Schlock Mercenary / Tropes O to Z

Tropes A to F | Tropes G to N | Tropes O to Z

Schlock Mercenary provides examples of:

• Obsolete Occupation: Computers are officially not allowed on one planet under the Bureaucratic Employment Protection Act. Breya, who has better things to do than hand-sign 300 identical pages, gets Ennesby to sign them and gets Schlock to silence any protests.
• Odd Couple: Bunnigus and the Reverend (sounds like a sitcom title), now Happily Married, despite issues with Fake Memories.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: Overlapping, with arrows between them.
• Oh, Crap!: Many.
  • Once literally.
    Kevyn: My sentiments precisely, sir.
  • Tailor's expression here is notable, just having realized that a gunship is about to shoot his restraints off.
  • The Reverend has a few of these moments, both giving and receiving.
    Ebby: What are the chances Credomar's king can be hacked? ...okay, I'm full. Time to go to sleep.
    Theo: Sleep? Who can sleep?
  • Kevyn's reaction to Para telling him that Tagii didn't plant the code causing the Gavs' mutations, she was jamming it.
  • Another literal reaction. Quite reasonable, when the man in question is in the habit of keeping antimatter stored next to his head.
  • Following this slightly verbose version from Tagii, Ennesby improvises the best response he can while giving some context.
  • Captains Murtaugh and Sorlie share a moment here, after realizing that they're in the path of a rapidly-descending battleplate.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Ennesby sets an army of repair drones to singing "O Fortuna."
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Captain Tagon gets this after he crashes into a table and winds up with a fork in his eye. For the rest of the Mallcop Command arc, his crew keep making fork jokes.
  Captain Tagon: I bet I can live that down after I turn it to my advantage.
• Only in It for the Money: It is about a band of mercs, after all - but even they won't agree to some things.
• On Three: There is the occasion when a sniper has Schlock in his sights, while Schlock had just fired some grenades at the target. While the sniper tries to get an eye shot, Schlock holds up his fingers to count down from three to zero (ground zero) since his targeting computer told him how long it'll take the grenades to reach their target.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • When Ennesby, the resident Pungeon Master fails to deliver a fart joke after learning that an ancient (and very insane) space station AI's name translates to "Broken Wind", Tagon realizes just how bad the situation really is.
  • When Petey apologizes for barging in and interrupting, everyone knows just how serious the situation is.
    Chisulo: Everybody! Stop what you're doing and LISTEN!
• Organ Dodge:
  • Schlock is borderline Immune to Bullets because he doesn't have organs, except for his eyes, and those are replaceable, with the flipside that losing mass to other kinds of weapon degrades all of his capabilities at once. He can get pretty smug about this, too.
    Schlock, while falling: I feel bad for those of you with bones.
  • Because Uniocs have one giant eyeball for a head, their brains are located in their pelvic cradle, which saves Ebbirnoth's life when he's sniped by a human marksman on Credomar. In Mandatory Failure, the fact that the people who tried to Double Tap the outer system casualties shot dead Uniocs in the head, rather than the pelvis, is used as evidence that the culprits aren't particularly familiar with the species.
• Orgy of Evidence: In the CSI parody arc, the lab tech promises his boss an orgy of evidence, and lays out how Schlock's body chemistry provides clear evidence of many, many crimes. Except not the crime that they know of and are trying to prosecute him for.
  Ozvegan Griz: What you've got here is more like a blind date.
  Ozvegan Gerg: But she's really hot, right?
• Orwellian Retcon: "The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries" used to be "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates," and the "maxims" referred to as "rules" (with the explanation that each "habit" comprised several "rules"). Eventually, the publishers of the real "Seven Habits..." caught wind and made him change it. ("Eventually" here defined as "after over eight years, when the joke had already long since undergone Memetic Mutation...") To soften the blow however, Howard Tayler admitted he was glad for the excuse to make the change, not least because the new title could be used for The Merch.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Amorphs ran into a problem with a TV version of them:
  Schlock: The TV-me is putting me-me out of a job. [...] Maybe we can kill another TV network. Is there still money in that?
• Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: And can form sentient beings...
• Our Elves Are Different: Pointy Ears one seen and mentioned in 2005-02-16.
• Our Souls Are Different: Kevyn describes the mind as an aggregate wave-form that isn't completely defined by the "hardware", that is, the brain or computer, that it is contained in.
• Out of the Frying Pan: Discussed when a squad of 'Toughs grab some bystanders after a fire is started in Haven Hive. After being asked "Are they hostages?":
  Bunnigus: What? No. We're saving them from the fire.
  Legs: We're chasing an indoor plasma rocket, sir. We're probably only saving those two from the frying pan.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted; religion is alive and well among many different cultures, and the Tagon's Toughs have their own chaplain (Reverend Theo). In his first appearance, Howard Tayler included an editor's note stating that this trope is what's "foolishly optimistic," not religion, as this trop assumes the possibility of coming to such a perfect understanding of the universe and life that there are no questions left to answer.
• Outlaw Town: The starport and orbital station of Ghanj-rho are havens for smugglers, pirates, and slavers. It's also where Tagon's Toughs hired most of their non-Terran troops, and it's Sergeant Schlock's homeworld (though he was one of the "primitive natives" and left years earlier as a slave).
• Outrun the Fireball: Averted. Major Charper's shuttle fails to outrun this particular (nuclear) fireball. Don't worry, he survives.
• Overused Running Gag: In-Universe, this is what Tagon considers Shodan's continuing to bring up the accident during the Mall Cop Command arc where Tagon got a fork stuck in his eye.
  Tagon: Clever, but I bet a professional comedian would have moved on to new material by now.
• Overly Prepared Gag: One of the ships the company gets was christened the "Serial Peacemaker."
  Ennesby: Everyone stand by to pour some Serial Peacemaker into a big bowl of "no-problem."
  Tagon: How long have you been waiting to use that stupid "Cereal" pun?
  Ennesby: Ever since you let me name the ship, sir.
• Painting the Medium: Characters routinely lean on or brace themselves against panel borders.
  • Some characters speech bubbles are written in a different font than the others. Shlock gets his own font, all AIs (including those inhabiting meat bodies) use a typewriter-like font, and some aliens species have their own font. There are some fourth-wall breaking comments on characters switching font.
• Peeling Potatoes: parodied here.
• People Jars: At one point, the author gets away with a full-frontal nude shot of Elf in a regeneration tank by making her too nude to have skin. "I'm as naked as the day I was born. And then some."
• Permafusion: Carbosilicate Amorphs, such as Sergeant Schlock, have a powerful reassembly reflex. Their bodies can reform after pretty much any injury, even if the pieces don't remember the whole they used to be. However, when Schlock makes contact with a version of himself from an Alternate Timeline, this reflex "thinks" that the two of them are disparate parts of one Amorph, causing them to involuntarily and permanently fuse together.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Ennesby has a habit of doing this. Words, phrases, quips, and puns. Ye gads, the puns...
  Schlock: Ennesby gave me a shorter word to say all that, Sir. 'Assassineated'.
  Tagon: Ennesby needs to stop inventing words.
• Perpetual Poverty:
  • However many times the Toughs get paid, they'll be struggling to make next paycheck before you know it.
    Tagon: This number looked a lot bigger before I started the payroll.
  • Interestingly enough, it was averted once. And then that aversion was deconstructed, as a large fraction of the mercenaries took their new-found wealth and retired.
  • The Neoafans give the Toughs access to an immense fortune. But when the original owners, who were trapped and presumed deceased for countless millennia, are finally freed, the Toughs are declared thieves and are laden with what is described as a debt the size of a planet over what they already spent.
• Perpetual Storm: Book 14, "Broken Wind", features a planet-sized gigahabitat that rotates to provide gravity. The resulting coriolis force has produced a permanent "sideways hurricane" in one part of the habitat, when a pair of baffle walls designed to prevent just that are intentionally knocked down.
• Pervy Patdown: Defied. The extremely well-endowed Dr. Bunnigus (who paid her way through university as an exotic dancer) is threatened with this by the border guard at Haven Hive entry port. Rather than allow her colleagues to respond with violence, she shows the would-be groper what she's not hiding, and what he'll never, ever get his hands on, in a way that leaves him a shuddering wreck.
• Phlebotinum Killed the Dinosaurs: A passing alien cruiser carelessly nudged several asteroids, wiping out dinosaur civilization before they could build flying machines. The Dinosaurs managed to get a distress signal out, but by then the ship (which could hear their radio signals because they left a hypernet-equipped probe in orbit) was too far away to do anything about it... so they used a teraport to evacuate the dinosaurs instead.
• Phrase Catcher: Schlock's faster than he looks. Finally lampshaded:
  Pau: Don't worry about me! Worry about that turd-tentacled monster! He's faster than he —
  Schlock: Say "Looks."
• Physics Plus: Gravity manipulation (but not generation — ships are built around spheres of neutronium as sources of gravity to manipulate), a process which is as well developed as electronics, and playing the result to its natural conclusions; ubiquitous flight, Deflector Shields, traversable wormholes (one example which Justifies a Time Travel storyline), and quantum teleportation. Some find the easy nanotechnology a bit of a stretch.
• Painful Adhesive Removal: Pronto was fond of using duct tape to restrain prisoners, prompting other characters to quip that they "hoped your species was hairless," or "you know sign language for 'I would like anesthetic'."
• Planet Spaceship:
  • Every Precursor that didn't hide was wiped out. The place most of them chose to hide was in massive, planet-sized spaceships, sent out to exo-galactic space.
  • Pa'anuri "warships" are on the scale of a gas giant, which given the scale of the Pa'anuri basically makes them Powered Armor. They're made of Precursor exogalactic planet-ships.
• Planetary Relocation:
  • One story arc of involves a race of aliens who wiped themselves out by ramming a gas giant into another gas giant. The Rant gives a treatise on the type of engine they used- double-ended fusion torch called a "fusion candle"-and tips for turning a planet into an STL Generation Ship.
  • By the end of the series, the Andromeda Dark Matter Aliens use gravity manipulation to disrupt the Unioc home planet out of the Goldilocks zone. This would have doomed all inhabitants, had it not been for Petey arranging for an emergency Brain Upload of all of them.
• Plant Person: None are seen, but in this strip given the medical weirdness going on aboard Haven Hive, Dr. Bunnigus is forced to ask the following when given the Double Meaning of Kathryn mentioning someone is a plant:
  Bunni: A plant like a spy, or a plant like a perambulatory asparagus?
• Pun: Multiple:
  • A supply vessel called "Eatonrun", call sign "MRE S0-7A57Y". The last part is claimed to be "completely unfunny", though (of course, if that's really MRE, it may be).
  • Ennesby coins the term "Assassineated" to describe what Schlock did to Colonel DeHaans.
  • An Unsound Effect version in this strip, Cindy discusses her bucket list after mentioning how much she's looked forward to firing her main gun. Tagon smirks and tells her it's something she can check off as he gives the order to fire. The sound effect for the next panel is a resounding "CHEKHOV!" punning both against "check off" and "Chekhov."
• Plasma Cannon: Schlock's signature BHG-9000 plasguns, plural because they tend to explode at the drop of a hat.
• Poor Communication Kills: After the Toughs have a brief battle with pirates, the local military sends them a message asking them politely yet firmly to leave with the warning "Further use of force would be regrettable, but you must understand that as the sovereign power here we are morally obligated to deploy any and all force necessary to restore order". The officers involved are somewhat nervous about the wording, but since things have calmed down a bit they think it's OK. Unfortunately the Toughs suffer a lethal sneak attack from a hidden third party just as the message is being sent, so it comes off as taking credit for murdering their friends...
• [Popular Saying], But...: A few of the Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries are phrased that way. To name a few examples:
  35: That which does not kill me has made a tactical error.
  43: If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky.
  59: Two wrongs is probably not going to be enough.
• Population Control: Earth has a gene pool protection act that required Doctor Bunnigus's parents to have a Designer Baby.
• Portal Network: with an incredibly dark secret; It copies everyone who uses it each time they use it. The Gatekeepers then interrogate the copies and kill them. They know everything about everybody without anyone's knowledge. Seven million people every minute. For hundreds of thousands of years. Technically, they meant well — the Pa'anuri made it clear that either the Gatekeepers would prevent the use of the teraport or they'd kill the Milky Way Galaxy. However, it was All for Nothing because they tried to kill everyone anyway, by means of a zero-point energy system they "gave" the Gatekeepers as a "peace offering" that nearly blew up the whole galaxy.
• Post-Scarcity Economy: Subverted, Cindy claims that she's seen society cross into "post-scarcity" three times in the past six hundred years, but every time they've found some new basic commodity they didn't have enough of.
  • Also discussed here:
  Elf: This little utopia doesn't use money.
  Tagon: "We don't use money" is not the same as "everything is free".
• Powered Armor: Besides the standard stuff, the Toughs are equipped with low-profile (to the point of invisibility) armor built into their uniforms that helps diffuse energy weapons and lets them fly.
• The Power of Friendship: A twisted sort of application of the trope. The Toughs can't count on their allies, because they're mercenaries and your allies might be the guys you're hired to kill tomorrow; they can't count on any of their respective home governments, for pretty much the same reason; they certainly can't count on their employers, who are frequently known to try to backstab the Toughs since, well, they hired a band of mercenaries to begin with, so why not add "screwing over those who make a living with violence"? But they know they can count on their friends (which, admittedly, is usually limited to "each other", but the sentiment is there).
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: "What do you guys eat?"
• Precursor Killers: Though covered up by an Ancient Conspiracy, galactic civilization has actually gone through several iterations. Known causes of downfall include dark matter entities called Pa'anuri, mistakes with Immortality Inducers leading to degeneration, and a type of Weaponized Teleportation that can bypass Teleport Interdiction called the long gun.
• Precursors:
  • Oisri is an ancient artifact built by a long forgotten race to create the Paan'uri. According to one analysis, it contains an annie plant orders of magnitude bigger than any Power Source modern galactic society can confidently build.
  • The ancient Oafans were a highly advanced race who had manufacturing processes thousands of times more efficient than modern galactic society.
• Private Military Contractors: The Toughs and much of their competition that isn't a star nation's military.
• Projected Man: most of the shipboard AIs; also, Ennesby before he joined the crew and got a body of sorts.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: 5er0 gets annoyed when people call him "Zero". His name is pronounced "Vernon": the "5" replaces the Roman numeral "V", and the "0" is pronounced "none".
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Pi's paranoid delusions are sometimes right on the money.
    • First, there's the incident with a grav-catcher. As the Lemony Narrator puts it, "It's a good thing he's not in therapy. This would undo months of progress."
    • And it takes someone as crazy as him to think of hyperspace cannons and zombie plagues.
      Pi: But the plan is absurd. Suborning Gavcorps would be terribly expensive, and no military will admit to having genocidal nanotech on hand...
  • Karl Tagon's response to seeing Kaff Tagon's nanite-riddled girlfriend start having a seizure - put his suit-helmet up in case of bio-weaponry. His wife wasn't so lucky...
  • The reason for Recursive Precursors? All the ones that didn't leave the galaxy or otherwise hide were wiped out, usually by one another. The ones that did leave chose to do so not only to hide from one another, but also to avoid the slightest probability, tiny as they were, of certain threats coming into being. Threats such as, for example, artificial dark matter lifeforms going renegade. Hundreds of millions of years later, the Pa'anuuri would come into being and pose a threat serious enough to annihilate the entire Milky Way galaxy.
• Psychic Powers: It is stated early on by the narrator that someone with "psychic sight" can see the bullet destined to kill someone. This is dropped in favor of harder sci-fi, but psychic powers such as (radio) telepathy get referenced every once in a while.
  • There's an in-universe TV show called Psychic Suzie. She's quite unconventional, for a medium.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Probably the best description of Schlock's attitude. He does show care and loyalty to his friends despite his status as a sociopath, but enjoys fighting too much to care about the blazing hot maimery he spews from his plasma cannon on anyone but his friends.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Multiple instances:
  • At the end of this quote from Strip 2011-05-05:
    Doctor: Mrs. Shephard, my team and I will get your son back and you will help us. We two, you and I, share responsibility for his predicament. But culpability, the blame? That belongs to someone else, and may God have mercy on his soul, because I. Will. Not.
  • From the third panel of strip 2009-12-06, when trying to get someone to shut up:
    Kevyn: You. Are. Not. Helping.
• Punctuation Shaker:
  • The F'Sherl-Ganni typically have three apostrophes in their names
  • And they call a certain enemy the Paan'uri, or is it Paa'nuri, or Pa'anuri?
• Pungeon Master: Ennesby, being an entertainment AI, used a databank of puns across 50 languages.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Schlock can do this, but it isn't very effective.
  Captain Tagon: Is that the "please save the nice lady" face, or "please let me kill things" face?
  Schlock: Those are the same face.
• Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: Much to Petey's frustration, an ancient archive device shows a very poor understanding of quantum mechanics, believing that due to it being a Time Abyss, it keeps the universe trapped in a cycle revolving around itself through observer effect.
• Quote Mine: Ennesby has to give Captain Tagon a quick lesson about this, before an interview with a journalist.
  Ennesby: You might say "Protesters were out in force, but my men used restraint, and no civilians were injured." What actually airs might be "My men used force, and civilians were injured." Of course, they won't need to chop your sentences up that much to incriminate us.
  Captain Tagon: It's not too late to kill that anchorman, is it?
  Ennesby: Case in point.
• Quote-to-Quote Combat: A notable exchange occurs after LOTA teraports New Credomar out of the cannon barrel.
  Kevyn: If you say "I told you so," I get to say "my sarcasm is more accurate than your paranoia."
  Ennesby: That's fair.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The misfits and more exotic alien members of the team are all assembled in a squad led by Schlock himself. Tagon and his command staff treat them as an elite force they don't so much deploy as unleash.
  • And barring some of the only remaining founding members of Tagon's Toughs (as seen at the start of the strip,) they represent the longest-serving and most experienced members of the company (experienced as Toughs, anyway.) The command staff tend to listen when they speak, even if they vastly outrank them. (It doesn't hurt that Sgt. Schlock once literally owned the company, and still owns as much or more stock as the command staff.)
• Rapid FTL Proliferation: After multiple assassination attempts by the Gatekeepers, the Andreyasn siblings make the hard decision to make the teraport open-source and spam it to half the galaxy. Setting off the so-called "Teraport Wars."
• Razor Floss: Tagon's "Dorothy System" which strings a razor-sharp wire between his boots when he clicks his heels together.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Captain Tagon may be somewhat Book Dumb, but he does listen to his men; and he knows when to let them act on their own (even when it's a ploy to get clients to do what he wants).
  Kevyn: You expressly forbade me from collaborating to determine what Osri is.
  Tagon: Stop playing innocent. You're bored on patrol with a puzzle right in front of you. Also, I gave you an order with loopholes in it.
• Recursive Ammo: Referenced once, but beam attacks tend to be more common when battles occur.
• Recursive Canon: The very inaccurate Show Within a Show licensed adaptation of the Toughs' adventures, which inappropriately chibifies the crew and exaggerates Schlock's abilities.
• Recursive Precursors: A resurrected being from millions of years ago claims this is the case, although other characters remain skeptical. However, this also brings up the Fermi Paradox, with some noting that according to their theories, advanced aliens should have existed long ago, and yet they can only find a tiny handful of ruins.
  • This is later shown to be true when a remnant of an even earlier one is encountered (digitized minds uploaded in a massive Dyson shell). The book 19 prologue shows us a few cycles of these and how they reacted to learning it themselves. The third (the Oafans), on realizing that multiple galactic cultures of a size and power equivalent to themselves had mysteriously vanished at their heights, conclude that "hiding seems prudent". It also turns out that a digital copy of the same individual who initially told everyone in the present about this learned some "very compelling reason" to kill and digitize his entire race before erasing both the deed and the reason from his memory long after they had in fact all hidden.
  • At the end of the same book they found out that a truly staggering number of those precursor civilizations are still around, existing in gigantic spaceships orbiting the galaxy for billions of years.
• Recursive Reality: In the library at Tinth-Pilkra, as part of an Old Media Are Evil joke, on a shelf in the foreground can be found compilations of early twenty-first century webcomics, including Sluggy Freelance... and Schlock Mercenary itself.
• Redshirt:
  • Lieutenant Der-Trihs, via Sdrawkcab Name. And most things go about the way you'd expect for him, with a name like that.
    Voyt: Lieutenant Commander Der Trihs. . . By all rights, you should be dead.
    Der Trihs: (currently a head in a jar) Dead is starting to look good.
  • Otherwise mostly averted. Minor characters are not treated as disposable, and many get characterization. It's eventually averted for Der Trihs, once he works out that the military tampered with his brain, making him a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, fixes it, and then retires to life as a fisherman. He even gets a girlfriend!
• Refuse to Rescue the Disliked: The Body Politic opens with the Toughs deciding that they will not take a contract to rescue chronic antagonist General Xinchub (who has previously bullied, blackmailed, insulted and harassed the Toughs in innumerable ways, including numerous cold-blooded murder attempts). Not even when their trusted associate Petey offers them 20 times their normal rates to do so.
• Regained Memories Sequence: The Toughs agree to have their memories modified by the UNS in exchange for liberty rather than be pursued and killed by them (fortunately, Schlock manages to keep the knowledge of the memory wipe itself, who did it, and why due to his Bizarre Alien Biology and later eats the man responsible to follow up on a threat/promise he'd made). Petey later restores them all (via simulated approximations of the actual events), with the fake memories being modified to black and white (including in-universe) so the Toughs can tell the difference. It hits the doctor and the reverend particularly hard when they discover the memory of their wedding was faked, although ironically they did get married (by the Admiral who struck the deal with them just before the wipe), but Petey had no way to know that.
• Remember the New Guy?: Justified. The Toughs are a mercenary company anywhere between several dozen and a few hundred strong, not all of them identified. Introducing a new character can and has been as simple as giving one of them a name and a job that lets the audience know what he does.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: When M'Conger is boggling at the sheer size of a mere portion of the artificial environment they're exploring, Legs dismisses it as no big deal.
  Legs: You weren't with us for the Buuthandi. Engineering feats lose their punch after you've popped the containment system somebody built around a star.
• Repeat What You Just Said: After Ebbirnoth figures out what's been bugging him about Credomar's structure:
  Ebbirnoth: 'Empty inside.' 'Distraction.' Eye of the Oth! We've been blind! And Lieutenant Pibald here is a genius.
  Pibald: I didn't say anything smart. I was just whining.
  Ebbirnoth: And Lieutenant Pibald here is an idiot-savant.
• Reset-Button Suicide Mission: One story arc revolved around trying to undo a false-vacuum collapse that will obliterate space itself. The same disaster made time travel possible when ordinarily it isn't, so Kevyn is chosen to go back in time with the information that will prevent the disaster (and incidentally prevent the death of Captain Tagon). The physics of the time gate requires those left behind to keep it open as long as possible in order to send Kevyn as far back as possible; they all die doing so to give Kevyn a chance.
• Retcon:
  • Due to trademark issues, the Big Book of War of the series needed to be retitled. Formerly "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates", it is now "The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries".
  • In the first strips the company had no body armor at all before getting some hard suits and eventually upgrading to the low-profile armor that doubles as uniforms which they would use as a baseline for the rest of the run. We are told the low-profile armor is very expensive top of the line technology that none of the characters are familiar with, which Tagon rejects for shallow aesthetic reasons. Later stories would establish that it's standard issue for human militaries and has been for decades at least, with Tagon specifically having been using it for his entire career.
  • When the crew first meets Petey, having dedicated AI systems running a ship is presented as unusual. It has since been established as a galactic norm, and their first ship not having one is an oddity that has been left unexplained. Much later the company acquires another ship of the same class and it does require one. Meanwhile the RPG states that organic pilots flat-out don't have the reflexes and calculative ability to pilot warships.
• Retroactive Precognition: Kevyn plays a joke on the Toughs (and himself!).
• Revenge by Proxy: If anyone ever manages to kill Colonel Pranger, his followers are set to kill both the killer, the killer's family, and the killer's friends.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: The Brandicor Vog leaves the toughs and goes to work for General Emm, who currently has them all imprisoned. Next time they're seen, they're floating in a medical tank, probably having been mindripped, so Emm's offer of employment was clearly not in good faith.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized:
  • It's not clear what sort of democracy Shufgar promoted, but his methods aren't much better than those of cannibalistic aristocracy he fights.
  • Credomar, just Credomar. One of the factions tried to use antimatter to blow up aid shipments.
  • In the Delegates and Delegation storyline, the would-be revolutionaries are willing to destroy a city of over four billion people, and one is shown, at one point, to be about to execute a tourist family that happened to be caught in the crossfire, before the Big Damn Heroes show up and save them. The revolution is eventually revealed to have been faked with mind control technology to spark a civil war; it was really a terrorist strike by a foreign power.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Human in basic emotions, very not human in every other part of their outlook.
• Right Behind Me:
  • Captain Tagon falls victim to this trope when he starts to badmouth General Xinchub, only to have Massey point out that the general is right behind him.
  • Lieutenant Der Trihs is questioning Dr. Bunnigan's medical credentials to a UNS surgeon, only for her to come up behind his head-bottle and remind him the foot shouldn't be in the mouth.
  • Captain Gasca tells the admiral how the current intelligence chief is too cautious. And that's when said chief appears to remind him that if her predecessor had been more cautious, he would be less dead.
  • Kevyn gets this pulled on him with the Gav ambassador aboard the Touch and Go, thanks in part to a "helpful" Tagii.
  • Karl Tagon gets the drop on one of the Parkata Urbatsu performers, who finds out that Karl resents the "nice" part of "nice old man".
  • Assuming that Schlock is busy speaking to Lt. Sorlie, several of the Toughs discuss him, and in the last panel he appears suddenly behind Lt. Bunnigus to comment on what she had said in the last few panels, prompting an addition, and Captain Murtaugh facepalming.
  • Liz really needs to work on her situational awareness
• Right Man in the Wrong Place: This Qlaviql ore freighter captain is in command of the only ship able to respond to an attack on his homeworld by a frigate armed with a powerful plasma lance. With guts and a "dream mess" created from the ore mined from asteroids, the frigate is destroyed. This ultimately results in his being declared the leader of the planet.
  • Later on, a Unioc captain is the first on scene when the Pa'anuri attack Xuvoth, and takes it upon himself to lead the offensive. Much like in the last example, Petey uses this as cause to pass the buck onto him when dealing with the aftermath.
• Right on Queue: A whole story arc is based around this. Luna's bureaucracy was so slow, and the queue so immensely long, only the oldest people in line remembered it ever moving. There were religions dedicated to the idea of reaching the front. The Toughs thought they'd been hired to disperse a crowd of rioters, but found that it was just the line for the bureaucracy.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The main antagonists of the Mandatory Failure arc, who are racist pirates that violently block the borders against aliens, wanting to keep their planet system's resources strictly under the control of their species.
• Rip Van Tinkle: After Kevyn's body is reconstructed from the neck down over the course of several days he mentions that he needs to pee like a racehorse.
• Robots Think Faster: A.I.s in have a seemingly logarithmic scale of CPU speed. The larger shipbrains often affectionately refer to organics as "meat-glaciers".
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Averted. The alien population is extremely diverse and well worth studying if you'd like to break out of that anthrocentric mold. The title character doesn't even have a head or a bipedal humanoid form. It's even played for laughs sometimes.
  Bounty Hunter: Everyone lie down, and put your hands behind your head!
  Tetrisoid: I can't lie down.
  Uplifted elephant: I don't have hands.
  Unioc: I don't have a head.
  Bounty Hunter: It's times like this I start feeling really, really bigoted.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  Bunni: Mrs. Shephard, my team and I will get your son back and you will help us. We two, you and I, share responsibility for his predicament. But culpability, the blame? That belongs to someone else, and may God have mercy on his soul, because I. Will. Not. (Strip here)
• Rugby Is Slaughter: All sports, from Ballet to Deathball, share a league. One where spiking the ball with high explosives is allowed. Rugby is not permitted.
• Rule of Funny: "[One interpretation of this scene is that] the Universe required a punchline (which it does, every day) and warped physics in such a way that the conversation was audible."
• Running Gag:
  • The most enduring example is that Schlock looks like, well, a giant pile of crap. Nearly everyone who sees him for the first time mistakes him for a moving pile of poop. And when not, they still say it.
  • Der Trihs ending up as a head in a jar; Kevyn surviving repeated deaths; Schlock crawling, or squeezing, through air vents and pipes; the names of the ships in Petey's fleet; the Toughs killing lawyer drones on sight; the Gavs.
  • In Book 11, the recurring question What Would Schlock Do? Schlock later shows up to deliver a superb "Show Not Tell" answer. "This."
  • Every time Kathryn gets her bus repaired, the Toughs hijack it frequently enough that its story is delivered as a running gag.
  • It's almost impossible to keep track of the amount of times when kitties are involved and Schlock tries to eat them. Fortunately for the kitties, he never does.
  • Schlock being faster than he looks, much to the surprise of those facing him.
  • The Vomiting Cop in "A Hand of Acey's." Yes, the Pun is Lampshaded.
  • The in-universe Schlock Mercenary TV show, it comes around every now and then to overshadow the protagonists and causes them inconveniences.
  • There's also recurrent phrases mostly from the "Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries," such as "Pillage, then burn" or "There is no overkill. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload.'"
  • One that was used heavily early on but shows up less frequently in later strips are the use of numerous variations on Open Mouth, Insert Foot.
  • Schlock's plasma cannon getting blown up. especially when he and the people he's with are in desperate need of heavy weaponry.
  • Due to time travel duplicates, split-personality cyborgs, at least one alien whose consciousness is split between two bodies, and various other shenanigans, someone remarking about needing to invent new pronouns.
• Sapient Ship: It's a rare exception when a capital ship is flown by a human pilot or even a mobile robot. Almost every armed starship we see is inhabited by its own AI, who "is" the ship and considers the whole structure its body.
• Sarcasm Failure: You know the situation is dire when Ennesby neglects to make a fart joke about "Broken Wind".
• Scare 'Em Straight: Regularly.
  • Such as with Renault clumsily hitting on Elf prompted her to "fill in some key details".
  • Tagon didn't agree with an employer on some important terms. His solution is to quit and then ask Pibald for "his favorite" (which is bound to be colorful) scenario for a potential attack, inducing the employer's security chief into their little Club Properly Paranoid in seconds.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Implied as the reason behind the Ob'enn's war-like nature.
  Psycho-Bear Lieutenant: Talking to inferior species beats getting killed by them.
  Psycho-Bear Captain: Don't let the chaplain hear you say that.
• Scenery Censor: Gets to ridiculous levels in The Sharp End of the Stick, when the Toughs wind up naked after being captured and stripped of their clothing and armor. Lampshaded in the note to this strip, where Schlock's arms being spread wide for a yawn cover the lower areas of Elf and Kevyn.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Cheerfully lampshaded: The narrator will go into great effort to describe exactly how big the universe/galaxy/star system is, and how abysmally low the chances of some event happening are, and then the event will happen. A lot of these are Justified much, much later.
• Scoundrel Code: The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Maxim 31: "Only cheaters prosper."
• Sealed Evil in a Can: This is what the structure the Toughs were defending in "Random Access Memorabilia" (Oisri) is thought to be at first, a Precursor prison containing a dark matter entity. The truth turns out to be a lot more complicated.
• Sealed Good in a Can: Eina-Afa, a quite literal can full of sky that contained, among other things:
  • A rare example of a friendly swarm of hive-minded alien insects, natively evolved inside the can after the builders left. Adapted themselves to the galactic society with alarming alacrity, and rapidly became a valuable ally of the Toughs.
  • The builders of said can, forcibly mind-uploaded by the station's management AI some 10 million Earth years before the story's time, after they migrated there en-masse to escape the dark matter entities latterly known as the Pa'anuri. At one time a galaxy-spanning civilization several orders of magnitudes greater than the Gatekeepers, has enough resources and military power - including thousands of Long Gun - to give Petey pause and find a specific UNS fleet that was running dark by (allegedly) brute force search over the entire Milky Way, built the whole can out of the series' Phlebotinum that is normally used for power plants and out of the reach of the average person in any significantly macroscopic amount, are nice enough to do nothing on-screen that would be considered evil by current galactic standards, even to the aforementioned AI that forcibly uploaded and imprisoned them, and even hired the Toughs to, quote unquote, save the galaxy despite them having basically stolen from them several planets' worth of materiel.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • The author is a Mormon from an Irish family. The BH-209 comes in two models, "M" and "I," for "Mormon" and "Irishman." The difference? Ethanol tolerance.
  • On the Nejjit:
    Petey: They are also deathly allergic to chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, and anything that's been fermented with yeast.
    Narrator: Wow. You'd think they were Mormons.
  • And on a more personal note:
    Kevyn: If you have an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of hypernet terminals, for an infinite amount of time, eventually you'll crank out all the great works of Howard Tayler.
    Narrator: Note: This can actually be done with three monkeys in fifteen minutes.
• Self-Disposing Villain: On Nov. 9, 2009 Schlock is trying to subdue some rioters who locked themselves in a storeroom in the ship, so he uses his plasma cannons to cut through the bulkhead. One of the rioters throws a hand grenade at the hole Schlock made, but it misses and bounces off the wall, before Schlock can even enter. This lands back on them and explodes. Turns out they were carrying antimatter which also explodes, incinerating all of them. Schlock didn't have to do anything. He thinks they did it to themselves on purpose, as he tells his crew-mate Elf, "They committed suicide when they saw me coming."
• Serial Escalation: Approaches this at times. How many times can you get paid for a single job? Tagon's Toughs' record is five.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: When Kevyn travels back and therefore the Bad Future is erased, this is effectively conveyed with a panel that imitates the look of loading a saved game in DOS.
  Your current game will be lost. Reload from previous save? Y/N
  > Y
  Loading...
• Ship Sinking: Despite having a short-lived doomed romance with Elf in the future timeline Tagon develops Selective Obliviousness towards her advances and shows no interest even when she outright tells him she wants a relationship. This can come across as a bit of an abrupt change and was followed immediately by Elf entering a relationship with Kevyn. Elf now denies any attraction to "old" Tagon. Not helped that the "romance" between Elf and Tagon only appears in less than a week's worth of strips leading up to Tagon's death in the "bad future" timeline, and received no development prior to that.
• Ship Tease: Played with/Implied twice, despite being years apart, between Shep and Para Ventura. Also between Elf and Tagon, then again between Tagon and Murtaugh, as well as between Tagon Sr. and Kathryn.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Shoulder Cannon: The Powered Armor developed by Tailor for the Toughs has the option of mounting a cannon on each shoulder of the suit, which can also detach and function on their own as "Paul-drones".
• Show Within a Show: Murderfinder and Meatpuppet, a forensic drama that apparently suffers from Ship Tease.
  Murderfinder and Meat-Puppet is a serial police procedural popular on the Unioc homeworld of Oth. It hinges upon several unlikely premises: a brilliant Unioc detective develops a rare and untreatable immune disorder, and must live in a sterile bubble. Her partner is a decidedly non-brilliant law enforcement officer promoted to detective out of nepotism, and most members of the department think it would be best for everyone if he met an untimely end.
  Because Murderfinder's allergies prevent her from using a proper CSTR (a conceit which moves beyond unlikely and into the "unheard of" realm,) she uses a custom communications suite to partner very closely with Meat Puppet, who must collect clues, gather evidence, and not die, all while suffering the constant haranguing from a voice that almost never shuts up.
  Murderfinder and Meat-Puppet is entering its 18th season, and rumor has it that Season Eighteen will be the one where Meatpuppet finally steals back Doc Jabbernoth's secret cure for Murderfinder's illness, which was stolen during Season Twelve by the Optomafia Cabal. This, then, would allow Murderfinder to meet Meat-Puppet eye-to-eye.
  They probably won't kiss, though. The writers need to save something for Seasons Nineteen through Twenty-four, which are all under contract.
• Silly Simian: Legs apparently finds the word "monkey" inherently endearing.
  Schlock: The Rev doesn't like Petey. He said he was a soulless warmonkey.
  Legs: Actually, "soulless warmonkey" sounds pretty cool.
  Schlock:: You just like the word 'monkey.'
  Legs: Who doesn't?
• Simple Solution Won't Work: Played for Laughs. The Toughs accidentally cause a population boom when they break a galaxy-spanning teleporter (that functions by creating a copy of an individual at the destination) by not destroying the original and sending one individual to 950 million different locations, causing perfect doubles to appear around the galaxy. One guy reunited with his wife/wives thinks he's found the perfect solution, only for the women to preemptively shoot down anything that rhymes with "gleesome".
• Slasher Smile:
  • Most of the Toughs' officers can do this, notably Tagon (example here). He likes violence and he likes getting paid. If he is smiling, pray you are his employer.
    Ebbirnoth: I've seen Schlock make that smile before, sir. It's creepier on you.
  • Pi's can get downright frightening, too.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Quite cynical at first, but drifted rather close to starry-eyed idealism in its second decade.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Despite the cynicism of the strip, it rarely takes itself seriously.
• Smart People Play Chess: AIs play chess for fun. You can tell when one of them is seriously outclassed because his opponent will be able to predict the entire game before the first move is played.
• Smells of Death: Schlock complains that a waste processing hatch Ennesby is leading him through smells like "lots and lots of death down there." Ennesby starts to reassure him it's not a sewage line, then comes upon a mountain of dismembered corpses.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Murtaugh combines this with Gratuitous Latin here.
• The Soulless: The Reverend doesn't think that A.I.s have souls. He mentions this to Schlock, who observes that's he's an artificial life form too, and wonders whether one might acquire a soul by eating someone else..
• Space People: The F'sherl-ganni/Gatekeepers, to the point of being able to survive vacuum.
• Space Pirates: A common enemy. Hyperspace gates and later Teraport interdiction fields make shipping follow predictable routes, and the sheer distances involved mean that only the strongest powers have navies strong enough to fully protect shipping. It doesn't help that large areas of space are not really controlled by any government, and pirate alliances have been shown to control whole planets.
• Spammer: In the 31st century, spamming is a capital offense.
  As early as the 21st century spammers were already less popular than defense attorneys, door-to-door fragrance salesmen, and the French. By the late 31st century they were held in the same regard as pedophiles and telemarketers.
  The stigma was so powerful that Hormel was forced to rename their increasingly unpopular luncheon meat to "SPHLEGM" (Salted, Processed Ham and Lard. Edible? Gag a Maggot!)
  Sales skyrocketed.
  • Kevyn is shocked to realize that, in the course of making his teraport invention open-source, "I just spammed something like 30% of galactic society."
• Spanner in the Works:
  • The presence of a squad of the Toughs on bodyguard duty (along with their advanced ship and tag-along UNS Lieutenant/Captain Sorlie) are the only things that keep the plot described below under Staged Populist Uprising from going off without a hitch.
  • Schlock deciding to remain behind with Elf during the ship evacuation in Mandatory Failure terminally derails the Uuplechan plot to keep everyone silent, including the dead that were about to be revived.
• Spit Take: Kevyn gets several in a row, starting here.
• Spy Speak: In this strip, Maximillian Haluska's use of field operative terminology gave away he was more than just a well-equipped thug. The "Aunt Amy" and "Uncle Bob" thing comes up again here, in conversation with Para Ventura.
  • Parodied when Schlock meets Timmons before the circus arc.
• Staged Populist Uprising: In chapter 15, a sinister conspiracy by as-yet unidentified individuals uses one to initiate a Civil War on Earth. They launch a False Flag Operation on the Proletariament and use Clone by Conversion Nanomachines to convert the entire police force into their own agents. They then use Do Not Adjust Your Set to announce a revolution for the "people", accusing the Plutorliament of being behind said False Flag Operation and claiming that the noble police force has joined their side topped with a final dose of setting out to deliberately blow up the city, erasing all the evidence, along with killing four billion people.
• Starfish Aliens: Schlock is really, really weird. Most of the others we meet at least breathe oxygen, and a lot of them are something vaguely resembling humanoid. But the Pa'anuri are the weirdest of all, consisting of dark matter that can't even exist in this dimension.
• Stealth Cigarette Commercial: The in-universe Plasma Cannon Safety Coloring Book, printed jointly by Magic Dreamland Entertainment and Strohl Munitions.
• Stolen Good, Returned Better:
  • Captain Kaepu finds himself with a bunch of "uninvited guests" on his ship, and in reassuring him they just want to "borrow" some of his ship's equipment. He's aware that some of the more xenophobic members of his homeworld might hold him responsible for them being there, until the happy later realization that they didn't give him a choice.
    Chisulo: Don't worry, captain. You'll have a better fabber, and we still won't want your ship. Tomorrow, though? You'll be the captain of the ship where ten thousand dead people came back to life.
  • When Elf Ellen is promoted following the capture of the Soulward Honor, she promises to do this with the captured vessel before returning it to its rightful owners. (Of course, since she later had to abandon Soulward Honor and therefore disable its weapons, and then later punch a hole in its hull to get her fragsuit out of it, she's got a lot of dirty work ahead of her if she is to make good on that promise.)
• Stomach of Holding: Schlock is this. Overlaps with Hyperspace Arsenal, given that he's been known to keep a substantial number of large weapons. He eventually gets an armoured spacesuit big enough to fit himself in.
• Story-Breaker Power: Petey could deal with most of the issues the heroes face on a whim. He has purposely done things in a less efficient way just to give them something to do in a few storylines since his ascension to Fleetmind. Petey explains in some later stories that his power isn't infinite; there are moments when he actually can't help the Toughs because doing so would mean he has to neglect the rest of the Galaxy.
• Stripperiffic: Parodied.
• Strongly Worded Letter: Used several times:
  • Once the Fleetmind starts interfering in governments:
    President Mancala: I'll send you the full report. This kind of opportunistic militarism cannot be tolerated. The United Nations of Sol and allied planetary Governments will not stand idly by while sovereign galactic powers are overthrown, crushed, or assimilated by the Fleetmind.
    Ambassador Breya: What's our plan, Mister President? Do I need to deliver a declaration of war, and then withdraw the embassy?
    President Mancala: Don't be ridiculous. Your job is to lodge a protest, using the strongest possible diplomatic language.
    Ambassador Breya: Ah. And how is that different from "standing idly by?"
    President Mancala: If we were standing idly by, we would not be lodging a protest.
    Ambassador Breya: Wow. We are fearsome.
  • And just to rub it in:
    Note: The League of Galactics is a millennia-old body of diplomats and other ne'er-do-wells representing almost two hundred thousand different governments throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. It has a rich and varied history, liberally garnished with back-patting tales of heroic diplomacy — studies conducted, sanctions administered, statements released, and reprimands served.
    It has about as much effect on key galactic events as central Asian rainfall has on the mean high tide in the Gulf of Mexico. Brandishing a reprimand from the League of Galactics is only marginally worse than threatening to cut off one's access to the Ron Popeil Shopping Channel.
  • ''I'm here to lodge a protest. I'll let you read it yourself. The formal document uses some of the strongest words you can write in Galstandard West without violating grammatical checksum.''
  • As far as Schlock himself is concerned, the words "temporary restraining order" mean "come back with guns."
  • Subverted on one occasion however.
    Ennesby: Fine. I've forwarded [the nasty-gram I sent to Xinchub] to you for your expert critique.
    Some time later:
    Tagon: I see you've just been exposed to Ennesby's Weapons-Grade Vocabulary.
• Stumbling in the New Form: In the first "Schlocktober" special almost the entire company gets decapitated and their bodies replaced by cloning. Brad, previously a skinny twig of a grunt, turns out to be genetically predisposed to be a body builder (but malnourished) and his new body is a 230 kilogram behemoth, leaving him a bit temporarily clumsy
• Subspace Ansible: The Hypernet is able to reach anywhere instantly, unless it's being specifically jammed.
• Sunday Strip: The comic runs a double strip on Sundays, and while some times it's covering another scene during the events of the current story line, as during the Oisri story arc, usually it continues with the story line of the time, particularly for events that wouldn't really be practical in the normal sized strip.
• Super-Senses: Schlock has superhuman senses of vision, hearing, and smell. Part of what makes him so dangerous.
• Super Serum: Soldier-boosts; illegal if done without a license, but that doesn't stop anyone.
• Super-Soldier: Several, with the Doyts being particularly notable.
• Super Spit: One of the abilities the Magic Cryokit gives Doythaban.
• Superweapon Surprise: Implied in the form of Maxim 24: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a really big gun."
• Suppository Gag: Hematic scrubbers look like giant pills and serve the dual purpose of filtering out heavy metals from the blood, and discouraging grunts from sitting down and "putting down roots" in areas where they're needed.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In the CSI parody arc, the Grissom Expy is chewed out for personally interrogating Schlock since as a CSI, he has no business interrogating suspects.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: The destruction of the Maxim 39 via "Long Gun" fire. We get one page of Oh, Crap! realization from Petey, Chinook and Iafa before the thing goes "boom" with all hands aboard. Tayler has killed ships and major characters before, but never so suddenly (and so many with the latter, Laz 5 "resurrection" notwithstanding).
• Swords to Plowshares:
  • The space-habitat of Credomar. A journalist even mentions that it was created by the "Swords to Plowshears" project. Essentially, it's a Hyperspace Death Ray with enormous stategic value, which has been repurposed as a deep-space habitat. An Arc centers around the king of Credomar evacuating the entire population to a habitable moon somewhere in order to reactivate the weapon - not because he's looking to pick a fight with anyone, but because he's worried that The Federation - who BUILT the damn thing in the first place - may at some point declare a 'state of emergency' and fire the weapon without evacuating the population first...
  • At one point Kevyn converts their terapedo supply into a Very Large Array, placing them around a solar system and using their targeting sensors to survey it without giving out radar signals. Of course, they're still fully functional teleporting missiles, which is why he calls it a Very Dangerous Array.
  • Referenced by Petey when he sends the Tohdfraug invasion fleet to Andromeda to fight the Paanuri with no supply line and compares them to swords.
    Tohdfraug Admiral: "But if you break a sword through abuse or neglect, it's useless."
    Petey: "As a sword, yes. Eventually I'll be needing plowshares."
• Symbol Swearing: Multiple, during Book 2: The Teraport Wars: Petey Promoted:
  • From 2002-09-28, after being glued to a wall:
    Chuk: $%#@!! Somebody un-$%#@ing stick me from this #$%@&ing &@#%ety wall!
    Narrator: There's far more profanity, and it's much louder, what with there being fewer holes in lungs.
  • From 2002-09-29: After a betrayal:
    Chuk: Oh, that is just $%ety-#$%!
    Gig: You double-crossing #$%@ers are gettin' paid twice!
• Take a Third Option:
  Katryn: 'Fight or flight,' Doc. If you won't let us fight, which way do we run?
  Doctor Bunnigus: We don't run. We take the unspoken third option. Surrender.
• Take Our Word for It: The artist knows full well that sometimes the readers' imaginations can come up with a far more epic scene than whatever he might've had planned, so he employs this.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Averted, here, due to one character having far less time to chat than he thought.
• Talking Your Way Out: Most characters employ this (even the supposedly dumb ones) to some degree, but Kathryn in particular is an artist. No small wonder, considering her background. Case in point here, talking her way out of being held at gunpoint.
• Tank Goodness: Flying Tank goodness for the win.
• Tastes Like Purple: Seen here, when a UNS admiral finds himself awakened in the middle of the night...
  Admiral Chu: Unnghh...the steward who makes the good coffee is still asleep. This cup from my adjutant is full of something that tastes like caffeine lost a knife-fight to the color brown.
• Technology Uplift: While hiding out on a primitive planet the company chaplain convinces Kevyn to build a robot to uplift the natives, unfortunately they throw it in a volcano.
• Teleportation Rescue: Done once using repurposed Terapedoes.
• Teleport Interdiction: Kevyn included the specs for a theoretical Teraport Area Denial device when he made the Teraport open-source, and both the UNS and Strohl Munitions announced they were building them during HN3's report on the mass-spamming.
• Tempting Fate:
  • The characters are very savvy when it comes to this. Lampshading it is something of a Running Gag. Of course, sometimes they know better, and, well, sometimes they don't.
  • Their terminology for it is "Taunting Murphy".
  • Again: Don't taunt Murphy.
  • In one strip, a planet's air traffic control advises a ship to "just shut everything down"... right before it crashes.
    Traffic Control Lieutenant: They got the "down" part.
    Traffic Control Captain: I actually said down. That's going to be on the transcript.
    • Then in the next strip:
    Traffic Tech 1: Rescue and Recovery is en route.
    Traffic Tech 2: Optimal route will cross lane 5. I'm making a hole for them now.
    [The wreck explodes]
    Traffic Tech 1: You said "making a hole".
    Traffic Tech 2: I know the rules. I can't get written up for unintentional irony.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Referred to by name. Anybody suffering from it is legally considered intoxicated, and there are safety systems to keep them from driving or operating heavy machinery.
• Theme Initials:
  • All of the PD Fleet ships have names with the initials 'P.D.'[1] Their fleet of warships contains, among others, ships named Pterodactyl, Perjurious Discourse, Pretentious Drivel, Predictably Damaged (I-VI), Priority Delivery, Painstakingly Defenestrated, Polysyllabic Designation, and more.
  • The official designation for the Fleetmind is the Plenipotent Dominion.
• The X of Y: All the Ob'enn ship names follow a strict pattern: The [Object] of [Pretentious Adjective] [Pretentious Principle]. If it is a defensive ship, the object will be a piece of armor or article of clothing; if offensive, a pointy handweapon of some sort. Lampshaded when Tagon was told his recently-acquired fabber is of Ob'enn manufacture:
  Tagon: Let's slap a drive and crew quarters on it and christen it the Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance.
  Kevyn: Making fun of Ob'enn ship names is like shooting fish in the barrel of circular swimming.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Routinely. Discussed in this strip.
  • Maxim 37: is "There is no overkill. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'.
  • And Maxim 34: "If you're leaving scorchmarks, you need a bigger gun." (First mentioned here, sans number.
  • After Karl Tagon and Timeclone Kevyn are kidnapped, the Toughs have the following exchange:
    Thurl: Whoever took him was not subtle.
    Kevyn: Broken furniture?
    Thurl: Craters.
• There Was a Door: Petey tends to use unorthodox methods of entering spaceships, seen, for example, here.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: When the Toughs attempt to recover an ancient Gatekeeper archive, the archive attempts suicide. When they make moves to stop it, it warns them that the secrets it holds are so incredibly dangerous, it must die, or else the entire galaxy will be doomed
• Three-Point Landing: In this strip, after being knocked through a wall by LCDR Foxworthy and falling several floor's worth of distance, Captain Tagon manages a perfect three point landing, the soldier boosts letting him walk away from it without any problems.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Both Petey and Lota are willing to threaten to use this tactic. Of course, Petey's version is more a teralock, but still...
  Lota: Should you so much as approach those systems Lota will be required to fire you.
  Kevyn: Okay, I get it.
  Lota: Out an airlock.
• Third-Person Person: Lota not only refers to Lota in the third person, but insists that everyone else does so as well. This includes not using "puny pronouns", although collective ones like "we" Lota is fine with.
• This Ain't Rocket Surgery: One plotline invokes both halves of this in quick succession.
• This Is Gonna Suck: When Schlock realizes that his attempt to cut a hole into the wall he is currently approaching at a rather unsafe velocity was less than fully successful, his expression and commentary fits this trope rather well.
  Schlock: I'll tighten the beam and cut myself a nice, round door...
  (sees the still-mostly-intact wall)
  Schlock:...which I will then open by knocking really, really hard.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: In the final battle the Toughs find themselves in a situation where only someone who's experienced in using their own body's neurons as a control interface and who has mastered eating his enemies to increase his own mass as a tactic can save the day on one front, and only a virus-based platform agnostic AI can save the day on the other. Up to this point these had been minor humorous quirks of Schlock and Enesby respectively.
• Time Abyss:
  • The Really Old Dude and Very Old Guy, members of the species that originally created the amorphs.
    Fobottr Tenant: Are you claiming that your people have been on the surface for over ten million years?
    Rod: Oh, my people have been down there for much longer than that. No, I was just talking about me, personally.
  • In another story Vog is discussing his age and how the differences in his own and Earth's calendars make calculating his age in human terms difficult. Just the margin of error (stated as one percent in the conversation itself, probably just to have a number to throw around) is older than human civilization.
  • The Oafa can match Rod and Vog. Though all living members of the species were genetically reconstructed from ancient Oafan remains, their old ships are older than the history of the human race and after Book 14, the Oafan's unique Genetic Memory means that Oafans from millenia ago are now alive and well. In Book 19 the original versions of those ancient Oafans turn out to still be around as well..
• Time for Plan B: Recurring.
  • Plan C! Plan C!
  • This strip goes to Plan E.
  • "I was happier not even knowing the letter."
• Time Travel:
  • Kevyn manages it in the effort to stop Captain Tagon from being killed, by jumping back to before it happens to stop it.
  • The Command and Conquer chapter returns to the time travel concept, giving hope that time travel can be performed using 140 character messages.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: A duplicate of Kevyn Andreyasn created by time travel meeting his past self results in pronoun trouble as well as the verb tense issue.
• Title Drop: The seventh strip. The individual physical book collections also have their titles dropped at some point during the events portrayed within.
  • A Little Immortality doesn't stop death.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Characters frequently point out that Schlock looks like, well, crap, but that's only about half of it, to the point of an Overused Running Gag.
  • And as such he knows better than to go with attempts to polish him, thank you very much.
  • With the proper set-up, a simple serial number can be hilarious.
• Toilet Teleportation: The titular Schlock travels by sewer on several occasion - mostly against his will, but on at least one occasion, he deliberately dives down a toilet in order to reach his destination stealthily. Justified in his case since he's basically a Blob Monster, and thus quite capable of fitting himself through the pipes.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The reason shit really hit the fan during the first visit to Credomar wasn't because the team messed up anything, or because an unexpected and heavily armed third party barged in to mess everything up like usual. It was because the Credomar's warring and rebellious faction were so terminally friggin' stupid they nearly killed themselves and the entire station along with them. In particular, the main station-breaching fire and antimatter blowout happened because the rebels blew themselves up before the team could even stop them, by way of jury-rigging a sloppy trebuchet to throw improvised incendiaries with that inevitably collapsed and set everything ablaze. All of that, right next to where they were stocking up on antimatter that was so terribly secured it's a surprise it didn't go off sooner. LOTA lampshades this once he's taken over the station, explicitly telling everyone the whole thing could have been avoided from the very start if not for the factions' "sheer anarchic stupidity".
  • In the Oisri story arc, a Hauling robot operator, whose hands followed his own in motion, was bragging he was good enough he could throw boulders with the same hands he could pick his nose with... and in the process of demonstrating, pinched his own head off with the robot's hand.
• Too Much Information: Comes up from time to time, often related to Schlock's biological functions.
• Torture Technician: U.N.S. Colonel DeHanns served Admiral Emm as her chief interrogator during the book "The Body Politic", until he got eaten by Schlock.
• Totem Pole Trench: In This strip Andy, Legs, and Schlock disguise themselves as a single tall creature, Legs riding on Andy's middle set of shoulders while Schlock has spread himself out into a sheet to drape over them like a robe.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Schlock Mercenary's eponymous character is fond of a drink mix called "Ovalkwik." The ingredient list is here.
    Ch'Vorthq: Sergeant, you will be drinking a very heavy stimulant cocktail cut with shampoo and high-tensile inert carbon.
    Schlock: I don't drink it, I eat it straight.
    Ch'Vorthq: And I suspect you're addicted to it.
    Schlock: [aims plasgun] Step away from the tub of happiness.
  • The cast of Schlock Mercenary are also fond of the noble 'Chupaqueso', which is, effectively, melted cheese, wrapped in fried cheese, traditionally garnished with cheese. It's not a good food for a prolonged lifespan, but mercenaries don't tend to live that long anyway.
• Try Not to Die:
  • Schlock sums up a briefing thusly:
    Schlock: Look sharp, weapons ready, don't get dead.
  • It's also their first priority: To survive long enough to get paid. Naturally, getting paid is a very close number two.
  • Sometimes survival comes in second. It probably depends on how broke they are.
• Tsundere: Most of the female cast has their moments, but Elf is the most prominent example, especially earlier in the strip.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: Referenced, and rejected by a gate clone of one man's wife, here.
• Two Words: Added Emphasis:
  Admiral Breta: Why are you giving me orders, Captain?
  Captain Tagon: Two Words: Bomb on Board.
• Unfortunate Names: "Uniocs" are only known as such because they decided it would be preferable to being known by the name of their home planet, Oth. Unioc, meaning "One-Eye" is merely a bit silly. But being called "Other" would have been politically difficult, having a meaning similar to "foreigner".
• Unit Confusion: Being reasonably hard SF, it's usually pretty good, but with the occasional slip-up.
  • Especially early on, "watt" would occasionally be used as a unit of energy instead of power.
  • Kerchak made this mistake as late as 2010, but that time the author claims it was intentional.
  • Upon getting his head around that one, Tayler made the different error of using "terawatt-nanoseconds" to mean "an incomprehensibly huge unit of energy." Power is energy divided by time, so "terawatt-nanoseconds" would have been simply "kilojoules," or about a hundredth of the energy the human body gets from a carrot. He was most likely trapped in the more common mold of "x per second," where, for instance, terajoules per nanosecond would be the extremely large "zettawatts." That said, a few kilojoules of energy correctly delivered is quite enough to kill a human. A bullet from an assault rifle or sniper rifle only has a few kj of muzzle energy, and a terawatt laser performing a nanosecond pulse on a 1mm diameter spot would remove the head or a limb from an unarmoured human.
  • Gav once refers to the "radius" of a Negative Space Wedgie where the author probably meant "diameter" (a slip-up from him being a bit less plausible than one from Kerchak), since a later strip has it swallowing a ship at a bit over half the "radius" given.
• Unobtainium: Post-transuranic alloys (or PTU's) are materials made of exotic super-heavy elements. They are essential for building matter-annihilation reactors ("annie-plants") but are almost impossible to produce unless you already have such a reactor. Even an advanced society would need millennia to bootstrap its own PTU industry, unless they get help from an older civilization... or find such a civilization's ruins. Late in the series, a hallmark of some of the most powerful precursor species is their ability to build star-sized megastructures out of the stuff - and still not avoid extinction.
• Unnecessarily Large Interior: An employer of Tagon's Toughs is the Oafan, whose current space station is as large as a planet, is big enough to stuff the planet Mars inside, and has a docking area big enough to dock battleplates, the largest spaceships the U.N. has. How many battleplates could dock inside? "All of them."
• Unplanned Manual Detonation:
  • In the eye tree story arc, Hob rigs up an improvised bomb to help crack open a dome the Toughs are trapped in, but the detonator doesn't work, requiring firing at the bomb with a pistol to detonate it in an ultimately fatal manner.
  • In the first Credomar storyline, Lt. Bradley is forced to rig a shell from his tank's ammo loadout to destroy his disabled tank before it can crash into civilian property and cause great damage. He succeeds in blowing up the tank while bailing out, but his low-profile Powered Armor is destroyed in the process, leaving him Killed Off for Real when his body hits a building at an unsurvivably high speed.
• Unsound Effect:
  • Ommminous Hummmmm, preferably intoned in real life in the style of Gregorian chants.
  • There's also POTSHOT, DOUBLETHOOM and OVERTHOOM.
  • Teraporting seems to result in a sound of PORT for short hops or TERAPORT if you're planning on staying, although it can vary depending on circumstances.
  • KA-LASE for the sound of a laser firing.
  • ''BOSSYRING'' to describe the ringtone for a villain's phone receiving a call from his boss.
  • DE-PLOYTCH as the sound made when Schlock deploys his Powered Armor
  • ABLATE ABLATE ABLATE ABLATE ABLATE ABLATE is used to represent the sound of ablative armor doing its thing to protect the wearer, with a "KICK!" for good measure.
  • Elizabeth's tossing a potted tree to block a door is accompanied by a sound of SHRUBBERY!
  • A technician is asked about discrepancies in the Urtheep Industries inventory; the subsequent explosion (due to their products being suborned and weaponized) sounds like DISCREPANCIES!
  • When Cynthia fires her main weapon for the first time, the sound effect is CHEKHOV!.
• Unusual Euphemism: Used rather often, and often to hilarious effect.
  Tagon: (discovering he's just been stabbed in the eye with cutlery) Oh. Fork.
  "Hullnuts."
• Unreliable Narrator: Mentioned in the commentary for 2017-11-05:
  Addendum to Note: If we've learned anything from this exchange, it's that I'm an unreliable narrator.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Invoked in this strip, where Gasht'g'd'g'tang explicitly says he's not going to discuss F'sherl Ganni plans, especially with the narrator, as "nefarious plans must remain secret".
• Unwanted Assistance:invoked
  • In the book "The Body Politic", Schlock accidentally lets slip to the clients they're planning to con that they made plans to... well, con them. Elf manages to explain it away as a security precaution.
    Schlock: Nice save.
    Elf: Stop helping.
  • In this strip Dr. Bunnigus tells Schlock to shut up while she's trying to counsel a distraught Para Ventura over her fear about killing others.
• Uplifted Animal: Humans have uplifted elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, polar bears, and possibly others. A few of the alien races were uplifted by other aliens.
• Uriah Gambit: In this strip, part of the book "The Blackness Between", Tagon and Jeeves discuss how to handle a frigate controlled by Admiral Breya Andreyasn's husband, as part of the Tough's assignment to capture Breya, by sending him and his ship off to attack a hostile force that the Toughs have no intention of engaging beyond a feint, leaving the frigate to be overwhelmed and destroyed.
• Variant Chess: This strip shows a cthulhu piece next to a bishop and a knight.
  The game has changed a bit over time.
  No, I'm not telling you how the Cthulhu piece moves.
• Vicious Cycle: There are multiple vicious cycles that inevitably result in all advanced life in the galaxy going extinct, most of which start with the invention of the teraport. Several cycles used the teraport enough to annoy the Pa'anuuri Eldritch Abominations, and got driven to extinction when the Pa'anuuri responded with their Gravity Master abilities. The Gatekeepers were eventually able to fight them to a draw, and they agreed to a treaty, stalling the cycle for a while. But the Pa'anuuri enacted a plan to sneakily wipe out the Milky Way galaxy anyway, resulting in Petey going to war with them. Other cycles developed the long-guns and eventually destroyed each other after Mutually Assured Destruction policies failed. At least one cycle got destroyed in large part to a self-replicating fleet of destruction created by Scary Dogmatic Aliens who hated the idea of Brain Uploading so much that they wanted to kill anyone who might use it. And some species just died on their homeworlds, being advanced but not spacefaring to any significant degree. There are some surviving civilizations, but they mostly hide by containing their stars in various types of Dyson spheres, rendering them impossible to find. The reason for this is because of the aforementioned long-guns; the only way to defend against them is for no one to know where you are, so civilizations cut themselves off completely.
• Virtual Celebrity: The New Sync Boys, which Ennesby ran before joining up with the Toughs, were a boy band performing pop music written and performed by their label's people, presenting to the world as a real band while being merely projected holograms.
• Virtual-Reality Interrogation: Creating a simulation in which the subject has escaped and begun musing on how he got into such a mess is the first phase of the infamous Mind-Rip.
• Visual Pun: Check out the "waldo".
• Vomiting Cop: Exaggerated as part of a CSI parody arc. The cop in question has been a forensic specialist for 3 years and still vomits at every case like a rookie — as well as any mere graphic description. On the other hand, he's helped put away 16 murderers and lost 40 pounds.
• Walking Armory: Sergeant Schlock seems to be little more than an ambulatory weapon depot.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Multiple:
  • Credomar.
    Pi: Hyperspace Death-Ray. That's what Credomar is.
    Lota: Correction: "Credomar" is a city-state full of coddled humans who currently reside on a habitable moon of their very own. The remains of their station...THAT is a hyperspace death-ray.
  • The Toughs' NUSPI array is a wave-motion gun scaled down to corvette size (and it uses the same operating principle as the Credomar Cannon). It bypasses any kind of shielding, armor or point defense, but it also uses up the ship's entire fuel supply in one shot, making it Awesome, but Impractical in most situations.
• We All Die Someday: From strip 2002-07-24:
  Athens: What I said was that in the end we will all die. Death is an eventual certainty.I mean, even if I survive this engagement, I'll still have to confront the entropic end of the universe at some point.
• Weapon for Intimidation: Sergeant Schlock favors an impressively large plasgun which powers up with an ommmmmminous hummmmmmmm and a glowing barrel. It is quite dangerous but its ominous hum is the most important feature. When he goes in to get a new one, he discovers that improvements in technology have led to it being replaced with a small, silent, and more powerful model. He rejected it because it was small and didn't hum. He storms out, appalled, as the salesman desperately calls after him, claiming that they can give it an impressively large cosmetic casing and a speaker to simulate the hummmmmmm. As Schlock is a mercenary, intimidation is part and parcel of the trade. The hum is a proven deterrent, and the glow of doom from the barrel is nothing to sneeze at, either. It's like selling an intimidating Hand Cannon without a hammer to Cock Dramatically or a Laser Sight to show someone exactly which part of their body it will blow off.
  Schlock: Grumble...Mount you in a big round case...
  Narrator: Arms dealer, know thy market.
• Weaponized Teleportation: The Teraport can be used to teleport troops and bombs to targets. Teleport Interdiction had to be invented shortly afterwards, and losing it will rapidly lead to game over. The scariest form of Weaponized Teleportation is a weapon called the long gun, due to the fact that no one has developed any form of Teleport Interdiction that can defend against it. This has in fact lead to several cycles of Precursors getting driven to extinction.
• Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Ennesby gives the trope its name here in a message sent to Xinchub after his attempt to have the Serial Peacemaker destroyed with an extra terapedo snuck into the ship's armaments.
  Ceeta: My stomach is in my throat right now. It's trying to spit acid on the parts of my brain that remember reading his message.
• Webcomic Time:
  • Lampshaded by the narrator
  • Book 11: Massively Parallel rewinds 744 hours, 32 minutes (31 days, 32 minutes) and takes 1 year, 3 months to catch all four of the component sub-arcs back up to the 'present'.
• We Are as Mayflies: Humans have much shorter lifespans than many alien races, as even Xinchub will admit.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • In the original timeline, the galaxy is destroyed because the governments are bickering and fighting over minor intelligence leaks instead of banding together to save themselves. Luckily, things go more smoothly the second time around, though only because Petey first blackmailed them and then assimilated their fleets.
  • Book 13 (Random Access Memorabilia) involves two different UNS intelligence agencies fighting over the Gav-owned artifact Oisri. Those under the command of Admiral Emm try to capture the artifact by hacking the Gav's backups so that they'll resurrect as loyal soldiers, while the second group tries to stop them.
  • Book 14 (Broken Wind) has the mercenaries themselves having severe chain of command issues. The Toughs are loyal to Captain Kaff Tagon, the Parkata Urbatsu team is loyal to General Karl Tagon, and the emancipated warship Bristlecone they're riding on is loyal to Para Ventura. Then there's the fact that the former owner of Bristlecone, Alexa Murtagh, is (possibly unconsciously) making a subtle power play by issuing challenge coins to the Toughs. Liz, Nick's girlfriend and the chef's new assistant, is the first one to notice this.
• We Will Not Have Pockets in the Future: The uniforms start off with (presumably) no pockets; soon after Tailor becomes the company's tailor/armor-designer he ends up designing a uniform with cargo pockets. "Oh great. The grunts are going to want to put things in them!"
• Wham Episode: Schlocktoberfest in general. When it's Halloween time, the story often takes a darker turn and characters will die. (Though, not always permanently.)
• Wham Line:
  • "Captain Tagon was killed in action this morning."
  • "So...next up on the to-do list: Declare war on the Andromeda Galaxy."
  • "You call that a confession? Here's a real confession: So was I."
  • "The Pa'anuri fired up a core generator of their own. Its about thirty-five times bigger than mine."
  • "Tagii didn't plant the code. She jammed it."
  • "To my analysis, Oisri is not a vessel for imprisoning a dark-matter creature. It is a machine for creating one."
• What Does This Button Do?: When GavCorp find a patch that may be an optical interface in Oisri, they start firing random pulses to see how it would react. Although they were already dead by the time it had an effect, due to another plot, the Paan'uri they released didn't exactly help the matter.
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Subverted to death with the Ob'enn, and summarized here.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Usually subverted, in that it's not being non-human that makes killing someone acceptable. It's getting in the way of the Toughs completing a contract.
• Which Me?:
  • The wormgate system creates a perfect duplicate of anyone sent through it, which is kept for interrogation by the Gatekeepers, who then kill the clone. The first characters who suffer from this problem are Doythaban and his gateclone Haban II, but this later becomes a galaxy-wide problem when billions of these clones are released. However, no-one suffers from it more than Gav, who clones himself 950 million times to escape, leading to an truly epic case of this trope.
    Gav: There are still over nine hundred million Gav clones out there. My activities of the last year can only be understood statistically.
  • At one point the Terran government tries to charge Kevyn with treason for mass-releasing the teraport designs. He points out that it was his now-deceased clone who released that information, not him, and thus he can't be charged with anything.
  • It also leads to some rather bizarre court cases since there are some legal issues where the gate clones are not always considered separate individuals. In one case, a person had two death penalties against him for Manual Operation under the Influence. When his gate clone turns up, the judge rules that, since the clone was created after the commission of the crime, it is perfectly legal for them to apply the second death penalty to the gate clone.
    Judge: Oh, and you used up all your appeals the first time around. Sorry.
  • In the "A Hand of Acey's" storyline, a gate clone attempts to murder the original version of himself, but instead gets killed by the original acting in self defense. Since the clone and the original are legally the same person in that particular jurisdiction, the final police verdict ends up being attempted suicide.
  • The Gavs eventually found a way to differentiate themselves from one another, to the point where they are barely recognizable as Gav-clones. Especially the females.
  • Kevyn has to go through this again, during his attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
    Ennesby: We may need to issue you some additional pronouns.
• Whole-Plot Reference: When Tagon's Toughs are on shore leave on a resort planet, they run afoul of the same Obstructive Bureaucrat types as seen in Jaws. The plotline does give them a lot more justification than the originals, though; the ecosystem on the planet is engineered and includes no large predators, so the scenario discussed really is less ridiculous than the truth from their perspective.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Variant. After regaining their full intelligence, memories, and lifespans, the practically-immortal oafa work to perfect and distribute the immortality project Terrans had been struggling with for generations, in order to have actual peers.
  Squid-Sophont: The Plutorialment will question your motives.
  Oafan Ambassador: They are a deep breath too young to understand our motives.
  Squid-Sophont: Old age makes you generous?
  Oafan Ambassador: Longevity is a curse if one has no friends with which to share it.
• The Worf Effect: Battleplates. The most intimidating ships of the UNS navy, used regularly to drive home that the Toughs have gotten in some deep crap. Starting with the Tunguska they also tend to be followed by something even bigger coming along to crap all over the plate in turn, just to sell how big the new threat is.
• World Shapes: the Bu'uthandis are a variant of a Type I Dyson Sphere (see also Hollow World), while the Zoojacks are literally shaped like toy jacks, and the Tinth look like giant subway sandwiches
• World's Shortest Book: Inverted:
  Tagon: Vog, you're about a zillion years old. What you don't know can probably be written on the back of your hand.
• Worrying for the Wrong Reason: This.
  Ennesby: Uh-oh. Those look like real police.
  Tagon: Uh-oh. Elf is smiling at them.
• Worst News Judgement Ever: In this strip a Hypernet News Network story item goes into detail about a zoo brontosaur projectile vomiting over 300 people, and then only gives a brief blurb about the possible deaths of millions of people by the collapse of a damaged Space Elevator.
• Worthy Opponent: Pranger's Bangers. Much ass-kicking ensues when they team up on a mission.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Woman mercs will casually threaten, punch, break the bones of, maim, and bounce bullets off of the body armor of the men. The men never, ever respond in kind.
• Wrench Wench: Roboticist Para Ventura converted a damaged tank into a robot that performed WAY beyond specifications. She also killed eight opponents in hand-to-hand combat while defending herself and two badly injured comrades from an angry mob.
• Writing for the Trade: Not so much in the earliest days, but now, oh yeah. As of this writing, the latest complete arc, Book 11: Massively Parallel started March 02, 2009 and ended 637 strips later.
• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Schlock either sent Jud to hire reinforcements or to an early death. According to Chelle, "We can hope for both right?"
  • Discussed with regards to General Xinchub, in Book 9:
    Captain Tagon: I don't know why Petey thinks the man needs rescuing, he could turn his own death into a tactical advantage.
    Kevyn: I've done that before. It hurts, but it's actually not that difficult.
    Captain Tagon: You're not helping.
  • A massive-scale gambit by possibly the Schuul in Book 15. After causing the JSC police force to reissue weapons they'd infected with nanites to mindjack the officers, the UNS and Toughs are forced to either allow them to destroy the entire city of Dom Atlantis and start a civil war or crash a Battleplate through the city to stop them, destroying all evidence and starting a civil war. It would've worked disastrously well, except that the Toughs had a hyperspace death ray they couldn't account for, and so could Take a Third Option.
• Yellow Peril: Professor Pau. Prefers to wax his 'tache rather than go for the traditional Fu-Manchu style, however.
• You and What Army?: "Captain Tagon's army. We're Space Mercenaries. Here is our business card." "This is why I always ask...."
• You Are in Command Now: Happens a couple of times during really bad crises, like during the HTRN takedown story arc which left Elf in command when more senior officers were unavailable.
• You Can Leave Your Hat On: Doctor Bunnigus previously worked as an exotic dancer, and it turns out that she hasn't lost those skills, though she only uses them once, when she is obliged to strip (between panels) by an annoying bureaucrat. She turns the situation round by sheer sex appeal and more or less melts his brain.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: After accidentally blowing up King Lota Lt. Pibald asks if the guy who blew up the king gets to be the new king. Lota survived the blast.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame
  Petey: I know I've hit a rough patch when a violent, amorphous sociopath is my best character reference.
  Tagon: He's the only reference I'll trust. What's that say about me?
• Your Mom: ...weighs six tons and kisses with two meters of muscled trunk.
  Chisulo: And she's not a pansy two legs afraid to try catching a box.
• You Monster!: Captain Tagon is called a monster by one of the Parkata Urbatsu members, when he informs them that there will be no video of the big chase scene involving them and the Toughs because all the PU cameras were destroyed before the actual pursuit began.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: There is a special type of teraport that can rip one's soul out of their brain, killing the body and teraporting the mind into a virtual space. This has been used as both a weapon and as an efficient emergency evacuation mechanism. While it is thankfully still subject to Teleport Interdiction, many people consider it one of the most terrifying weapons ever invented.
• Yowies and Bunyips and Drop Bears, Oh My: Referenced in this strip by D'amico, in regards to Petey.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: Sooner or later, they all seem to do this.

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