it only costs 3 energy to operate. Federation C has an artillery version of the Flak MK 2, which takes up a system slot, fires slightly slower and requires a bit more power at maximum fire rate, but is able to keep on charging even when damaged.
90** Player ships can't equip them, but the Anti-Ship Batteries are these. They fire one single, powerful shot that pierces all shields, deals 3 damage,[[note]]for reference, the weapon with the greatest damage-per-hit, the Breach Missile, deals 4 damage (though it's not the weapon with the greatest DPS — that honor goes to the Chain Vulcan, with the runners-up being the Glaive Beam, Halberd Beam, Burst Laser II, Burst Laser III, Charge Laser, and Hermes)[[/note]] and is guaranteed to breach your hull if it hits. [=ASBs=] are one of the reasons why it's a good idea to stay ahead of the Rebel Fleet.
91* BigDumbObject: The "Great Eye" monolith is one — it's large enough to be seen with the naked eye in a nebula on a drifting planet, and if you obey the Zoltan elder and approach it, depending on your luck, it can make one of your crew disappear (and a Clone Bay won't bring them back), give you a healing weapon, give you a high amount of scrap, or ignore you.
92* BittersweetEnding: Your ship and an opposing ship can [[MutualKill kill each other at the same time]]. Usually, this is just GameOver for you. However, if [[FinalBoss the Flagship]] is destroyed in this way [[SequentialBoss at stage three]], you win and the Federation is saved, but your entire crew died. This also counts as a HeroicSacrifice.
93* BizarreAlienBiology:
94** A RandomEvent mentions that Rocks have no internal organs, but they're still vulnerable to asphyxiation like any other race. That said, their 150% HP will allow them to survive longer, which is useful for boarding airless automated enemy ships. Crystal aliens, on the other hand, are resistant to suffocation, though not immune; they also have 125% HP, further extending their survival.
95** ''Advanced Edition'' adds the [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Lanius]], a race of metal creatures that suck oxygen out of rooms (and are ''not'' vulnerable to asphyxiation) and absorb metal into their bodies.
96* BoardingParty: Some events will result in the player's ship being boarded. Both players and enemies can send in boarding parties if they have the Crew Teleporter ship system, in order to kill enemy crew and damage ship systems. Mantis ships, particularly types B and C, are designed around this, since they get bonuses in hand-to-hand combat and start with 4-man teleporters.
97* BoomerangBigot: A sad example in one event. It tasks you with calming down Robert Smith, a Mantis who is convinced he's a human. Sending another Mantis results in Robert panicking at the sight of a terrifying alien and lashing out against his captors, eventually needing to be put down. Luckily, sending a human or using a MindControlDevice results in a positive outcome.
98* BoringButPractical:
99** As a general rule, upgrading crucial systems even if your reactor is not good enough to power them fully yet. The empty power bars serve as a damage buffer, which means said systems are able to take damage before shutting down. This is most prominent with the piloting subsystem, whose upgrades only provide marginal bonuses, and instead mainly serve to increase the health of the system.
100** Engine upgrades are more incremental than shields or weapons upgrades, but they are able to reduce the number of shots that hit you, reducing the scrap spent on repairs, as well as letting your run away faster from nasty fights. Conversely, destroying the enemy ship's engines or helm first renders them unable to dodge, allowing you to pick off the other components more easily (like their weapons or shields).
101** A manned door system can mean the difference between life and death. Upgraded doors block fires from spreading and force boarders to breach the doors first. This allows you to starve either threat of air or rally your crew to handle the problem.
102** An upgraded oxygen system can outpace the oxygen drain of a hull breach when all doors on a ship are open, which is useful for dealing with boarding drones. Upgraded oxygen is even more important in ''Advanced Edition'', since a level 3 Hacking system can drain oxygen faster than a level 1 oxygen system can replenish it.
103** Upgrading your teleporter only reduces its cooldown. This tends to be surprisingly useful for two-man teleporter ships, letting you teleport a second team onto the enemy ship faster and therefore overwhelm them quicker. In addition, at level 2, the teleporter recharges fast enough to beam your crew into and back out of a completely depressurized room without killing them, making teleportation a viable strategy against drone ships as long as you don't accidentally send in a [[SquishyWizard Zoltan]].
104** The Burst Laser MK 1, which fires two shots for two power. While it tends to be outshadowed by the SimpleYetAwesome Dual Lasers and Burst Laser MK 2, and lacks a gimmick unlike the Chain Laser and Hull Smasher MK 1, the Burst Laser still provides capable firepower at a reasonable cost.
105** The best way to level up your crew is to find or create a battle where the enemy's weapons cannot penetrate your shields and leave the game running for by itself while you go do other things and your crew gets [[StatGrinding some no-risk training]].
106** The A-layout Kestrel's starting missile launcher, the Artemis[[note]]also equipped on the Rock Cruiser A and Slug Cruiser B[[/note]], will be a mainstay in your arsenal, even as you get lasers that chop through hulls and bombs of radiation. It only uses one bar of power but deals two damage per shot, and still has the shield-piercing capabilities of every other missile in the game. The same is true of the Leto missile on the Federation B and Zoltan A; a weak, one-bar missile that, while only dealing one damage per shot, is every bit as capable of piercing shields as any other missile.
107** Basic lasers are dull, firing only a single laser beam and doing a relatively pitiful one damage on a hit. However, the Kestrel's B-type layout, the Red Tail, comes with ''four of them'', which, combined with their single power requirement and a decently trained weapons officer[[note]]and with four weapons with only 10 seconds' charging time firing per salvo, that training will happen quickly[[/note]], will chew through anything with two or less shields. It's only when enemies start getting two and more shields that you need to seriously consider upgrading (by that point, enemies will have engines powerful enough to reliably dodge at least one of your shots from almost every salvo).
108** The Scrap Recovery Arm boosts your scrap collection by 10%. Doesn't seem like much, but the scrap bonuses add up over time, and it's much more pronounced in later sectors when defeated ships dole out more scrap. If you somehow manage to pick up a second SRA, the boost stacks up. Having one also adds a blue option to a relatively common event, resulting in a nice pile of scrap if you happen to get it. Its benefits are lower on harder difficulties, where you gain less scrap to begin with.
109** Hull Repair Drones don't do anything exciting and spend most of the time stashed away in storage. But they can save your life if your ship is starting to break apart from all the accumulated ScratchDamage and there's no store in sight. They are especially useful for healing in between the three phases of the final boss fight. They also help you save scrap you'd pay for repairs, if you have more drone parts than you need.
110** The Drone Recovery Arm augmentation, which recovers unused drones upon jumping away from a beacon, can enable you to run large amounts of drones without fear of running out of drone parts. It also works well with Hull Repair Drones; as the Hull Repair drone repairs between 3-5 hull pieces before disappearing, if you warp out before it vanishes, you will get that drone part back automatically, repairing your ship for free.
111** The Backup Battery adds two or four extra power bars for 30 seconds. That's it. But there will be ''so'' many times you ''need'' that extra power.
112* BossDissonance: Not that the game itself isn't [[NintendoHard quite a challenge already]], but the Rebel Flagship as the final boss has the game throw literally everything it has at you. It's not uncommon to be cruising and doing quite well at the game only to have victory wrenched from your hands by the flagship.
113* BreakOutTheMuseumPiece: The default Kestrel was decommissioned prior to the game's start and had to be pulled out of mothballs.
114* BuyOrGetLost: {{Exaggerated|Trope}} when one of the random events has the player encounter a merchant ship with suspicious markings. The ship owner is revealed to be a drone-specialized merchant, and if approached, he'll offer the player to sell some of his wares. If the player refuses, the pirate will ''[[DisproportionateRetribution booby-trap the player's ship]]'', damaging its hull and systems, setting some on fire, and will try to kill the player. He would also attack if the player tries to ignore the ship, though thankfully without booby-trapping the ship. If the player has a Slug crewmember (and Slugs are known for their {{Telepathy}}), they will warn the player that they'd better plan on making a purchase if they want to dock. The player can also avoid the deal by using the hacking system to hack their weapons before they'll attack, and then they'll pay the player a "standard fee" and leave in irritation without a fight.
115* CameBackStrong: [[spoiler:A certain Engi event causes one of your Engi crew to be disintegrated due to 'a virus'. Win against the virus investigators afterwards, and said virus will reform your dead Engi crew with all skills maxed.]]
116* CantCatchUp: A problem in the vanilla game, as even though you could hire potentially useful crew members later on, their complete lack of skills ensured they were only hired to replace deceased members. ''Advanced Edition'' averts this with new crew members potentially leveled in skills already, meaning it could be worthwhile to swap your roster.
117* {{Cap}}: A [[http://imgur.com/a/gTbt4 save file corruption]] shows that the session records cap (ships defeated, beacons explored, scrap collected, and crew hired) is 32,767. The cap for crew records is likely the same.
118%%* CharacterSelectForcing: In ''Advanced Edition'', the Mind Control subsystem is almost a necessity. Otherwise, the FinalBoss Mind Control attacks is going to absolutely ''wreck your shit''. Alternatively, you can get an all-Slug crew, but good luck with that, considering their rarity.
119* ChargedAttack: ''Advanced Edition'' has Charger weapons, volley gun versions of regular weapons. Rather than getting more powerful the longer they charge, they fire +1 shot for every level of charge they have. They come in missile launcher, laser, and Ion flavours.
120* CharmPerson:
121** If you have a Slug crew mate, there are blue options in certain events. Most of them involve the Slug mentally surveying an area, communicating with someone out of harm's way, or checking an enemy Slug. There is one event, however, where the Slug silently talks some Zoltan guards into letting your ship bypass profiling. Usually, the mere sight of a Slug ship at a trade hub causes the guards to attack. Here, your crewmember is able to convince them your ship is fine and to give you fuel, so it's implied there was some degree of mind control going on.
122** There's also a system you can install that is literal MindControl; you can take over enemy crew and make them destroy systems and fight other hostiles. You can also use the system to [[StatusBuffDispel break mind control]] on your own crew.
123* ChooseAHandicap: One random encounter is with a slug ship that will hack your choice of your Weapons, Shields or Oxygen systems, either turning them off completely, or if they are upgraded, merely weakening them. It is also possible to counter the hacking with your own hacking system, though that occupies the system, disabling it instead.
124* ClippedWingAngel: [[spoiler:The third form of the Rebel Flagship; while it [[DamageSpongeBoss can take a lot of punishment]], it's a far cry from the murderous second form. With good evasion and a strong volley directed at the missile launcher, it will be practically incapable of hurting you. Its wings are even ''literally'' clipped, since the wing-like nacelles on either side blew up in the last two rounds. The ''Advanced Edition'' of the ship could [[ZigZaggingTrope zig-zag]] the trope, however, since the Flagship now has Mind Control, which can be extremely hard to counter if you don't have one of your own, and it will take you a while to break through the ship's Zoltan shield before you can disable it. If the Flagship still has a large crew contingent left, the enemy boarding team and mind control together has a very good chance of wrecking you.]]
125* CloneDegeneration: The Clone Bay system produces a clone of any crew member that dies, but with a skill experience penalty. Thus, while you will technically never lose your crew, they will not be as powerful as they could be, and you have to forsake healing them during battles to do it, which makes it all the more likely that they'll die unless supplemented by other methods of healing. Furthermore, while the Clone Bay does heal with each jump, it can only heal a maximum of 25 HP per jump.
126* CloningGambit: The Clone Bay system lets you take most events that would otherwise have a decent chance of killing a crew with impunity, as after they die, they're revived as a clone. However, clones are unable to be made when the original person is still alive, and clones suffer from any diseases the original suffers.
127* CoitusUninterruptus: In Engi space, it's possible to run into an event where you find two Engi ships smashed together. If you have an Engi crewman, you can TakeAThirdOption where said crewman [[TheTalk informs you that the two ships are "trying to achieve a union"]]. Once you learn that, you can salvage some of the debris floating around, although you feel icky for doing so.
128* ColorblindMode: There is an option for a colourblind-friendly interface, which adds status icons for enemy ship's systems that are normally colour-coded (a lock symbol for systems disabled by ionisation and an X for damaged systems), among other changes.
129* ColorCodedForYourConvenience:
130** The individual sectors in the sector map fall into one of three different colors: green, red, and purple. Green sectors (Civilian, Engi, and Zoltan) tend to have more friendly and non-combat encounters and are a low-risk choice, while red sectors (Rock, Rebel, Mantis, Pirate-Controlled, and Abandoned) have more combat encounters and dangerous enemies, but can potentially provide you with more scrap thanks to the numerous battles. Purple sectors, fittingly ambiguous compared to the normal danger level spectrum, are reserved for nebula sectors -- Slug and Uncharted -- in which fleet pursuit is slowed and rebel [=ASBs=] cannot shoot you should you be overtaken, but where you often lose system functionality.
131** Each race or faction has a distinct color scheme for their ships. Their Type A playable cruisers all follow their faction's standard color scheme, while their Type B cruisers have unique liveries. Pirate-controlled enemy ships will have the standard colors of whichever race's ship they're flying painted over with crude purple splotches and pirate symbols, which the Kestrel Type C uses.
132*** Federation ships are light grey with orange stripes, with the exception of the Stealth Cruisers, which weren't completed until after the Rebellion. This includes the playable Kestrel and Osprey cruisers. The type B Federation Cruiser sports a black hull with yellow decals.
133*** Rebel-manned ships are bright orange, with light blue stripes. Interestingly, the Kestrel's Type B counterpart, the Red-Tail, has Rebel colors, suggesting that you stole it from them along with the intel about the flagship. Rebel automated ships, on the other hand, are dark matte grey.
134*** Mantis ships are solid blood-red. Their Type B cruiser, however, is navy-blue with turquoise stripes. Their Type C cruiser is a very dark cyan with sky blue lights.
135*** Rock ships are a rocky orangish brown evocative of sandstone. Their Type B cruiser is igneous black with red lights on the edges between armor plates, similar to the Rockmen themselves, who are dark grey with red eyes. Their Type C cruiser has the armor colored a shiny blue like their ancestors.
136*** Slug ships are a purplish-grey metal, with their Type B being dull red and olive-green. Their type C cruiser is a golden yellow.
137*** Zoltan ships are bright green with orange viewports, with their Type B cruiser being dark and multicolored with glowing white viewports. Their Type C is a dark gray with glowing white viewports.
138*** Engi ships are metallic grey. Their Type B is maroon. Their Type C is a smoother, shiny metallic grey.
139*** Lanius ships are a metal gray while their Type B is deep purple with red structures between the plates.
140* ComicallySmallBribe: If you're really laying a beatdown on a ship, they may offer you a bribe to leave them alone. If it's a lot of fuel or missiles, or a nice weapon, you will probably take them up on it. But if it's one missile, one fuel, and only a handful of scrap, you really have to wonder how much value they place on their lives. Although, when you salvage them, it turns out ''that was everything they had.''
141* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard:
142** Weapons that can fire multiple shots will only target one room. The computer can target multiple rooms with the same weapons. This can potentially allow them to damage or destroy several systems at once. This is especially bad with the final boss.
143** While rare, it's possible for enemy ships to have five layers of shielding. Player ships and the final boss max out at four.
144** Similarly, enemy ships can appear fielding four drones, whereas the limit for any playable ship is three. Some classes of enemy ship can have up to 10 bars of weapons power, and the player's ship can only have up to 8 bars.
145** Certain events begin with your ship being boarded, in addition to entering combat with another ship... [[ZergRush which can then board you]]. The former can even breach Zoltan Shields, which are supposed to block teleporters while active. The game will lampshade this. ''Advanced Edition'', however, introduces the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, which you yourself can equip, and will point out that the boarders must have this augment if they're able to circumvent your Zoltan Shield, thereby averting this trope.
146** Enemy mind control does not need active sensors to target your crew, even though you can only use the system when they are visible to your sensors. You'll notice this when you face an enemy inside a nebula, which disables all sensors, and they still control your crew even though they can't possibly see them. Additionally, they can even mind control your crew while your ship is cloaked.
147** One specific event begins by having you face off against an ordinary-looking enemy ship, like many other enemy encounter beacons. However, once they start taking on some damage and the situation turns, they prepare an "emergency FTL jump", and will almost ''immediately'' jump away — you have a grand total of '''5 seconds''' to stop it as long as they have any level of functioning piloting and engines. If you fail to do so, you lose out on any scrap reward from the ship, and will have to accept a quest to pursue it instead, which leads you to a fight against an even stronger enemy ship. The new enemy ship is ''also'' capable of an accelerated FTL jump, although you have a slightly longer 12 seconds this time, and only need to damage it enough to provoke a surrender (though you can get a greater reward by outright destroying it or killing its crew).
148** The final boss outright ignores most of the game's rules, though oddly does play by the four-shield limit.
149*** In addition to a slightly longer custom Halberd beam, it has a triple-barreled laser (that can cause fires and breaches), a triple-barreled ion cannon, and a triple-barreled missile launcher, none of which you can ever buy. Each also has its own dedicated artillery bay and crewmember to repair it. They are mercifully isolated from the main ship area, unless you're playing on Hard.
150*** Killing the crew causes an advanced AI to take over, turning it into an auto-ship and giving it the same type of automatic repair ability.
151*** It is immune to Level 3 sensors, which isn't that important but does prevent you from judging just how much punishment a system can take or how efficient it is.
152*** It can field four drones (boarding, defense, anti-ship, and beam), not only exceeding the maximum of three only certain ships have, but fielding a special boarding drone that only takes two power instead of the normal three power.
153*** It can jump even if its piloting or engines are offline, since it's a three-part battle and it needs to retreat each time.
154*** It has an ability called [[spoiler:Power Surge, which allows it to either launch a ridiculous number of drones or fire a massive laser barrage in the second and third phases, respectively, which recharges independently of any of its visible or target-able systems.]]
155*** [[spoiler:It's the only non-Zoltan ship with a Zoltan Shield, which has 12 points instead of the normal 5 points, and is the only ship able to recharge its Zoltan Shield all at once in combat, as part of phase 3's power surge.]] Exactly how advanced ''are'' the Rebels?
156* ComputersAreFast: Specifically when it comes to cloaking and drones. A cloak-equipped computer ship can activate it the instant a battle starts, preventing you from beaming any crew over, or mind controlling any crew.
157* ConMan: The Slugs are a whole race of them, with there being plenty of events in their space where they present themselves as generous people before betraying you.
158* ContinuousDecompression: Averted, insofar as a difference in air pressure will eventually even out. A hull breach or open exterior airlock will drain the air from a room and then air in adjacent rooms will start to flow into the vacant room. Unless the decompression is contained with bulkheads, eventually all connected rooms will be drained. An entire ship with open bulkheads will drain in seconds. If the ship's life support system is functional and there is no further drain, the air pressure will slowly return to normal. In addition, if the bulkheads are open across the ship and there are no breaches to space, oxygen will actually refill faster, as the air pressure stabilizes between rooms, and filling the entire ship is faster than specifically oxygenating one room.
159* ContrivedCoincidence: Lampshaded in one particularly lucky random event:
160-->"Holy crap! A weapon is just floating in space!"
161* CoolButInefficient: The Repair Arm repairs a few points of hull automatically at each jump point, at the cost of 15% of your earned scrap. Over time, this adds up to far more scrap than you would have spent if you just repaired your ship at a store or waited for an event which is cheap/free. Furthermore, if the player is taking enough damage that the augment is actually reasonably spending the scrap it's stealing, then keeping the hull intact is the least of the problems they're facing. If you are [[PowerupLetdown "awarded"]] it as part of a random event, you are well-advised [[ThatOneDisadvantage to dump it as quickly as possible]].
162* CosmeticAward: While most achievements do nothing, [[NotActuallyCosmeticAward each ship has a set of unique achievements that allow you to unlock a new layout.]]
163* CowardlyBoss: {{Justified|Trope}}. The Rebel Flagship is attempting to complete a mission that doesn't involve the player's destruction, though it won't immediately jump away once its drive is charged like in certain enemy encounters. Instead, it will only jump away if you deal critical damage to it, making it part this and part SequentialBoss.
164* CowardlyMooks: Sufficiently damaging an enemy ship's hull may convince its crew to beg for mercy or spin up its FTL drive in order to escape. Enemy {{board|ingParty}}ers with low health will also zip out from your ship the moment their teleporters become functional again.
165* CrashIntoHello: One nebula encounter can have you and a Mantis ship unintentionally trading paint. Noteworthy in that it's one of the only two Mantis ship encounters you can reliably elect not to fight without a blue option, simply because the Mantis pilot hates flying in nebulae too. [[note]]The other encounter is a run-in with a Mantis slaver, which you probably want to fight because beating the tar out of him gives you a free crew member, and also because... [[EveryoneHasStandards well, he's a slaver]].[[/note]]
166* CrazyPrepared: An encouraged playstyle, due to the sheer amount of SchmuckBait and the fact that choosing the same option in different playthroughs (or different times in a playthrough) can give a different outcome. You will want to have as diverse a crew and upgraded systems as possible, perhaps including weapons, to get those [[TakeAThirdOption blue options]] when dealing with the various Random Events throughout the galaxy.
167* CrewOfOne: A ship needs at least one living crew member to make jumps. The Engi Cruiser Type B starts with just one Engi, with drones picking up the slack for defense and repair until you can get more crew. Operating with only one crew member is extremely sub-optimal, though, as you don't get bonuses for manning systems, you can't repair systems or fight off boarders effectively, boarding enemy ships is out of the question, and if anything happens to your one crew member, you lose the game.
168* CripplingOverspecialisation: Many ships start out this way. Worse, those which start out with a critical system missing or "weak" need to pay a high premium to upgrade it to the normal starting level. To list them off:
169** The Engi Cruiser Type A focuses heavily on ionising shields and damaging with drones. The ship's starting Ion Blast II does no hull damage, so your only method of damage is the Combat Drone, which uses up a limited supply of drone parts, and damages systems randomly.
170** The Type B Mantis Cruiser has only two crew, two drone slots, and no starting weapons. However, it [[StoneWall comes with powerful shields]], a four-person teleporter room, and is crewed by Mantises, who are the masters of hand-to-hand combat. They can make short work of most ships by boarding them. If you wind up against a drone ship, however, you either have to wait for the boarding drone to slowly break and re-break all of the robot ship's modules, or just escape. Additionally, until you get a weapon or happen upon the Zoltan Shield Bypass augment, you are impotent against anything with a Zoltan shield. The Type B Crystal Cruiser shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the Type B Mantis Cruiser, with the main differences being the swapping of the second shield layer with cloaking and a shift of the crew composition to 3 Crystalmen.
171** The Type B Zoltan Cruiser starts with powerful weapons, but no normal shield underneath its non-recharging Zoltan Shield. Prolonged fights will leave you defenseless, and asteroids or combat drones will tear through your shield (and hull) before you can hope to respond.
172** The Type C Zoltan Cruiser has a power-hungry arsenal but a near-useless reactor, instead relying on its Zoltan crew and a 30-second battery. Boarders, repairs, or fires that require you to move anyone from their post will force you to shut down systems, and if your drone doesn't kill the enemy in 30 seconds you'll have to un-man piloting and shut off your engines and oxygen to keep the drone, your weapons, and your shield online.
173** The Rock Cruiser Type A has two missile weapons only. They are powerful and can take out a lot of ships in only 2 or 3 hits, but if you run out of missiles, you can't hurt the enemy at all. An enemy with a Zoltan Shield or Defence Drones will often cost as much cash in new missiles to blow up as you get in scrap for killing it. The Slug Cruiser Type B has this problem even worse; not only does it only have missile-based weaponry, but it also lacks a medbay at the start, so healing your crew after a boarding operation requires the use of ammo-consuming Healing Bursts which might miss entirely.
174** The Type B Rock Cruiser has no airlocks (and can't gain any later) and it starts with no door control system. Your only defense against boarders or fires is for your rock crewmen to slowly walk over there and deal with it in person. If you're lucky an enemy shot will breach the hull in an unimportant room to give you an impromptu "airlock", but you'll still have to buy an expensive door system to use it.
175** The Type A and B Stealth Cruisers lack shields in exchange for a cloaking system that makes them evade all fired projectiles, making them stronger against early enemies with large volleys or shield-piercing weaponry, but leaves them vulnerable to beams, drones, and asteroids.
176** The Type B Stealth Cruiser can OneHitKill most enemies in the early sectors thanks to its Glaive Beam. That is, if you can keep the beam online for its 22.5-second charge time (enough time for many other weapons to fire at least twice) with no shields, low-level engines, and only a 10-second cloak offering any real protection.
177* CriticalExistenceFailure: Applies to crew; at 0 hit points, they go from alive to "dying" to dead in about a second. Also, since [[HitPoints hull integrity]] is measured separately from SubsystemDamage, it's quite possible for a fully-functional ship to explode thanks to a stray shot.
178* CruelMercy: When you damage an enemy's hull enough, they'll usually offer to give you some scrap and other resources as long as you stop shooting at them. In most cases, they'll survive, but if you've damaged their oxygen system, they'll die if they can't repair it, meaning you've basically doomed them anyway. A similar thing can happen if you've destroyed their doors system and set a large amount of their ship on fire, usually resulting in them burning to death slowly but surely, or their ship spontaneously exploding after you've accepted their surrender. Of course, these things can happen to you just as easily.
179* CrutchCharacter: Many ships' early loadouts can become this once enemies become too strong for them to deal damage. On a broader level, the Engi A is often one of the first ships players unlock, simply by reaching Sector 5 with any Kestrel ship. Its typical gameplay -- set your Ion Blast to auto-fire, and allow your combat drone to do all the work of attacking -- requires little active input from the player. This playstyle will backfire when progressing later into the game, when stronger enemies require more diverse and technical weaponry and management.
180* CrystalPrison: The Crystalmen get a variant of this as a special ability; their Lockdown power temporarily coats the room with crystals, which prevents exit or entry until the crystals are destroyed. Handy for trapping enemies in airless rooms or keeping them from responding to boarding parties.
181* {{Cthulhumanoid}}: Implied through the JollyRoger flown by SpacePirate ships, which feature octopus-like faces superimposed over crossed bones in place of the traditional human skulls.
182* CutsceneIncompetence:
183** One random event has a crazed Mantis rescued from an escape pod lash out and kill a random member of your crew instantly. Then you return to normal gameplay and fight him. Even the most physically frail race could survive at least a few seconds against that very same Mantis, which becomes apparent if his next target is of the same race as the one he just killed.
184** Thankfully works in your favor in one event where a ship of notoriously untrustworthy Slugs request your help repairing their oxygen system. You can choose to send over a Mantis crewman, if you have one, and he will gleefully [[PaintTheTownRed spread them on the walls]] if it turns out to be a trap. Normally, two Slugs would be a fair match even for a combat-experienced Mantis; three or more would win easily.
185* CutscenePowerToTheMax:
186** If you have a Clone Bay and lose a crewmember to certain events, they are instantly respawned, as opposed to taking however many seconds required to clone them normally. The system doesn't even have to be powered.
187** Some events allow your crew to teleport onboard an enemy ship as a blue option. You can do this for enemy ships with Zoltan Shields even when you don't have a bypass unit. You can also safely teleport crew to an automated ship and back with a level 1 teleporter, when in gameplay the cooldown time usually wouldn't be enough to save them from asphyxiation.
188** Blue Options at events can do this; one Rock crewmember can extinguish a burning space station or put down a riot on his own, a Scrap Recovery Arm can suddenly mine asteroids, the Anti-Bio Beam can one-shot an entire station full of giant spiders without harming anyone else...
189[[/folder]]
190
191[[folder:D-K]]
192* DamageSpongeBoss: [[spoiler:The final phase of the boss fight gives the boss a Zoltan shield with slightly more than double the power of a normal one and the ability to restore it completely after a while. This is partly to make up for it being weaker now than in the last two phases.]]
193* DarkReprise:
194** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tAShpPu6K0 Last Stand]], the Sector 8 theme, to the CutSong [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glAEauHXu0s Federation]].
195** In the ''Advanced Edition'', both the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjYKhD-yIuk Lanius]] theme and its [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG6Ys2opFD0 battle remix]] are darker versions of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiXWfxHHdAU Space Cruise]], the title theme.
196* DeaderThanDead: The introduction of the Clone Bay and even the Backup DNA Bank augment doesn't give your crew immortality.
197** If your Clone Bay is taken down and you don't have the Backup DNA Bank, any crew who die or who were being cloned will die for real very quickly.
198** The "Zoltan Great Eye" event can see your crewman vanished from existence, regardless of your clone bay or DNA bank. There are also a few other events where you cannot clone a crewman (usually due to disease, which carries over through cloning), or they are left behind without being able to clone them (Federation regulations prohibit the cloning of anyone who is currently alive).
199* DeathByDeaging: When you approach the "Great Eye" in a Zoltan sector, one of the possible outcomes is a crew member aging in reverse, then disappearing. You're uncertain what happened to that crew member because [[DeaderThanDead even a Clone Bay won't bring them back]], and you hope that they've [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence transcended physical existence]] instead of simply disappearing.
200* DeathIsCheap: With the Cloning Bay, events that would kill your crew become BlackComedy instead.
201-->With a new-found respect for flames, your crewmember's clone stumbles out of the Clone Bay.\
202The Mantis is shocked to see the crewmember it just slaughtered step out of the Clone Bay.\
203The weapon detonates, sending your bomb disposal volunteer spinning off toward a nearby sun. Fortunately, your crewmember was close enough to the ship for the Clone Bay to revive them. Sheepish and apologetic, they rejoin the crew.\
204Your abandoned crew member is waiting on the ship when you return, trying not to dwell on the fate of his previous incarnation [being eaten by crazed cannibals].
205* DeathRay: The Anti-Bio Beam does no damage to ships or systems, but can kill almost any crew member in two hits. Very helpful for defeating an enemy ship while leaving the ship itself intact and thus preserving more salvageable material. The Slug Cruiser Type A is built around the use of this weapon with supporting Dual Lasers and Breach Bomb, to clear out enemy crew without destroying their ships.
206* DecapitatedArmy: [[spoiler:If you kill the flagship, the ending crawl states that with the flagship destroyed, the Rebel fleet falls apart in spite of their extreme numbers advantage over the Fedaration. Presumably, the flagship had all of the Rebellion's leader on board and/or they dumped too many resources into it to continue with it taken down.]]
207* DefeatMeansFriendship: If you play your cards right in the encounter with [=KazaaakplethKilik=], you can have him join your crew, direct you to a valuable supply cache, and [[spoiler:offer you the assistance of his ships, unlocking the Mantis Cruiser]].
208* DefectorFromDecadence: A random event has a rebel soldier teleport on-board and announce his plans to defect. Either the defector joins your crew and you fight off a ship sent to apprehend him, [[FakeDefector he turns out to be a saboteur who damages a system and springs an ambush]], [[RewardedAsATraitorDeserves or you kill him immediately because his motives are suspect]].
209* DeflectorShields:
210** These are standard on most playable and enemy ships. They block nearly any laser/energy fire, and unlike [[HitPoints hull integrity]], they regenerate on their own after being knocked down.
211** Zoltan Ships come equiped with an augment that gives the ships a non-replenishing green super shield that consumes no power, is independent of the ship's normal shielding system, and only gets recharged during FTL jumps. It can only take five damage, but as long as it holds, it can block any form of attack and prevent teleportation, hacking, and mind control. On the downside, it takes double damage from ion weapons and can be stripped rather quickly by drone attacks or asteroids.
212* DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment: The title. But probably justified, as this makes the game easier to find in searches when you type in "''FTL: Faster Than Light''" instead of "FTL" or "Faster Than Light" separately.
213* DesperationAttack: The final boss has an ability called Power Surge which it uses during the second and third phases of the battle. [[spoiler:During the second phase, Power Surge will launch a massive group of attack drones, though they'll go away after the surge wears off. In the third phase, it will either fire a barrage of seven lasers or fully recharge the ship's Zoltan Shield.]]
214* DestructibleProjectiles: Missiles and certain {{Attack Drone}}s can be shot down by Defense Drones; the Defense Drone Mk. II can even shoot down incoming ''plasma beams''. Additionally, projectiles can occasionally collide with one another in midair, destroying both.
215* DevelopersForesight:
216** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um1zPzbRwO0#t=1m Believe it or not]], missiles can collide and explode in mid-space. Drones also can be destroyed this way, both yours and your enemies'.
217** There is a special death message for dying during the tutorial, which can only be done by turning off shields or intentionally running out of oxygen (which itself can only be done by turning off oxygen or opening all the doors).
218** Drag out a battle long enough, and it's possible for enemy ships to run out of missiles and drones.
219** If your teleporter gets knocked out while your entire crew is on board the enemy ship, and then defeat the enemy crew, [[http://imgur.com/QCNnm9U your crew will take a shuttle back to your ship]].
220** If you manage to take out the entirety of the Flagship's crew, an advanced A.I. takes over, in order to make sure you play through all three phases of the battle. This sometimes makes the fight harder, as the A.I. automatically repairs its systems.
221** If you have a Zoltan Shield (which, among other things, prevents teleporters from working) and encounter a random event where some boarders are teleported to your ship, the event will play normally but the game will point out that it is a mystery how they managed to bypass the super-shield. With the addition of a purchasable Zoltan Shield bypass augment in ''Advanced Edition'', the message instead says that the boarders must possess that augment.
222** Ships you encounter while out of fuel will charge their FTL drive from the beginning of the battle so that if you can't beat them, you aren't stuck in a stalemate forever. If you somehow manage to permanently prevent them from jumping but can't deal any more damage, then eventually the ship disables its weapons and drops fuel, and [[http://i.imgur.com/iygpFTY.png even the text box is puzzled]].
223** Averted during certain events, such as the Crushed Pirate or the Malfunctioning Defense System, which assume that you always have weaponry, even on a weaponless ship.
224* DifficultButAwesome:
225** The Stealth Cruiser Type-B is normally [[CripplingOverspecialization extremely specialized]] and difficult to use in the early game — that is, until you upgrade your stealth matrix to level 3, which gives you 15 seconds of invisibility. Since almost every enemy weapon takes longer than 7.5 seconds to charge and can't lock onto you[[note]]meaning that they stop charging[[/note]] during the 15 seconds you're stealthed, the combined 22.5 seconds of safety is plenty of time to charge your [[InfinityPlusOneSword Glaive Beam]] and OneHitKill most ships through the first couple of sectors before they can even fire their weapons.
226** When fully charged, the Chain Vulcan fires so fast it will quickly obliterate enemy ships with a constant stream of fire. The problem is it's expensive (95 scrap), takes 4 power bars, and 35.5 seconds to fully charge. This can make it very difficult to afford the gun and the power it takes while also affording the necessary measures needed to support it with other weapons and avoid damage during the charge time. But if you can acquire such measures, then the Vulcan is easily one of the best weapons in the game.
227* DifficultyLevels: Easy and Normal in vanilla ''FTL''. Note that even Easy is NintendoHard. Normal gives you 10 starting scrap instead of 30, makes the AI targets your systems more often, and beefs up enemy ships to have more shields (up to ''[[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard five]]'' for late-game enemies) and stronger weapons. ''Advanced Edition'' adds Hard, which gives you ''no'' starting scrap, makes the AI targets vital systems (such as shields and weapons) more frequently, and adds two connecting rooms to the [[FinalBoss Rebel Flagship]] so that the strategy of killing all crew except the one manning lasers won't be as effective. [[HardModePerks You get a score multiplier for trying the harder difficulty levels]], however.
228* DisasterScavengers:
229** Your crew often finds the remains of past battles and long-empty settlements, which you then root through to get scrap, fuel, and other resources.
230** The Lanius commonly reside in abandoned sectors in the wake of interstellar conflicts, the evidence of which "[[BlatantLies mysteriously]]" disappear.
231* DiscardAndDraw: Exemplified by [[spoiler:[[FinalBoss the Rebel Flagship]]. Even though [[MyRulesAreNotYourRules it can survive having its hull whittled down to nothing]], ''[[SequentialBoss twice]]'', and escape to recover, each defeat it suffers causes it to lose several rooms and the systems they contain; it compensates by installing new systems between battles to replace the systems it lost]].
232* DiscOneNuke:
233** The [[PurposelyOverpowered Crystal Cruiser]]. Its weapons ignore one level of shields and don't use ammo, making it trivially easy to beat the early sectors. This is mitigated slightly by the weapon being the only non-missile weapon which can be intercepted by a Mk. I Defense Drone, but most enemy layouts will not have such a drone in the early sectors. [[note]]The Rock Cruiser B, the Shivan, has a unique Heavy Pierce laser that also bypasses one level of shields and cannot be intercepted by Mark I Defense Drones, but that ship has [[CripplingOverspecialization several... difficulties]] (including a lack of airlocks, which cannot be addressed no matter how the ship is upgraded) that keep it out of GameBreaker territory (though it still qualifies as a DiskOneNuke, as seen in the next bullet point).[[/note]] Crystal crew members also make for a powerful boarding crew should you choose to go down that path, so much so that the B layout of their ship is based around that strategy. That said, the process for unlocking this craft is so convoluted and improbable that you might as well have won a minor lottery if you get it.
234** The Rock Cruiser Type B "Shivan" starts out with Fire Bombs, a unique Heavy Piercing Laser, and a strong Rock crew. The Heavy Pierce is incredibly effective early on, charging fairly quickly and ignoring one layer of shields, while taking no ammunition and not being vulnerable to Mk I Defense Drones. While it becomes less effective later on, it's strong enough to the point where you can collect the supporting crew and a teleporter to assemble your Rocks into a fire-augmented nigh-unstoppable boarding crew for the late game, or else acquire further weaponry to help combat more heavily defended foes. It does have 2 disadvantages: no airlock and no door control. This means that you can't hurt enemies by opening airlocks or hinder their movement around your ship, and have no way to contain fires or extinguish them unless you divert crews from their position to stop them. Door control can be purchased at a store for 60 scrap, but there is no way to solve the lack of airlocks; the closest things to a "solution" to that problem are creating a hull breach in an empty, out-of-the-way room or getting a Lanius crew member, and you still need door control to actually use the deoxygenated room as an impromptu airlock.
235** The Zoltan Cruiser Type B, "Noether", starts with two Ion Blasts and a Pike Beam, which, given an experienced weapons officer[[note]]which you can easily have by sector 3 or 4, given how fast the Ion Blasts can fire[[/note]], is actually ''enough firepower to bring down the final boss''. The two ion weapons can quickly and efficiently disable enemy shields and keep them down, and you can even divert one to disabling enemy weapons once that's done. And once the shields are out of the way, the Pike Beam can do widespread and severe damage to the now-defenseless enemy, as it cannot be dodged and is the longest and most energy-efficient beam weapon in the game. More heavily shielded enemies take longer, but can eventually still be rendered defenseless and cut down. Throw in a laser, an extra ion weapon, and/or an attack drone, and you're pretty much set. The downside to the initial firepower, of course, is that your normal shields need to be upgraded before they can properly function, and you depend entirely on your Zoltan shield and evasion at the start, which can lead to hairy situations in fights against drone-heavy enemies or in asteroid fields, or, if you're ''really'' unlucky, [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs fighting drone-heavy enemies]] ''[[BreadEggsBreadedEggs in]]'' [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs an asteroid field]].
236** The Mantis Cruiser Type B starts with no weapons at all, but its two-layer shield, four-person teleporter, defense drones, and starting crew of two Mantises make it trivially easy to defeat almost any ship, earning plenty of scrap for weapons and other upgrades.
237** The Kestrel Type B ship, the Red-Tail, starts off with four Basic Lasers, single-shot lasers with a charge time of 10 seconds. While each one is weak on their own, four of them at the same time allows you to inflict more damage than a Burst Laser II, but with less recharge time. In fact, it's not even necessary to target the shields on single-shield enemies for the first two sectors since you can still do pretty reasonable damage with three lasers; sometimes you can even shut down an enemy's weapons before they can fire ''at all''. Later on, swap them out for Burst Laser [=Is=] or [=IIs=] to pile up the damage some more. Crewmembers manning weapons gaining experience each time ''each weapon fires'' — meaning you often max out the gunner before Sector 3 or 4 — is a bonus.
238** The Type B Lanius cruiser starts with a highly power-efficient flak launcher: 3 shots, even if slightly inaccurate, will easily chew through 1 layer of shields to damage enemy systems.
239* DissonantSerenity: Your Mantis crewman shows this on one blue event.
240--> Almost expecting this, your Mantis calmly responds to the trap. Once a couple of the Slugs have been spread across the walls of their ship, the rest surrender.
241* DistressCall: Some beacons on the map have a distress tag on them. The events at them are typically less combat oriented, and instead are solved through either risking assets such as hull and crew, or having the right crew/item/system and using a blue option. If you run out of fuel, you can send one out for a better chance at rescue, though this can also bring you into a battle.
242* DrawingStraws: When you choose to send a crewman to slavers or to defuse a mine with a missile, they draw straws.
243* DroneDeployer:
244** While all player ships have the ability to send out drones, Engi ships are particularly focused on drone combat and come with more slots for drones (Engi ships can support three drones while most ships can only field two). The Engi Cruiser Type B starts with ''three'' onboard drones and only one lonely crew member.
245** Certain enemy types are able to field drones themselves. These include Rebel riggers and disruptors, Auto-assaults, Engi fighters and bombers, Zoltan Energy bombers, and [[spoiler:the second phase of the Rebel Flagship]].
246* DrunkWithPower: In a Zoltan sector, you can find a "wise man" who has figured out how to use a spacial rift and has been driven mad with power. He demands that you gaze into the rift and makes a Rockman, Slug, or Mantis ship appear to fight you (you get to choose which). When you win and contact him, he gets very angry and implodes.
247* EasyModeMockery: In a minor way. The in-game achievements list the difficulty level you unlocked them on.
248* EarlyGameHell: Runs the gamut of straight to aversion of the trope depending on which ship you pick, and your general luck in what enemies are generated in each game run.
249** The main reason the early game can be much harder than the late game is that your defenses are relatively weak (to the point of being next to nonexistent for certain ships [[note]]Zoltan Cruiser B and all Stealth Cruisers[[/note]]), and you start with very little engine power[[note]]unless you're using the Stealth Cruiser A[[/note]]. As a result, if you run into a nasty ship, it will take a long time to charge the FTL to run away, and they may well destroy your low-level piloting or engines system to keep you in the fight for even longer.
250** The Unidentified and Rock cruisers have the sheer firepower to destroy any early-game ship, and Mantis cruisers are easier to blast through the early game with their ability to slaughter the enemy crew with ease, as early game ships lack the numbers of crew ''and'' the medbays that make them able to better resist a Mantis boarding party, let alone a boarding drone or bomb on top. On the other hand, the Rock Cruiser A and all Mantis Cruisers have severe offensive shortcomings [[note]]complete reliance on missile weaponry and boarding parties, respectively[[/note]] that can render the former helpless if it cannot find sufficient resources[[note]]read: missiles[[/note]] and makes the latter nearly helpless against certain enemy ships[[note]]namely auto-AI ships[[/note]], and the Rock Cruiser B has a very rough time against enemy boarding parties due to having no airlocks or door control to asphyxiate them, but they're all strong enough to steamroll the early game unless they're unlucky enough for their weaknesses to become relevant.
251** The Stealth cruiser, on the other hand, is a very hard ship to use in the early game. No variant of the ship has shielding, relying on engine and cloaking modules to increase the soft counter of evasion against attack, instead of the hard counter of shielding. Taking one bad hit can cripple its ability to withstand punishment, and they are guaranteed to take a severe beating against anything equipped with [[AlwaysAccurateAttack beam weapons]] (which completely NoSell evasion as a tradeoff for being [[NoSell No-Sold]] by shields, which the Stealth Cruisers do not have).
252** The Vortex, Engi Cruiser layout B, has trouble fighting enemies in ''Sector One''. It has massive drawbacks (no internal sensors, sub-par weaponry, and a single Engi as your "crew") and very little positives (your drones move a little faster, you do start with a Heavy Laser I... and that's about it).
253* EmergentNarrative: The story follows you, a starship captain, with valuable information for your allies who are on the losing side of a rebellion, while the Rebels pursue you. During your journey, you accumulate currency, crew, equipment, and ship upgrades from various "beacons", or waypoints. Sectors are randomly generated, and what occurs at each beacon is usually a RandomEvent. Each event and even an empty beacon will describe some occurrence, the outcome of which you usually have a hand in. Seen all together, the events form a narrative of how you went from a basic ship and skeleton crew to ready-to-face-the-Rebel-flagship. (Or how you failed to.) Your journey can go one way in one playthrough and be significantly different in the next. The only story elements that definitely occur are those at the very beginning and at the very end (assuming you make it that far).
254* EliteMooks: Some of the heavier enemies you come across; Zoltan Energy Bombers, Mantis Bombers, Slug Assaults, and the rarely-seen Rock Assaults all qualify. And the Rebels have the [[AdvancingWallOfDoom massive fleet of Elite Fighters chasing you the whole time]].
255* EnemyCivilWar: The Mind Control system turns one crewmember against their friends.
256* EnemyScan: Sensors grant additional information about enemy ships when upgraded. Level 2 lets you see inside enemy ships, level 3 gives each of the enemy's weapons a visible charge bar, and level 4 (which is only accessible by manning level 3 sensors) gives a readout of the enemy's system levels.
257* EnergyBeings: The Zoltan. They give one bar of power to whatever system they're currently in, but are more fragile than the other races at 70 health instead of the usual 100. They also explode on death, dealing 15 damage to everyone in the room.
258* EnergyWeapons: Three main categories. First there are the "lasers", which fire one or more projectiles of energy that do hull and system damage, can be blocked by shields but weaken them, and like all projectiles, can be dodged. Then there are the "beams", which fire energy beams that cannot be dodged and do damage based on the number of rooms they hit, often requiring careful aiming of the beam path. Their damage is reduced by 1 for every layer of shields they have to pass through, however, and they don't have any weakening effect on the shields themselves. Then there are ion weapons, which fire blue projectiles of energy that can disable enemy systems on impact but do no hull damage. If they hit shields, it's as if they hit the ship's shielding system, and hence their disabling effect is applied to the shield generator. ''Advanced Edition'' adds an ion subset, stun, which has the same effect as ion weapons but also are guaranteed to cause anyone in the affected room to be stunned for a short period; the tradeoff is that the actual ion damage they deal is pitiful relative to their charge-up time.[[note]]The "guaranteed" in the previous sentence is there because regular ion weapons are also able to stun crew members in the room they hit; however, unlike stun weapons, regular ion weapons are not guaranteed to stun crew (and in fact are likely to fail to do so), and when regular ion weapons ''do'' stun crew members, the stun tends to be shorter than that caused by a stun weapon.[[/note]] The projectiles of stun weapons are yellow to differentiate them from normal blue ion shots.
259* EpicFail: It is possible to die during the VideoGameTutorial. Since tutorial enemies can't damage your shields, this requires venting your entire ship of oxygen or turning your shields off manually — two actions that are completely unnecessary to completing the tutorial, and thus amount to [[PressXToDie killing yourself on purpose]]. The game gives out a NonstandardGameOver for this.
260* EscortMission: Some ships you encounter along the way will give you some payment if you agree to lead them to a certain area in space. Luckily, you don't have to actually take care of said spaceships, and they don't mind if you agree to help and don't bother jumping to their destination.
261* EtherealChoir: One can be heard during the LastStand.
262* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Everything in the universe seems to have a grudge against your poor ship — from slavers and pirates to asteroids and suns. There are some exceptions — occasionally you'll encounter Federation loyalists who give you free stuff, people thanking you for saving them, and some aliens who will be nice to you if you help them or prove your worth to them.
263* ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: The Slug, Mantis, and Rockmen alien races are literally races of giant slugs, mantises, and men made out of rock.
264* ExclusiveEnemyEquipment: Generally, anything the enemy uses, you can too, except for the Flagship's triple-barrelled guns. There are also some ships with five layers of shielding, although these are rare.
265* ExcusePlot: With the victorious Rebel fleet in hot pursuit, you must BringNewsBack to the last of TheFederation forces. Or, much more likely, [[NintendoHard die trying]]. Have fun!
266* ExpansionPack: ''Advanced Edition'' is a free content pack released in 2014 that provides a variety of new events, pieces of ship equipment, systems, and even a new crew type and sector.
267* ExpendableClone: The entire point of the clone bay, especially where boarding is concerned. Your crew won't be as strong and they can't heal nearly as well, but as long as it is active, you can just keep sending replacements until you win. Zoltan crew work especially well with this tactic, as their ActionBomb ability does damage to all the crew in the room they die in, making up for their lower health.
268* ExplosiveDecompression: {{Averted}}. Hull breaches and open airlock doors will cause air to leak out, complete with hissing sound effect, but won't affect your crew until asphyxia starts draining their health.
269* ExplosiveInstrumentation: If a system is completely destroyed by a fire or boarding party, the ship will take 1 hull damage.
270* ExposedExtraterrestrials: Humanity seems to be the only race that bothers with clothes.
271* {{Expy}}: With their single eyes, nanomachine contruction, and penchant for technology, Engi bear a great deal of resemblance to Upgrade from ''WesternAnimation/{{Ben10}}''
272* FantasticRacism:
273** The Rebellion is human-supremacist and is shown enslaving non-humans; a small bribe is enough for a Rebel checkpoint to let a group of human ships pass inspection freely, and the Zoltan Envoy quest has a fanatical Rebel reject the idea of unity on the grounds that aliens are limiting humanity.
274** The Rockmen tend to be very distrustful of other races, and find them "repugnant". They'll help you only if you impress them in various ways, such as by surviving the heat of a red giant star, by showing them advanced sensor data, or even by saving them from arranged marriages.
275** Even the generally affable Engi can become distrustful of aliens, with a fleet of Engi ships only divulging their plans if you have a fellow Engi.
276** A special case for the Mantis, who view all other races as prey. Some Mantis individuals even specialize in hunting members of specific races.
277* FashionableAsymmetry: The ''Rigger'' and ''Disruptor'' class rebel ships are a big box with a radiator vent or RamScoop intake on the front and a cockpit offset to the left.
278* FasterThanLightTravel: It's in the game's name. The "jump drive" variety of FTL seems to be in effect, with the common subtrope of a ship being stuck in harm's way while waiting for the jump drive to charge playing a major role. You progress through the game by jumping from one "navigation beacon" to the next, encountering a random event at each. If you get into a dangerous situation, you can try to hold out long enough for your engines to charge, and then make a HyperspeedEscape — as long as your FTL drive doesn't get disabled, and as long as you have fuel.
279* FinalBossPreview: You can come across an unfinished secondary Rebel Flagship in the Rebel Stronghold sector. It is roughly equivalent to the third phase of the FinalBoss, except the weapon rooms aren't isolated (unless you're playing on Hard, in which case this is irrelevant), it has no power surge ability, the number of crew and system levels scale based on the current sector, the Zoltan Shield is missing, and there is no AI takeover if you kill the crew. You get a rather hefty reward for beating it, especially if you do so by killing the crew. The battle serves as the new unlock quest for the Federation cruiser.
280* FluffyTheTerrible: Since names are randomly selected from a naming pool, you'll often recruit dangerous Mantises or gargantuan Rockmen with names like "Butters" or "Stick".
281* FlyingCutlerySpaceship: The Lanius spaceships look like large silver blades arranged in a vaguely aerodynamic shape and adorned with bright blue lights. The Lanius themselves also have spikes protruding from their bodies.
282* TheFundamentalist: Rock culture involves a lot of this, preaching about how alien species are heretics. Zoltan government is a cross between fundamentalist preaching, a pacifistic culture, and red-tape bureaucracy, [[{{Irony}} the latter of which causes a lot of senseless violence through the player ship failing to meet the exacting guidelines of Zoltan space]].
283* FunWithAcronyms: Combining the Captain's Edition with the Advanced Edition gives most people coining the title '''A'''dvanced '''C'''aptain's '''E'''dition or [[NintendoHard ACE]].
284* GadgeteerGenius: The Engi, who are themselves ambiguously mechanical lifeforms, are skilled in shaping ship equipment from scrap metal.
285* GameplayAndStorySegregation:
286** There are certain {{Random Event}}s that can leave one of your party members infected by a plague or neurotoxin. It can even happen to your Engi or Rock crew, despite them being either immune or resistant to disease as a blue option to another plague event (or even ''the same'' plague event, if you're foolish enough to pick a non-blue option when a blue option is available).
287** The quest to unlock the Zoltan cruiser requires you to demonstrate a commitment to pacifism. As a bonus (including if you've already unlocked the ship), you get a new Zoltan crewman called Envoy. Envoy is maxed out in all skills, including weapons and combat, and you can then make Envoy your weapons officer and/or have him fight enemy boarders or be in boarding parties (though the latter may be a bad idea, considering that max combat skill doesn't modify his below-average health).[[note]]You can be given the Zoltan Shield augment from this event chain instead of getting Envoy (with the reward being chosen randomly), but the Zoltan Shield has no GameplayAndStorySegregation potential.[[/note]]
288** Using a teleporter in blue events ignores its cooldown time. For instance, you may find an opportunity to use a basic teleporter to get onto an unmanned scout ship and get sector information, then return safely. The cooldown time on a basic teleporter is longer than the amount of time it takes for a crewman (other than a Rockman, Crystal, or Lanius) to asphyxiate in an unpressurized room.
289** The events for killing off the enemy crew in a slaver ship aren't programmed to determine how the enemy crew was killed off. This can end up with the slaves getting scorched to death even though it was a simple boarding mission. Or somehow with them surviving on board a ship that was oxygen deprived with multiple breaches or was completely flooded with ''fire''.
290** You, the player, require a pilot at the helm to FTL jump, and so do most enemy ships, but this doesn't apply to automated ships or the [[spoiler:Federation cruiser]] you can send back home (and then it does apply to that Federation Cruiser when you actually play as it). This is taken to a ridiculous extreme by [[spoiler:the Rebel Flagship]], which is not only able to jump without anyone in the pilot seat[[spoiler:, even if it still has crew members alive and the A.I. hasn't taken over]], but can even jump if both the piloting and engine systems are thoroughly demolished and in no state to be repaired — it doesn't matter if the piloting and engine rooms have every tile on fire and containing a hull breach, with the crew all the way on the other end of the ship, [[spoiler:the Rebel Flagship is still going to jump away the first two times its hull points are reduced to zero]].
291** While the Engi aboard Mantis ships are usually described as slaves, they will keep fighting to the death even if their captors have been killed.
292** Even if the player has Lanius crewmembers on the ship, communications from Lanius ships still need to be translated.
293* GatheringSteam: "Chain" weapons, such as the Chain Laser, Chain Ion, and Chain Vulcan get progressively better each time they fire in an encounter. Depending on the weapon, getting better implies either shooting faster and faster or getting more powerful. In exchange, their first shot is nearly always weak and/or has a very long charge time. On the first shot, the Chain Laser is just a slower Burst Laser I, while after the third, it's a much faster one, going from a 16 second initial cooldown to a final cooldown of 7 seconds. By the fourth shot, the Chain Ion has gone from one ion damage to four, though its cooldown never changes from 14 seconds. The Chain Vulcan takes 11.1 seconds to charge a measly one shot, but after five shots, each shot has a cooldown of 1.1 seconds, so fast that it can overwhelm any amount of shields through raw rate of fire. If any chain weapon loses power, it loses all its steam and has to start over from square one.
294* GatlingGood: The Chain Vulcan consists of 3 barrels, with every shot causing the gun to spin to the next barrel in line. While this effect is not particularily recognisable as a gatling gun at the weapon's base charge time of 11.1 seconds, once it is spun up to 1.1 seconds per shot, the effect is much clearer. There are also lesser chaingun lasers, which have two barrels that revolve twice when the gun fires.
295* GeoEffects: Space around you may present some hazards that make some beacons more dangerous for you and your opponent. Specifically, there are asteroid fields (an asteroid hits the ships or shields every few seconds), suns (a solar flare hits the ships every 20 seconds or so, causing fires and sometimes hull damage), pulsars (an EMP pulse hits the ships at regular intervals, ionizing systems, especially the shield), and Anti-Ship Batteries (Every 20 second, a powerful shot that can be dodged hits either your ship, the other one, or both). Finally, there are nebulae, which disable sensors but make the Rebel fleet slower, with an Ion Storm variant, which also cuts the reactor power of the ships by half.
296* GemstoneAssault: Crystal weapons fire crystals that don't use up ammuntion, yet are able to pierce 1 layer of shields. Crystalmen also throw crystal shards as a ranged attack.
297* GeneticMemory: Clones of people who died in events remember getting killed. They also come back with most of their skill intact. The game develops [[BlackComedy a grim sense of humor over the idea of your Red Shirts getting killed over and over]].
298* GhostShip:
299** There are a few events in the game where your crew finds an apparently empty ship... things may or may not end badly for one of your crewmembers.
300** ''Your'' ship will become this if you get a GameOver by way of crew loss.
301---> ''Your ship will continue to drift for eternity, or until looters destroy it.''
302* GlassCannon: The Stealth Cruiser starts out with a cloaking device, strong sensors, and efficient (if somewhat weak) weapons, but no shields. Its Type B variant takes this up to eleven, trading engine strength and a defensive augmentation for the devastating (but rather inefficient) [[InfinityPlusOneSword Glaive Beam]].
303* GodzillaThreshold:
304** When your ship is invaded by more attackers than you even have crew, launching bombs at your own ship seems like a good alternative to, well, having your crew slaughtered and your ship crippled.
305** Similarly, if your sensors go out during a boarding or fire, venting your entire ship suddenly starts to look like a pretty good idea.
306** For the Type B Rock ship, it could actually be considered beneficial to use a breach bomb on an empty room so you have a way to vent the ship of air in an emergency.
307** Story-wise, the entire game takes place well past the threshold. If you want the Federation to survive, you have to do whatever it takes to get to them. Destroying defenseless ships for the scrap, taking bribes from slavers and pirates, ignoring those in need of assistance... it's all fair game.
308* GoodOldFisticuffs: When standing in the same tile as an enemy crewman, it looks like everyone fights barehanded. When standing on a different tile of the same room, they tend to fight with ray guns (which do the same damage as punching), by spitting acid, or by throwing rocks.
309* GracefulLoser: Many of the enemy ships you encounter will admit how much stronger you are and surrender to you when low on health, offering scrap, missiles, drone parts, and/or fuel (and possibly even weapons, drone schematics, and/or augments) in exchange for letting them live. For some reason, however, they will never demand your surrender mid-battle (though they may offer you a chance to pay them to avoid a fight entirely), so if your ship is losing a fight, you will have to jump away or die fighting.
310* GreatOffscreenWar: The game begins when the Rebels have nearly won, so you've skipped through much of the conflict until the end, when you warn the last Federation fleet. There are also mentions of a previous war with the Mantis race, many of whom still despise humans for this reason. On Earth, parents still tell their children of the blood-red ships that invaded the planet.
311* GuideDangIt: Several of the ships have quite specific requirements to unlock, and the game gives sparse — if any — hints as to what those requirements are. The Crystal Cruiser is a particularly notorious example, with it requiring 2 random events to occur in the right order before heading to a specific sector.
312* GunboatDiplomacy: There are a few events where if you have enough levels in weapons, you have the option to power up your weapons at someone to get what you want:
313** In one case, there is a struggling ship trying to move cargo which puts up the last of its shields when it sees you. You power up your weapons as a show of force, but you don't get the items for free — you just open a store. Curiously, this event is marked "store" on the map, so your threatening gesture is automatic.
314** One event has you hauling a stranded ship's goods to another jump beacon, for which the insufferably snide buyer offers you a paltry reward for your trouble. If your weapon systems are adequate, however, you get a blue option to power them up, which quickly makes the buyer rethink his position and gives you a ''much'' better reward.
315* HackYourEnemy: The hacking system in ''Advanced Edition'' fires a limpet drone onto an enemy system, allowing you to shut it down, or, in the case of the medbay, oxygen/life support, teleporter, mind control, backup battery, weapons, and shields, reverse its effects for a few critical seconds.
316* HardModePerks: Playing on Normal gives you a score multiplier. Playing on Hard gives you an even bigger one.
317* HealingFactor: Medbays grant this to occupants, as long as they're powered on. "Engi Med-bot Dispersal" grants this to your entire ship at a reduced rate. "Reconstructive Teleport" can take this up to eleven in short bursts, by completely and instantaneously healing anyone who uses your teleporter.
318* HealingShiv: There's a bomb that heals your crew, and ''Advanced Edition'' adds another bomb that completely repairs a system.
319* HelloInsertNameHere:
320** This is the case for your starting crew, opening the floodgates for players to go for obvious choices such as [[{{Series/Firefly}} Mal, Wash, and Kaylee]], or [[{{Anime/CowboyBebop}} Spike, Jet, and Faye]]. That dusty old Kestrel can very well be named [[{{Series/Firefly}} Serenity]].
321** In ''Advanced Edition'', you can now rename any crew at any point in the game, leading to such oddities as taking named characters, such as Kazaaak or Robert Smith, and arbitrarily giving them new names. (Though this is also useful when you get several crewmen named Charlie.)
322* HeroicSacrifice: Destroying the Rebel Flagship counts as a win, even if your own ship explodes.
323* HiddenElfVillage: [[spoiler:The secret Crystal Sector. True to the trope, many of the inhabitants are outraged by the sudden intrusion of outsiders, while others are amazed and intrigued.]]
324* HitPoints: Every ship has a health bar in the form of hull strength, with player ships able to have up to 30 hull. Individual crew have their own hit point totals as well.
325* {{Hitscan}}: All beam weapons work this way, hitting their targets instantly.
326* HobbesWasRight: The fall of TheFederation brought with it a [[EvilPowerVacuum power vacuum]] that left the galaxy in a shambles. [[SpacePirates Pirates]] are everywhere, and all the surrounding powers are scrambling to either acquire more territory or keep would-be terrorizers ''out'' of their territory. The only way to end this mess is to bring back TheFederation and its military.
327* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Opening the airlocks to asphyxiate fires or boarders can easily turn into this. If you door control unit goes down, you can't close the airlocks, and if your oxygen gets shut off, you can't re-pressurize. Woe betide you if both the oxygen ''and'' door control go down..
328* HoldTheLine: To unlock the Rock ship, you have to meet a specific ship at a node with a nearby sun so they can [[OnlyTheWorthyMayPass test your mettle]]. While solar flares are burning both of your ships, it will shoot at you while its jump drive charges. While this is going on, you must wait for it to jump away and then follow it to its base. Destroying it or killing the crew nets you standard rewards [[WhatTheHellPlayer and a guilt trip]]. You ''can'' shoot it to disable its weapons, but this runs the risk of the ship choosing to repair systems over charging its FTL drive.
329* HoldYourHippogriffs: At a RandomEvent taking place at a Zoltan trade hub, if you try entering without a blue option, the result may be text saying your ship is like "a Casvagarian Sea Slug in a Plutonian Shrimp Stew", and you will get boarders and have to fight a Zoltan ship.
330* HonorBeforeReason: If you make a deal to spare somebody, you take only their bribe and leave them alone, even if they blow up after the fact, which would allow you to scavenge the ship otherwise.
331* HopelessBossFight: In the demo, there was a NighInvulnerable pirate ship that stopped players from advancing past Sector 2. [[LordBritishPostulate Not that this stopped player Ohmwrecker from defeating it and getting his name in the random crew names as a reward]].
332* HordeOfAlienLocusts:
333** The Mantis are giant alien [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin mantises]] that are stated to be the most aggressive and antagonistic race in the game. However, they aren't [[HiveMind hive-minded]], nor are they concerned with consuming everything, and [[MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch they have plenty of reasonable members you can recruit]].
334** One random event lets you board a station to fight back an invasion of [[GiantSpider giant alien spiders]].
335** The Lanius, found in ''Advanced Edition'', regularly enter periods of hibernation and reawaken when large metal deposits make themselves available (such as a galactic war providing lots of tasty debris) then set about consuming it all. Apparently, they do have rules that forbid attacking the ships of living sapients. However, this is not the most popular policy, and a lot of Lanius you encounter disregard this.
336* HumanPopsicle: Or Alien Popsicles in this case. Some random events have you reawaken aliens from stasis, such as the one that gets you a [[spoiler:Crystal crew member]].
337* HumansAdvanceSwiftly: Humans learn skills 10% faster to make up for having no other special abilities.
338* HumansAreAverage: The only bonus that humans get is 10% faster skill learning, [[JackOfAllStats having no other modifiers to their stats]]. The game describes them as "common and uninteresting".
339* HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: The Mantis often do this, though the Rock also sometimes attack foreigners for target practice.
340* HyperspaceLanes: Beacons are linked by these; jumping to one reveals some information about adjacent nodes. Certain events or systems can let you see the entirety of the Sector. The "Advanced FTL Navigation" system lets you bypass them, but only to return to ones you've already been to.
341* HyperspeedAmbush: Everyone in space apparently uses the same hyperspace beacon coordinates, so it's not uncommon to find yourself in an ambush after a jump. Pirates and slavers also occasionally set up fake distress beacons to lure in victims.
342* HyperspeedEscape: If a battle gets too tough and the player waits long enough for the engines to get ready again, he can jump to hyperspace mid-battle. Enemy ships will sometimes attempt the same, unless you disable their piloting or engines or destroy them before they get the chance to jump. The Rebel Flagship will do this twice to repair and power different systems.
343* HypnoRay: The Mind Control system introduced in ''Advanced Edition'', allowing you to turn enemy crew into allies for a limited time. Of course, an enemy with a Mind Control system can do the same to you, and if both ships have Mind Control, one ship can use its Mind Control to negate the other's.
344* IDidWhatIHadToDo: Of course, sometimes you need to make tough decisions. If you just barely survived a fight against a Rebel and you need scrap to repair your hull ''now'', you will probably have to take whatever fuel and Scrap the pirate will give you or risk getting killed. You're not going to like it at times, but Rule #1 is '''survive'''.
345* ImmuneToFire: The Rockmen have fire immunity as one of their strong points. While others put out fires with extinguishers, Rockmen put them out by stomping on them. If you encounter a space station with out-of-control fire, you can send them to succesfully put out the fire without risking your crew or your ship. Crew drones are immune to fire too, which makes it useful to deploy a system-repair drone when over half your ship is on fire and you can't vent your oxygen (because your door system's broken and probably on fire too) without losing your crew.
346* ImmuneToMindControl: Slugs are telepathic, which, on top of being able to influence minds themselves, renders them immune to mind control.
347* ImpossibleTheft: In Slug-controlled sectors, you can encounter a Slug captain who beams aboard your ship and offers you an unidentified drink. One of the possible results of accepting the drink is [[SlippingAMickey finding yourself drugged]], allowing the Slugs to steal some scrap from your cargo hold. The amount stolen is not limited by the amount of scrap in your possession, and sometimes you lose more scrap than you had in the first place.
348* IncendiaryExponent: Rockmen when invading ships in conjunction with fire weapons. They're immune to fire. And the enemy ship and crew, unless they're also Rockmen, are not.
349* InsectoidAliens: The Mantis are [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin giant mantises]].
350* InstantSedation: The worst outcome from accepting the Slug captain's drink is that you are quickly knocked out by the heavy anaesthesia, and when you awake, you find out that the Slug stole your supplies.
351* InstantWinCondition: Dealing the death-blow on the third stage of the Rebel Flagship fight means you win, even if your crew and/or ship is on the brink of death itself. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlxIPbwQHOM Your ship can even be blown apart first]], as long as the Flagship is destroyed within a few seconds after (before the "game over" popup appears). Justified, as the Flagship holds the highest in command of the Rebel Fleet, the Rebels have invested the bulk of their war efforts into it, and your goal is saving the Federation, not simply looking out for yourself; whether you're alive upon Flagship defeat or not, your crew will be commended as Federation heroes.
352* InterfaceSpoiler: If your ship enters a new location a little bit farther to the left, or your "Ship" button is blacked out with an "In Danger" message, that means there's a fight happening.
353* InterruptedIntimacy: In Engi space, you may come across two Engi ships smashed together and surrounded by debris, and you wonder if they need help. If you try to pry them apart, one of them will attack you. Then it's explained that you interrupted a "union" that was in the process of creating another ship. (If, instead, you ask an Engi crew member to help them, your Engi will embarrassedly refuse and explain what they're doing.)
354* JackOfAllStats: Humans have no particular perks or penalties, which makes them good in any situation. The Kestrel, the default ship, has average stats across the board, is crewed by three humans, and can make good use of almost any gear you find. The Type B version gets a more rounded-out crew (a Zoltan and a Mantis plus two humans).
355* JerkassHasAPoint: While most events or fights have a clear-cut "profit from somebody else's pain" angle, slavers offering to give you a slave for their freedom do have a very valid point: If you don't have a boarding crew, anti-bio beam, or hacking module you can plant on their oxygen system, you're going to kill everyone on board if you don't let them go.
356* JollyRoger: SpacePirate ships are decorated with tentacled {{Cthulhumanoid}} faces superimposed over crossed bones.
357* KaizoTrap: It's possible to get your ship destroyed at the same time you destroy an enemy ship, or '''even after an enemy ship that just attacked surrenders''', just because it made one last attack before taking the fatal blow or initiating said surrender, which still counts as a GameOver. Unless it's against the third phase of the Rebel Flagship, in which case the game throws you the victory.
358* KeystoneArmy: [[spoiler:Destroying the Flagship of the Rebels cripples the fleet trying to destroy the last Federation base, winning the game. Justified because the Rebel army's morale is [[DespairEventHorizon obliterated]] by the destruction of the Flagship (the game explitly states that the Flagship's destruction throws the Rebel Fleet into chaos).]]
359* KillItWithFire: There are several weapons designed to light an enemy ship on fire, the most prominent being the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Fire Beam]]. Fire destroys equipment, consumes oxygen, hurts crew members (except for Rocks), and worst of all, ''spreads''. That small fire in the security room can quickly turn into a blaze consuming half the ship. One achievement requires setting every square of an enemy ship on fire.
360* KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter: Missiles have drawbacks, true — most prominently being limited in quantity — but in the end, they ignore standard shields and can dish out some pretty good damage.
361[[/folder]]
362
363[[folder:L-R]]
364* LampshadeHanging: Even if you are in a Zoltan ship with your special Zoltan shield holding, which is supposed to prevent missiles, bombs, and boarders teleporting onto your ship, you can still get the "attackers board your ship" events, with the game only mentioning, "You don't know how they got past your Zoltan shields!". That said, you still can't be boarded by actual enemy ''ships'' while your Zoltan shields are up, just by random events.
365** ''Advanced Edition'' adds a new augmentation that lets you board past enemy Zoltan shields, allowing the game to avert this trope by saying that they must have had said ship augment.
366* LanguageBarrier: Between the Lanius and pretty much everyone else. This causes problems, especially considering the Lanius' first instinct is to eat the ships of everyone they meet.
367* LastStand: [[TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon Sector 8]], called The Last Stand, is where you and the Federation [[spoiler:face down the massively advanced Rebel Flagship]].
368* LawfulStupid: The Zoltan. They are members of the Federation your ship is trying to save and are considered peaceful. They will also constantly harass you with legal requests and government business, up to and including attempting to arrest vital crew members or ''trying to kill you over customs disputes.''
369** The "Unknown Disease On Mining Colony" event can result in you having to leave a crewman behind who is infected. If you have a clone bay, you get this text:
370-->"As your crewman is still alive and working towards a cure, it would be against Federation regulation to create a clone to continue with you on your journey."[[note]]To be fair, if you happen to beat the Flagship, save the Federation, and restore peace to the galaxy, it would become rather awkward to have the same person simultaneously existing in two different places.[[/note]]
371* LawOfAlienNames: PlayedWith, since the default name pool seems to apply to all characters regardless of species. This sometimes creates weird situations like having a female human called Pipaluk and a genderless Engi called Elizabeth on the same ship. PlayedStraight with alien {{NPC}}s, however; the Mantis in particular stand out, with names like [=KazaaakplethKilik=].
372* {{Leitmotif}}: The Mantis, Rockmen, Zoltan, Engi, Slugs and Lanius have their own themes that are played in their respective sectors. In addition, there are what the composer calls Space Cruise Chords, Milkyway Melody, and Conflict Theme, all of which turn up in multiple places in the soundtrack. Conflict Theme in particular is intended to represent the consequences of war, and shows up towards the end of the Mantis, Rockmen, and Last Stand tracks. [[http://benprunty.com/2013/07/11/a-guided-tour-through-the-ftl-soundtrack-analysis-of-themes/ See here for more information.]]
373* LethalLavaLand: Being at a beacon too close to a class M star behaves like this: both combatant ships will have a room or two set on fire periodically, and may take some hull and system damage when this happens.
374* LimitBreak:
375** The Flagship has an ability called Power Surge which has several effects. It can summon a huge swarm of combat drones, fire a massive barrage of lasers, or restore its Zoltan Shield.
376** ''AE'' adds the Backup Battery system, which provides extra reactor power (2 or 4, depending on whether it's been upgraded) for 30 seconds.
377* LimitedLoadout: Depending on ship type, you can have only three or four weapons and two or three drones, and each set can only use a maximum of eight reactor points. You can also only ever have three Augments on your ship, and there is only room for eight main systems; if you get things like a Teleporter and a Drone Control, you might not be able to fit a Mind Control or Hacking system on your ship.
378* LuckBasedMission: The entire game, in various ways:
379** Weapon drops and store sales are both essential to winning the game, and both are affected by luck through what they can give you, meaning that you might end up with a run that only gets ShopFodder, leaving you woefully underequipped for later sectors, let alone the flagship.
380** The sector map generation can screw you over by having a thin strip of systems be the only path to the exit, forcing you to either rush through the strip, thereby preventing you from having as many jumps as you could've had, or go to another patch of systems before heading to the exit path, likely forcing you to go through several Rebel-occupied beacons.
381** Most ships can be unlocked simply by finding the relevant homeworld (Stealth, Mantis, Slug, Rock, Zoltan) or beating the game normally (Engi, Federation). The secret ship, however, is much more complicated. First you have to find the Damaged Stasis Pod, an event which can only be found in specific sectors and even then doesn't always produce the pod (thankfully, it occurs at distress beacons, meaning that you can scout out which nodes may or may not have the pod, and you're guaranteed to get the pod if you have Rock Plating... [[ShmuckBait unless you take the weapon the event offers instead]]). Then you have to open the pod, which is also an event only possible in certain sectors — and this event is a normal beacon, so good luck actually finding it, even with the map scouted. [[note]]There are two sector types [[spoiler:(specifically Engi-controlled sectors and the Engi Homeworlds)]] that can contain both the pod acquisition event and the pod opening event. However, those are far from guaranteed to actually have both, and you obviously can't open the pod before you find it, so if you find the events in the wrong order, you're out of luck.[[/note]] ''Then'' you have to find the Rock Homeworlds, which may not even appear, while also not allowing the crew member gained from opening the pod to be killed. Each attempt can take from 30 minutes to an hour. This trope is somewhat downplayed by the fact that an alternate unlock method exists for most ships that only requires winning with the previous ship on the list, making it more consistent. The secret ship can be unlocked "merely" by beating the game with all sixteen of the main A and B type ships.
382** One achievement for the Federation ship requires you to use your crew in four blue events by sector five. Even with your diverse crew, you just have to hope you run into events which allow you to do so. Another achievement for the Kestrel is "Have six different alien races on your crew." Nearly impossible with Kestrel A (starts with Human crew only) and a little easier with Type B (starts with three of the six races: Human, Mantis, and Zoltan). And an achievement for the crystal cruiser requires destroying 10 rock ships in one run. That will likely require running into 2 rock controlled sectors, and fighting a lot of battles in them. You are much more likely to beat the game with the ship than you are to get this achievement.
383** On the hardest difficulty, it's always a toss-up whether you'll come across a manageable opponent or a ship with a zoltan shield and three weapons right after the first jump.
384** Unless you have a scanner (obtaining one is a luck-based mission in and of itself), you'll never know what hazards the next system will have. This can be especially problematic in nebulas -- you can ''merely'' find yourself having to fight with limited visibility, or you end up in an ion storm that halves your reactor's capacity.
385* MacGuffin: The "vital information" you're carrying. You (the player) never even find out what it is until you reach the final system. (It turns out to simply be [[spoiler:"There's a boss ship."]])
386* MacrossMissileMassacre:
387** When fully charged, the Swarm Missile Launcher fires three missiles for the cost of one.
388** The vanilla game's Pegasus Launcher is a lesser version, firing two missiles for the price of one. It actually has better damage output than the Swarm Launcher (2 missiles dealing 2 damage each versus 3 missiles dealing 1 damage each), but obviously, 2 missiles are easier for defense drones to stop and ships to dodge than 3 missiles.
389* MagikarpPower:
390** Both of the ships that are entirely focused around boarding (the Basilisk[[note]]Mantis Type B[[/note]] and especially the Carnelian[[note]]Crystal Type B[[/note]]). The first sector is often the hardest, as you have virtually no way of destroying rebel drones (the Basilisk can destroy Auto-Scouts with a Boarding Drone and patience, but the Carnelian lacks even that) and you're stuck leaving your ship entirely unmanned while you fight on the enemy ship. In addition, since the scrap yields for the first sector are naturally very low, you're not getting too much more than you do on a regular run. However, if you can make it through the first couple of sectors and pick up some non-combat crewmembers to run the ship (and some actual hull-damaging weapons to deal with Auto-Scouts, Auto-Assaults, and the Rebel Flagship), then you probably have a winning run on your hands.
391** The chain-laser series in ''Advanced Edition'' starts out with a long recharge time, but it decreases with each shot, to the point where they fire faster than most weapons in the game. However, the chain is broken if the weapon is depowered, so protecting your weapons system from damage is ''absolutely vital'' (even more so than usual). [[GatlingGood The Chain Vulcan]] takes this to the extreme; it's a four-power, single shot laser needs to be fired five times to reach its minimum reload time of ''1.1 seconds''. That's faster than shields can recharge. This means that, even allowing for misses, the Vulcan alone will take out any ship in the game, including the Rebel Flagship. If you can get it — and that's a big if — you can spend all your scrap on shields, engines, and other systems to help you survive while the Vulcan chews through anything and everything in front of it.
392* TheMainCharactersDoEverything: Oh, you've just jumped across half the universe, surviving by the skin of your teeth to bring us this vital information about the Rebel fleet? Good job. Here's some fuel and some repairs. Now go defeat their Flagship for us. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], as it's mentioned that the Federation uses their fleet to fight off and distract the Rebel fleet (the one that's been chasing you all game) while you deal with the Flagship.
393* TheManyDeathsOfYou: You get a different message depending on how, exactly, your game ended.
394-->''One last explosion marks your fate as your ship is torn apart.''\
395''All crewmembers have died. Your ship will continue to drift for eternity. Or until looters destroy it.''\
396''[[spoiler:[[NonStandardGameOver The Rebel Flagship is within range of the Federation base. All is lost, they've won.]]]]''
397* MartialPacifist: The Zoltan at their best are a peaceful race able to protect themseles with their advanced technology. At their worst, they're LawfulStupid bureaucrats who attack you over the slightest fault. The quest to unlock their cruiser reveals this to be their ideal, which they hope that you also strive for.
398* MasterOfAll: The special crew members you can recruit fall into this trope. If you manage to nab them, you'll find that they're fully maxed in ''all'' categories.
399* MeaningfulName: "Lanius" means "Butcher" in Latin. The Lanius destroy oxygen just by being in a room and suck the metal out of their enemies' ships; they are indeed the butchers of space.
400* MechanicalLifeforms: The Engi race — humanoid, [[StrawVulcan logical]] androids who get bonuses to repairing (but, on the flip side, are terrible at fighting).
401* MesACrowd: Averted with the Clone Bay. The plague event has the possibility of removing a crewmember without killing them. If this happens and you have the Clone Bay, you won't get the crewmember back due to regulations prohibiting the cloning of someone who is still alive.
402* MisappliedPhlebotinum:
403** Averted with Bomb weapons. The devs must have read "The technology that allows your crew to travel from the Cool Starship to the planet and back without using a shuttle is the same technology that can park a live warhead in the enemy captain's lap without using a missile," and came up with Bomb weapons, which do exactly that. However, they do no hull damage, since they appear inside the ship rather than smash into it.
404** The idea of using a teleporter as an AutoDoc is touched upon with the "Reconstructive Teleport'' augment. Nobody thinks to use it as a cloning machine, though.
405* MoneyForNothing: It's rare to find oneself in this situation, but it's possible to end up in sector 8 with all ship upgrades purchased, scrap left over, and no stores to visit.
406* MoneySpider: [[JustifiedTrope Justified]]; the only thing useful as currency is scrap metal, which you can obtain from every ship you destroy (and you can salvage even more if you kill the crew and leave the ship intact). The exception is if you fight one of the [[DemonicSpiders souped-up Rebel Elites]] at a Rebel-controlled jump point; even if you win, you only have time to drain one unit of fuel (or three, if you're flat out) from them before you have to leave.
407* MookChivalry:
408** Only one ship will ever attack at a time. However, if you jump to a node under Rebel control, other ships will contribute to the fight by launching an Anti-Ship Battery at your ship. Occasionally, an event may invert this, with the ASB targeting your opponent instead.
409** Justified with the Rebel Flagship, as the reason that they don't fire battery shots is because they are currently engaged with the Federation fleets, as stated by Admiral Tully in the Last Stand start beacon event.
410* MookMaker: Cloning bays, which regenerate a crewmember when they die. A problem if one uses antipersonnel tactics instead of regular weapons. Also, Drone Control Systems allow you to turn Drone Parts into MechaMooks of various flavors.
411* MoreDakka:
412** Possible in the vanilla game with enough laser weaponry, but taken up to eleven with [[GatlingGood the Chain Vulcan]] in ''Advanced Edition''. It takes four power to run and only fires one laser, but after you've fired it five times, it fires one bolt ''per second'', which is faster than shields can recharge.
413** Flak weapons shoot a cluster of debris. The Mark II version shoots 7 chunks at once, and you can have two of them installed at once if you're very lucky. NOTHING has enough shields to deal with that.
414** If you're lucky enough to find four Burst Laser Mark [=IIs=] (and crazy enough to equip them all and upgrade your ship enough to supply the eight bars of power they'll collectively need), you can launch precisely 1.5 times more dakka than the Rebel Flagship's [[LimitBreak Power Surge]] in a single AlphaStrike. Sadly, you cannot equip four Flak Mark [=IIs=] to launch 3.5 times the Flagship's level of dakka, as you cannot upgrade your weapons system enough.
415* MrFixit: The Engi are elite repair men who can restore broken systems at an astonoshing rate.
416* MutualDisadvantage: Happens often when any two ships with [[StoneWall very robust defenses]] end up fighting each other. When there is no LogicalWeakness to exploit, both ships [[PaddedSumoGameplay just end up exchanging potshots]] with neither one able to overcome the defenses of the other.
417* MutualKill: A possible outcome of the final boss, if you're good enough to take out the Flagship, but not careful enough to protect yourself. It still counts as a victory, since you succeeded in causing the fall of the Rebels. (Technically, a MutualKill can happen in any battle, but unless it happens on phase three of the Flagship, it's just a GameOver.)
418* MutuallyExclusivePowerups: You can't have a cloning bay and a med bay on the same ship, meaning that you have to choose between [[AutoDoc on-demand healing]] or [[CloningGambit immortality through cloning]]. The clone bay imparts a per-jump HealingFactor and ResurrectiveImmortality, however, and you can still heal mid-battle with the Healing Burst weapon and/or Reconstructive Teleport augment.
419* MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch: Some members in random events can act in contrary to their species' hats. However, due to the multiple outcomes of each event, that same event in a different playthrough could have the member acting exactly how you'd expect. One great example is when a [[ConMan Slug]] ship's captain invites himself for a friendly drink. If you accept the invitation, it can either end with him thanking you for not judging him by his species by fixing your hull and opening his store to you, or him drugging you and stealing a lot of your Scrap.
420* NecessaryDrawback:
421** Lasers never need ammo and better ones can fire multiple shots, but each laser shot can be dodged or absorbed by one layer of shielding, regardless of the laser's damage output, requiring a fairly large number of lasers to overcome shielding in later levels. It is very possible to fire twice as many lasers as the enemy has shields and still completely fail to put a dent in the enemy ship's hull.
422** Heavy Lasers do more damage per shot and can more easily punch holes in the target's hull, but have a lower number of shots, making them by themselves ineffective against shielded ships.
423** Beams [[AlwaysAccurateAttack never miss]] and do enormous damage, but have longer charge times and their damage is reduced by 1 for every shield layer it must pass through, and they cannot damage shields at all. Only two beams, Halberd and Glaive, have sufficient raw damage output to penetrate a one-layer shield, and only the Glaive Beam can penetrate a two-layer shield, which means you need other weapons to supplement them.
424** Missiles ignore shields, but have limited ammunition and can be dodged or shot down by defense drones. The bigger ones also take a fair amount of time to charge.
425** Bombs ignore shields ''and'' defense drones, but share ammo with missiles and never inflict hull damage. Some can start fires that can potentially cause hull damage, but that's only one point. All bombs take longer than missiles to charge, too, and are just as likely to miss, wasting the ammo and the long charge time.
426** Ion weapons disable systems, but [[NonDamagingStatusInflictionAttack their effects are temporary and deal no actual damage]]. They can also miss, just like lasers, missiles, and bombs. On the plus side, they generally charge faster than most weapons, with one ion weapon, the Ion Blast II, having the fastest charge time of any weapon short of a fully-warmed-up Chain Vulcan[note]Four seconds, compared to the Chain Vulcan's 1.1 at full speed[/note].
427** Offensive drones attack continuously and at a rate above most mounted weapons, but are limited by your supply of drone parts and are computer-controlled, aiming at random rooms. Furthermore, the Mark I Combat Drone's rate of fire is insufficient to overcome enemy shields without support, while both varieties of Beam Drone and the Fire Drone are entirely incapable of bypassing shields. On top of that, offensive drones they can be shot away by accident by enemy weapons, or disabled and potentially destroyed on purpose by Anti-Combat Drones[[note]]Anti-Combat Drones fire ion shots rather than damaging shots, but drones directly afflicted with ion damage have a chance of self-destructing rather than reactivating when the ion damage wears off (ion damage to Drone Control or to a room containing a drone does not count)[[/note]]. Mark I Defense Drones will ignore combat drones, but Mark II Defense Drones will attempt to shoot down the lasers fired by combat drones (they will not respond to beam drones).
428** Boarders allow you to wreak havoc inside an enemy ship, but AnyoneCanDie — often in [[YetAnotherStupidDeath stupid ways]], such as them destroying the enemy ship while inside it, causing their deaths, the ship getting destroyed by your own weapons if you're not careful, or the enemy jumping out with your crew members still on board.
429*** Boarding drones are similar to boarders, able to attack the enemy's systems and crew. They require a drone part to launch, but their use is independent of boarding parties — you don't have to put your crew in harm's way, or even have a teleporter — and they have the durability of Rockmen, the power of Mantis (in the case of standard boarding drones) or the ability to do ion damage to systems and stun crew (in the case of Ion Intruders), and immunity to suffocation. They also create a hull breach on entry. However, they target rooms, including their entry room, completely at random, and take a few seconds to travel from their home ship to the enemy ship, during which they can be shot down by defense drones (both Mark I and Mark II) ''and'' stunned or potentially destroyed by anti-drones. Furthermore, boarding drones become inert and completely vulnerable to anti-personnel drones and the enemy crew if depowered (and as they require 3 power to operate, this can happen fairly easily), and even when powered, boarding drones are just as susceptible as actual boarders to being overwhelmed and destroyed by superior numbers of enemy crew before they can inflict substantial damage, meaning that boarding drones are most effective when supported by actual boarding parties.
430** Hull weapons will do double damage when they hit a system-less room, allowing them to inflict severe hull damage in just a few shots. In exchange, they take slightly longer to charge, making them less viable for disabling ships. Furthermore, hitting a room without a system means that no system will be damaged by the shot, and some enemy ships have no system-less rooms at all, taking away a hull weapon's niche. The Hull Beam also has half the beam range of the otherwise equally powerful Pike Beam.
431** The Federation Cruiser's [[WaveMotionGun Artillery Beam]] is independent from its other weapons, cannot miss, and ignores anything short of Zoltan shields to deal massive damage, but can't be manually controlled and counts as one of the 8 ship systems, meaning fewer additional helpful systems like cloaking or hacking can be installed. It also starts with a 50-second charge time, which takes a lot of scrap and power to upgrade into a more reasonable 20 seconds.
432** The Crystal Cruiser A and Rock Cruiser C have special Crystal weapons which mostly behave like lasers and have most of the same advantages and disadvantages. However, Crystal weapons can bypass one layer of shielding (for comparison, missiles and bombs can bypass five layers of shielding, which is the most any ship (even a [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard computer-cheating-bastard]] ship) can possibly have). Since they otherwise behave like lasers, Crystal weapons don't use ammo; however, unlike lasers, crystal weapons fire physical objects that a Mk. I Defense Drone can shoot down.
433** The Repair Arm will restore your ship's hull whenever you collect scrap, but you'll earn less scrap when you're repaired.
434** Fire weapons do no damage by themselves, but the fires they start can cause damage in addition to forcing the enemy to put the fires out prior to effecting repairs. Fire also spreads, and can grow out of control if not managed quickly. However, only Fire Bombs and Fire Beams are guaranteed to start fires, and both take some time to charge, meaning the crew may be able to keep up with the fires if there's enough of them. An upgraded door system will also render fire virtually harmless, since it can't get past blast doors.
435** In the ''Advanced Edition'' expansion, the Hacking system can shoot out a drone that attaches to the enemy hull and affects a single system. This locks the doors to that room to enemy crew, allows friendly crew to freely pass through the doors, makes it unable to be manned by a crew member, and allows a disruption ability that makes the normal effect of the room inverted or disabled, and said disruption is reusable. However, each usage costs a single drone part, the drone cannot be moved unless it is destroyed through ion damage or hacking, and each use of the system takes as long to cool down as cloaking does. Much like boarding drones, it's also vulnerable to defense drones and anti-drones, though it doesn't have a cooldown period between launches.
436** Flak weapons, also in ''Advanced Edition'' always fire multiple projectiles at once, up to seven with the highest tier, making them great at taking down shields. However, they can be shot down by defense drones, and they deal damage in a wide circle, meaning some of the projectiles might not even hit the system you were aiming at.
437* NiceJobBreakingItHero: When you reach the [[spoiler:Crystal Home Sector]]. Before you went there, the inhabitants were peaceful and happy, relatively speaking. And then you came along, and the Rebel Fleet followed you there. Now, presumably, the [[spoiler:entire Crystal fleet is in disarray, and their home has been taken over by nasty Rebel forces. All for a shiny new ship]].
438* NintendoHard: Like basically all {{Roguelike}}s. One of the pre-start tips [[LampshadeHanging explicitly says]] that half the fun is dying.
439* NoBiochemicalBarriers: One of the {{Random Encounter}}s consists of a human-inhabited planet sending a distress signal regarding a plague. While Engi and Rockman crewmates can help out with no ill effects, other alien crewmates can't.
440* NoFairCheating: The save-backup exploit works like a charm up until you unlock a ship or an achievement. If you try saving and reloading again, that unlock or achievement will be locked again, and it'll only remain unlocked if you immediately start a new campaign with your new ship and make a new save.
441* NoHarmRequirement: You may be greeted by a station who will ask you to "convince" their friends to drop their career as SpacePirates by damaging their ship's hull enough to make them surrender. There are also plenty of missions where you're supposed to kill the ship's crew without destroying the ship itself. [[note]]If you do destroy the ship, ''at best'', the person who asked you to recover the ship will be very unhappy with you; at worst, the destroyed ship will '''violently explode''', dealing a whopping '''15''' points of hull damage to you.[[/note]]
442* NoHeroDiscount: Played straight once and subverted everywhere else. One trading outpost FlavorText states that the Federation merchant is glad to see the military is still functioning, then charges you regular prices. The rest of the time, when you come across friendly outposts or allied forces, they'll donate scrap, supplies, or nifty weapons free of charge to help with your mission.
443* NoItemUseForYou:
444** Or system use, rather. Certain events or environmental hazards negatively affect systems. A plasma storm halves your reactor output, Auto-Scouts may occasionally knock out a layer of shielding with a computer virus, Pirate ships disable engines every so often, and Slug vessels target your medbay or oxygen. If the system has enough power, it may only be limited instead of disabled.
445** One event lets you do this to an enemy instead. If you are using one of the Rock cruisers, an event can allow you to {{ram|mingAlwaysWorks}} the enemy ship, which permanently disables the enemy ship's engines, leaving them unable to evade your attacks.
446** Another event lets you track down and disable a Rebel Ship's engines if your sensors are maxed out.
447** Then there's Hacking in ''Advanced Edition'', which allows you to shut down or even reverse the effect of any one of the enemy's systems for a few seconds.
448* NonActionGuy: Engi and Zoltans aren't very good fighters, on account of doing half damage and having 30% less health than average, respectively.
449* NonDamagingStatusInflictionAttack:
450** The ion damage type removes power from systems and stops power from being put back into them for a few seconds, but cause no real damage.
451** Stun is an effect that can be applied by ion weapons and high-damage weapons on crew, which stops them from doing anything for a few seconds.
452* NonEntityGeneral: There is no indication of who or where ''you'' are during the game, save for a scant few mentions of being a human, and it is entirely possible to lose your entire starting crew without any interruption to your mission provided you always have at least ''one'' crewmember left to man the helm. With the Clone Bay in ''Advanced Edition'', your ''entire crew'' can be stuck in the cloning process, yet this won't stop you from fighting.
453* NoPartyLikeADonnerParty: One of the random encounters involves a refugee ship where the passengers and crew turned to cannibalism after being stranded in deep space and running out of food. It comes in several varieties, depending on how long they've been stranded and how many survivors there are when you encounter them.
454* NoSell:
455** Rockmen are completely immune to fire damage. Exploit this by using fire weapons along with boarding parties.
456** Lanius don't need oxygen at all (in fact, they drain it from the room they're in), making them immune to asphyxiation. This makes them great boarders, especially in combination with boarding drones.
457** Zoltan Shields block any attempts at teleporting, boarding, hacking, and mind control while they're active.
458** Slugs are immune to the MindControlDevice, since they're psychics.
459** Clone Bays allow you to NoSell several events that kill your crew outright. The infamous CutsceneIncompetence example of releasing a crazed Mantis from the escape pod notes the shocked expression he makes as he sees the person he just bisected stroll in from the next room. However, there are a few exceptions, such as a crew member being left behind deliberately by an event (as Federation regulations prohibit the cloning of individuals who are still alive) or being infected by a fatal disease from a damaged space station (as the disease would be cloned along with the infectee, accomplishing nothing save for the infection of the entire ship).
460** Defense Drones don't have perfect targeting, but for the most part keep you safe from missiles, asteroids, and even incoming combat/hacker drones.
461* NonStandardGameOver:
462** If you fail to intercept the Rebel Flagship during the Last Stand.
463--->''The Rebel Flagship is within range of the Federation Base. All is lost, they've won.''
464** If you fail the tutorial, the game gives out a special message informing you that while you're free to try again, [[EpicFail "this doesn't bode well for your mission."]]
465* NotActuallyCosmeticAward: The alternate layouts often feature new weapon loadouts, crew rosters, and different systems. For example, the Kestrel Type B has four crew, two of which are non-human, compared to the three humans of the base layout.
466* NoTrueScotsman: Several random events end up with you the victim of FantasticRacism, with aliens belittling or outright attacking you. Understandable when your ship is of a human design and the few members of their species onboard could be considered [[CategoryTraitor Species Traitors]], but this happens even if you're the both the same type of ship and only have members of the same species as the aggressors. Looks like they must not consider you true members if you dare work with the Federation, even if it is to take down a mutual threat.
467* ObliviousAdoption: One event has you help a some perplexed Engi customs officers detaining "Robert Smith," a panicked Mantis who's utterly convinced he's a human. If you have a human who can convince him to calm down (or a Mind Control system), you return him home, where you find out that he's HappilyAdopted by a human family of engineers.
468* OneWingedAngel: [[spoiler:The Flagship's second form. It loses the cloak, door control, and the triple ion cannon, but gains ''insane'' drone capacity and the horrendous Drone Swarm. The one-winged part might be a bit literal in the sense that the ship lost its left wing-like nacelle after the first phase.]]
469* OnlyOneSaveFile: The entire game has a ''single'' save file. This means you can only ever have one active game at a time - if you start a new game, the current one is erased. This means you can't have separate games for different ship types saved at the same time for example - once you start a game, you have to play it till you win, die or choose to restart and overwrite it.
470* OrangeAndBlueMorality: The Engi tend to value knowledge and technology over their individual members. There is at least one random event where the Engi would actually prefer you save their drone schematics rather than their lives. However, if you do save their lives, they will still thank you and will often reward you with scrap and technology. They may also join your crew.
471* OverratedAndUnderleveled: The famous Mantis pirate [=KazaaakplethKilik=] shivers your timbers at the mere mention of his name. With the right preparation, you are able to [[DefeatMeansFriendship defeat him and have him join your crew]]. However, before the release of ''Advanced Edition'' he started with no extra skills, just like any other ordinary Mantis to join you.
472* PacifistRun: One of the in-game achievements, titled "[[LampshadeHanging Coming in for my Pacifism run!]]", requires making it to Sector 5 without firing a shot, using an offensive drone, or teleporting.
473* PaddedSumoGameplay: If you dump all of your scrap into upgrading shields and/or engines but don't acquire or upgrade offenses, and neither you nor your opponents have missiles, both ships will be stuck this way. It is possible to jump away from an unwinnable battle, go through a beacon or two to upgrade, and return, though the Rebel fleet will steadily continue toward you.
474* PaintTheTownRed: When a Slug ship asks for your help about their broken oxygen system, you can let your Mantis see what's going on, at which point it's obvious nothing's wrong with the system. Once the Mantis spreads a few Slugs across the walls, they surrender.
475* PercussiveMaintenance: The Rockmen style of repair. Also possibly the only depiction in fiction that has ever applied this to fighting fires, since the Rockmen jump on fire to put them out. The same goes for Crystalmen, being a reskin of them.
476* {{Permadeath}}: For [[AnyoneCanDie crew members]] and for [[GameOver the ship itself]]. You can only save if you exit the game. On the plus side, destroyed systems can always be repaired, and as long as you've got one hull point left, you can repair up to full. The Clone Bay system in the ''Advanced Edition'' will clone dead crewmembers after a short wait, based on how much power it has, but takes the place of the Medbay and cloned crewmembers take a hit to their skills. You can also still lose them if the clone bay stays offline for too long while there are dead crew[[note]]by which we mean about three seconds[[/note]], unless you have the DNA Bank augment.
477* PerpetualStorm: Nebulae last forever (or at least as long as you are within the sector). Ion storms, which happen within Nebulae will always last the duration of the battle, but can clear up if you're out-of-fuel and have to wait inside the storm.
478* PetTheDog:
479** The automated fueling drones. As only the Rebel fleet deploys unmanned spacecraft, it means they have set up a system that will help anybody needing fuel, assuming they're willing to pay for it.
480** An event details how the Rebels are providing supplies to the current system's inhabitants, who have had it tough due to the war. If you choose to fight them, upon winning, it tells you that now the people will be left out to dry again, but hey, [[YouBastard eliminating a few Rebels matters more to you than the well-being of thousands of colonists.]]
481* PlanetOfHats: Each species has a unique cultural trait that most of their members follow wholeheartedly. In addition, [[MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch there are always exceptions to the nominal culture]]. Among your crew, however, all races are helpful and can be made to act different from the rest, i.e. you have a boarding party of [[SquishyWizard Engi]].
482** The Mantis are a ProudWarriorRace of SpacePirates.
483** The Rockmen culture is full of [[ProudWarriorRace warlike]] [[FantasticRacism racists]] that follow a [[CorruptChurch transparently corrupt]], [[ScamReligion state run religion]].
484** The Zoltan are [[ReligionIsRight religious]] and [[TechnicalPacifist heavily armed pacifists]] who happen to be [[ObstructiveBureaucrat painfully bureaucratic]].
485** The Engi are [[AmbiguousRobots possibly robotic]], [[TheEngineer industrious]], and [[TheStoic stoic]].
486** The Slugs are [[ManipulativeBastard backstabbing]], [[TheHedonist hedonistic]], [[OnlyInItForTheMoney capitalistic]] [[{{Jerkass}} assholes]].
487** The Lanius are [[HordeOfAlienLocusts very hungry]] but [[PlayingWithATrope also interested in]] [[InnocentAliens diplomacy and community]].
488* PlayerDeathIsDramatic: When enemy crewmembers die, they silently keel over, collapse, or explode. When ''your'' crew die, their deaths are audible, including sound effects such as human death grunts and Engi clanking.
489* PlugNPlayTechnology: Pick up any ship component (weapons, systems, and augmentations), and it'll slide easily into your ship, no matter the source of the item or the ship itself. This is from simple examples such as buying weapons from far-off shops in foreign systems or random events with civilians gifting parts to you, to extremes like lucking into Mantis Pheromones for an Engi ship (in very rare events). Most of the time, this is justified, as the universe ''was'' formerly part of TheFederation, but even isolationists like the Slugs and the Crystalmen have shops that happily sell gear to your ship, no matter the origin of the ship.
490* PoorCommunicationKills:
491** Occasionally, battles will be triggered by you being unable to respond to a transmission from another ship, with your silence being mistaken for hostility. This usually happens with Engi ships, which generally don't attack you unless they've been hijacked by Mantises.
492** Occurs often with the Lanius. In one sterling example, you find a ship begging for help against a Lanius ship apparently trying to harvest it. You can either destroy it, or through a blue option find out that the ship is a merchant ship trying to dock, which then allows you to trade.
493** In an Engi sector, you may come across two Engi ships apparently smashed together. If you try to pry them apart, one of them will become hostile and attack you. Using an Engi crew blue option will reveal that the two ships are... making a baby ship, and neither vessel is in any danger.
494* PopQuiz: At a Slug nebula distress beacon, you track the signal to a number of moons orbiting a planet. A Slug marooned on one of the moons tests you by asking how many there are, so if you weren't paying attention and skipped through the text, you can only guess. If you guess wrong, the Slug steals your supplies, while guessing right will get you a Slug crewman.
495* PostDefeatExplosionChain: Destroying a ship makes it give off a few explosions before falling apart.
496* PowerfulButInaccurate: Flak weapons have the potential to inflict a large amount of damage across multiple rooms with a single burst, but in exchange have lousy accuracy.
497* PowerupLetdown: The Repair Arm [[HealingFactor repairs a few points of hull automatically]] each time you gain scrap, but you get a 15% scrap reduction as long as it's installed. Compare to the Scrap Recovery Arm, which gives you a 10% scrap bonus which you can then spend at a shop to repair your ship for less scrap than the Repair Arm consumes[[note]]on Easy difficulty. On harder difficulties you gain and thus lose less scrap, making Repair arm at least overall efficient [[/note]] (or purchase something to reduce damage taken in the first place, like shield upgrades or defense drones).
498** This still can be a boon for when shops can't be found for prolonged periods of time, as you hardly will be able to repair or increase offensive power normally. Upgrading shields can be of greater helpfulness still.
499* PracticalCurrency: Scrap (metal) is the game's primary currency, used for buying items at shops, sometimes being used to barter with passing shows, and can be put towards upgrades for your ship.
500* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: The Rockmen and Mantis.
501* PressStartToGameOver:
502** Newbie players on Easy — and even experienced players on Hard — can suffer devastating defeats in the first jump if they get bad luck, especially if they pick a ship with a glaring weak point; nothing says "fuck you" like encountering an Auto-Ship or Zoltan fighter with no offensive capabilities other than boarding parties, or encountering an enemy with beam drones and beam weapons without any shields.
503** The Engi B cruiser starts with only one crew member. If your first jump results in an event with options that can result in crew loss, it's possible to die right there and then for an instant game over, without even getting into a battle.
504* PressXToDie: Whenever you want, you can vent your ship's oxygen. This is normally a way to repel a hostile boarding crew, but you can also do it to kill yourself. An exception exists for all-Lanius ship crew, as Lanius not only are immune to oxygen suffocation, but they ''drain'' oxygen.
505* PsychicPowers: Slug crewmen use these, revealing enemy crew positions even if your ship's sensors are damaged. They can also see into adjacent rooms. Essentially, they have life form-detecting PsychicRadar. In ''Advanced Edition'', their status as telepaths makes them immune to mind control.
506* PunyEarthlings:
507** Every other species has some element that makes them superior to humans in certain situations. The most egregious example are Slugs, who have the same exact statistics as humans, but with the extra benefit of having PsychicPowers.
508* PurelyAestheticGender: Human crew can be male or female, giving them different sprites. The alien races all either don't have gender, or they just look the same, with {{Palette Swap}}s to tell them apart. Going by the various in-game texts, Engi and Zoltan seem to be the former, and Mantises, Slugs, and Rockmen (and the Rockmen's ancestors, the Crystals) are likely the latter. The Lanius are anyone's guess.
509* PurposelyOverpowered: The Lanius ships are seemingly considered this by the game (and indeed they are among the top most powerful), since the alt-unlock for [[spoiler:the Crystal ship]] doesn't allow the use of Lanius ships.
510* PunchClockVillain: Numerous encounters qualify. Of particular note are Rebel ships whose captain will say that he'd ''rather'' fight for the Federation given the chance, but since they lost and [[OldSoldier fighting is all he knows how to do]], he'll continue to fight [[IFightForTheStrongestSide on the Rebels' side]].
511* RammingAlwaysWorks: One hostile encounter involves a Mantis pirate ship decorated with Rock body parts. If you're flying the Rock Cruiser, you get the option to "[[PrecisionFStrike ram the bastards]]" before the fight, disabling their engines. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that the Rock Cruiser's Rock Armor can totally take it.
512* RandomEvent: You get one at ''almost every'' jump beacon; they can result in everything from combat, to trading options, to situations that present you with an option to intervene or ignore it and keep moving. You can, however, get no activity at all, and [[spoiler:the FinalBoss is not a random event, for obvious reasons]]. The outcomes are also randomized every time you encounter that event. In one instance, you might recruit a rebel defector who will join your crew if you let them aboard, while in another encounter with the exact same event, they're a FakeDefector who will sabotage your ship if you let him aboard.
513* RealTimeWithPause: This is how ship and personnel combat pans out. Use it wisely. The iPad version has an option to automatically pause when you aim, select crew movements or use door controls because of the additional dexterity required in using the touch screen.
514* RecruitingTheCriminal: One random event has a Mantis fugitive teleporting onto your ship and begging for refuge from the Engi ship pursuing him. Sometimes, he's sincere, and he joins your crew to help fend off the Engi trackers; other times it turns out [[SchmuckBait he can't believe you fell for that, and he sabotages a system while the Mantis-operated Engi ship ambushes you]].
515* RedAlert: {{Downplayed}}; all rooms are equipped with a red light that blinks in case of fire or hull breach.
516* RegeneratingHealth: Segmented regeneration for systems. If a reactor bar for the system is partially damaged by enemy boarders or fire, it will instantly snap back to full health as soon those disappear from the room the system is in. Also inverted for repairs, if the repairers will exit the room without fully restoring a bar, it will likewise instantly snap back to fully damaged.
517* RegeneratingShieldStaticHealth: Systems can be repaired, but hull damage can only be restored by events, going to a store, or using one of the rare and moderately expensive Hull Repair drones — which can only be used if you have a Drone System and consumes one Drone Part to restore between 3 and 5 hull.
518* ResourcesManagementGameplay: Not only will you need to watch out for your fuel, missile, and drone-part supplies, but also for the power distribution of your ship. Careful management is critical in order to achieve victory.
519* TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized: [[ANaziByAnyOtherName The Rebels are]] ''[[ANaziByAnyOtherName definitely]]'' [[ANaziByAnyOtherName the bad guys]]. Some of the dialogue reveals that the Rebels think [[TheSocialDarwinist humans are superior to aliens, who deserve to be subjugated]], and they will happily send out swarms of Rebel and Auto-Ships to enforce their will on the various species of the galaxy. At the beginning of the game, [[DownerBeginning they've already defeated]] TheFederation. Now you're on a run through alien-controlled space to reach and regroup with whatever little Federation-loyal forces remain to mount a [[LastStand last-ditch counterattack]].
520* RidiculouslyHumanRobots: The Engi, being made of lots of nanomachines, manage to be both of these at different times. They have a lot of human-like sensibilities about them and usually assume a bipedal form [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith presumably to make their human allies more comfortable]]. However, one filler event in Engi sectors describes Engi becoming vortices in order to work on special machines.
521* RoboRomance: You can happen upon two Engi ships that appear to be either in combat or to have collided with each other. If you try to intervene, you're informed that no help is needed and that it's a private matter. There is a very strong implication that the two ships are ''mating''.
522* RobotMaster: The Engi, possibly as a result of their partly-mechanical nature and their MachineEmpathy. They make heavy use of drone systems, and their ships coming pre-installed with drones and have 3 drone slots as opposed to the 2 of almost every other playable ship. The lone Engi who pilots the Type B Engi Cruiser fits this trope particularly well, as he commands a 'crew' composed entirely of robots.
523* RockMonster: The Rockmen, whose bodily materials give them 150% health but limit their speed. [[spoiler:Ditto for Crystalmen, who are the Rockmen's ancestors.]]
524* RuleOfFun:
525** The power plant is not a physical object. Probably because one shot to it and you'd be totally screwed. Note that it can be interfered with by ion storms, as well as upgraded, but it is otherwise intangible and invulnerable. Presumably, Rule of Fun's why the whole ship isn't cheeseballed invincible the same way.
526** Despite allowing a few other teleporter-based [[MisappliedPhlebotinum shenanigans]], the teleporter can't be used as a substitute for a clone bay. That would mean a ship with a teleporter would have cloning ''and'' a medbay, making her crew effectively invincible and making the clone bay (and Backup DNA Bank) obsolete.
527* RunawayFiance: The "Wife of The Grand Basilisk of Numa V" event in the Rock Homeworlds has the player escort the wife to her destination, at which point you can either hand her over in exchange for scrap and an augment, ([[WhatTheHellPlayer leading her to curse at you]]), or you can refuse, which draws the ire of the Basilisk's escorts but has the rebellious fiancé join your crew.
528[[/folder]]
529
530[[folder:S-Z]]
531* SalvagePirates: If you run out of fuel and are drifting in space (with or without you distress beacon) there is a chance your "rescuers" will be more interested in helping themselves to your ship.
532* SaveScumming: Normally restricted, because a single save file is only made upon quitting the game and is actually deleted on loading. However, if you can quit the game, find the save file, set it to "read only," and don't mind the tedium of quitting/restarting the game, you can load and reload until you get a set of favorable outcomes. Of course, even then, the game's UnstableEquilibrium often means that you'll have to start over anyway.
533* ScavengerWorld: Not the ''whole'' galaxy, but definitely large portions of it, considering scrap is the universal currency of outer space.
534* SceneryGorn: When a ship explodes, it will split spectacularly into a detailed multi-piece wreck. This can (and [[NintendoHard frequently will]]) [[GameOver happen to your ship]].
535* SchmuckBait:
536** A common encounter in Slug sectors. Many events involve suspiciously generous offers, most of which turn out to be ruses to sabotage your ship. On the other hand, choosing the exact same option in said situation in a different playthrough CAN give different outcomes. For instance, a Slug trader talks to you about a special deal for his wares for a while only to be revealed as distracting you from his mates disabling your weapons. The next time you meet him, choosing to talk to him instead have him appreciate your trust in him and give you some extra bonus. So the only way to know whether it's really a SchmuckBait or not is to take it.
537** The many encounters where you find a person of questionable motives or sanity seeking to join your crew. Sometimes they'll join without incident, but it's equally likely that they'll be saboteurs/completely insane and kill a random crew member, lead you into an ambush, or both.
538* SchrodingersGun:
539** If you pick up a quest towards the end of a sector, generally the quest will carry over to the next sector, unless you're in sector 7, in which case the quest will simply cancel out. What if there's a fork and you have to choose between two sectors, you ask? The sector you choose will be the one containing the quest marker.
540** There are several random events where you can choose to take a risk and either get a decent reward or induce accidents that lose resources and crewmembers. These events often have special responses, marked by blue text, that allow you to avoid the dangers of the event. If you choose a blue option, the following text tends to describe the dangerous result and how your choice protected you from it (even though half the time choosing the normal option wouldn't result in any danger) making it seem as if the blue option caused the danger to happen.
541*** One example is when a Slug transport sends a distress signal asking for help with life-support. Normally they either pay you handsomely for your help, or ambush your crewmember and kill them. If you send a Mantis (good at melee combat) to help, the Slugs will always ambush you so that the Mantis can wipe them out and recover resources from their ship.
542** The quest for unlocking the Zoltan ship involves talking a rebel ship into not fighting you. If you succeed, it'll [[spoiler:turn out to be the Zoltan from before testing you]], but if you fail, it'll just turn out to be an ordinary rebel ship.
543* ScoldedForNotBuying: Most merchants won't mind if you don't buy anything, but there is a random encounter where you can contact a ship that has equipment for sale, and if you look at his inventory but don't buy anything, he'll attack you for wasting his time.
544* ScratchDamage:
545** Every shot that hits a room will do at least one hull damage, provided the weapon has some sort of base damage. Bombs, ion weapons, the fire beam, and the bio-beam are exceptions.
546** Having a fire or boarding crew completely destroy a system will damage that ship by 1 hull point.
547* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Both you and your enemy can do this, though it takes time for the jump drive to charge. It's generally unwise for the player, because retreating doesn't reward scrap, though it is useful for running through Rebel nodes which give almost no reward and are more difficult than normal.[[note]]If the player isn't strong enough to defeat an enemy, they can also jump away, upgrade, and return, though the ever-present fleet will move closer with every jump.[[/note]] The enemy occasionally does it right at the start of the battle (either out of fear or to warn the Rebels) or when they've been damaged enough, but you can stop them by disabling their engines or piloting system or by keeping their crew too busy to pilot the ship.
548* SealedEvilInADuel: Can be [[InvokedTrope turned to your advantage]], see StatGrinding below.
549* SecretTestOfCharacter: In the Zoltan Homeworlds, you can encounter a ship preaching a message of pacifism. Listen to what they have to say and they'll direct you to another beacon, where you'll find [[spoiler:a hostile rebel ship waiting for you! Talk to them instead of fighting and push for a peaceful resolution, and they'll eventually reveal themselves to be the Zoltan from earlier. They will praise you for taking their message seriously and offer their support, unlocking the Zoltan Cruiser and either a Zoltan Shield or a crew member with maxed stats]].
550* ShootTheBullet:
551** All defense drones can shoot down missiles, asteroids, and hostile boarding drones. Mk. II defense drones can also shoot down incoming laser and ion shots.
552** Missiles, lasers, ions, asteroids, and drones can collide in space and destroy each other, although this happens very rarely, and is next-to-impossible to do on purpose.
553* ShopFodder: The most straightforward example of this is drone schematics. If you don't have and aren't planning on getting a drone system, they're useless except as store credit.
554* ShortRangeShotgun: Shows up in ''Advanced Edition'' with Flak Weaponry. They shoot several projectiles with actual spread, with the expected accuracy and medium-to-long reloading times. They're often better than ion weapons at stripping shields, but their inaccuracy leaves them ill-suited for the precision needed to damage systems in smaller rooms.
555* ShoutOut:
556** Some of the default names for crewmembers — [[VideoGame/{{Minecraft}} Notch]] and [[Series/{{BurnNotice}} Mike Weston]], for instance.
557** Some of the achievements:
558*** The picture for "Trustworthy Auto-Pilot" achievement is a [[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey red lens with "PAL 1000" inscribed above]].
559*** The achievement for fully repairing a Kestrel Cruiser that has been beaten down to one [[HitPoints Hull Point]] is "[[Film/StarTrekFirstContact Tough Little Ship]]".
560*** The 'Rule Ten: Greed is Eternal' achievement is a reference to [[Franchise/StarTrek Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition]].
561*** The achievement "The Guns...They've Stopped" is a reference to [[Film/ANewHope A New Hope]].
562*** Setting every single section of an enemy ship on fire earns "[[Film/TheDarkKnight Some People Just Want To Watch Ships Burn]]"
563** If you blank the ship's name and press enter, the name will automatically change to "[[VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment The Nameless One]]".
564** If you're stranded and out of fuel, you will get a wait option in your map screen. This causes random events to happen until the rebel fleet catches up to you. In one random event, a ship arrives with this subtle nod to Han Solo of ''Franchise/StarWars'':
565---> ''A modified [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-1300_light_freighter YT-1300 Freighter]] jumps to an area near your sector. Your gut tells you these people are smugglers, but they seem to be feeling altruistic and present an offer of assistance.''
566** One random event has you following the distress beacon of an Engi ship that has crash landed on a planet populated by [[WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic brightly colored horse-like creatures]]. [[SchmuckBait Go ahead]], try to take a few with you. Interestingly, the event was implemented on request by a donor to the game.
567** The effect shown when a ship jumps, a spark-like flash that quickly moves along the length of the ship, is the same FTL jump effect used by the Colonial ships in the remade ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|2003}}''.
568** The default name for the Stealth Cruiser type-B, the [=DA-SR12=], is an obvious shout out to the ''Normandy'' SR-1 and SR-2 of the ''Franchise/MassEffect'' series, another frigate famed for its experimental stealth capabilities.
569** The default name for the Stealth Cruiser type-C is Simo-H, referring to UsefulNotes/SimoHayha a.k.a. the deadliest soldier in history. As Häyhä did, this ship is expected to use stealth and precise weaponry to decimate the opposition, although ironically, the Simo-H swaps the cloaking system for a drone system that produces super shields instead.
570** Whether it's intentional or not, the battle theme for Rock sectors has a riff that sounds not unlike the RecurringRiff from the main theme of ''Film/TheThing1982''.
571** If its name and red-and-black colour scheme didn't make the connection obvious, the Rock Cruiser Type-B strongly resembles the Shivan Nahema bomber from {{VideoGame/FreeSpace}}.
572* ShowsDamage: The Rebel Flagship is the only ship to show increasing external damage as you defeat each of its forms.
573* SkewedPriorities: You may meet a mercenary who offers his services: delay the Rebels, or scout the sector. If you choose to fight, the text will read: "Mercenaries are worse than rebels. The only honorable course is to engage the mercenary in battle."
574* SkillScoresAndPerks: You improve your ship through a skill score system wherein each installed system can be incrementally improved by spending scrap. Systems that aren't pre-installed on your ship can be bought at some stores for a scrap cost, after which they can also be improved in the same manner. All systems are capped at a certain level, and higher-level upgrades are more expensive. Main systems have their upgrades manifest by simply increasing the amount of [[TimTaylorTechnology power you can pump into them]], and you need to upgrade your reactor to obtain more power, while passive subsystems like helm control, doors, sensors, and backup battery don't consume power and are improved directly. Crew members, meanwhile, improve the performance of certain systems by manning them, and get better at in the process via StatGrinding.
575* SlowLaser: Alongside the {{hitscan}} beams, the game also has lasers that are incremental bursts that are actually projectiles.
576* SnipingTheCockpit: It is possible to injure or even kill the crew of enemy ships by firing upon the section they are in. If all of the crew are killed, you win even more scrap, although trying to do this with conventional weapons is likely to destroy the ship via hull damage before the crew is dead. It's much more efficient to kill crew off with bombs, fire, boarding parties, mind control, or an Anti-Bio Beam, all of which deal negligible hull damage at most.
577* SoleSurvivor:
578** Players can come across distress beacons set up by other spacemen who survived crashing into an alien world. These survivors can be brought aboard the ship and either become new crewmates, blow open an impromptu airlock, or kill one of your crew at random. If you have an upgraded medical bay, you're given an option that guarantees the first of these actions.
579** If something goes drastically wrong, one of your crew members can become this.
580** There's an achievement for the Mantis ship having one crew member survive an all-out battle with another ship.
581* SomethingWeForgot: The game helps avert this if you try to jump to another node while your crew is still aboard the enemy ship by giving you a warning prompt asking you if you really want to jump.
582* SpaceClouds: Nebulas, which cover certain jump points. Within them, sensors are useless, obscuring vision of your own and enemy ships, though Slug PsychicPowers still work. Certain nebula jump points also contain a plasma storm, which cuts reactor output in half for the player and any enemy ships. Some sectors are one giant nebula, generally inhabited by Slugs, and nebula beacons in those sectors don't impede the Rebels quite as much as nebulas outside of them.
583* SpaceFighter: After a fashion. There are enemy ships ''called'' fighters, but they've got multi-person crews and compartments big enough to walk around in, making them seem more like gunboats or patrol craft than "traditional" fighters.
584* SpaceFriction: If a drone stops receiving power, it will slow down and gradually come to a stop rather than continuing to move at the same speed.
585* SpacePirates: If you're not fighting Rebels, you're likely fighting these. Usually they're a random type of NPC ship with a mix of the different races as crew, although some are exclusively Rockmen.
586* SpaceSector: The player travels between jump beacons which are grouped into "sectors" of space (starting with Sector 1). Each of these sectors has an "exit" beacon which connects a given sector with one or two other sectors.
587* SpaceWhale: Never seen in-game, but mentioned off-hand in a random store description.
588--> ''A Mantis crew here has hunkered down in the abdomen of a long-dead space-whale -- the only way, presumably, for them to operate their black-market trade without detection. Worth a look?''
589* SssssnakeTalk: Slugs tend to [[SelfDemonstratingArticle sssspeak like thissss]].
590* StandardHumanSpaceship: The Kestrel and other Federation ships play this straight, with their designs dominated by simple flat lines. The Rebel ships avert this, being moderately sleek and colorfully painted with no visible engines. Also, the Engi-built but Federation-run and human-crewed Stealth Cruisers avert this, being very sleek and glossy, which is strange given that the ships the Engi build for their own use are extremely utilitarian and boxy.
591* StartXToStopX: An amusing example pops up in ''Advanced Edition''. Has a crew member been Mind Controlled into attempting to murder their comrades or blow up the system they were manning? Just use your own Mind Control device on them, and they'll be instantly brainwashed back to normal.
592* StatGrinding: If you happen upon an enemy ship with a loadout that is incapable of damaging you, you can soak up their attacks indefinitely while letting your crew gain experience for it. With enough patience, your entire crew can be experts in multiple systems. Any enemy shot that misses you gives experience to your engines officer and helmsman, any shot that that hits your shields gives experience to your shields officer when they recharge your shields, and any shot you fire gives experience to your weapons officer regardless of whether or not it hits. You just need to keep your firepower low enough to not kill the enemy, such as by turning off most weapons or using non-lethal ion weapons until you're done grinding.
593* StealthInSpace: A cloaking device is one of the ship systems you can pick up. It boosts your Evasion by 60%, greatly boosting your evasion although not guaranteeing that enemy shots will miss unless your pre-cloak evasion is 40% or more. Additionally, while a ship is cloaked, weapons on the enemy ship stop charging. Normally, firing while cloaked [[InvisibilityFlicker weakens the cloaking effect]], but an augment removes that limitation.
594* StealthPun:
595** In one event, an Engi captain reports "an odd bug", and requests your help in debugging [[spoiler:[[InsectoidAliens a Mantis]]]].
596** The Slugs are pretty much psychic giant slug [[ConMan con men]]. They're [[spoiler:slimy in both the literal and figurative sense]].
597** The Slug cruiser C layout, called the Ariolimax is banana yellow. It so happens that ''Ariolimax'' is the scientific name for the banana slug.
598* SternChase: You're only ever a few jumps ahead of the Rebel Fleet. You ''can'' slow them down if you're zipping by all events or come across an event where friendly Federation forces will bog down their fleet with bad tracking data, but otherwise, expect to keep running for your life within a few jumps.
599* StoneWall:
600** The Mantis Cruiser Type B, at least early on. It has no weapons, level 2 shielding to start, a drone system with a defense drone, a crew of two Mantises, and a four-person teleporter. Early combat tactics involve sending them both over to board enemy ships, leaving the shields and drone to protect the ship since it has zero evasion in your absence. This is actually way more effective than it sounds, especially in the early sectors, when enemies struggle to generate with weaponry able to break through 2 shield layers without missiles. Plus, killing the crew instead of just blowing a ship up gives you a bigger Scrap reward, letting you buy more crewmates and/or upgrades.
601** Enemy Engi ships have drone systems that are only able to use defensive drones. This is compounded by the fact that Engi bombers have higher level shields, meaning that some Engi ships can be invincible to starting weapons, even as early as sector 2.
602* StrongEnemiesLowRewards: Getting caught by [[AdvancingWallOfDoom the Rebel Fleet]] will put you in a fight against an elite rebel ship guaranteed to have weapons and defences that can easily counter yours. If you somehow manage to defeat this ship (whether by destroying it or killing its crew), all you will get is a single fuel cell as you don't get much time to scavenge propery with all that fleet of [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized angry rebels]] surrounding you and ''still'' pelting you with powerful projectiles.
603* SubsystemDamage: All systems and subsystems can be individually damaged. Systems with more than one reactor capacity have reduced effectiveness when damaged and can be disabled entirely if hit hard and/or often enough; systems with only one bar of reactor capacity are either working or not. This applies to enemies as well as players; deciding which system to target is one of the biggest tactical parts of the game.
604* SuicidalOverconfidence: Even if your ship has three shield layers and the enemy has only beam weapons, in most circumstances, they will try to fight you. Also, individual enemy crewmembers aboard your ship will continue trying to fight your crew after their own ship has been destroyed or jumps away (they will at least retreat immediately if their ship surrenders (and you accept said surrender)).
605* SupportPartyMember:
606** Engi and Zoltan. Engi do half damage in combat and Zoltan only have 70 health, making both inferior combatants. However, Engi repair twice as fast while Zoltan provide one bar of power to whatever room they're in, making both ideal for ship support during a battle.
607** Whoever is manning the sensors or door systems. These systems have no direct offensive capabilities, but manning sensors lets you see inside the enemy ship, and manning doors makes them harder for enemy boarding parties to breach.
608* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Solving people's problems in a way that creates more problems will not endear you to anybody, and you should not expect much of a reward for doing so. The standout examples are sending a boarding drone to deal with giant alien spiders (leaving the space station with a big hole to outer space), dealing with a malfunctioning defense satellite by shooting it until it stops working entirely (meaning that the space colony it was protecting now has no defense against pirates, Mantis, Rebels, and other unwelcome visitors), and blowing up a rebel ship that was supplying goods to a colony (leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves).
609* SuspendSave: You can save and come back later, but this only lets you resume your progress. [[PermaDeath The save deletes when you die]].
610* TheTalk: In Engi space, you may come across two ships stuck together, with signals and debris coming from them. You don't know what's going on and think something's wrong. There is a blue option wherein you ask your Engi crew mate to hail the ships.
611-->''Your Engi crewmember refuses. In a halting use of adjectives and nouns, followed by some animated holographic aids, the Engi explains the ships are... using each other to, loosely translated, "achieve a union." For some reason, this consolidation of ship matter sounds embarrassing and personal.''\
612''You elect to leave the two Engi ships... to their "business." After questioning your Engi crewmember, however, you do manage to salvage what scrap parts you can from the perimeter, even though you feel slightly dirty for doing so.''
613* TakeAThirdOption: Called a "blue option" in game, these allow you to use a unique member of the crew, weapons, or ship upgrades to get around random events; for instance, using an advanced medbay to cure an unknown virus, or using an ion gun to disable a defense system gone haywire. While standard options can pose a risk to your ship's hull, crew, or cost scrap, the vast majority of blue options are zero-risk, and might even contain greater rewards!
614* TakingYouWithMe:
615** It is possible to destroy the Rebel Flagship, with your ship getting destroyed at the exact same moment, and still win the game.
616** Zoltans explode when killed, damaging enemy crew.
617** Some events end up with an intruder aboard your ship; depending on their mental state, they may lash out if antagonized.
618** A downplayed example in the Crystal Cruiser's Crystal Vengeance augment. If you take hull damage, a piece of the debris may strike the enemy's ship.
619* TalkingIsAFreeAction: Enemies can surrender (and pause gameplay) in the middle of a fight, even if their ship is half a second away from destruction. If you accept their surrender, everything that was about to destroy their ship will become instantly harmless. The same doesn't apply for you, though: if you accept surrender before the enemies' projectiles hit, they'll hit anyway.
620* TaughtByExperience: Your crewmen become better at the stations they're assigned to, become better at repairing the more they do it, and do more damage by killing enemy crew or wrecking enemy systems.
621* TeleportGun: Bombs use the "teleporting bullet" variation. They can really ruin the enemy (or your) crew's day, but they can't damage the hull.
622* TeleportersAndTransporters: Used for boarding actions and bomb weapons. They are somewhat common in universe as many merchants, space stations and other ships have access to them.
623* ThemeNaming:
624** Standard beam weapons are named after polearms, while standard missile launchers are named after things in Greek mythology.
625** Most ships available to the player have some sort of themed name:
626*** All Federation ships (Kestrel A, B, and C, Federation A, B, and C, and Stealth A) have names that are birds or related to them (Kestrel, Red-Tail, Swallow, Osprey, Nisos, Fregatidae, and Nesasio, respectively). Nisos is the name of a man in Greek mythology that turned into a bird, a Fregatidae is better known as a frigate-bird with a black-and-red color scheme to boot, and the Nesasio is a type of owl known for being stealthy.
627*** All Engi ships (Engi A, B, and C) have names of geometric shapes (Torus, Vortex, and Tetragon, respectively).
628*** Zoltan B and C (Noether and Cerenkov respectively) are named after physicists.
629*** Mantis A and B (Gila Monster and Basilisk respectively) are named after large serpents.
630*** Rock A and C (Bulwark and Tektite respectively) are named after minerals.
631* ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman: Humans are generally quite average, and useless in events that require more specialized crew. However, one event concerns a Mantis that believes that he is human. The human blue option provided is the only one that guarantees the good outcome.
632* ThisIsUnforgivable:
633** Occasionally, while fighting ships, the enemy ship will surrender and give you offers so you can leave them alone. Against pirate ships, the "don't accept surrender" option is labeled as "Piracy cannot be forgiven. Attack!"
634** In the same vein; "Continue attacking the slaver scum."
635* ThrownOutTheAirlock: Downplayed. You can't suck boarders straight out into space, but you can open up the airlock doors to suffocate enemies to death. If you've got upgraded blast doors, they'll be pounding at the doors while they die of asphyxiation.
636* TooDumbToLive: FTL's AI isn't very complex, so often, ships will die mostly because they fail to employ strategies any human player would.
637** Enemy ships use autofire constantly, meaning their weapons will likely fire out of sync, giving your shields time to recover. However, they sometimes won't fire weapons while cloaked, which can result in an AlphaStrike if the cloak lasts long enough.
638** Enemy ships will deploy their cloaks as soon as they recharge. This allows the player to know precisely when they'll use the cloak and plan accordingly. The same applies to the hacking and mind control systems.
639** Enemy crew members follow a specific pattern when dealing with threats, which makes manipulating their behavior incredibly simple:
640*** On their ships, they will run to their medbay as soon as their health starts to get low, and will fight an unstoppable boarding party to the death if it's full.
641*** They will prioritize the protection/repair of their shields system, occasionally even forsaking defending other systems to repair and defend it.
642*** They won't cease attacking a blast door once they've begun attacking it, even if another door is opened in the same room.
643*** They will immediately retreat from any airless room. While sensible, this makes it trivially easy to herd a boarding party into your medbay, where they are guaranteed to lose. A number of boarders that can easily overwhelm the crew [[https://imgur.com/X9XmfCG will still refuse to travel through an airless room]].
644*** If the enemy ship has a teleporter, and have their starting crew all alive, they will ''always'' use it. Even to send just one crew member, or to send in Engi[[note]]a poor choice because they do half the attack damage of most races[[/note]] or Zoltan[[note]]also a poor choice because they have only 70% of the health of most races, although they can [[ActionBomb explode]] upon death, enabling suicide bomb strategies[[/note]] if no other choice of boarders are available, regardless of how much more effective it is to just keep the entire crew on board.
645*** Boarders only retreat from your ship at low health, even when faced with a battle they can't possibly win.
646** Enemy ships have random arsenals; it's entirely possible to wind up fighting an enemy that relies solely on beams, making it incapable of harming you if you have any amount of shields active. Some enemy systems are also randomized for each encounter, leading to the amusing sight of a shieldless auto-ship attacking you in an asteroid field and [[WinsByDoingAbsolutelyNothing ending up dead without you having to fire a shot]].
647* TopDownView: The entire game shows the layout of the ships from the top, with only a slightly tilted perspective for crewmen.
648* TotalPartyKill: Damage to your ship's life support and/or door controls, especially when combined with fire, hull breaches, or doors you left open to fight a fire or enemy boarders but were locked open by an attack, can easily result in this if not addressed quickly. The same is true for your enemy.
649* TranslatorMicrobes: Most ships have a universal translator. These translators are, however, not perfect (especially when dealing with the Lanius) and can still result in diplomatic mishaps.
650* TrustPassword: A crewman in the aftermath of a nebula battle gives you one before dying, along with coordinates. If you go to those coordinates and scan the area, a Zoltan ship will remove its cloak, and its captain will demand your reason for being at that beacon. Giving the correct word will award you supplies for your service to the Zoltan, while saying anything else will begin a fight.
651* UnblockableAttack: Bombs are unblockable except by a Zoltan shield, but don't do hull damage. They can also miss, dependent on the target's engine power. The Artillery Beam is even more unblockable — except for the Zoltan shield, it can pass through any defenses and cannot miss. The Anti-Ship Batteries that the Rebel fleet fires at you are similarly unblockable, but can still miss.
652* UncommonTime: The Zoltan themes are in 10/4.
653* UnexpectedGameplayChange: Before ''Advanced Edition'', The Last Stand suddenly has you move in from the right side of the map to intercept the Rebel Flagship. Justified because instead of the Rebel Fleet chasing you, you are now chasing the Rebel Flagship. Your roles have reversed, and so has the direction you have to move. This was removed with the ''Advanced Edition'' update, where direction is consistent with previous sectors. Another difference in both versions is that there is no advancing Rebel Fleet; instead, they take over nodes at random while you try to catch and defeat the boss.
654* UngratefulBastard:
655** It is possible to ride to the rescue of some harassed ship, only to have it jump away without offering anything as thanks. The game doesn't seem to mind, though — it points out that they wisely fled while you were keeping their attackers busy. Given that this is a universe where two ships will fight over who gets the rewards, this is reasonable.
656** If you use a boarding drone for the {{Giant Spider}}s event, the victims will be rather displeased with you damaging their ship, their lives be damned, and only give you a small payment.
657** There is an event where a space station's satellite defense system has a broken AI, and the repair crew ask if you can fix it. If you offer to help and destroy the satellites that were shooting at them, they won't be happy and you'll have to salvage the satellites in lieu of payment before leaving quickly.
658* UnintentionallyUnwinnable: The Backup DNA Bank augmentation prevents your crew from being lost if the Clone Bay is off or broken, allowing them to be brought back later once the Clone Bay is turned on or repaired. However, if all your crew die while the Clone Bay is broken, and you have no other way of repairing it, [[http://i.imgur.com/veVlfcu.jpg they will all just sit inside the bank forever]], and with no pilot to charge the FTL, you'll be stuck. You won't even get a GameOver screen, and must restart manually.
659* UnlockableContent: Only one ship, the Kestrel, is available for play at first. Eight other ships can be unlocked, either by playing through the game[[note]]Reaching sector five unlocks the Engi cruiser, and beating the game unlocks ships based on what ship you won with[[/note]] or by completing certain events. Each ship also has a 'Type B' variant which can be unlocked by earning ship-specific achievements. ''Advanced Edition'' adds a ninth ship and Type C ships which are unlocked by reaching the final sector using their corresponding Type B ship with Advanced Edition content turned on.
660* UnstableEquilibrium:
661** Pick up lots of scrap, take a minimum of damage, and have good encounters, and you have good chances to go far. On the other hand, taking lots of damage and being forced by the RandomNumberGod into poor encounters where you can't get much scrap will force you to use that scrap for repairs and hobble on with poor equipment, which will further lower your chances of survival.
662** Getting into a fight while orbiting a star can quickly become this if you can't manage the fires created by the solar flares. If your pilot control or jump drive is knocked out, defeating the local enemy will quickly become the least of your worries; add to that a hit to your door controls, and you'll never get ahead of the flares.
663* UnwinnableByDesign: Unless you can manage to upgrade your ship to keep up with the increasing difficulty of the ships the game throws at you, it's quite possible to find yourself in a situation where you're incapable of killing your opponent. Boarding-based ships like the Mantis B are especially liable to find themselves in such a situation, as Zoltan shields and automated ships present a significant problem without ways of compensating for their defenses. The Flagship basically enforces getting a strong offense up, as its myriad tricks make it far more formidable than normal enemies.
664* UselessUsefulStealth: The Cloaking system is one of the best means of avoiding attacks at your disposal. However, the blue options it grants for events usually just mean you're going to skip a fight, which you usually don't want, considering the rewards from fighting and the fact that you have a limited number of encounters per sector.
665* VariableMix: Each music track has two versions: calm and spacey most of the time, and incorporating more rhythm and percussion when you're squaring off against a hostile vessel. One version automatically fades into the other as the situation changes. The only exception is the Last Stand track, which only has the version with more rhythm and percussion, befitting the elevated risk of the last sector.
666* [[TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon The Very Definitely Final Fight]]: The Rebel flagship. Even before you intercept her and get to see her up close, you know you're in for something big.
667* VideoGameCaringPotential:
668** You can easily get attached to individual crew members. Rescuing hapless space travelers from rebels, pirates, asteroids, giant alien spiders, and anything else that pops up can give you the warm fuzzies as well. Especially when you encounter another Federation vessel, usually heavily damaged and always in trouble.
669** Many encounters end with the enemy trying to bribe you, including the Lanius showing you pictures of their cargo holds. Actually, you can spend a few events trying to communicate with the Lanius. One possible surrender message has them use their limited knowledge of human culture to attempt to surrender by showing you a video feed of them waving around makeshift white flags WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes style.
670** You may come across an event where you could take the less friendly option and get some benefit, but you can also be nice and possibly not get anything, but the game will compliment you when you're lucky. For instance, there's a random event where the Engi ship at a beacon immediately surrenders their supplies. One option is accepting the supplies. If you refuse and explain you're friendly, they might leave in relief (leaving you nothing), or they might give you the supplies anyway, saying you deserve them for your kindness. There's no additional benefit aside from you feeling better for it, since you get the same amount of stuff.
671* VideoGameCrueltyPotential:
672** You can accept bribes from pirates to leave them alone when you find them attacking another ship, agree to hand over one of your crew to slavers in order for the rest to go free, and cruise right on by desperate pleas for help without stopping. For more hands-on cruelty potential, you can deal with enemy boarding parties by opening up your airlocks and letting them suffocate. Some of the game's achievements actually ''encourage'' cruelty to your enemies — such as one that requires you to drain an enemy ship of oxygen, while another requires you to KillItWithFire by having [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill every single square of an enemy ship ablaze at the same time]].
673** There is also an event that encourages cruelty where you meet a pirate who is trying to extort resources from a planet-side colony and can "[[DoWrongRight show him how it's done]]" by igniting their villages with a fire beam or fire bombs, should you choose to, granting better rewards.
674** One of the achievements to unlock the Type B Mantis Cruiser requires you to defeat the last enemy crewmember on their ship with your last crewmember. The easiest way to do this is to kill all but one of their crew, beam back, suffocate your entire crew save one, then finish the job on their ship.
675** Depending on your weapons, it can be better to watch as the crew of an enemy ship slowly but surely dies while cowering in one of the few safe rooms left. And by "left", we mean "safe ''at the moment''". [[KillItWithFire Fire flooding the shields room]], [[AlmostOutOfOxygen a breach in the Oxygen room]], a [[KillerRobot Boarding Drone]] tearing the med-bay to pieces and having killed the last three crewmembers to attack it... Not hard to see why after flailing around trying to figure out what to do, and with no way to survive, sometimes an enemy will just... stop. [[SayYourPrayers As if looking for peace.]] [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill Then your Bio-Beam cuts them in two.]]
676--->[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi-VNkT57oE "We do not accept surrender!"]]
677*** The game actually rewards you for using methods like these by giving you increased loot for killing the crew while leaving the ship intact. One method that's particularly useful (and cruel): find a ship that doesn't have the firepower to get through your shields, set an ion weapon to auto-fire on their oxygen room, and go do something else for 5-10 minutes. It'll level up any crewmembers you have manning many of your stations while the enemy crew slowly but surely suffocates, utterly helpless to prevent the inevitable.
678** If you've got a clone system (or even if you don't), [[EnergyBeings the Zoltan]] make excellent [[ActionBomb suicide bombs]]. The Federation Cruiser C "The Fregatidae" advertises this as a tactic by giving you a two-man teleporter and two Zoltans with no weapons and an Artillery Flak cannon in place of your Artillery Laser.
679** Fire can spread and destroy systems, and destroying a system deals one hull damage. If an enemy surrenders while their ship is on fire, you can accept their surrender... [[CruelMercy and then watch their ship explode anyway]].
680* VideoGameTime: Making a few FTL jumps in a matter of a few minutes will cause the [[AdvancingWallOfDoom Rebel fleet]] to advance or the [[FinalBoss Rebel Flagship]] to take action, but you can idle around or fight an enemy ship nonstop all day and the Rebels will be more than patient enough to wait for you until you jump to another beacon.
681* VisualInnuendo: The Federation Cruiser (Osprey/Nisos/Fregatidae) is an extremely [[PhallicWeapon phallic ship]] ([[http://ftlwiki.com/images/thumb/1/1a/Cruiser_Hull_Federation_A_The_Osprey.png/280px-Cruiser_Hull_Federation_A_The_Osprey.png take a look at it]]). Just to make things less subtle, [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything it has a one-of-kind laser which it can shoot from its tip and penetrates all shields. However, it must wait a long time between each discharge]].
682* WaveMotionGun:
683** The Artillery Beam. It takes up its own module instead of being incorporated into your weapons, and bypasses all shields except Zoltan shields. It also cuts across multiple rooms like all beam weapons in the game, dealing 4-5 damage to most ships, and sometimes more.
684** Anti-Ship Batteries are nigh-unblockable, do high damage, and seem to be too big to mount on a spaceship. Only with a cloaking system or a ''really'' good engine (or preferably both) can you hope to dodge even one shot, but you will ''not'' be able to stay alive forever while under fire from them.
685* WeaksauceWeakness: AI-controlled crewless ships can't repair hull breaches. Because a damaged system can't be repaired as long as there is a fire or a hull breach in the same room, this means breaching a system room and destroying the system will destroy it ''permanently''.
686** Downplayed with ships that have a teleporter and a strong boarding team but no weapons. Said ships tend to have trouble fighting off [[{{Mooks}} automated scouts]], which, while not absurdly easy to deal with, are dime a dozen in the galaxy.
687* WeaponizedTeleportation:
688** Teleports pass through shields easily, which Bomb weapons exploit, teleporting an explosive device directly into the enemy ship. They can't be blocked by defense drones like missiles can, but they only damage systems and not the hull, unlike missiles. Like all non-beam weapons, they can miss if the enemy has high enough evasion.
689** Any enemy under Mind Control is considered your crew for the duration. Which means you can teleport them to your ship. They are still AI-controlled, though, so most likely they will run off to man one of your systems. But send your elite soldiers to keep an eye on them, and once the Mind Control wears off.... This lets ships with otherwise weak boarding capabilities to take out the sprawling crew of the Flagship if they can survive long enough.
690* WeHaveReserves: The entire point of the Clone Bay subsystem. Who cares if your men keep dying? There's more where they came from. Can your enemy say the same? If they can, then this isn't quite as viable.
691* WeWinBecauseYouDidnt: Done in the player's favor when fighting the Rebel Flagship. If you and the Flagship [[MutualKill blow up at the same time]], [[HeroicSacrifice it counts as a victory]]. After all, the narrative objective of the game is "save the Federation", not "save the Federation and come out alive."
692* WhatAPieceOfJunk: The base Kestrel Cruiser is stated to have been pulled off from mothball, but it's actually one of the ships with the best starting weapons.
693** In general, Engi ships are said to "look like a pile of junk loosely held together", but they are more capable than they look. {{Subverted}} by the Engi B with its starting crew of one and poor weaponry, however.
694* WhatTheHellHero:
695** A few events will call you out if you choose not to help out. At least one is particularly nasty about it; if you opt not to help a ship struggling through an AsteroidThicket, sometimes they'll make it out alive without you and relay your location to the rebel fleet as revenge, advancing the Fleet by an extra jump.
696** One of the sidequests has you escorting the RunawayFiance of an ArrangedMarriage. If you choose to complete the arrangements when you arrive at the quest destination, you'll get a weapon as a reward, but not without said fiance screaming "May your children erode to dust!"[[note]]The alternative is to [[ScrewTheMoneyIHaveRules refuse to hand her over, forgoing the weapon]] and starting a fight, but the bride joins your crew as gratitude for helping her flee her forced marriage.[[/note]]
697** There is an event where you can steal supplies from a rebel colony. Assuming they don't booby-trap it, they'll cite you as an example of why the rebels have support.
698* WhatTheHellPlayer: It is possible to fail the tutorial mission, but it requires performing actions that are completely unnecessary, such as turning off your shields or oxygen. Doing so nets a [[NonStandardGameOver special game over message]] informing you that while you're free to try again, "this doesn't bode well for your mission."
699* WhatYouAreInTheDark: The game doesn't have a KarmaMeter, but many events will test your morality. Do you take the bribe of a pirate and let him go after some ship, or do you take him on? When a slaver offers gifts in exchange for [[VillainsWantMercy letting them live]], do you accept and let him live to continue his dirty work, or do you finish the job? Do you help when asked for it, even if it may cost you health, ammo, or crew? There's no one around who will judge you, only your conscience. Choose, skipper.
700* WhenAllElseFailsGoRight: You are always traveling from left to right — even in the eighth sector when trying to catch the flagship, your ship begins on the left side of the map and the flagship generally on the right.
701* AWinnerIsYou: Right after finishing off the Rebel Flagship, [[spoiler:the game immediately cuts to text that reads: "''Thanks to the valiant effort of [ship name] And her successful crew: [names of crewmembers] The Rebel's flagship was destroyed, throwing their fleet into chaos and ensuring a Federation victory''". Then the credits roll.]]
702* WinsByDoingAbsolutelyNothing: If you encounter a Rebel scout ship with no shields in an asteroid field, and provided your own ship has functioning shields, it's possible to do nothing and watch as the asteroids blow the scout into pieces. If you have enough shields and evasion, it's very possible to win this way without taking any damage.
703* WireDilemma: You can run into one of these during a special event in which your ship has to dodge an active mine. Fail to dodge it or be unable to TakeAThirdOption and the mine will attach to your ship, forcing a crew member to go outside and try to defuse it. If the crew member panics at the sight of the mine's interior, you are then prompted to cut a red or blue wire. Cut the right one, and the mine is disarmed and you deconstruct it for scrap. Cut the wrong one, and the mine explodes, doing significant damage to your hull as well as ending the unlucky crew member tasked with disarming it. If you have a Clone Bay, the clone steps out, sheepish and apologetic.
704* WithThisHerring: You have [[WhatAPieceOfJunk an old, clunky ship]] with hand-me-down weapons and a small crew. Your mission is to save the struggling Federation. Good luck.
705* AWorldHalfFull: You can change the galaxy for the better... if you can somehow win the FinalBattle.
706* WoundedGazelleGambit:
707** One random event has a Rebel soldier teleport onto your ship, hoping to defect from them and join your crew. You can either reject his offer or let him join. However, if you let him join, he will either A) be a loyal crewmate, which is always a plus, or B) immediately betray you and BackStab one of your crewmates, killing him or her. And even if you reject him, he might attack you anyways.
708** Slug ships occasionally claim to be unarmed and seeking asylum, before weapons spring from their hull and they attack.
709* YetAnotherStupidDeath: So many ways.
710** Many deaths are related to oxygen/fire issues, such as:
711*** Accidentally depressurizing half your ship by forgetting to close an airlock.
712*** Repairing the oxygen room, but forgetting to put power back into it and not noticing until your crew start dying.
713*** Being in a plasma storm (which cuts your reactor power in half), and deactivating the oxygen to activate just one more shield or weapon, then forgetting to turn it back on afterward.
714*** Screwing up the anti-fire door shuffle, and watching your oxygen, door control, and/or medbay get burnt by the fire or hit by enemy weapons, resulting in crew that have a choice of dying from asphyxiation or fire.
715*** Your door or oxygen system getting hit while your ship is on fire or with a hull breach or with external doors open.
716** Throwing units in the medical bay during a battle, with low oxygen levels and/or to fight boarders, and forgetting to put power into it.
717** Certain events can inflict hull damage without a battle, which can result in a heavily damaged ship being destroyed.
718** Certain events can cause crew loss. They do not make exceptions if you have only one crew member left. If you start a game with the Engi B cruiser, which starts with a single crew member, [[PressStartToGameOver it is possible to get a game over after only one jump]].
719** Boarding an enemy ship during heated combat can result in a number of stupid deaths for your crew as your attention is drawn to one area when you need it on another:
720*** Teleporting your crew onto an enemy ship, only to see it warp away.
721*** The Federation Cruiser's Artillery Beam special weapon is not controllable by the player in any way except by powering it down. This can lead to situations when, after boarding a ship, it shoots the beam at a compartment your boarding party are in, which can kill your crew through friendly fire if they're already at low health.
722*** Forgetting to turn off auto-fire and accidentally destroying the opposing ship with your crew on board.
723*** Forgetting that having your boarding party destroy a system results in hull damage, with the hull already critical. A ship with 1 hull point left whose crew have retreated to the medbay will leave your boarding party to attack some other system, which, if they destroy it, will blow up the ship with themselves on it.
724*** Watching your boarding team get taken out because the enemy has a cloak and your team got stuck in a combat situation they can't win, unable to get back to your ship since a cloak blocks teleporting.
725*** In the same vein, teleporting onto a ship with upgraded doors and being killed by a lack of oxygen, or getting stuck in a medbay or against overwhelming numbers of enemy crew.
726*** Teleporting crew onto an AI Drone ship with a Level 1 teleporter. Drone craft have no atmosphere, and your crew will die before the Level 1 teleport recharges. Level 2 is fine, but cuts it close. However, Rockmen can last a little longer with their 150% health, Crystals have improved suffocation resistance and 125% health, and Lanius are completely immune to suffocation.
727*** Similar to the above, accidentally picking the wrong crew to teleport to an AI Drone ship, and sending a Zoltan instead of a crewmember from a more suitable race. Their lowered health prevents them from surviving long enough for a level 2 teleport to save them.
728** Forgetting you turned your weapons onto auto-fire and wasting shots/charge time OR forgetting that you turned it off and missing damaging important systems.
729** Firing a weapon too soon, such as a beam or a laser, before another weapon, like a missile or a bomb, has time to actually connect and disable the shields.
730** Deciding to hold off healing a crew member, just to have him/her killed by a breaching weapon.
731** Forgetting to return units to stations, heal them, repair systems, etc. before jumping into combat.
732** Forgetting to buy repairs/fuel/missiles/drones before jumping.
733** Forgetting to check if that beacon leads to where you want to go and misjudging the rebel's advance just to get bogged in a DesperationAttack against the fleet.
734** Giving supplies to a passing ship for the rewards [[VideoGameCaringPotential or the good feeling]] and forgetting that: 1. you don't have the supplies and/or, 2. this type of event can give you a benefit that you don't need, like map data when you are on the second-to-last beacon or getting a augment you can't keep/already have.
735** Having Lanius crew mixed in with non-Lanius crew can cause problems, such as getting multiple crew into the same room (e.g. to stave off a boarding attack), but not noticing your Lanius crewmember draining away oxygen that the other 1-3 people in the same room need until you start hearing the "low crew health" beeps.
736* YouRebelScum: {{Inverted|Trope}}. At one point, the rebels call you, "federation scum".
737* YouWillNotEvadeMe: The Crystals' Lockdown ability prevents crew from entering or escaping a room, preventing enemy crew from running away to their Medbay to heal.
738* ZergRush:
739** Certain events can result in six boarders appearing on your ship. This often exceeds the amount of crew a player will have under their control for the majority of their attempts.
740** The player themselves can use this strategy with the use of the Clone Bay, which allows sending inexhaustible waves of boarders onto the enemy ship. Combine with a four-man Teleporter for maximum effect.
741** The Flagship is really bad about this. If its crew has survived to the third stage, they'll funnel over to your ship as fast as their teleporter can charge, and their crew size is equal to your maximum, plus the ones manning the weapons.
742[[/folder]]
743----
744->''You find nothing of major importance reading through the page. However, exploring it [[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife has taken a lot of time and allowed the Rebel fleet to catch up]].''

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