History VideoGame / Naev

** Ships are generally very small for their classifications. For example, the Goddard, one of the most iconic battleships in Imperial space, has a mass of 2300 tons, comparable to a late-WWII destroyer. Even after the mass of a heavy arsenal of weapons and heavy arsenal, only the largest ships break 10,000 tons, putting them around inter-war cruisers in mass. Similarly, the Mule is a heavy freighter and has a mass of 800 tons and a cargo hold of 250 tons.

* UnusableEnemyEquipment: There are several ships that are simply not obtainable in normal gameplay, including the Za'lek Haephestus, [[spoiler: Thurion]] capital ships, the Soromid Vox, and any and all [[spoiler: House Proteron]] vessels. Unlike similar games like ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'' and ''VideoGame/EndlessSky'', ships cannot be obtained by boarding and these ships are either not sold at any market, are only sold at markets where it is impossible to legitimately obtain a high enough reputation with their faction to land at them, or where you can land but cannot obtain a high enough reputation to be permitted to make the purchase. Generally speaking, these ships are also better than those that ''can'' be obtained and are unobtainable precisely because they are PurposefullyOverpowered.

** In general, this is Krain Industries' speciality - they make the Kestrel, which is essentially a cruiser that handles like a destroyer, and they make the Strabridge, a destroyer that handles like a corvette. Neither is likely to win against their own weight class, but excel at hunting down the next size down by matching their performance with much greater firepower.

* TheEmpire: Subverted, as the Empire seems to be the stablest and nicest government in the setting. Za'lek is a bunch of ivory tower intellectuals who are too stuck in academic arguments and bureaucratic red tape to get much done and have one of the worst piracy problems of any house, Dvaered are constantly fighting each other in internal wars, Sirius is fine if you can handle their pervasive religion, the Frontier Alliance is a textbook case of WeAreStrugglingTogether, Soromid governance is unclear but regardless to function on most of their worlds requires extreme gene therapy with an 80% mortality rate, the Independents aren't really a government so much as a collection of unaffiliated planetary governments, House Goddard is more or less insignificant and more than any other house, basically just part of the Empire, and the Pirates are, well, pirates. Even if some clans are better than others, it's still essentially gangster governance. Compared to all of these, the Empire proper has little infighting, is generally prosperous, and is able to keep its trade routes mostly safe. [[spoiler: And then Thurion is decent enough if you're willing to live your whole life with the plan of eventually being uploaded, which greatly limits what you can do before then as, for example, even minor alcohol exposure can cause the process to fail fatally. And Proteron society sees people as little more than cogs, albeit cogs that get much better maintenance than in other societies with the his perspective.]]

* GreenEyedMonster: House Za'lek ''despise'' the Soromid because House Za'lek prides itself on being the most advanced and always on the cutting-edge of technology. Pushing the cutting edge of science is, after all, the entire reason their house was formed. As such, that the Soromid have such advanced genetic augmentation technology, technology that Za'lek lacks and does not understand, ''infuriates'' Za'lek. It is perhaps for the best that Za'lek is in the deep galactic south and Soromid in the far galactic north with the Imperial core worlds in between, thus usually keeping them from coming to blows.

* ArbitraryMaximumRange: Projectile/energy weapons fade out, missiles presumably run out of fuel... yep, limited ranges all around. Justifiable with everything except kinetic energy weapons like gauss guns.

-->"[[Machinima/RedVsBlue Hey, you ever wonder why we're here?]]"

** Dialog in the bar, mentioned above, is almost direct quote from ''Machinima/{{RedVsBlue}}''

* WideOpenSandbox: Much like its inspiration, ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'', the galaxy is wide open as soon as you start, and it's up to you to find something to do, work with or against a faction, and survive the persistent scourge of {{space pirate}}s.

** Asteroid fields get in the way of combat, with asteroids eating projectiles but otherwise being harmless.

* AIIsACrapshoot: The Collective, a vast swarm of hostile drones that has been terrorizing the Galactic west, are the result of an Imperial project gone wrong. [[spoiler: The [[SubvertedTrope trope is however subverted]] as the drones are actually functioning exactly as intended and instead it was the humans running Project Collective who went rogue, hid the completion of the project, and took the Incident as thirm time to strike.]]

* GreenEyedMonster: House Za'lek ''despise'' the Soromid because House Za'lek prides itself on being the most advanced and always on the cutting-edge of technology. It is, after all, the entire reason their house was formed. As such, that the Soromid have such advanced genetic augmentation technology, technology that Za'lek lacks and does not understand, ''infuriates'' Za'lek. It is perhaps for the best that Za'lek is in the deep galactic south and Soromid in the far galactic north with the Imperial core worlds in between, thus usually keeping them from coming to blows.