History XUniverse / TropesSToZ

* SpaceIsCold: ''Albion Prelude'' has a UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} achievement titled "It's Cold Outside" for forcing another pilot to eject.

** [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfDistance Distance]]/[[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfVelocity Velocity]]: In all the games, maps are at most hundreds of kilometers across (I'm looking at ''you'', Sol System). But the ships are so horrendously slow that they actually require a TimeDilation device to cross them in a reasonable amount of time. Unless the kilometer was redefined at some point, this suggests spaceships in the game are far, far slower than they have any right to be -- [[FridgeLogic raising the interesting question of how any of the spacefaring races actually managed to become spacefaring races when they don't seem to have any ships that come anywhere near escape velocity for a planet with a mass similar to Earth.]]
*** Some of the slowest ships can actually be outrun by a basic passenger car, and that's ''before'' you account for air friction, making you wonder why the races in the setting even bother with spaceships for gate travel - they could set up a cable/rail/something public transit network, or tow the gates closer together and build a single space station around them.
*** Oh, and your ability to hail other ships and stations is cut off abruptly at 25 kilometers.
** [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfEnergy Energy]]: Shipboard weapons and shields are much weaker than anything in a sci-fi setting has a right to be. Most transport ships and fighters as of ''Terran Conflict'' have no more than about 100 megajoules of shielding. Burning a gallon of gasoline releases about 130 MJ. There is, of course, a difference between releasing 130 MJ over the course of burning a gallon of gasoline, and releasing it all at once, but the point remains.
*** A somewhat better comparison: 1 MJ is about the energy released by a current-generation hand grenade. No M5 has more than 5 MJ of shields.
*** The most powerful weapon in the game, the nuclear-tipped Hammerhead missile, releases 1.2 gigajoules (enough to destroy fighter swarms and all but one M6). By contrast, Little Boy, the nuclear fission bomb that demolished Hiroshima in 1945, released somewhere between 54 and 75 ''tera''joules (at least 45,000 times more). The major powers of the X-Universe would lose to ''modern-day Earth''.

** Teladi: [[AnimalThemeNaming Flying creatures, primarily birds]] e.g. Condor, Falcon, Bat

** USC (Terran): [[ArmsAndArmorThemeNaming Swords for fighters]], [[LocationThemeNaming Japanese cities for capital ships]] e.g. Cutlass, Tokyo

** Yaki: [[ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming Japanese Shinto deities and demons]] e.g. Susanowa, Akuma.

* SceneryPorn: Massive planets, huge stations, sleek spaceships... let's face it: the latest installments are ''Crysis'' [[JustForFun.RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]. Taken UpToEleven in ''X Rebirth''.

* SuspiciouslySpecificDenial: The "[[SpacePirate Mercenary]]" Information Network in ''Xtended'' routinely puts out articles like "How to set up your [[WretchedHive base]]" or "How to spot a good haul", with a vehement denial written at the bottom of every article stating that they are ''not'' telling you how to set up a Pirate Base / Pleasure Palace, how to raid traders, or how to spot police informers.

* SceneryPorn: Massive planets, huge stations, sleek spaceships... let's face it: the latest installments are ''Crysis'' [[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]. Taken UpToEleven in ''X Rebirth''.

* VendorTrash: Most of the ships/weapons/items you sometimes obtain tend to fall under this. Examples include the [[JokeCharacter Teladi Vulture]], any abandoned ship whether or not it was piloted, the Fragmentation Bomb Launcher, any dumbfire missile that isn't the Tornado, [[{{Unobtainium}} and Nividium]].

* TeleFrag: Ships travel between different sectors of space through jumpgates. Jumpgates are two-way, meaning that ships both enter and leave sectors from them. Meaning, you can use your jumpdrive to jump to a distant sector for a mission... right as a five-kilometer-long vessel is entering the jumpgate's event horizon (where you are). The Terran sectors in ''X3: Terran Conflict'' are notorious for this, as they have very active military patrols which fly between the smaller Terran gates very often.
** The solution to this problem is using the autopilot to fly through gates whenever feasible (obviously this is not a good idea when under attack). The game features a "traffic light" system at each gate pair, and only the player has the ability to run a red, so to speak. The autopilot always waits for the light to turn green.