YMMV / Star Carrier

• Anvilicious: The books continually hammer the point that Armchair Military types should just shut up and let the men on the front lines do their job.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Earth Strike mentions that the flooding of New York in the 21st century was helped along by a Hurricane Cynthia. This became a lot less science fictiony after Hurricane Sandy.
• Misaimed Fandom: A repeated plot element is the "White Covenant", a document of basic human rights that included strong prohibitions of certain religious practices and activities. In short, all adherents of all religions had the right to believe what they wished so long as that belief did not harm others. Proselytizing, missionary work, and conversion by force or by threat all were proscribed as violations of basic human rights and dignity. There are a lot of people who think this would be a damned good idea, despite the author's reveal that it's a major part of the Dystopia of the setting, as it required a One World Order and mass mind control to put into effect.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Grdoch's method of eating. They have about 900 toothy, tubular mouths positioned all over their bodies, which they use to feed on still-living animals. Humans die quickly, if gruesomely, when attacked this way, but their food animals can survive being fed on every few days for months.
• Paranoia Fuel: A.I.s in this series are so advanced that personal secretary versions are capable of mimicking their owners to the point that people have a hard time telling the difference between the AI and the real person. Trevor Gray's AI contacts a ship captain who'd been giving Gray trouble, disciplines him, then gives him words of encouragement, all without Gray or the captain knowing the AI did it on its own initiative.
• Strawman Has a Point: Trying to surrender to the Sh'daar Empire's No Transhumanism Allowed demands is bad bad bad bad, and to prove it the Conciliationists in the Confederation Parliament, i.e. the peace faction that wants to surrender and stop the war, are willing to do such things as drop nanite disassembler warheads on civilian targets and otherwise flagrantly break the Confederation's own laws of war in the hopes of killing our red-blooded American heroes who refuse to surrender under any circumstances (and a few other nations who are seemingly only allowed to be both competent and good guys when allied to the Americans). No significant counterargument for why surrendering is the wrong course of action is ever offered.

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