[[foldercontrol]]
[[folder:Old Man's War]]
* The two-shot special that John creates during his first real battle against the Consu. Not only does it turn the tides, but as from one point of view, John has the highest kill count against them, it also helps the CDF get an audience with the Consu, netting them both critical info on the Rraey's borrowed skip drive technology ''and'' an insight into the Consu's BlueAndOrangeMorality.
* Maggie's death in ''Old Man's War'', when she's been sucked out into space during a botched planetary landing operation. She's only got ten minutes of oxygen, she's falling from orbit, and she knows nobody can rescue her in time. So she spends her last minutes alive trying to ''shoot down an attacking enemy starship with her grenade launcher'', actually inflicting some minor damage, and then makes one last tranmission to her friends before burning up on re-entry:
-->Then Maggie turned, faced the planet that would kill her, and like the good professor of Eastern religions that she used to be, she composed ''jisei'', the death poem, in the haiku form.
--->''Do not mourn me, friends''\\
''I fall as a shooting star''\\
''Into the next life.''
* John and his squadmate outmaneuver and defeat about a dozen Whaidians as a duo. And his squadmate is a NewMeat.
* The five Consu duels to confirm the help they gave the Rraey. Ending with Jane the CombatPragmatist taking advantage of the ScreamingWarrior nature of the Consu she's fighting - while he's bellowing a war cry, she throws her knife through the roof of his mouth and into his primary braincase.
* The Colonial Special Forces have to attack an enemy installation on a heavily defended planet. Therefore, they fly in on their starship, knowing full well that it will be blown up within a few minutes...planning to use ''that'' to cover up their [[RocketlessReentry jump into the atmosphere]]. The plan is completely successful. (They get a lot more of this in the sequels, too.)
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Ghost Brigades]]
* Jared Dirac weaponizing Smartblood.
** Plus his DyingMomentOfAwesome with the Trojan Horse.
* Near the end, Harvey is left behind on an alien planet crawling with hostile Obin, with rescue days away. Jane asks him to retrieve some data from a nearby installation if he can. [[OffscreenMomentOfAwesome The next chapter]], she gets it.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Last Colony]]
* Offscreen, General Gau and the Conclave pull off a feat the Colonial Union claimed was impossible: peaceful coexistence among alien civilizations. It comes close to collapse, but this makes the achievement ''more'' impressive, not less.
* General Gau is (unknowingly) about to be utterly outmaneuvered by the CDF. John Perry jeopardizes the success of the maneuver (which relies on ''total'' surprise) by offering ''Gau'' a chance to surrender - out of compassion for the unsuspecting crews of Gau's space armada.
* Jane, with secretly reactivated soldier enhancements, rampages through the alien soldiers attacking Roanoke.
* The series's defining moment of triumph: John Perry finally gets his revenge on the Colonial Union, fatally destabilizing it and freeing humanity from its grasp with a well-placed trading convoy.
* Hiram Yoder, in accord with his ActualPacifism, literally turning the other cheek to Roanoak's "werewolves" and thus showing they were sentient beings.

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Zoe's Tale]]
* Zoe vs. the Roanoke "werewolves"
* Zoe and the Obin in the scene with the Consu
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The Human Division]]
* Throughout ''The Human Division,'' Equilibrium has been pirating ships, murdering their crews, and forcing the [[BrainInAJar disembodied brains of their pilots]] to carry out suicide attacks. In the first episode of ''The End Of All Things,'' one ''escapes.'' It's ''amazing.''
** And in the next episode, Daquin performs a series of extremely difficult maneuvers to match velocities a tumbling, damaged ship -- and then gets out unscathed when it blows up.
--> “You should be dead!” Aul yelled at the monitor. “You should be dead, your ship should be dead, you should all be dead! You magnificent shit-eater!”
** Offering all the other captive brain-ships freedom in the finale counts too, but that's a [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments different trope]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:The End of All Things]]
* Abumwe and crew's feats of diplomacy.
* Hafte Sorvalh goes to deal with a human wildcat colony... of white supremacists. They aren't fazed when she threatens to exterminate humanity over their illegal colonization. But when she threatens to exterminate only the light-skinned human phenotype? They back down!
[[/folder]]
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