Meet the crew of the Krishna
Reborn as a Space Mercenary: I Woke Up Piloting the Strongest Starship!alternate titles is an isekai Space Opera Light Novel, written by Ryuto and illustrated by Tetsuhiro Nabeshima. It originated as a Web Serial Novel and was published by GC Novels in Japan. A manga adaptation drawn by Shinichi Matsui is also in production. The novels and manga are being translated to English by Seven Seas Entertainment.Captain Takahiro "Hiro" Satou was your typical Japanese salary-man whose normal routine involves going to work, coming home, grabbing a bite to eat, spend an hour or two on his favorite MMO, Stella Online, and then going to sleep.
Except one "morning," he wakes up shivering cold in the cockpit of a spaceship that matches his on-line ship, the Krishna. As soon as he gets his ship warmed up, he gets jumped by pirates.
Fortunately for him, looting the wrecks that result from his successful battle nets him a plausible cover story, the layout of the star-system he's in, and the credentials he needs to become a very, very successful mercenary.
See also Survival in Another World with My Mistress! by the same author.
Associated Tropes:
- Animal Wrongs Group: Exaggerated. An organization calling itself Artificial Life Protection Association genetically modified the bio-mass inside the space colonies' meat factories to be extremely dangerous, highly aggressive, and attack the colonists, then set them loose while most of the imperial navy was away dealing with a major pirate elimination mission. Although Hiro was able to stop their schemes, the casualties were enormous. The Empire labeled them Public Enemy Number 1 as a direct result, with kill on sight orders.
- Artistic License – Physics: While the science in this series is normally pretty soft, one thing it gets right is that carbonated beverages don't behave well in microgravity
. Hiro can't remember the details, but the Real Life reason is that carbon dioxide bubbles don't float to the top in microgravity, which can cause soda and beer to become a foamy mess. This is much to Hiro's annoyance, since sodas were his Trademark Favorite Food on Earth, and motivates him to save to buy a house planetside just so he can have one. The problem with this plot point is, everywhere the cast goes appears to have Artificial Gravity of some kind. Soft drinks would only make a mess if that failed for some reason—believable on a spaceship, but the first Space Station Hiro visits is a bicycle-wheel style that appears to generate Centrifugal Gravity. - Ass Shove: Among the ways Hiro finds to make money is selling his genetic information to a pharmaceutical company (his Earth genes are apparently quite unique). The scientist requires it in the form of both blood and semen samples, and apparently acquires the latter via a prostate massage. After Elma teases him about it, he has anal sex with her offscreen (this was Adapted Out of volume 4 of the manga) and later threatens her with it for the next time she decides to get blackout drunk.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Several prominent cases.
- The White Swan heavy frigate. It has great specs, focused on speed and maneuverability, but it's not only wildly expensive to maintain and repair, but is extremely difficult to pilot. Even Hiro couldn't do it in Stella Online. The biggest drawback though is that under the right conditions, it will go "berserk," which means it will ignore all input and accelerate in a straight line until it runs out of fuel, and then explode! Poor Elma learns this the hard way, and only survives because her Swan collides with a police ship and is disabled before it runs out of fuel.
- Anti-ship counter-reactive torpedoes: Hiro starts the story outfitted with four of these. They allow his Simple, yet Awesome fighter to punch way, way above his class, even on screen blowing up a heavily armored and shielded battle-ship. However, they are wildly expensive, at 500,000 Ener each, on the cheap side, and are extremely rare to boot, they are also easy to shoot down with point defenses, so it takes a truly talented pilot to use them properly.
- In chapter 100, web novel, the suppression ship is introduced. They're light fighters that sport a battleship's shields and generator, are designed to drill into an enemy battleship's hull, and offload commandos, but cost 50 mil each and are so impractical that the Grakkan military calls them "Noble's mobile coffins."
- Beach Episode: The bulk of Volume 3 has the Krishna's crew spending a lot of their time in the resort planet of Cierra III.
- Benevolent A.I.: "Machine intelligences" have no problem with humans in general and are suggested to do a lot of the grunt work keeping society running. Even during the past Robot War, they only fought defensively and mostly hoped they could stop the fighting by wearing their attackers out.
- Black Box:
- The Krishna was the strongest ship of its size in the game by a significant margin, to the point that Hiro wondered if it was a mistake. When the space dwarves take a look at it, their non-destructive analysis tools can't figure a lot of it out, especially the power core that generates so much more power than a standard core of its size should.
- Their corpses are seen as a useful material, but nobody knows exactly how crystal life forms work. In particular, no one knows how their singing crystals somehow summon them out of nowhere, even though this research could probably be useful for improving Faster-Than-Light Travel.
- Boarding Pod: The "suppression ship" introduced in volume 4 is a vehicle consisting of little more than a crew compartment, an engine, and a Nigh-Invulnerable Deflector Shield (Hiro hits it with an Alpha Strike from the Krishna and can't even dent it), as well as a shield neutralizer module to punch through opposing shields. It's designed to send a Boarding Party aboard opposing capital ships for sabotage operations; Balthazar Daleinwald uses it to board Count Abraham Daleinwald's mothership in an attempt to Dungeon Bypass the fleet the Count gathered to fend off his younger son's attempted Military Coup and settle matters with a Duel to the Death.
- Born-Again Immortality: The elven World Tree is a Single Specimen Species. If the tree dies, it will shoot an immortal seed to some far off location. The seed will then use Winds of Destiny, Change! to bring The Chosen One to germinate the seed and deal with whatever threat destroyed the previous world tree.
- Bothering by the Book: In volume 2, the vampish Serena Holz tries to force Hiro into going on a date with her by casting it as a working lunch (he's currently contracted to her as a trainer for a Navy pirate-hunting task force). Hiro turns it back on her when Elma calls his terminal at an opportune moment: having not seen them in a couple of weeks due to his current contract, he invites Elma and Mimi to lunch with them, reasoning to Serena that if it's work-related, there's no reason not to bring his crew members along.
- Bounty Hunter: The most common way mercenaries, like Hiro, earn cash is to blow up pirates and then head to either the military or mercenary's guild and collect the bounty. Loot and data caches recovered from pirate vessels can also be sold in the stations.
- Centrifugal Gravity: Implied—it isn't discussed, but the first space station Hiro docks at has buildings built along the inner rim of a bicycle wheel-style ring.
- Crack Defeat: The Belbellum invasion against the Empire in Volume 1 turns into this. Originally, the Empire forces stationed at Tarmein Prime planned to Hold the Line, but Hiro carries out an incredibly risky gambit of heading Straight for the Commander and deploying a Singing Crystal to attract crystal life-forms, which annihilates the invading fleet.
- Culture Clash:
- The protagonist, Hiro, comes from modern Japan and has no ulterior motive for inviting Mimi and Elma into his ship as crew-members, because the two of them were on hard times and genuinely needed his help to get back on their feet. He later learns that when a woman agrees to enter a man's ship, she's implicitly signing up to be his sex-toy, for which she gets a salary based on a percentage of his income. He doesn't learn this until after both Mimi and Elma have thrown themselves at him, and he accepted their advances.
- Coming from a democratic society, Hiro is extremely put-off by the Feudal Future society of the Grakkan Empire he finds himself in, and has to be educated about proper customs and warned that pissing off a noble for any reason can end up with him being stabbed by a sword, beheaded, or thrown in prison forever, as nobles are considered to be above the law unless they pick fights with other nobles.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Hiro specializes in dishing these out in Space Battles, often against small-to-medium sized pirate craft.
- Cut and Paste Environments: At first, Hiro thinks that the repetitive space station building designs are a case of this trope, due to this world having an uncanny resemblance to the game he was playing. Turns out, they actually do have a logical real world reason for it, and it's pretty similar to the videogame one. The buildings are mass manufactured, and uniqueness is too much of a luxury.
- Deflector Shields: A spaceship's first line of defense is their energy shields, and then their armor.
- Dystopia: The disparity between the haves and have-nots is enormous. Buying a planet-side house costs hundreds of millions of Ener (roughly the same value as US dollars), just to be a citizen and buy the place. Everyone else (roughly 80% of all people) lives in space-station colonies as officially registered second-class citizens, unless a tragedy occurs, where the unfortunate get dumped into the slums, and have no rights whatsoever, and piracy is an ever present threat. Even wiping out a pirate base is only a short-term fix, as other pirates will soon move in to fill the void. As if that wasn't bad enough, the government officials in charge of those space stations are rife with corruption, and there's apparently no courts or legal system to which a civilian can file an appeal.
- Fantastic Rank System: From lowest to highest, the mercenary ranks are Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Less than 5% of mercenaries reach Gold (after which they're considered a One-Man Army) while only 13 have achieved Platinum, which is treated as a noble title equal to a viscount. Hiro is outright stated to be Platinum-tier after his first pirate-subjugation mission.
- Fantasy Contraception: Mentioned in volume 1, which is rather important given how sexually active the main cast are together. Elma is even informed by a doctor in volume 2 that she's interfertile with Hiro despite being a different species (one that is normally only fertile with people they love).
- Fate Drives Us Together: Even when she isn't actually stalking him, Serena and Hiro somehow keep running into one another, with Hiro being pressured into accepting mercenary work from her. He lampshades the trope and desperately hopes that this trope is not what is happening, since he finds her an Abhorrent Admirer. But since the Contrived Coincidences he keeps running into are a subconscious result of his own Power Incontinence over his Winds of Destiny, Change! ability, they do in fact share a destiny, romantic or otherwise.
- Feudal Future: While it's not technically the future, the setting of Stella Online is an interstellar civilization ruled by noble houses, including House Holz and House Dalenwald.
- Fictional Counterpart: Stella Online is based on Elite Dangerous (the author is a fan).note
- Fictional Currency: Ener, the in-universe currency, is often stated to be roughly 100 yen, or a close approximation to one US dollar, as noted by the comments. It's digital, making it easy to transfer, but also allowing the elites to track every transaction, which is why some people prefer rare metals instead.
- Flash Forward: The aftermath of several major battles is reviewed not in a debriefing, but in a classroom, as a history lesson, with Hiro and (then) Lieutenant-Commander Serena Holz, as the focal point, of course.
- A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Hiro is one of the few mercenaries who bothers to have savings, while the rest typically blow through their earnings after every job.
- Foreign Queasine: In the Cierra system, the height of fine dining consists of consuming the contents of food capsules raw. In the manga, Hiro compares the flavor to "coal tar, but with umami".
- Fun with Acronyms: Stella Online is shortened to "SOL" (which, for English-speakers, usually stands for "shit outta luck")
- Future Food Is Artificial:
- Most foodstuffs are sold in the form of capsules manufactured from vat-grown protein and algae, which food-preparation appliances then process into imitation meals. Genetic engineering is also heavily used: Hiro, Mimi, and Elma tour several food factories in volume 2, where real-ish meat is grown in the form of worm-like creatures genetically derived from livestock that can regenerate when pieces are cut from them, and plants grow products that come conveniently pre-fermented into alcoholic beverages.
- The crew are able to get real food when they vacation on a resort planet in volume 3. The girls are deeply impressed that Hiro can cook from scratch, while Hiro is pleased to be able to have a soda for the first time in months (though the recipe for cola, his favorite, unfortunately seems to have gotten lost).
- Generic Doomsday Villain: The crystal life-forms. They assimilate everything they come across, asteroids, spaceships, people, everything. There is no way to communicate or reason with them. It's either shoot them down and then gather the remains with extreme care, to make sure they don't reassemble themselves, or get swarmed and consumed.
- Glass Cannon:
- Hiro describes most pirate vessels as this, being fast and well-armed but not very durable. Their main tactic is to Zerg Rush solitary freighters and grab what (or who) they can before the military shows up.
- Crystal life-forms are less durable than ships, but come in swarms and relentlessly pursue any signs of life. Woe to any ship and person that comes in contact with them.
- Green-Eyed Monster:
- It's a Running Gag that other men, especially mercenaries, are jealous of Hiro having attractive women in his crew. They're also bewildered at all the amenities he can afford and one has a Heroic BSoD upon seeing the latest model of auto-cookers on Hiro's mothership.
- Serena and Christina are envious of Mimi and Elma for hooking up with Hiro first.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War:
- While collecting bounties for killing pirates doesn't offend mercenaries or civilians who can fight back, pirates are universally loathed because, without exception, they are all truly heinous people who happily prey on the innocent, kill entire ship crews, sell passengers off into slavery, and take everything of value, even re-purposing captured vessels to increase their fighting potential, and don't contribute to society in any way.
- The elven homeworld once had multiple sapient races. They rejected all elven attempts at diplomacy. Ultimately, the Grakkan Empire discovered their world and enacted a Final Solution on the other races. Even if it seems ruthless, the Grakkan Empire is actually one of the more lenient empires to other races.
- Guilt-Tripping:
- As Elma decides to walk away from Hiro and Mimi when Hiro decides to save Mimi against her advise, Hiro manages to make her come back by saying she's showing her true colours as a person who'd abandon her trainee and that he was wrong to think she was a generous and reliable mentor.
- Serena Holz tries to guilt Hiro into staying close to her instead of taking his crew on vacation by pointing out that the colony they're in is still recovering from the terrorist attack that Hiro helped deal with. Hiro resists since Serena isn't actually seeking his help with the recovery efforts, she just wants to be close to Hiro.
- Milo the AI has sale quotas to fulfill, and builds a Robot Maid to Hiro's specifications when he only wanted to see a preview, and to really land the sale, Milo has Mei mention that if Hiro doesn't buy her, she will be dismantled for parts. Hiro can only scream in frustration when he realizes the guilt-tripping is working.
- Hero's Slave Harem: Played with. Hiro rescues Mimi from an attempted gang-rape, buys out her debts, and hires her as a trainee crew member to work them off. Mimi insists on sleeping with him that night; he's initially reluctant but she succeeds in seducing him. A similar situation plays out later with Elma, an experienced mercenary pilot who incurs massive fines in an accidental collision. It's not until way later that either girl bothers to explain to him that, by local custom, if a man hires a female crew member, she's consenting to be his doxy in addition to her other duties; they mistakenly assumed he already knew. He's a little shocked by this, but decides that what's done is done, and the fact that both girls do actively love him and enjoy having sex with him doesn't hurt.
Once aware of the custom, Hiro specifically recruits only women whom he's mutually attracted to and who have useful skills, and makes sure to be clear that sharing his bed is strictly optional. He accepts the android Mei (designed according to his own sexual fantasies) onto his crew after the Cierra III resort management AI has her built for him as a marketing ploy, tries to hire the buxom Dr. Shouko as chief medical officer (she initially turns him down), and then contracts for the dwarf engineers Tina and Wiska to be placed on his crew by their company. He also actively refuses Serena Holz and Chris Daleinwald: Chris is way too young for him (not to mention her powerful grandfather would probably have him killed), and unfortunately for Serena, he finds her personality repellent. - Human Aliens: Well, Demihuman aliens, at least. Despite originating from different planets, there are races like elves and dwarves, and while Hiro isn't clear on the specifics, elves, at least, can breed with other races.
- Inherent in the System: Space Pirates are a problem in need of regular maintenance. Even though pirates are regularly cleansed from entire systems and they tend to have short lives, their lives and equipment are pretty cheap in the first place, so new pirates take the place of the dead ones very quickly.
- Kidnapped by the Call: Hiro goes to bed in modern Japan, wakes up in the cockpit of a starship that's an exact replica of his online game ship, no idea how he got there.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Flak cannons have shorter range than lasers, but quickly tear through a ship's shields and plating when used within their effective range.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Discussed. In order to explain how he's a brilliant pilot but also completely clueless about everything else about The 'Verse that wasn't in the game, like local customs or how food is made, Hiro invents a story that his brain got scrambled in a hyperjump accident. He fesses up about the real story to Elma in volume 2.
- Lightning Bruiser: The Krishna is insanely overpowered, possessing no fewer than six Class III weapons, shields that can soak up an absurd amount of damage, and is one of the fastest ships out there, making it all but impossible to hit in the first place. With Hiro at the controls, it’s a pirate’s worst nightmare.
- Magitek: Psionic technology, which makes it possible for machines to interact with Psychic Powers, enabling things like detecting them and blocking them. The Grakkan Empire's materialist mindset means that they have only managed to develop the basics, but the Holy Vuelzarus Empire practically specializes in the subject, deploying technology like Psionic Deflector Shields.
- Mugging the Monster: Defied: Space Pirates are said to rarely attack systems with major shipbuilding industry such as Vlad, because the shipbuilders see them as free weapon-testing targets.
- Mundane Luxury: Hiro outfitting his ship with modern conveniences like a kitchen, a bath, and a nice double-bed has Elma, the moment she sets foot inside, scream out that he's got his ship decked out like a luxury cruiser.
- Mundane Wish: Similarly, Hiro's driving goal is to earn enough money to buy a planetside house, just so he can finally drink carbonated beverages again.
- No-Paper Future: Paper is seen as obsolete. Everything is either digital or printed synthetic material. Paper is no longer mass produced and relatively expensive.
- No Periods, Period: Averted; Volume 5 starts with Mimi and Elma feeling like garbage due to both being on their period.
- Not the Intended Use: Hiro, among many players of Stella Online, found out that a ship's emergency cooling system, designed to deal with overheating and overloads is great at fooling thermal sensors and all but making the ship invisible on radar. Hiro uses this trick to ambush hostiles, repeatedly, with the radar tech getting chewed out by his compatriots.
- No Woman's Land: It's a universe where women are incredibly vulnerable. Prisons are not segregated by gender, and men there see women as their rightful prey - and the prison is safer than the slums, where attractive women are routinely targets for gang rape and forced prostitution. And any woman who hires on to a man's starship crew is expected to be his sexual property, in addition to whatever her regular job is—though Hiro, being a normal person from Japan, puts the kibosh on that and makes clear to his Bridge Bunnies that sharing his bed is strictly optional.
- One Thing Led to Another: Most of Hiro's sexual encounters are described this way.
- Our Elves Are Different: A Long-Lived race with pointy ears and Psychic Powers. Elves are divided into traditionalist elves, who remain on their homeworld and function as forest elves, and Space Elves, who left to explore and have culturally diverged. Hiro doesn't know the details, but they can interbreed with humans, despite originating from a different planet.
- Polyamory: Mimi, Elma, and Mei are all in love with Hiro. They get along pretty well out of the bedroom and aren't averse to sharing him between them on occasion, though most of the time they take turns in his bed.
- Privateer: Guild-registered mercenaries like Hiro and Elma are essentially this. They mainly earn their money as Bounty Hunters policing the spacelanes against piracy, and are occasionally hired in groups by the regular Space Police as reinforcements for larger operations. Serena Holz has even been trying to set up a deniable privateer force for special military operations in the war with the Belbellum Federation.
- Psychic Block Defense: There are forms of technology that can be used to hide yourself from those with an especially strong psychic sense.
- Psychic Powers: One form of power in this universe. Some races, like elves, are psychic as an entire species, while among humans, it's uncommon. Borrowing power from spirits and augmented by certain tools, traditionalist elves can use spirit arts to do things like set fires and increase the power of arrows. There are also concepts like Telepathy, and far more rarely, Winds of Destiny, Change!. There are certain forms of technology that can interact with psychic powers, though the Grakkan Empire only has limited development in this field.
- The Purge: The Emperor has numerous corrupt officials fired and imprisoned when he discovers that one of them arranged an "accident" for his nephew and almost destroyed his great-niece's life.
- Rape as Drama:
- Prisoners are not segregated by gender, so Prison Rape is a persistent issue, especially if a Merc finds herself being shipped off to a Penal Colony when a fine too big for her to pay gets slapped onto her.
- The space-station colonial slums are worse. Attractive women who wind up there tend to be gang-raped and drugged, forced into prostitution and then abandoned when they're no longer profitable, left in puddles of their own waste and facing the withdrawal symptoms.
- Recycled In Space: It's your basic isekai Harem Genre storyline IN SPACE!
- Robosexual:
- Mimi had an ex-boyfriend who lost all interest in her after being gifted a Maidroid, which is exactly what it sounds like: a Ridiculously Human Robot in the form of a Meido. She is therefore not pleased when Hiro is given a custom Maidroid of his own by a resort planet's AI after going a bit nuts designing one during downtime (without planning to actually place an order), though Mei is able to win her over soon enough.
- In the same book, we're told that robot fetishists were partly responsible for helping resolve a past Robot War with a settlement that guaranteed civil rights protections to "machine intelligences".
- Sex Slave: Mimi was in the process of being kidnapped off the street by sex slavers when Hiro stepped in and scared them off with a little harmless gunfire (he'd set his blaster to the minimum setting before intervening).
- Sharpened to a Single Atom: Blades made for combat have an edge only a molecule wide and can make a Clean Cut through ship plating, and needless to say, human flesh.
- Shout-Out:
- The first guild receptionist strongly resembles Kanji Tatsumi. After shopping on Cierra III, the first clothes Mimi buys for Hiro look just like Kanji's default outfit.
- In the light novel, Volume 2 Chapter 7's title "Lieutenants Have Layers" is a reference to the "ogres have layers" conversation from Shrek.
- When told that Imperial nobles in full battle rattle can deflect gunfire with their swords, Hiro is immediately reminded of "J*di".
- The crew settles on the name Black Lotus for their mothership in volume 5. Hiro comments that it makes the ship "sound strong and expensive" in a reference to a notoriously overpowered Magic: The Gathering card."Strong and expensive...?" Mimi asked, totally confused by my claim.
"Never mind that." Should I get ready to add three mana to any single color of my choice?
- Sickening Sweethearts: Hiro and his crew, Mimi and Elma, and, later on, Mei, have a lot of sex; their flirting is completely heartwarming and full of fluff.
- Sins of Our Fathers: Mimi is introduced in the slums because her parents were killed in an industrial accident, and the government, blaming said parents for damages, foisted the debt onto her as a child. While the concept of not inheriting a parent's debt exists, it requires legal action within a time limit, which Mimi didn't have the expertise or assistance to deal with.
- Slave Race: AI. While they're sentient, self-aware, and there's a charter that would take a week to read, provided someone could read 24/7, outlining their inalienable rights, the fact of the matter is that they can be bought, sold, and treated as pretty much any other commodity. The fact that Hiro treats them as equals is shocking, in-universe.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: While the legal slave trade in the Grakkan Empire is very, very strictly regulated, and people often willingly throw themselves into slavery to improve their social standing, actively resisting being freed, the primary reason piracy is universally hated is because pirates care not a whit about the well-being of their "merchandise." Pirates raid tourist liners, merchant vessels, colonies, and even entire planets, take their slave cargo by force, and then put them through unseen "processing" that completely crushes their ego and free will, making them little more than flesh based robots. The chances of rescue and recovery are so slim, Hiro equates it to a divine miracle. In fact, Serena Holz actively tries to rescue a pirate controlled slave-colony outpost in the Theta System arc only to learn it's all but suicidal, as the slaves in question charge the marines as suicide bombers. She, regretfully, has to call off the rescue and then bombard the base into oblivion.
- Slow Life Fantasy: Takahiro Satou woke up as his Player Character in his favorite Elite Dangerous clone. He takes work as a mercenary with the Mundane Wish of earning enough money to buy a planetside house so he can drink carbonated beverages again, and actively works to avoid any deeper entanglements with The 'Verse's major factions.
- Space Is Cold: Played with. All the Krishna's systems are offline when Hiro wakes up in it. He nearly freezes to death before he gets life support up and running. That said, it's not known how long the Krishna was drifting unpowered before he appeared in it, and overheating risks and the ship's active cooling system are plot points elsewhere.
- Space Opera: The majority of the story takes place in space, with ship to ship dog-fights being commonplace.
- Stealth in Space: Spaceships mainly use heat emissions to track and target each other in space battles. Hiro figures out he can use the built-in cooling systems of the Krishna and low-power settings to sneak up and ambush enemies, to great effect. note
- Teleportation: Mercenaries don't have to carry their purchases home. They, for a fee, can have their purchases transported directly to their ship, via teleportation, or even trade between mercenaries can be done this way, as Hiro once shipped over a crate of booze he plundered from a pirate to Elma after she helped him out.
- Teens Love Shopping: Mimi certainly does when given the opportunity, along with Elma and Chris.
- Trapped in Another World: It's an isekai. Hiro goes to bed after his daily routine of work, eat, spend an hour or two on his favorite space-themed MMO, and wakes up inside his customized-out-the-wazoo spaceship from the game with no idea how he got there, or how he's going to get back—if he ever ''wants'' to go back, that is.
- Underestimating Badassery: The Krishna and, later, the Black Lotus both weaponize this, with their weapons folding away into concealment, so that they look unarmed at first glance. When a pirate thinks he’s found some easy prey, then the Krishna suddenly deploys a compliment of heavy lasers and flak cannons. The Black Lotus takes this even further, being made to look like a standard cargo or mining vessel, before it unfolds its own compliment of powerful weapons, including a high-power railgun, while also deploying that aforementioned Krishna. One of Hiro’s favorite tactics is to play at being a merchant or miner to lure pirates in, then decimate them as soon as they take the bait.
- Wild Card Excuse: Hiro justifies not knowing anything about the local customs and common sense and his lack of data records with the excuse that a hyperjump accident messed up his memories and data records, since the truth would make him sound insane.
- Wish-Fulfillment: Hiro is reborn on the helm of an Ace Custom ship with a hold full of valuable cargo, ace piloting skills, and intrinsic knowledge of all the languages of the setting. He instantly acquires a loving harem and makes a name for himself on the galactic stage.
- Work Info Title: Exaggerated even by Light Novel standards: the full title of the original web novel is 目覚めたら最強装備と宇宙船持ちだったので、一戸建て目指して傭兵として自由に生きたい, literally "When I Woke Up, I Got the Strongest Equipment and a Spaceship, so I Went and Became a Mercenary in Order to Live as I Please while Aiming for a Detached House". Even the author thought it was excessively long in hindsight.
