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400 billion star systems. Infinite freedom. Blaze your own trail.

Elite Dangerous is the Distant Sequel to Frontier: First Encounters and the fourth game in the Elite series of space Simulation Games, developed and published by Frontier Developments.

Elite Dangerous takes place in the Milky Way galaxy 1286 years from now, starting approximately 45 years after First Encounters. True to its tagline, Elite Dangerous features the 400 billion stars thought to exist within the Milky Way, 150,000 of which are based on actual astronomical data, and the other 399,999,850,000 being created through Procedural Generation. It also features the return of the Galactic Federation, the Empire of Achenar, and the Alliance of Independent Systems from the previous games, as well as hundreds of smaller factions within each of the three superpowers, and the faction that the player belongs to, the Pilots Federation. There is also an underlying story to the game accessible via an in-game news service featuring political clout within the Space Cold War between the Empire, the Federation, and the Alliance, as well as some mysterious events pointing to the legends of the Thargoid race being more than just legends...

Gameplay in Elite Dangerous is similar to other games in the Elite series—players start out with 1,000 credits, a small starting ship with basic equipment, and the goal of reaching the coveted "Elite" rank through collecting bounties, trading goods, and exploring the galaxy. There is no set path or timeframe for players to do this, and they are free to do whatever they want in pursuit of this goal.

In a first for the series, Elite Dangerous features the ability to influence faction standings within a star system which, if enough influence is reached, can result in a major shift in that system's loyalties, whether it be a Federation system seceding to the Empire (or vice versa) or an independent system aligning with the Alliance. In addition, it is also the first Elite game with any sort of multiplayer functionality, in the form of it being a partial Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, with options for "Open Play", where players can encounter other players like a regular MMO, private groups where players can mingle only with chosen friends and not have to deal with other random players, or an online-only "Solo Mode" where players interact directly with NPCs only. Cross-platform play is not supported, but all platforms are linked to the same background simulation that drives the game's universe and any events that happen; thus, players across all platforms have a limited degree of influence on one another even if they do not interact directly. Finally, the game features an incredibly meticulous amount of attention to detail—Players can look around the cockpit of the ship they are flying, space stations have NPC traffic alongside player traffic, starfields are accurate to the player's position in space, and black holes feature gravity lensing.

Elite Dangerous was announced in 1997 as Elite: IV, but dwindling interest in space simulation games at the time, combined with a lack of funding for the game, ensured that the game remained Vaporware for 15 years, before Frontier obtained sufficient funding via Kickstarter in 2012 to develop it over the course of the next two years, and release it for the PC on 16 December 2014. A macOS port was released on 12 May 2015, but due to technical barriers, support for it was dropped on 11 December 2018. A port for the Xbox One was released on 12 May 2015, while a PlayStation 4 port was released on 27 June 2017; further development of both console ports was officially cancelled on 11 March 2022.

Several updates and Expansions for Elite Dangerous have been released since its initial launch, usually grouped into "seasons". After the first season of post-launch updates, the second season, named Horizons, was released on 15 December 2015 as a paid expansion, but was turned into a free add-on for all players on 27 October 2020. The third season, named Beyond, was released on 27 February 2018 and comprised four free updates released over the course of that year. Following Beyond, a number of standalone free updates were added in 2019-2020. The game's latest expansion, named Odyssey, was released for the PC on 19 May 2021, becoming a PC-exclusive expansion on 11 March 2022 due to the development of console ports being cancelled.


Hello Commander. You should take the opportunity to read these tropes while you are here:

  • 2-D Space:
  • Absent Aliens: Zig Zagging; when Elite Dangerous was first launched, there were no intelligent aliens, although Galnet published an article regarding an auction for artifacts that allegedly belonged to the Thargoids, who supposedly existed only in legends. The Horizons expansion then starts to play with this trope by first playing it straight with the Guardians, which is an alien species that was wiped out 1-2 million years ago, although fragments of their technology remain scattered throughout the Milky Way, then averting this trope entirely by reintroducing the Thargoids in force, who begin making inroads at the edge of human civilisation by attacking stations, systems, and lone explorers getting too close to them, and even occasionally pulling entire ships out of hyperspace.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • Ship maintenance and cargo handling actions in stations are instantaneous. It is possible to refuel your ship, repair its canopy and hull, and sell off all your commodities in the time it takes for your ship to be taken into the depths of the station.
    • Averted when removing a module equipped on a hardpoint—the hardpoint needs to retract and fully shut before you can continue outfitting.
    • When your ship is destroyed, you are instantly placed on a station once you have confirmed your insurance options. Depending on whether you choose to rebuy your destroyed ship or start anew with a Sidewinder, and whether you were destroyed by a System Authority Vessel or not, you would either end up at the last station you docked at, a Pilots Federation station located in LHS 3447, or a Detention Centre.
  • Ace Pilot: The Combat and CQC ranking systems (Harmless/Helpless, Mostly Harmless/Mostly Helpless, etc.) measures how much of one a player is.
  • Acrofatic: The Federal Assault Ship has an eye-watering mass of 480 tons completely stock - 80 more than the far larger Anaconda - but retains the agility of a ship half its weight, allowing it to track annoying gnats like Vipers or Eagles.
  • Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Between official and community acronyms/abbreviations, there is an acronym or abbreviation for a lot of things. For instance, players who are exploring the galaxy will likely remember "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me" or "KGB FOAM"note , usually equip at least one AFMUnote , scan systems they visit with the FSSnote , and map HMCs, TWWs, and ELWsnote  with a DSSnote . The community-run Wiki has a relatively comprehensive list.
  • Advert-Overloaded Future: The Federation is the worst offender of this, with citizens bombarded by advertising unrelentingly. There's also a mild case of this in Space Stations as well, with holographic billboards advertising the game's various ship-making companies, like Core Dynamics, Faulcon deLacey, and Zorgon Peterson both outside the station's "Mail slot" docking port, and inside their hangar bays as well. Station concourses are no better, since the adverts now have voiceovers to go with them!
  • Aerith and Bob: People have all sorts of names in the game, both of the Player and NPC variety, meaning that one moment players could be doing battle with David Williams then be conversing with Cmdr. Everlynn Bylarth in another moment. And then there's the issue of Zorgon Peterson. The spaceship pilot NPC pool is also populated by player submissions from early backers, leading to a sea of references like Jebediah Kerman. Other NPCs run the gamut, with names like Man Battle, Denny Britt, Glenn Rollins, and Gayle Talley-Khachatryan.
  • The Aesthetics of Technology: Each major manufacturer (and, to some extent, faction) has their own aesthetic;
    • General neutral tech either has sleek, angular designs (Faulcon DeLacy, Lakon's civilian designs) or sleek, smooth designs (Zorgon Peterson).
    • Federal tech is hard angles and boxy shapes (Core Dynamics).
    • Imperial tech is sleek and smooth, with curves and vaguely aquatic vibes (Gutamaya, Saud Kruger).
    • Alliance tech is relatively sleek with softer angles, following Lakon's militarized designs.
  • Alien Sky: Played straight with any planetary landing, since Earth-like planets (which includes Earth itself) cannot be landed on, while landing access to the moon is locked with an unobtainable permit.
  • The Alliance: The Alliance of Independent Systems returns in this game, mostly keeping quiet but also containing all of the systems from Galaxy 1 of the original Elite.
  • All Planets Are Earthlike: Thoroughly Averted; Earth-like worlds are uncommon, and non-Earth-like bodies that are considered candidates for terraforming are nearly as uncommon. The majority of stellar bodies, landable or otherwise, are either Death Worlds or just downright uninhabitable due to factors such as extreme temperatures or a lack of atmosphere.
  • All There in the Manual: There are a few novels that can be bought that expand on the lives of people living in the early 34th Century as well as legends pertaining to the Thargoids. As of Beyond Chapter 4, some of this info is now available in the in-game codex.
  • Almost Out of Oxygen: If your ship's canopy is breached, or if your ship's power plant is unable to continuously power its Life Support module, you have between 5 to 25 minutes to reach a starport or an outpost, depending on the rating of the latter.
  • And This Is for...: NPC pilots in Anti-Xeno conflict zones will sometimes say, "This is for Salvation, you insect scum!"
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes:
    • Until you hit Elite in one of the four categories, the only tangible rewards you get for advancing in rank are special decals to customize your Cool Car, Cool Starship, and Latex Space Suit with, and a congratulatory message. After you hit Elite once (which unlocks the Shinrarta Dezhra system, where every single ship and module is sold, with a nice little discount), hitting Elite again only unlocks the requisite decals. Getting Elite in Combat, Trade, and Exploration nets you an extra shiny new 'Triple Elite' decal.
    • CQC ranking (not to be confused with your personal CQC rank) averts this since ranking up generally unlocks additional loadout options for your Space Fighter as well as additional loadout slots.
    • Double-subverted with missions. While higher ranks give you access to missions with greater rewards, it is also balanced out by the increased competence of enemy NPC pilots you may encounter during the mission, which scales to your rank.
    • Literally the case with Mercenary and Exobiologist ranks in Odyssey, as you unlock new outfit pieces for your spacesuits based on your rank.
  • Animal Theme Naming: Numerous ships are named after animals, mostly snakes but also a few sea mammals and birds. For a complete list:
    • Birds: Eagle MkII, F63 Condor, Imperial Eagle, and Vulture.
    • Sea mammalsnote : Beluga Liner, Dolphin, and Orca
    • Snakes: Adder, Anaconda, Asp Scout/Explorer, Cobra MkIII/MkIV, Diamondback Scout/Explorer, Fer-de-Lance (technically), Mamba, Krait MkII/Phantom, Keelback, Python, Sidewinder MkI, Taipan fighter, Viper MkIII/MkIV.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • The April Update, released on April 23, 2019, added several features that invoke this trope. Among other things:
      • All newly-purchased small ships, as well as the starting Sidewinder given to new players, come pre-installed with an Advanced Docking Computer, which automates the infamous docking sequence and launch, and is enabled by default.
      • A cluster of previously desolate systems located deep within the Core Systems is overhauled into the Pilots' Federation District, a network of Noob Caves accessible only to pilots with a special permit; said permit is given only to players who start a new game within the District, which is the only option for most post-Kickstarter players. The permit (and thus, access to the District) is automatically revoked if its holder lands on a station outside the District or kills too many players within the District.
      • Supercruise Assist is added to the game and is pre-installed on all newly-purchased ships. This module partially automates supercruise travel by regulating the ship's speed and trajectory throughout the trip; all the player needs to do is point their ship towards the destination. The module can even be used to take the ship into a safe orbit if the destination is a stellar body, such as a star. Supercruise Assist was further enhanced during the Fleet Carriers Update, now also bringing the ship to a dead stop upon arriving at the destination so that inattentive players won't become an unnecessary pancake on anything in front of them.
    • The September Update, released on September 18, 2019, added a Justified Tutorial for new players, teaching them basic flight and docking controls, including the use of supercruise and hyperspace travel, providing basic scanning and combat exercises and, upon completion, assigning them an optional, time-limited mission to travel to a space station located within the Pilots' Federation District for a modest reward of 10,000 credits, which is usually enough for most new players to repair, refuel, and rebuy their ship multiple times while they get acquainted with and figure out what they want to do in the game.
    • Ship insurance: if your ship is destroyed, you can rebuy the same model and all of your modules for a modest 5% of their original price. Alpha/Beta backers, Li-Yong Rui's supporters, and players with no ranks on all role tiers (i.e. Harmless, Penniless, Aimless, and Helpless) get an even greater reduction on insurance costs. The cost also drops if you are killed by a player who has existing bounties on their head for killing other players.
    • Loan: In the case you don't have enough credits for the aforementioned ship insurance, you can make a loan to pay for it. Your loan limit is based on your current rank and 10% of all your earnings is deduced until you finish paying up the loan, but you still have some coverage against permanently losing your ship and upgrades in case of lack of money.
    • Flight Assist helps the ship move in the desired direction at the desired speed by automatically countering your thruster inputs so speed and direction are maintained. Without Flight Assist, thanks to the Newtonian physics that the game uses, you would keep accelerating until you made a thrust in the opposite direction, and if you turned, you would keep spinning until you applied counter-rotation.
    • There is a star, located about 100,000 ls away from the supermassive black hole at Sagittarius A*, that can be scooped for fuel, so that players who spent all their fuel making the trip to the system won't be stranded there.
    • In contrast to the Federation and Empire, which require you to reach specific faction ranks in order to purchase their ships, Alliance ships have no faction rank requirements. As the Alliance is the only democratic superpower, this can also be seen as Gameplay and Story Integration.
    • Bounties gained from powerplay interactions do not count towards player notoriety nor give the various penalties to the associated ship (higher transport costs and finned modules). This is due to said interactions having unavoidable bounties, as even self-defence will result in one.
    • Players using Odyssey can now cash in any held bounty vouchers at any authority contact, at no loss, removing the need to go trawling for stations that the bounties can be cashed in at or taking them to a Factor who'll take a 25% cut of the money.
  • Apocalyptic Log: The datafiles from the lost Generation Ships, and how.
    • Also the datafiles from the derelict ship The Zurara, located in the Formadine Rift.
    • The logs of Commander John Jameson as well, since it covers the release of the mycoid bioweapon against the Thargoids all those years ago.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Mass lock factor is a functionally weaker, ship-based version of mass lock, increasing the time it takes for nearby ships to enter supercruise. Due to its namesake, it is easy to assume that mass lock factor functions like actual mass lock, implying that a ship with more mass would affect nearby ships with less mass. In reality, mass lock factor exists as a separate, fixed value for each ship that is completely independent of the ship's mass. This can result in situations where large ships, such as the Type-9 heavy, are affected by smaller ships, like the Python, due to the latter having a higher mass lock factor value despite having less mass.
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range: Most weapons in the game have a "damage falloff" range in addition to their maximum range; after a certain distance, the weapon's projectile does reduced damage, and at maximum range, it dissipates harmlessly. Missiles and mines double-subvert this trope as the former will automatically detonate after a period of time, while the latter has no travel velocity, and torpedoes avert this trope entirely as they do not detonate until they either hit the target or are shot down.
  • Armor Is Useless:
    • Having absurd amounts of armour is no insurance against module damage. Savvy players can bypass all that armour by sniping at modules, which damages them and reduces their functionality. Notably, damage to the power plant reduces the amount of power it can provide to other ship modules, resulting in some modules being inoperable, and really unlucky hits can even cause the power plant to explode, taking the ship with it; destroying the ship's canopy will activate its emergency oxygen supply which, upon depletion, will cause the ship to spontaneously explode. This, combined with the inefficiency of hull repair in the middle of a battle, is why a large portion of the metagame revolves around ships equipped with Deflector Shields.
    • Downplayed when in combat against Advanced Tactical Response (ATR) units, which typically equip weapons engineered with reverberating cascade to bypass and destroy shield generators with only a handful of hits. This makes ships with high amounts of armour more likely to survive skirmishes with ATR units long enough to escape.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: Engineer upgrades allow certain weapons to damage hull through the ships shields or cause equipment malfunctions. And some thargoid weaponry has this effect too.
  • Artificial Brilliance: NPC pilots with a combat rank of "Dangerous" or highernote  will actively stay out of your line of sight while attacking, and frequently deploy chaff to scramble the targeting systems of your gimballed and turreted weapons. Some even pack engineered weapons and modules for an extra kick.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • When it comes to avoiding collisions, the AI is a bit sloppy. The AI in isn't terribly competent at avoiding collisions.
    • In the original release, among other things, NPCs that were supposed to be mining asteroids were actually mining nothing. This was fixed in a post-release patch. The changelog for update 1.1 includes some amusing bugfixes, like "Stopped AI miners from mining empty space".
    • In combat, NPC pilots with lower combat ranks (especially "(Mostly) Harmless") sometimes fly in a straight line, making them easy pickings for even the ungainliest ships. Considering that the combat ranking of NPC players scale based on the combat ranking of the player who encounters them, this trope is probably invoked so that even newbie players can ease themselves into the game's combat mechanics.
    • Limpet drones have no sense of collision avoidance and often fly headlong into objects placed directly between your ship and their target, destroying themselves in the process. Said objects include asteroids, debris, other ships, and your own ship's cargo bay door.
    • Whilst the autodock and autolaunch software is generally reliable and effective for most commanders, it can occasionally get stuck in failure loops or manage to get itself caught on station geometry, and require manual overrides to avoid the ire of station authorities. As tempting as it may be to slap the autodock button and slip out for a toilet break whilst the AI handles things, it's generally prudent to remain at the controls until the ship is through the 'mail slot' if your ship is loaded down with valuable goodies.
  • Artistic License – Space: It's possible to find Earth-like planets orbiting stars far too young to support complex life forms. Achenar, The Empire's capital system, is a good example: it's a mere 2 million years old, yet it has an Earth-like moon with its own sentient species. At least it used to, before the Imperials killed them all.
  • Ascended Meme: One of the in-game posters has the tagline "Friendship drive charging", a popular meme amoungst the community.
  • Asteroid Miners: It runs the risk of being attacked by Space Pirates, but players can definitely do this within planetary rings or asteroid clusters. NPC ships can be observed going at it as well. It's actually quite profitable if you know which minerals to look for specifically. Plus you get to crack asteroids in half with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom sometimes.
  • Asteroid Thicket: One of the rare cases where it is played as it is in real life. The asteroid thickets can only be found in the ring systems around planets, like Saturn's rings. Even so, they're only one km high at most, which is exactly what scientists say it is here in the real world. Also averted with the asteroid belts, as these are incredibly sparse and can only be locked onto in a few "dense" clusters – where even these dense clusters only contain a handful of asteroids.
  • Attack Drone: Surface outposts are guarded by skimmers; remote-controlled drones that hover a view meters off the ground. They come in many shapes and flavors such as the tiny Stinger, the standard Sentry Skimmer, and the ship-sized Goliath. Skimmers are usually hidden under the surface and only spring up when altered, though in larger bases they are always active or can be deployed from specialized docking ports.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: System Authority Vessels, typically affiliated with the controlling faction of a populated system, fly ships that are armed to the teeth and are the first responders to any crimes committed within a system. Most NPC ships and less experienced players stand little to no chance against them. However, this gets exaggerated with ATR units, which are only deployed to face down the handful of ships that System Authority Vessels are unable to deal with. ATR units invoke this trope by bringing The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard into the fray, flying ships with heavy defences and equipment enhanced with engineering upgrades that cannot be legitimately obtainable by a normal player, such as lasers and multi-cannons with reverberating cascadenote .
  • Auto-Save: The game automatically saves when you leave supercruise and when you land at stations.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Plasma Accelerators and Railguns are fun, but they are pretty inefficient, requiring perfect aim and a lot of luck (doubly so for Plasma Accelerators, as they fire Painfully Slow Projectiles) on top of cooking your ship like nothing else.
    • Torpedoes have massive damage output, but you can only carry two extra shots for the thing, and they are expensive as heck to restock.
    • The Pack-Hound Missile Rack fires a Macross Missile Massacre that can overwhelm point defences and is fun as hell to watch, but they are about as damaging as a wet fart unless used very carefully and generate extreme levels of heat if you carelessly dump the magazine.
    • Every Power reward equipment falls under this trope by virtue of them requiring a massive amount of grind to unlock for something that is, at best, marginally better than regular equipment under specific circumstances (Imperial Hammer, Prismatic Shield Generator) and, at worst, a trophy item (Retributor, Mining Lance).
    • Pirating in general; it's not an efficient way to make money especially considering the risk unless you abuse a few things.
    • Shock Cannons. They're unique auto-loading kinetic weapons that look pretty slick and hit fairly hard, but have to be unlocked via Human Tech Brokers, generate a lot of heat, and can't be engineered.
  • Beam Spam:
    • High-Intensity Conflict Zones. It's like a rave party, only with more spaceships, explosions, and overall death. Also easily invoked if a player's ship is scanned while traversing a station's airlock (or "mail slot") and the player is smuggling something illegal; the station's defensive hardware will unload on the essentially trapped offender with an impressive - and extraordinarily lethal - Laser Floyd show.
    • Players engaged in combat against Thargoid interceptors will usually have at least one beam laser continually focused on the Danger Daisy, resulting in a spectrum of death visible from up to 15 km away.
  • BFG: Plasma Accelerators are standard armaments on gigantic military battleships, cruisers, and space stations; not so standard when they are mounted on ships designed to use small landing pads, such as any Diamondback or the Adder, but it can be done. Befitting this trope, the smallest Plasma Accelerator any ship can mount requires a Class 2 medium-sized hardpoint. In more general terms, any Class 4 ("huge") weapon qualifies, as they can only be mounted by around half a dozen ships in the game but pack proportionate levels of firepower. And yes, you can have a Huge Plasma Accelerator. Or two of them, if you own the Federal Corvette.
  • Big Damn Heroes:
    • During the game's development, Frontier released the Capital Ship Battle Video, in which four commanders responded to a distress message from the Damocles, a Federation Battlecruiser, which had been jumped by an enemy battlecruiser and was being overwhelmed due to its weapons systems being crippled. Despite losing one of their team, the commanders provided a fighter screen for the Damocles long enough for it to restore power to its point-defence and torpedo systems, allowing it to deliver a punishing barrage to the enemy battlecruiser and even the odds. This trope becomes exaggerated when you consider that all four commanders were flying Sidewinder MkIs, which is one of the lightest playable ships in the game, as well as the ship every new player starts out with. It's not impossible for well-engineered, well-flown Sidewinders to be very dangerous, but it is implausible.
    • There are player squadrons dedicated to providing critical services to players who need them in a pinch, such as refuels, canopy repairs, and/or Fleet Carrier transport in the most remote regions of the galaxy. Without these squadrons, there would be many, many more destroyed ships littering the galaxy. Said squadrons include the Fuel Rats, Hull Seals, and The Broken Limpet Logistics, to name a few.
  • Bold Explorer: The Exploration ranking system (Aimless, Mostly Aimless, etc.) measures how much of one a player is. Some players have gone weeks upon weeks in just exploring going millions of lightyears. You even get paid for your efforts.
    • And there's the Distant Worlds player group, with a huge group of players setting out to chart the stars.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The Hauler is the smallest freighter in the game and thus has the lowest carrying capacity of the lot. At a glance, it also resembles a smaller, blockier Adder, with none of the sleek curves or distinctive engine noises, and with considerably worse core and internal compartments. However, the Hauler is also the second cheapest ship, behind the Sidewinder, and because of its low hull mass, the Hauler can travel around 40 ly in a single jump with a fully engineered 2A Frame Shift Drive. It is not unheard of for the Hauler to be used as a long-distance shuttle for rare goods, then subsequently converted into a long-range exploration vessel, and due to its very low cost, the Hauler's ship insurance cost is tiny, making it cheap to rebuy if it is destroyed.
    • Weapons and modules:
      • Multi-cannons are not very flashy compared to other kinetic weapons, such as cannons, and have pathetic single-shot damage. However, they draw minimal amounts of power, have the highest firing rates in the game, suffer very little damage falloff over range, and have a wide variety of engineering options. In addition, they are a ubiquitous weapon sold on nearly every station and outpost, making them easy to find and buy, their ammo is cheap, and even if you somehow can't find somewhere to resupply it can easily be synthesized using very common elements.
      • Missile weapons are relatively cheap, hit hard, and once you get the hang of them even the dumbfire ones aren't too hard to use. Their splash damage means they tend to cause a lot of exterior module damage, and one or two solid hits can very easily take out a ship's weapons, thrusters, and/or its utility modules, leaving it a Sitting Duck or at the very least disable those annoying chaff sprayers. They also have the added benefit of being one of the few spaceship weapons that is very effective against ground targets in Odyssey surface missions and battle zones. And as far as weapons tech goes, they're pretty much Older Than Feudalism.
      • The Lightweight Alloy bulkhead equipped as standard on every ship is the weakest bulkhead in the game, but it is also the only one that is massless. This means engineering upgrades and effects that increase bulkhead mass, such as Heavy Duty and Deep Plating, provide their additional benefits to the hull with no drawbacks whatsoever.
      • A higher-rated module costs thrice as much as the same module of the lower rating, in exchange for slightly higher efficiency (and occasionally drawbacks, such as increased mass or reduced module integrity). Therefore, it can be prudent to keep certain modules at a lower rating to save cost, especially if you have limited credits and/or don't envision yourself relying on them very often. That said, always skip the B-rated modules, as they weigh far more than either A or C.
      • D-rated core internals and shield generators are the most fragile ones in their grade, as well as the second least powerful, but they are extremely cheap and the lightest ones in their respective grades while providing better overall performance than the stock E-rated modules equipped on every new ship. Regardless of what you want to do in Elite Dangerous, the general rule of thumb is to upgrade all of your ship's relevant core internals, as well as the shield generator, to at least D-rated modules since their reduced mass will increase your ship's jump range, allowing you to move between systems faster and more efficiently, while at the same time making your ship slightly more capable at any task.
  • Breakable Weapons: Weapons are considered modules, except as they are externally mounted, they are even more susceptible to damage than most other modules except for maybe thrusters. It’s a common tactic to use missiles to remove an opponent’s ability to fight back.
  • Bug War: Courtesy of the Thargoids coming back. Oh, and currently humanity's effectively losing, at least from its own view. The Thargoids aren't communicating their views on the matter.
  • Canis Latinicus: The officially recognized group of player volunteers named Fuel Rats (which even has its own in-universe ads) has an ostentatious Latin Motto in their logo: "Collocare occasionem liberabuntur", which would be the perfect example, as it's mostly gibberish. Even members can't agree on what it's supposed to mean, but the most commonly accepted meaning is something along the lines of "we'll assemble for the opportunity to rescue them" (which in grammatically correct Latin would be "collocabimus occasioni eos liberare".)
  • Casual Interplanetary Travel: Supercruise - powered by a ship's Frame-Shift Drive - allows players to travel within star systems fairly quickly; while it's nowhere near as quick as Hyperspace travel it still allows players to get most anywhere in a star system within a matter of seconds or minutes. It also has a speed cap of 2,001 times the speed of light.
  • Casual Interstellar Travel: The Frame-Shift Drive enables FTL speeds within a planetary system and also jumps between systems. Its range isn't unlimited, but as you get a more powerful FSD the amount of light-years you can cover in one jump grows larger.
  • Centrifugal Gravity: The Starports rotate to generate artificial gravity, and this adds quite a bit to the complexity of docking. Ships, on the other hand, are constantly in free-fall conditions when not accelerating.
  • Clown Car: While ships capable of carrying a ship-launched fighter ostensibly carry the replacement fighters as spare parts that are assembled before launch, the Federal Gunship can carry two fighters ready to launch within seconds (with Multicrew), and even a single fighter takes up the bulk of the ship's rear volume.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • NPC ships have infinite ammo on all weapons. It is particularly jarring on NPC ships using railguns, which on player ships have the balancing factor of pathetic ammo capacity.
    • If you have a bounty on your head in any system, NPC bounty hunters will periodically spawn right on you in supercruise and interdict you. The same goes for when you have any cargo in your hold, or if a mission has specifically sent hostile ships after you, which causes periodic pirate spawns. And with both, if you perform an emergency drop to avoid them, the NPC will spawn right next to you in normalspace even if they were halfway across the system. Even if you submit to the interdiction and just jump out, mission pursuers will spawn again and harass you all the way to your destination, forcing you to either constantly evade them or kill them.
    • When the Engineers update launched with its ensuing AI buff, almost every NPC had heavily engineer-upgraded components and a Game-Breaking Bug caused their weapons to swap stats, leading to Anacondas using upgraded Plasma Accelerators that had the firerate of multicannons or fragmentation cannons with railgun accuracy.
    • The ships around space stations really have it out for you; security vessels will often crash straight into yours and full speed in a desperate attempt to scan your ship and cause a big chunk of damage; then fine you for the crash. Other vessels; particularly larger ones don't seem to have a concept of braking or stopping. If you happen to end up in the path of one of these you can expect them to pin you to a wall; where you'll likely be instantly killed for blocking the entrance.
    • Zig Zagging with supercruise scanning; normal players can see your bounty status even in supercruise when scanning; however the AI cannot. Conversely players can't see your cargo in this state in any way, yet the AI pirates apparently can. (They contradict themselves though; they'll say they know you have a huge cargo hold, yet still, need to scan you to see it.)
    • Also AI ships are completely immune to heat damage which is a pretty big annoyance and makes any heat based weaponry absolutely worthless if you're not actively planning on PVP, and also lets them use shield cell banks with no downside.
    • The AI also has perfect accuracy, will rarely ever miss with fixed weaponry, and will never miss with Railguns because they react to your inputs.
    • Enemies can both shoot at you while exploding and dying and can fire their weapons while charging FSD drive, a feat impossible for players.
    • To top it off enemy stats can make little sense. A basic Viper can in some cases have upwards of Python level shielding; a feat impossible even with max engineering and gaurdian boosters.
    • If a damaged NPC enemy ship jumps away from your location, it will instantly regain all of its health if you intercept it again.
    • Advanced Tactical Response ships are frequently equipped with the reverberating cascade mod on weapons such as pulse lasers, allowing them to quickly, and permanently take out a ship’s shielding, regardless of how much health it has.
  • Continuing is Painful: If the ship you fly costs hundreds of millions of credits (such as an Imperial Cutter with heavily engineered Grade A modules) and/or it has any combination of commodities, bounty vouchers, exploration data, or contract-specific cargo, or all of these at once, and it is destroyed, you will need to decide between footing the insurance cost of the ship, which will typically run into tens of millions of credits, or essentially "starting over" with a free Sidewinder equipped with basic modules. Even if you are able to afford the insurance cost for your ship, you will still lose everything else—any bounty vouchers or exploration data is lost, and any contracts requiring contract-specific cargo already stored in your ship become Unwinnable by Design, requiring you to forfeit them and earn the ire of the faction that gave you the contract, which can result in fines as well as lost influence/reputation with that faction.
  • Continuity Porn: A lot of things from the previous games are mentioned or seen in Dangerous, including the original systems from the first Elite game, Jacques the Cyborg Bartender from Frontier: Elite II (now in possession of his own station which travels the stars), The Federation, the Duval Empire, and The Alliance of Independent Systems, and a few references to Cmdr. Jameson (the default Player-Commander name for the previous games). Lave Station (where players started out in the Elite series) has become sort of a Mecca for players coming from the previous games! There are also a lot of references to the (also canon) book series.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: Anti-Xeno and Guardian weapons generally draw less heat and power than conventional weapons while doing considerably more damage against Thargoids. There's also something to be said about the coolness of possessing weapons that are either developed by an organisation that embodies the survival and adaptability of the human race or incorporates technology reverse-engineered from an extinct galactic superpower. However, these weapons are also classified as experimental modules, which means you cannot equip more than four of them at any time. In addition, they cannot be engineered, which limits the amount of potential damage they can do, and do less damage against human ships compared to conventional weapons. Finally, the usefulness of these weapons gets called into question when you factor in the fact that most ships firing on you will typically be other commanders (often with engineered weapons and defensive systems) and not a Thargoid, or, in the case of exploring the distant parts of the Milky Way, the fact that you are highly unlikely to even be drawn into a combat situation in the first place.
  • Cool Car:
    • The Scarab is a vehicle small enough to fit inside even the Sidewinder and used to explore the surface of planetary bodies. It has 8 wheels arranged in a 4x2x2 configuration, a top speed of 38 m/snote , vertical thrusters to "hop" over obstacles and produce downforce, Deflector Shields, a plasma repeater turret, a cargo scoop, and a dedicated 2-ton cargo rack. Amusingly enough, the Scarab also has an indestructible canopynote  and takes no damage from neutron wakes.
    • Odyssey gives us the Scorpion, a combat-oriented SRV packing a turret that features a rapid-fire plasma gun and a co-axial missile launcher. Frustrated by those agile skimmers darting around? The Aculeus launcher will get rid of them right quick!
  • Cool Starship: The game is laden with dozens of them, and at least one of them ought to appeal to a Commander.
    • Faulcon deLacy produces some of Elite's most iconic ships, including the legendary Cobra Mk.III, the Viper Mk.III, the Sidewinder, the Python, and the Anaconda.
    • Core Dynamics has more famous ships in the Eagle, hailing from the second installment, and the newcomer Vulture, as well as the Federation Military's civilian-available ships, the Federal Dropship, Assault Ship, Gunship, and Corvette. They also produce the Farragut-Class Battlecruiser for The Federation as well as the Federation's exclusive short-range fighter, the F63 Condor.
    • Zorgon Peterson produces the Adder, having taken over from Outworld Workshops, a basic cargo ship called the Hauler, and another Elite classic, the Fer-De-Lance.
    • Lakon Spaceways produces a line of cool cargo haulers referred to as the Type Six, the Keelback (basically a Type Six converted to be a very light carrier and combat vessel in the tradition of converted transports from the World Wars), the Type Seven Transport, the Type Nine Heavy, the Asp Explorer (another Elite classic), its sister, the Asp Scout, and the Diamondback Explorer and its little sister, the Diamondback Scout, with the Asp Explorer and Type Six being regularly used by explorers. They also produce a short-range fighter for independent factions, the Taipan. In more recent times (during the Beyond content cycle), they've become aligned with the Alliance, and produce the Chieftain for the Alliance alongside its variants the Challenger and Crusader (these being fairly large combat vessels with surprising maneuverability for their size that also make excellent armed traders) as well as the Type Ten Defender - which is, essentially, a Keelback writ large, a Type Nine hull made twice as wide, with a ton of armor strapped to it (it out-armors every other non-capital ship in the game), and with guns (a staggering nine of them) covering every surface and full fighter capacity.
    • The only ships currently available to players from Saud Kruger are the Dolphin, the Orca and the Beluga, which look cool - and, in the Beluga's case, is the largest player-accessible ship in the game - and can fit luxury passenger modules but are otherwise largely outclassed by every other ship in the game (what with being luxury liners, not combat vessels).
    • On the other hand, the few Imperial military ships available to players are Gutamaya's Imperial Eagle (produced in tandem with Core Dynamics), Courier, Clipper, and Cutter, the Clipper having become a legend in its own right due to its impressive design and superior combat capabilities. They also produce The Empire's line of Majestic-Class Interdictors and the Empire's exclusive short-range fighter, the GU-97.
    • And of course there are the Capital Ships—the Majestic-Class Interdictor for the Empire, and the Farragut-Class Battlecruiser for the Federation - which were among the first ships shown to audiences back when the game was still being crowdfunded via the "Capital Ship Battle" video. These Mile Long behemoths represent the best both factions can give, and both can launch faction-specific short-range fighter craft which are also incredibly cool, the Federation F63 Condors in their Standard Human Spaceship design and the GU-97s in their shininess. There are even plans to make these behemoths available to players!
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: You serve one in the game's combat scenarios.
  • Country Matters: Just try to read the Kunti system description without smirking.
    "Kunti is a rough neighborhood. EDA Kunti League was founded when some tough Kuntis got together with some reckless Kuntis to spread their message: 'Oi Kunti, it's time to harden up!'"
  • Crew of One: The game can be played entirely solo with only one person on your football-field sized ship. You can even use a ship-launched fighter without a second pilot, but your ship is limited to following you around. Multicrew does grant a number of benefits for adding players to your crew; the Helm gets a 25% rebuy discount, two fighters can be deployed at once, and the gunner can scan targets and lock missiles in a 360 degree arc, and each additional player (up to 2) grants additional power distributor pips. Even then, youll be piloting a ship with at most three people on board; with enough space for a large town to sit in.
  • Creator Provincialism: A rather egregious case happens here: Since the game was developed in the UK, all the on-screen text and dialogue is written in British English. The egregious part comes with the part that, according with the backstory of the game, the first superpower, the Federation, is basically the United States in space, but most of their writing used in their colonies is also British. Even more bizarrely, London, the capital of England, was destroyed during World War III. To be fair, there's a mishmash of spoken accents used through the game, including American, British, Russian, Chinese and others. There's also an odd mention about a system populated by Welsh immigrants in the game.
  • Critical Hit Class: Torpedos and Missiles deal massive damage to internals once shields are down, making them particularly effective at killing enemy thrusters.
  • Cut and Paste Environments: Although starfields in the game are accurate to the player's position in the Milky Way, this has led to most regions of space outside of the Galactic Core and most nebulae looking almost exactly the same as each other. Beyond that, the only real differences between systems are the color of their planets and parent stars and how many of each those systems have, and whether or not those planets are ringed. Planetary Landing, introduced in Elite Dangerous: Horizons and improved upon in each update following its release, has gone to some lengths to rectify this.
    • The interiors of most space stations also tended to be identical to each other, though some in more populated systems looked more lavish with an Ascetic Aesthetic-feel to them. Update 1.6/2.2 - which introduced ship-launched fighters - introduced a larger variety of station interiors, alleviating this for the most part.
  • Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Corrosive Shell experimental effect causes the weapon that has it to apply an effect to the target that increases the damage they take by 25% and attacks against the target have an additional 20 armor penetration.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Thargoid Scouts, despite their apparent threat across the galaxy, are utterly pathetic damage wise as even a basic Sidewinder can shrug off most damage in a 1 on 1; however youll be fighting these things in massive groups at once. Not to mention they have a nasty Damage Over Time effect that can whittle your health down, even after combat is done. One scout may be a joke but a swarm is a real problem
    • Also seen with the Thargon Swarm attack of the Interceptors; which is a huge swarm of tiny aliens aimed right at your ship. Each one alone does practically no damage at all, but are shot in a massive pack, from a minimum of 32 up to 98. They'll rip your ship to shreads if you dont have an explosive weapon able to kill them quickly.
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist:
    • Although you can never actually die in Elite Dangerous since a built-in fail-safe Ejection Seat is installed in every ship and will automatically activate when the ship is destroyed, losing your ship can either be this trope or Continuing is Painful. The insurance cost of a ship is around 5% of its total cost, which includes modules and upgrades, so as long as you have sufficient credits when your ship is destroyed, you can purchase a carbon copy of it for a fraction of its original cost; while you will still lose any commodities (except rare commodities), bounty vouchers, exploration data, and contract-specific cargo, and the insurance cost will set you back a bit in terms of your remaining credits, you will get the same ship model, along with the same equipped modules that your original ship had at the time of its destruction, at the last port you docked at. The well-known community mantra "never fly without a rebuy" is this example in principle and meant to invoke this trope.
    • Rare commodities are insured against ship destruction, so if your ship is destroyed while you are carrying Hutton Mugs, the only thing you need to worry about is footing the insurance cost for your ship.
    • If your SRV is destroyed while you are driving it, you are instantly sent back to your ship with no losses beyond whatever exobiological data you're carrying and having to replace the SRV with a new one. This only costs 1000 credits, which can be made back a few times over by completing any contract, making a marginally profitable commodity run, or selling off exploration data obtained from scanning a star system, so even relatively new commanders can afford it. The main headache for losing an SRV is if it happens when you are outside human space and can't quickly get to a station that sells them.
  • Deflector Shields: The three shield types in Elite Dangerous are single-segment Hard Light eggshells encompassing the entire ship and invisible except when the ship's shield generator is booted up or when the shield is hit, with the only major visual difference across the shield types being their colour. Each shield generator is designed to project optimal protection on ships with up to a specific amount of mass; exceeding that, the shield generator will function at a reduced capacity, providing a weaker shield, and in extreme cases, it cannot even generate a shield at all. Rather importantly, an active shield also blocks all damage to modules, as well as providing a cushion against collisions, and serves as a hard counter to Armor Is Useless. All newly-purchased ships come with an E-rated shield generator, but it is not unheard of for traders and miners to dispense with a shield generator entirely to get some extra cargo space or an extra module slot on their ship.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: The Empire has more in common with The Roman Empire than it does with modern nations. From the official site:
    Originally founded by Marlin Duval, who led the colonization of the Achenar system in the mid 23rd century, the Empire is based on a "cliens" system much like ancient Rome.
    Society is strictly stratified, with people being able to move between strata based on money, patronage and influence.
    The Empire values both status and honour very highly indeed. So, whilst it is acceptable to flaunt wealth, treating people well is a question of honour - and this includes slaves. Having an unpaid debt is seen as utterly dishonourable - an honourable Imperial citizen would sell themselves into slavery to clear a debt they couldn't otherwise afford.
    Law is seen and enforced very differently in the Empire. Senators are responsible for enforcing the Emperor's laws, but the Senators themselves are above the law. They can order executions, and can even kill people themselves, though sometimes (rarely) they may be held to account for their actions by the Emperor.
    In the Empire very little is illegal, but many things are frowned upon, like excessive use of narcotics.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Thargoid Interceptors are the meanest foe you can face in the game and not meant to be fought alone; but that hasn't stopped some players from taking them out solo, and in one case, doing it in the massively underequipped Sidewinder.
  • Diegetic Interface: Every part of the game's interface is a holographic projection bar the main menu and system/galaxy maps. Notably, the crosshair and heads-up-display is projected onto the cockpit canopy, meaning that if the canopy shatters, you lose almost all of your HUD and must eyeball shots and when in supercruise must use reflected sunlight to line up on your destination.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • Plasma Accelerators are fixed weapons with a lethargic rate of fire, firing shots that drain lots of energy, generate a lot of heat, and travel very slowly, so hitting agile ships accurately is borderline impossible. However, Plasma Accelerators are the only weapons that do absolute damage, which completely ignores the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors of shield and armour resistances, and the base damage of each shot is extreme. There are not many ships that can survive a few hits from a Plasma Accelerator.
    • Railguns are fixed, charged weapons that are limited to sizes ideal for Small and Medium hardpoints, which limits their damage potential compared to other weapons with greater scalability, and each shot fired generates a lot of heat while drawing a lot of power. The shots, however, travel so fast that they are essentially hitscan, do a high amount of thermal and kinetic damage versus weapons of equal sizes, thus making them effective against both shields and armour, and hit the target with enough force to push it out of its trajectory and overpenetrate it, often seriously damaging even modules located on the opposite side of the target.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Loitering or blocking a landing bay wont just get you a warning or a ticket; your ship will be violently blown up; and prior to being patched if one of your bullets happened to chip a NPC's shields who got in the way or flew behind your wanted target; you'd be shot out of the sky rather quickly. In Elite there are only two responses to felonies and misdemeanors; a fine or death sentence.
  • Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: The Thargoid Interceptors are actually fairly docile when encountered in space; they'll usually just scan your ship and let you move along your merry way, they dont even mind if you rescue the escape pods they're trying to kidnap. Piss them off by shooting them or carrying any Guardian artifacts without some backup, and you'll be dead before you can regret the decision.
  • Drone Deployer:
    • Limpet drones are stored in a ship's cargo hold and are typically programmed to perform tasks, such as collecting free-floating materials, repairing/refuelling ships, breaking the cargo hatch of other ships, or hacking into data points, using a Limpet Controller module. Limpet drones programmed with a Repair Limpet Controller also serve double duty as the only way for the ship launching it to repair its own hull integrity in space.
    • Horizons introduced the Fighter Hangar module, allowing compatible ships to store smaller, tele-operated ships, known as ship-launched fighters (SLFs). A single Fighter Hangar module contains all the necessary equipment to service an SLF, as well as the resources to rebuild the SLF a limited number of times if it is destroyed; higher-class Fighter Hangars allow the ship to carry, service, and rebuild 2 separate SLFs. In solo play, if the player has hired NPC crew members, they can be deployed in SLFs and ordered to attack other ships or defend the mothership as needed. The multicrew experience is similar to solo play, except that the SLFs may be controlled by actual players.
  • Drugs Are Bad: The In-Universe opinion of multiple system governments; if you are carrying any as cargo in a system where they are prohibited and get scanned by the authorities you will incur a fine.
  • Dynamic Loading: The dimension that ships pass through when travelling between stars using their Frame Shift Drive, known by the wider community as "witchspace", is used to cover up dynamic loading. As a result, the amount of time a player spends in witchspace varies depending on a host of factors, such as the player's computer specifications, network speeds, and the status of Frontier's servers.
  • Easy Logistics: Zig Zagging; while there are one-touch buttons to immediately and instantly refuel, rearm, and repair a ship at the starport services menu, there is an "Advanced Maintenance" sub-menu, which has additional options to repaint the ship's livery, perform ship integrity repairsnote , and restock limpets. The Supercruise Assist and docking computer modules invoke this trope by controlling the speed and orientation (and, in the case of the docking computers, pips and landing gear) of the ship while it is travelling in supercruise or landing/departing a station or spaceport; the latter extends to remote planetary landings in Odyssey. Finally, the player has the option to enable a "pre-flight checklist" on their ship details panel, which adds a small control test sequence that the player needs to complete whenever they launch their ship.
  • Elite Tweak: Ships will be improved reasonably well by just purchasing the right mix of modules depending on the role you want for your ship, but in order to truly boost performance players will need to seek out Engineers, who can (after you unlock them by meeting their requirements) customize your modules for various effects that can greatly enhance performance, using materials provided by the player of course.
  • Ejection Seat: Ships supposedly have ejection seats based on what Betty says when you explode and the design of the command seat, but it is never seen in operation and it's never explained how a explorer can go from Beagle Point on the opposite side of the galaxy to Sol when they blow up.
  • Enemy Scan: There are scanners that can be used to determine what cargo other players or NPCs are carrying, and if there are any kill warrants on them.
  • Energy Weapon:
    • In all kinds and sizes: Pulse Lasers, Burst Lasers, Beam Lasers, Point-Defense Lasers...
    • The laser weapons in Dangerous instantly connect in the distance, and are 100% effective through their range (they stop working after max range due to thermal blooming).
  • The Empire: The Duval Empire returns in Dangerous, facing a succession crisis as the Emperor has fathered an illegitimate child in Arissa Lavigny-Duval, with his plans to marry his daughter's mother, Florence, being put on hold due to Aisling Duval's (his grand-daughter) objections.
  • Enhance Button: The Full Spectrum System Scanner works this way. Once you lock on to a planet, you can just keep zooming in until you have a clear picture no matter how far away in the system it is.
  • An Entrepreneur Is You: Your ability to earn credits in Elite Dangerous ties in directly to your success and progression in the game, regardless of whether you decide to be an Asteroid Miner, Space Pirate, or anything else in between. When you are just starting out and the only ship you have is the Sidewinder, you are mostly limited to bounty hunting, completing courier contracts, or trading commodities; the proceeds from these activities will provide the funds you need to buy a more expensive ship that (typically) is more capable at certain roles, as well as open up more credits-earning opportunities, such as selling the scan data of systems and planets or earning a passive income from furthering the causes of powerful individuals in the galaxy. Reaching Elite in any role requires earning enough credits from selling combat bonds, commodities, or scan data, at which point you gain access to a system with a station that perpetually has every ship and module available for purchase at a discount. Assuming you have the necessary resources and funds, you can even purchase and maintain your own fleet carrier, which can be used to ferry other commanders across large swathes of the galaxy and provide a variety of for-profit services typically seen only at space stations, outposts, and planetary bases.
  • Ethereal Choir: One appears in the main theme of the game and starts to scream when you're in the vicinity of a Capital Ship, whether in combat or just looking around.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Both The Federation and The Empire are willing to do some pretty questionable things, but there are lines that they won't cross.
    • The Federation comes down hard on any attempts to secede, unless the system in question follows the proper regulations and procedures. Then they just make a lot of noise about how unfortunate it all is. They also take issue with their member worlds heavily damaging alien ecosystems, especially if said ecosystem includes a sapiant species.
    • The Empire makes extensive use of slaves, but the institution is more like Indentured Servitude than what people today think of slavery. It is considered a matter of honor that Imperial slaves are treated humanely, and as far as the Empire is concerned unregulated Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil. Some of the more affluent Imperial citizens will even fund missions to "liberate" unregulated slaves and bring them to Imperial worlds on the principle that in the Empire they will at least be treated fairly.
    • Averted with the Kumo Crew; they will go to any lengths whatsoever and really don't seem to have any standards whatsoever and are the only power to not oppose non-imperial slavery.
  • Exact Time to Failure: Your ship's Life Support module activates its emergency oxygen supply if the power plant is not providing power to it, or if the canopy is breached, which also causes a timer to appear on the HUD, indicating how long its oxygen supply will last. If the timer counts down to zero, your ship spontaneously explodes. The timer can be reset by synthesising supplies for the Life Support module, and will stop counting down if the ship enters a space station or is moved into the hangar of an outpost or surface port, thus downplaying this trope.
  • Expansion Pack: These are typically released in a "season" of updates lasting several months, which add new features to the game. While these are typically free, some require purchase.
    • Horizons was initially released as a paid expansion, but was eventually turned into a free add-on. It added planetary landings, an Elemental Crafting system, "Engineer" NPCs that can perform Elite Tweaks on ship modules, the Holo-Me Character Customization feature, the Multicrew system, which allows up to three players/NPCs to travel the universe in a single ship, and the introduction of alien species.
    • Beyond is a free expansion that also included changes to players who owned the Horizon expansion, revolving largely around under-the-hood stability fixes, but also added several new ships, introduced a system for players to form groups, called "Squadrons", and made changes to gameplay mechanics related to mining and exploration.
    • Odyssey is the game's latest paid expansion, introducing ground combat mechanics in the vein of a First-Person Shooter, and introducing several new species of alient plant life that can be found on landable planets, and boosting the game's overall level of detail.
  • Explosive Overclocking: Supercharging the FSD, which can be accomplished by supercruising into the jet stream of a white dwarf or neutron star with a Fuel Scoop equipped, increases your ship's jump range by 50% or 300% respectively for one jump, but also causes it to take gradual hull and module damage due to the extreme gravitational forces present. Dropping out of supercruise while inside the jet stream usually results in the destruction of the ship, especially if it is smaller, due to the sheer power output and gravitational pull of the stream causing modules to overload and malfunction faster.
  • Expy: The Federal Corvette has a very similar profile to that of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Parodied in the opening to this video.
  • Fantastic Drug: Onionhead, which was grown on the planet Panem in Kappa Fornacis until The Federation bombed it into oblivion, to some serious In-Universe controversy; though another strain called Lucan Onionhead is farmed on Luca in the Tanmark system. Both variants are highly potent narcotics and both are illegal in The Federation... once again, to some serious In-Universe controversy. As of March 2015, players have no idea what Onionhead actually does.
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: Via Hyperspace for Intersystem travel, and Supercruise for Intrasystem travel, via the Frame-Shift Drive.
  • Featureless Protagonist: Before Horizons update 2.3 was released players could only change their Commanders' Purely Aesthetic Gender. Everything else was obscured behind a black Remlok Latex Spacesuit with face-obscuring visors over their heads.
  • The Federation: Makes a return in the game, facing political turmoil and serious controversy under President Halsey and her successor, President Zachary Hudson.
  • Felony Misdemeanor: One of the regular Public-Service Announcements in Space Stations is "Loitering is a crime, punishable by death. Please ensure you have authorization before entering the bay." And they do enforce that, violently: if you enter the station without docking clearance, if you block a landing pad other than the one you're assigned to, or if you fail to leave in a timely fashion after taking off, you'll be targeted and destroyed by about 25 high-power, 100% accurate lasers. This is almost guaranteed to happen to you the first time you play the game and get confused about how landing works.
  • Feudal Future: There are systems in the game that follow patronage or feudal government styles, and are universally the poorest in the game.
  • Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Fixed weapons have the highest DPS of all weapons with no inherent inaccuracy, but only have enough aiming freedom to maybe converge on a target. Railguns and Plasma Accelerators, the two most powerful weapons in the game, can only be had on fixed mounts.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: An interview with Lord Braben at Gamescom 2016 got briefly interrupted by static images which included a desolate battlefield with an actual alien spaceship. It also included an ARG that led players to the crash site of an abandoned alien spacecraft.
  • From Bad to Worse: The firing of Salvation's system scale Proteus Wave device resulted in this when the device backfired, resulting in the Thargoid ships not only powering back up, but abruptly able to remotely damage any nearby Guardian tech. Which, as it happens, includes most anti-xeno combat weapons and equipment. The Thargoids close to the system went absolutely berserk, attacking human craft on sight, a doctrine which seems to be creeping out from HIP 22460. And then the Empire opted to withdraw from the mutual defense agreement with the other superpowers. And now a mobile star with Thargoid-esque streamers has shown up, making a beeline for something.
  • Gaiden Game: Elite Dangerous: Arena, a Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch/Capture The Flag PvP game spun off from what was formerly known as CQC Championship mode. Features the smallest craft in the game (including the Condor and Imperial Fighter, both of which are NPC ships planned to be made flyable in the main game) duking it out in and around asteroid thickets and stations which provide more cover and ambush opportunities than typically available in the base game. Free and accessible in the main menu for all Elite Dangerous owners, much cheaper than the base game for those who want a sample of the game's space combat or would prefer an X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter style experience to a Wide-Open Sandbox.
  • Game-Breaking Bug:
    • The "buffed" AI in update 2.1 was buffed to the point of absurdity through some shoddy coding and misplaced numbers. Players were reporting AI enemies with Plasma Accelerators firing faster than multicannons, explorers were reporting being chased hundreds of lightyears in their max jump range explorer craft by Eagles, and AI ships were hyper-aggressive attacking players and each other with little rhythm or reason. The problem was so widespread that, following the hotfix for this a week later, players who had lost their ships to the AI had their ship insurance costs reimbursed.
    • The mining changes in Beyond Chapter 4 added a new mechanic: Sub-surface deposits that required a specific tool to retrieve. The problem? Said tool is borderline non-functional and rarely works as intended and will cause the audio to bug out and loop a sound effect endlessly, making these deposits practically unobtainable.
    • The initial release of Odyssey was riddled with bugs and plagued by poor optimisation, making the game borderline unplayable for many players. This only cemented the wider community's perception that Odyssey was released in an unfinished state due to its extremely tight release schedule.
  • Gameplay Grading: Players are graded according to their proficiency and money earned in one of four (or six with the Odyssey expansion) fields: Trading, Combat, Exploration, CQC, Mercenary work, and Exobiology. Reaching Elite any one of these fields is considered an end goal for most players, and with Odyssey players get five tiers of Elite ranking (from Elite I to Elite V) as a form of prestige ranking.
    • Combat Ranking is graded according to Elite's classic rating system: Harmless, Mostly Harmless, Novice, Competent, Expert, Master, Dangerous, Deadly, and Elite.
    • Exploration Ranking is graded as follows: Aimless, Mostly Aimless, Scout, Surveyor, Trailblazer, Pathfinder, Ranger, Pioneer, and Elite.
    • Trade Ranking is graded as follows: Penniless, Mostly Penniless, Peddler, Dealer, Merchant, Broker, Entrepreneur, Tycoon, and Elite.
    • CQC Ranking is graded as follows: Helpless, Mostly Helpless, Amateur, Semi-Professional, Professional, Hero, Champion, Legend, and Elite.
    • Mercenary Ranking requires the Odyssey expansion and is graded as follows: Defenceless, Mostly Defenceless, Rookie, Soldier, Gunslinger, Warrior, Gladiator, Deadeye, and Elite.
    • Exobiologist Ranking requires the Odyssey expansion and is graded as follows: Directionless, Mostly Directionless, Compiler, Collector, Cataloguer, Taxonomist, Ecologist, Geneticist, and Elite.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Subverted in that, while the actions of a single player has almost no effect on the game's background simulation, the collective effort of the player community can result in shifts to the simulation.
    • Averted with Kahina Tijani Loren aka. CMDR Salomé, who was a prominent figure in Imperial politics. Her in-game ship was controlled by author Drew Wagar, who used events revolving around her as reference material for a novel of the game. Wagar novelised the destruction of her ship by CMDR Harry Potter as her actually dying with her ship, thus creating one of the rare instances where the actions of a single real-life player over the course of actual gameplay directly resulted in an in-universe notable person being Killed Off for Real.
  • Gang Up on the Human:
    • Open fire on a wanted NPC ship that is being engaged by a dozen System Authority Anacondas and it is guaranteed to stop firing at its current target, turn around and start shooting at you. Initially, they would also never change targets once the player shot at them, though now they will usually go back to fighting their previous targets if the player runs away or doesn't present a significant enough threat. In Conflict Zones, enemies entering the zone will automatically target the player if they are in range, and will only break off if another ship shoots at them.
    • If you make the horrible mistake of taking a large portion of supply run missions at once (which would make sense at first) then you'll soon realize that almost every one spawns at least one pirate to chase you. This often results in being chased by several pirates all at once. In some cases, if you get out of their interdiction, you can be instantly interdicted again and again before the first pirate starts interdicting again, result in an endless loop of inevitable death. A similar (but far less obnoxious) situation can occur with illegal runs and the authority ships.
  • Gatling Good: Small, medium, and large Multicannons all take the form of a rotary gatling gun. Huge Multicannons retain the multiple barrels but drop the rotary motion, instead looking like linked autocannons.
  • Generation Ships: There are apparently several out there, and so far, five have been discovered within 100 light years of Sol.
  • Generican Empire: The three superpowers are known simply as the Federation, the Empire, and the Alliance.
  • Ghost Ship: There are many derelict Generation Ships floating in the void for players to find. Interacting with them will often play a series of audio logs detailing the downfall of the ship, from mechanical breakdowns to internal disputes among the crew, to Space Madness, or even disease outbreaks.
    • One of the spookiest is the Thetis, found drifting in the Nefertem system. The logs from the comm officer speak of a strange signal the ship picked up from an uninhabited planet they passed by, which caused anyone who heard it to go violently insane and murder their crewmates. Then the officer admits she listened to it too. The final log is apparently the message itself, a mix of static and a whispered voice saying "kill them all".
  • Glass Cannon: Ship-Launched Fighters can put down as much as damage as a Huge Class 4 hardpoint, but will explode with a slight sneeze. Good thing that they are tele-operated. The Eagle in particular embodies this trope; with god-awful shielding and armor but potent mobility and damage output.
  • Global Currency: All factions accept credits.
  • Gravity Sucks: Averted. Black Holes work just like ordinary stars in terms of navigational hazards, only more black and with gravitational lensing around them. Also, gravity from nearby celestial bodies will negatively affect your speed while in supercruise, but will not pull you towards them if you slow down or stop nearby.
  • Guide Dang It!: The learning curve of this game is rather...cliff-like, with the in-game tutorial not being very helpful beyond telling you what you can do in the game.
  • Happiness in Slavery: The Empire is very adamant that Imperial Slaves are treated with dignity and honor, because being an Imperial Slave generally means you had the honor to sell yourself into it to make ends meet. Somewhat justified in that Imperial slavery is more like Indentured Servitude. They even go so far as to openly criticize those who specialize in trafficking of "unregulated" slaves, and some Imperial Stations offer rewards to players who bring such slaves in to port to become Imperial Slaves.
  • Healing Shiv: Lasers with the Concordant Sequence engineer upgrade will damage enemies, and restore ally shields.
  • Hell Is That Noise: Thargoid vessels make sounds that are like something between a low inhuman growl and the creaking of an enormous metal structure. Horrible noises can also be heard while jumping through hyperspace and while alone in supercruise. Guardian surface sites also make rather concerning noises while in the vicinity.
    • There's also the somewhat subtle sound of impending doom that is the sound of your canopy fracturing. Whilst you generally have at least a few minutes to find somewhere to repair (unless you're in the middle of absolute nowhere, in which case you better hope you have the best life support money can buy and enough materials for emergency resupply synthesis) there are still few noises anywhere near as distressing.
  • Hitscan: All laser weapons are, as you'd expect, instant-impact beams with no travel time, though they do have a 3-4 kilometer long Arbitrary Weapon Range. Railguns are also functionally hitscan, being hypervelocity projectiles that appear to be beams from the perspective of any onlookers.
  • Holographic Terminal: The control panels in ships are holographic in nature, with radar, stats, communication, targeting, etc. all done in holograms or reflected on the ship canopy. When the power goes out they all disappear leaving you in the dark, both literally and figuratively. You can lose some information if the canopy blows out, as well.
  • Honor Before Reason: A lot of what makes up The Empire's modus operandi. Imperial Citizens obsess over honor, to the point where it's considered honorable to sell yourself into slavery to clear a debt rather than default on it.
  • Hufflepuff House: While the Alliance controls a large amount of systems, they are the least fleshed out in terms of gameplay. There is no Alliance ranking and only one aligned Power, whereas the Federation get two, Empire get four, and Independents get three.
    • Ironically the community ended up inverting the trope somewhat; The Alliance is the most popular power and most influential in the game, likely due to its powers not being split out at all. While they have no power exclusive ships they do have 3 ships specifically designed for them (or four, if you count the Type 10)
  • Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: You can't judge speed or direction in Hyperspace, you pass unidentifiable cloud structures and points of light in it, and you can hear all sorts of freaky sounds in it, possibly coming from the Thargoids.
  • Interface Screw: Damage to the canopy will mess with your HUD, making it harder to target enemies or objects. A larger concern would be the oxygen that is now rapidly leaking out of your ship.
  • Intrepid Merchant: The Trade ranking system (Penniless, Mostly Penniless, etc.) measures how much of one a player is.
  • I Surrender, Suckers: Various circumstances can lead to enemy ships attempting an interdiction on the player. When this happens, there are a few outcomes - One is where the player succeeds at evading the interdiction and goes on their merry way. Another is when the player fails to evade the interdiction and both they and the opposing vessel fall into the same space. A third option is this trope; The player submits to the interdiction, which while not seeming too smart, actually leaves them in a position to get their hard points up, fly around, and light up the incoming vessel when they drop into the players space, if they are sufficiently well armed. If not, they can evade until their frame shift comes up ( submitting results in a much shorter frame-shift cooldown than if they had failed to evade ) and then warp out, leaving their opposition behind.
  • Item Crafting: Horizons adds item crafting using small quantities of materials found on planets. The player can craft munitions, SRV fuel and repairs, and a one-shot range booster for the FSD. Horizons also adds the Engineers, which can turn a variety of data, materials, and commodities into module modifications such as adding incendiary bullets to multicannons or speeding up the FSD spool up time.
  • Jack of All Stats:
    • The Cobra MKIII isn't the best ship in any one particular archetype, but its balanced stats make it the premier early game ship. It's the fastest ship in the game, carries the same firepower as the combat-oriented Viper MKIII while pitching and rolling almost as quickly, carries enough cargo to smuggle and trade rare goods, and has enough interior slots to kit it out for exploration. Its only real downside is the abysmal small weapon mounts on the wingtips, which all but require gimbals to hit a target.
    • The Asp Explorer qualifies as well. While it does one thing really well (exploration, due to its excellent jump distance) it can handle any role at least fairly well, making a solid combat ship due to its well placed two medium and four small weapon mounts and middling maneuverability, a decent trader with up to over 100 tons of potential cargo space (And does amazingly with rares, due to its large jump distance), a fair miner, and a surprisingly good pirate ship due to aforementioned weaponry mounts and cargo space, all wrapped up in a midlevel price tag.
    • The Anaconda was the largest ship from the initial launch, however it's still very popular because of how much you can do with it. It can carry enormous amounts of cargo while remaining well armed and armored, it rivals the Asp Explorer in jump range, it can carry fighters, be modified as a small battleship, carry a ton of passengers or even be setup for some space mining. Engineering upgrades can essentially make this ship anything you want it to be, except nimble.
    • The Python is the Anaconda's smaller cousin. At approximately 288 feet long, it is still one of the larger ships in the game, and is usable in any role. It has tons of space for cargo storage, or exploration based modules. It can reach good speeds, is nimble enough that smaller craft have trouble outmaneuvering it, and can carry enough defences and firepower to be a serious threat to large ships like the Anaconda, Federal Corvette, and Imperial Cutter if not dealt with quickly. It's also the largest ship that can use a Medium landing pad, meaning it can dock at smaller orbital platforms.
  • Joke Character: The Orca and its sister, the Beluga. They both have rather poor jump ranges, hardpoints equal to ships half their size, mediocre shields and armor and a price tag that puts it alongside the Jack of All Stats Python and the bounty hunting Fer-de-Lance. Their few saving graces are decent speeds for their size, their looks, being capable of fielding ship-launched fighters, and being really good at transporting passengers in absolute luxury. But even then the smaller Dolphin can also fly luxury passengers, while having a decent jump range and a reasonable price tag. The Asp scout really takes the cake here though. Everything it does a ship a fraction of its price can do miles better and excels in no departments but mobility (which the eagle; the second cheapest ship in the game, does better). Even the game's own wiki has practically forgotten the ship exists with a still vastly incomplete section more than a year after its release.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Downplayed; the high effectiveness and widespread availability of kinetic weapons is the reason why most gameplay loops typically include equipping a Deflector Shield, which can absorb high amounts of damage from kinetic weapons and reduce damage sustained from collisions with other objects.
  • Latex Spacesuit: All commanders start out with a black form-fitting Remlock spacesuit, complete with helmet. The Horizons and Odyssey expansions allow the player to recolour the suit or add additional layers of fancy clothing on top of the suit respectively.
  • The Law Firm of Pun, Pun, and Wordplay: Like its predecessor, the manual opens with a letter from Sue, Cripple & Sneer.
  • Lead the Target: Required if you are using fixed kinetic weapons. Gimballed weapons do this automatically for you as well.
  • Leave No Witnesses: Seems to be standard operating procedure for the Aegis organization. Before increased Thargoid activity became impossible to hide, any civilian ship or listening post that discovered evidence of Thargoids was given the "no survivors" treatment by Aegis ships.
  • Lethal Joke Character: The Orca. It doesn’t boast the obscene carrying capacity of the Beluga, still requires a large pad, and boasts a less-than-stellar armament. However, for a ship of its size, the Orca is deceptively fast, leading a good few players to use it for high-speed ramming attacks while unloading into an unwary target’s hull with high-damage weapons.
    • The Type-9 Heavy is typically only ever used to haul cargo. However, due to its absolutely massive class 8 internal slots, it can fit one of the largest shields possible, and have room for shield cell banks with an obscene amount of hull reinforcements AND a Fighter Bay. Properly armed, the Heavy is a nightmare to kill.
    • Also, there’s the Sidewinder itself. Most are eager to be rid of it, but in the right hands, it is capable of going toe to toe with nearly any foe in the game. It has killed Anacondas, Corvettes, Cutters, and now with the small guardian weaponry released, there are videos of Sidewinders killing Thargoids. Alone.
  • Level Scaling: The pirate and bounty hunter Random Encounters are level and ship dependent; fly around in a Sidewinder, and they'll be in Adders and Eagles. Fly around in a Anaconda, and they'll be Clippers and Dropships. Higher Combat rank will make them more effective and carry more potent loadouts. Averted with the supply run missions, which generally throw this rule out the window.
  • Lightning Bruiser: The Federal Assault Ship is extremely durable, agile, and packs a punch with twin Large and twin Medium hardpoints. It pays for this with an abysmal jump range and widely spaced hardpoints that making hitting targets with both large weapons difficult.
  • Lonely Piano Piece: While cruising around on planetary surfaces in your SRV, one will occasionally fade in and out.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Li Yong-Rui's faction specific reward, the Pack Hound missile rack.
  • Microtransactions: Pilot's Federation rank and community goal decals aside, this is the only way to get paint jobs for the various Cool Starships in the game.
  • Made of Explodium: Ships explode when their hulls fail, they also explode when their powerplant is destroyed and most inexplicably, when the oxygen timer hits 0, even if the ship was totally undamaged, it will still explode.
  • Magnetic Weapons: The Railguns are a class of weapons that inflicts both Thermal and Kinetic damage at the same time. Its rounds are extremely quick and more powerful against armor than pure thermal weapons, however it has a tendency to draw a bit more power than a ship's reactor outputs if not properly managed. They are also only available with fixed mounts, so you have to line up your shot without any kind of tracking assistance.
  • Master of None: It is a popular running joke in the community that nobody knows exactly what the Asp Scout is designed to do, and for good reason—while it is marketed as a mid-priced multirole ship and cheaper version of the Asp Explorer, comparing any aspect of it with other ships makes its failings obvious. Its weapons, utility mounts, and internal compartments are comparable to the Cobra, which is smaller and just as manoeuvrable but faster, its maximum cargo capacity is lower than even the combat-oriented Keelback, its jump range is similar to a Diamondback Scout, but worse than even the Adder's, and with a base cost of around 4 million credits, it is considerably more expensive than any other ship that boasts similar specifications or is built for a specific purpose and sold within the same price range, including all of the other ships previously mentioned in this example, while at the same time, its lower cost compared to the Asp Explorer is insignificant due to the way a player's income and expenditure scales up as they progress deeper into the game and since it can be largely offset by discounts at specific stations, outposts, and bases, effectively rendering its marketed purpose moot.
  • MegaCorp: There are several in the game, though players will mostly be familiar with the ones that deal in making ships, such as Zorgon Peterson, Lakon Spaceways, Saud Kruger, Core Dynamics, Gutamaya, or Faulcon deLacy, Remlok (who makes the spacesuits used by players), and the Sirius Corporation, one of the Powerplay factions, headed by Li-Rong Yui.
  • Microtransactions: The in-game currency, Arx, can be obtained in small amounts from performing actions in the game (exploring, trading, completing missions, etc.) and is sometimes given out for free when logging in during holiday events, but can also be purchased with real-world money. It's only used for cosmetic enhancements like ship paintjobs and player character appearance customizations.
  • Mighty Glacier: The Federal Gunship has some of the worst maneuverability, speed, and FSD range among non-trade ships, but carries a whopping seven hardpoints, is fighter bay capable, and has more hull hitpoints than all other combat ships bar the far larger Anaconda and Federal Corvette. It also carries the most military slots, allowing it to stack Hull Reinforcement and Module Reinforcement packages. Then there's the Type-10; which has the worst mobility in the game at ZERO, along with the Type-9 it was based on; however it has the highest hull health and damage output in the game, just a shame getting a spot where all the hardpoints can hit is tricky as it is; made nigh-impossible with the sluggish pitch and yaw speed.
  • Mile-Long Ship: The Farragut-class Battlecruiser is 2 kilometers long, and the Majestic-class Interdictor isn't much shorter. Some stations like Jacques Station and Newholm Station mount hyperspace drives, technically making them 4 kilometer wide spaceships. Among player-flyable ships, the Beluga Liner (the largest player-owned ship at this time, surpassing even the Federal Corvette) is only 200 meters long.
  • Military Alphabet: Flight controllers use the ship make, followed by the NATO variant of the first three letters of a commander's name, ship's name, or ship's ID (player's choice) to greet them when welcoming them to a station.
  • Money Grinding: Trading is mindbogglingly dull but is the only viable way to purchase the large craft, i.e. the Anaconda in Dangerous at a whopping 142 million credits.
  • More Dakka: Multicannons, which run the gamut from small 2-ton Gatling Good guns to massive reciprocating autocannons. CMDR Rinzler o7o7o7's recommended loadout for the Federal Gunship takes it to its logical conclusion:
    The Git Gud Guide to the Gunship: Here is what you do to dish out maximum amounts of pain: You buy a large multicannon, a medium multicannon, a medium multicannon, a medium multicannon, a medium multicannon, a small multicannon, and a small multicannon. Believe me, firing 7 multicannons at once pushes the legal limit of fun that civilians are allowed to have.
  • Mugging the Monster: Happens to both NPC and player commanders alike, typically by picking a fight with something that far outclasses or is wildly more skilled than themselves. Especially common in regards to bounty hunters - bounties usually earned through assault and murder. Many commanders tend to view them as a nuisance.
  • Mundane Utility: The Anaconda, one of the few ships in the game which can be considered a frigate or cruiser-class ship, capable of fitting a class 4 gun, and will get the ability to launch 2 smaller ships as part of the Horizons expansion... sees just as much use as a bulk hauler or exploration craft as it does as a combat ship, arguably more given that it is very difficult to bring an Anaconda's firepower to bear on anything but a ship of its own size or larger. Justified by the Anaconda being a freighter in the original Elite, though the maximum upgraded jump range of 35 light-years (for context, that's almost five times what a stock Sidewinder can do and is only matched by the Hauler and dedicated exploring ships) is a new feature.
    • And thanks to the Engineers, it's now possible to get an Anaconda with a jump rage exceeding 55ly, making it the ship with the biggest jump range in the game.
  • Multi-Track Drifting: The Federal line of whateverships (Dropship, Assault ship, Gunship) boast massive thrusters and very rapid turning rates — but only when using flight assist off, where their absurdly heavy hulls causes them to drift. As such, standard combat policy in these ships is to pull FA-off strafing runs, sliding through space sideways at max speed.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Several of the generated pirates will have these, but its purely random if it matches the threat level.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: The release trailer depicts people walking up to their ship (not in the game at all at release, and later only in an Expansion Pack), and depicts action that is significantly more dense and fast paced than the actual gameplay though nothing explicitly wrong aside from a Cobra firing Robo Teching missiles backwards. The CQC Arena Downloadable Content that came out two years later matches the original trailer's pacing but not its scale.
    • The commander chronicles videos serve as trailers, specifically so for Beyond Chapter two and showed pilots walking around admiring the new ship. With the lack of space legs it comes off as a bit of a tease.
  • N.G.O. Superpower: The collapse of all national governments during World War III, except the capitalist-oriented United States, coincided with the increasing power and wealth of corporations and the discovery of habitable exoplanets, resulting in corporations taking the lead in humanity's development of interstellar travel, with the Generation Ships, built to travel to the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, being funded almost entirely by corporations. This also forms the basis of several contemporary companies with considerable influence and renown throughout the galaxy, such as:
    • The Pilots Federation. Despite not having much system influence in the Milky Way, they are the employer of virtually all human pilots, including those who are loyal to the Federation, Empire, and Alliance, and have a monopoly over in-universe news in the form of Galnet, which is a standard amenity on nearly all human stations and outposts in the galaxy and acccessible to pilots via the console of their ship regardless of manufacturer. The creation of the Pilots' Federation District only came about because the Federation, Empire, and Alliance all agreed to it which, considering the animosity between these three powers, is a rare feat in itself and hints at the clout and resources the Pilots Federation has at its disposal.
    • The Sirius Corporation. Named after the system that it settled, Sirius Corporation made its mark on human history as being the first corporation to fully colonise an entire star system without the aid of an interstellar power, and which it still retains full control of over 900 years later, right up to the present day. Although it is not the largest mega-corporation, it is the wealthiest, as well as the most influential. This is also the mega-corporation that manufactures the Frame Shift Drive, the ubiquitous ship module that allows for Faster-Than-Light Travel on all human ships, and also manufactures power generators and hydrogen fuel used by most factions. The Sirius Corporation uses its essentially bottomless coffers to buy over entire star systems and pioneer advances in space exploration and colonisation, as well as build and fund its own private navy, while it uses its clout to push for ownership of initiatives originally proposed by other corporations, such as the Galactic Summit, and act as a mediator between warring interstellar powers.
    • Universal Cartographics. This mega-corporation creates and maintains the systems that power and record star system data, which are built into every single contemporary human ship, and strives to map as much of the visible universe as possible, subject to the technological restrictions of Faster-Than-Light Travel. Universal Cartographics has contacts posted on nearly every station and outpost, as well as some fleet carriers, and provides credit rewards to commanders who turn over exploration data to them while also providing comprehensive system maps to any commander at almost no cost.
  • Night-Vision Goggles: More of a terrain brightener than actual night vision. Can be enabled on your ship with the push of a button. And considering how dark space is, its bound to come in useful.
  • Noob Cave: The Pilots' Federation District is a special cluster of star systems located within the Core Sector that is accessible only to new players who begin their game in the Dromi system with the starting Sidewinder. Within the District, PvP combat is strongly discouraged, and the only Space Pirates moving about are the Raven Corsairs, a faction of Privateers sanctioned by the Pilots' Federation to provide Training from Hell to players aspiring to make a living from earning combat bounties.
  • No-Harm Requirement: Odyssey missions that don't involve killing can have the Nonviolent tag which requires the player to get to the target settlement, do the mission, and get out without killing any of the facility personnel. Similarly, on-foot Takedown and Assassination missions can have the Clean tag which means that the player is only allowed to kill the target.
  • No Warping Zone: When inside a station or celestial object's gravity well, your ship is considered "mass locked" and you will be unable to engage your frame shift drive until you exit the gravity well. This can be invoked on other ships using an FSD interdictor, which is often used for pirate ambushes. Big ships cause a type of Maybe Warping Zone on other ships by slowing down their drive charge; the larger the difference in ship masses, the greater the disruption factor (and thus, charge time). This makes it easier to escape from ultralight fighters like the Eagle, and gives heavier vessels some use in piracy or bounty hunting.
  • Not the Intended Use: Quite a few ships are surprisingly effective in ways that they clearly were not designed for, in large part due to how much the game favours specialization, as well as how certain modules and engineering can compensate for baked-in weaknesses.
    • The Sidewinder is the most basic ship in the game, with mediocre stats in every area save maneuverability, but you'll often see high level players running around in one. This is because it's so cheap that you can just let another player or NPC kill you and clear your bounties without any waiting or risk (this was later removed because it was so widely abused, however). Its also used for dangerous runs to areas where you won't be expecting to fight back.
    • The Hauler is a pretty well-known example; considering the name you'd expect it to be designed for cargo runs, but its capacity is awful and with just a few extra credits you can near double everything with the Adder. However, the Hauler is a fantastic exploration vessel able to reach great speeds and jump range very cheaply which means super cheap rebuy costs. It was also a good alt to the sidewinder as a sacrificial lamb for clearing bounties.
    • This also occurs with Saud Kruger ships. Every one of their ships is specially designated as passenger carriers/liners and for most part designed accordingly, with relatively few hardpoints and weak armour paired with the ability to carry luxury passenger cabins. However, they are also great at a range of non-combat activities other than passenger running like trading, smuggling, exploration, and mining, as their respectable jump ranges and sizeable compartments lend them well to other purposes. If one is willing to completely throw common sense out of the window, it is possible to exploit their considerable hull mass to turn them into lightning fast rammers.
    • Despite being claimed as a trader with bad combat ability, the Type-9 Heavy can be a fairly effective tank, capable of soaking up tons of damage thanks to its massive compartment size and thick armour. While it is somewhat lacking in outright firepower when compared to similarly sized ships, it can compensate by mounting a flight hangar for launching fighters In well-populated systems, the authority will show up long before any kind of damage can actually be done; otherwise, it's entirely possible for it to fight off adversaries simply by outlasting them. Ironically because it's so much more expensive, the Type 10 combat variant can often be worse at this as it has similar downsides, but costs much more and has one less class 8 internal slot. It also attracts much stronger hostile ships due to how NPC pirates are generated in-game.
  • Noob Bridge:
    • Although these are covered in the game's tutorials, understanding pip management, and reducing ship speed to the blue indicated region for maximum turning ability, are virtually requirements in being able to perform effectively in ship-to-ship combat; against other players, learning to control the ship while Flight Assist is turned off is also a must.
    • Equipping a Fuel Scoop and getting used to refuelling from orbiting main sequence stars, rather than refuelling at the nearest starport, is essential if you intend to expore the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
    • Hunting Thargoids requires equipping Anti-Xeno modules to counter the shutdown fields, neutralise Thargon Swarm attacks, and do substantial damage to their ships. Taking conventional weaponry to fight against Thargoids is a very effective way of getting to the rebuy screen quickly.
    • Nav Beacons provide two examples:
      • The target location of a Nav Beacon is not the same as targeting the actual beacon itself; once you enter the vicinity of a Nav Beacon, you still need to manually target the beacon using your targeting control, or selecting it from the Contacts tab, in order to download information from it.
      • The vicinity of a standard Nav Beacon will often be peppered with clean, docile ships moving around and jumping into supercruise without paying attention to you; even if a Wanted ship were to be present, their prolonged presence near the beacon will alert System Authority Vessels to drop into the area and deliver a swift and lethal response. At a Compromised Nav Beacon, however, most of the ships moving around will be Wanted and likely to fire on your ship, and no System Authority Vessels will ever appear to deal with them even if you have "Report Crimes Against Me" enabled. This makes understanding the difference between a regular Nav Beacon and a compromised one very important, since the former serves as a place of respite, while the latter is more or less a deathtrap for unprepared players.
    • Beyond blind luck, any form of smuggling will generally require you to know how to manage your ship's heat signature and, ideally, keep it below 15% so that your ship cannot be targeted and scanned by other ships moving around stations or landing pads of planetary ports and looking for contraband, such as System Authority Vessels. Because most ships run above 15% heat under normal conditions, even when idle, a mixture of methods, such as disabling non-essential modules, temporary use of Silent Running, equipping a lower-Class Shield Generator, speeding through the access corridor at near-flank speed, and deploying a Heat Sink in the event of a ship scan, is often necessary to achieve this.
  • Numbered Homeworld: Generic alphanumeric names make up the vast majority of all star systems and planet names. While many inhabited systems are given an actual name with names for each planet, a huge portion are still using randomly generated star designations or astronomical catalogue numbers, such as the starting system, LHS 3447.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Invoked by NPC pirates when they realize the miner they've targeted is really a bounty hunter.
    • Any NPC criminal when a dogfight isn't going their way.
    • Generally the reaction of any player who hears these words in a Combat Zone: "Warning! Capital-Class signature detected!" Then watches as a Mile-Long Ship drops out of Supercruise, enshrouded by a massive magnetic storm, and hears straight-up Reaper sounds. All with a good dose of Ominous Latin Chanting.
    • Also the reaction of any trader, or anyone flying a ship not built for combat when an NPC pirate starts announcing their attack. Especially true with the bad mobility ships; which really suck at dodging interceptions. Sometimes pirates won't give this warning if quests are taken or your shield is off (or it's another player of course), which will often result in a small Jump Scare, due to the massive effect and loud noises. VR has been known to make pilots soil themselves when this scenario occurs.
    • Thargoids are pretty much this writ large for the Elite 'verse. The fact they've stepped up their war on humanity since 3304 (and the Beyond expansion) started has only made this worse.
    • Recently, a new Thargoid variant appeared named the Hydra. The community’s general reaction ranged from “oh crap” to “time to go live on the other side of the galaxy.”
  • Old-School Dogfight: Emphasised with the difference in damage output between fixed, gimbaled, and turreted weapons, with fixed weapons having the highest damage output, and turreted weapons the lowest. It is not uncommon to see a large and bulky ship like the Federal Corvette getting into a turning contest with a smaller, more agile ship so that it can focus all its fixed and gimbaled weapons on the latter for maximum damage.
  • Opposing Combat Philosophies:
    • Federation ships are warships. They carry the most armor of their class, and prioritize weapons and handling above all else leading to some abysmal jump ranges. The Federal Corvette is the end-all of combat ships, but moving around in it with its dismal 12 LY jump range is absolute agony. The Farragut-class warships embody this, being pure and simple war machines; they don't have any luxury features whatsoever.
    • Imperial ships all emphasize the glory of the Empire and allow the pilot to bask in their superiority. Oversized engines and improved internals allow them to diversify their roles, but this comes at the cost of often poor handling and horrible weapon placement. The Empire's Majestic-class Interdictors feature their own rotating ring section to generate (low) gravity for visitors, as the vessels serve as roaming embassies and yachts for wealthy owners.
  • Overheating:
    • Each ship has an indicator that shows how much heat the ship is generating from its running modules, as well as any heat it is receiving from external forces, such as stars, damaged station interiors, or damage from weapons with the Thermal Shock engineering effect. Heat also momentarily increases whenever the ship is firing its weapons, boosting its thrusters, or charging its frame shift drive. All ships are designed to handle heat levels up to 100% without any ill-effects; beyond that, modules will begin to take damage and malfunction, and above 150% heat, the damage spreads to the ship's hull, which can eventually result in ship destruction if heat is kept above 150% for prolonged periods of time. Certain modules and engineering modifications, such as the Heatsink Launcher and Thermal Spread effect, exist to avert this trope.
    • Inverted with a ship's Weapons Energy Capacitor, which slowly depletes as it transfers heat from firing weapon modules into the overall heat generated by the ship; attempting to fire weapons while the capacitor is depleted will cause the former to go into "Thermal Overload"—since the capacitor does not have enough power to transfer heat from them—and remain in that state until the capacitor has regenerated enough power to continue transferring heat.
  • Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: Almost every ship in Dangerous has a very blocky shape - the Imperial Clipper and Eagle are some of the few exceptions - as a Continuity Nod to the vector graphics of the original game.
  • Pacifist Run: It's quite possible to ignore combat completely and earn credits by trading, mining, or selling exploration data. In fact, there is nothing stopping you from removing the weapons that come with your ship and replacing them with mining lasers, or just leaving the hardpoints empty to save on weight and power consumption.
  • Padded Sumo Gameplay: The game has slow ship handling - which can be described as "B-17s in WD-40" - and very durable ships, to make subsystem management and stealth that much more important.
  • Painfully Slow Projectile: The maximum velocity of a torpedo is 250 m/s, which is only slightly higher than the maximum top speed of some of the larger ships in the game and makes it the slowest moving projectile. Engineered thrusters aside, smaller/lighter ships can evade a torpedo by simply flying away from it at full speed, while most slower ships can disable Flight Assist and boost periodically with all pips to engines to take advantage of the game's Newtonian physics and achieve a similar effect.
  • Plasma Cannon: The Plasma Accelerator. Now a tradition coming since the original Elite, the Plasma Accelerators are the weapons that deal the most damage in the game, but are also extremely expensive (a single plasma cannon costs more than some lower-end ship hulls) and demand a lot of power. Like Railguns they're also only available in fixed mounts, and only in Medium, Large, or Huge slots at that, limiting which ships can make proper use of them between aiming/maneuverability concerns on top of their power consumption.
  • Procedural Generation: Elite Dangerous uses a system called the "Stellar Forge" that runs on this trope to create the approximately 399,999,850,000 star systems in the Milky Way that are not based on astronomical data.
  • Punny Name: If it's not some manner of pop culture reference, there's pretty good odds of an NPC's name being a pun such as Hugh Jenjin or Ric O'Chet.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: The only difference between male and female pilots is how they look. Slightly downplayed with the introduction of NPC crew who have gender-specific voices.
  • Ramming Always Works: Ramming deals damage proportional to the mass and velocity of a ship. The Federal series of ships are excellent rammers thanks to their absurdly high mass relative to their size and speed. Just be careful not to hit a friendly small ship while in one; or youll likely destroy it instantly, where youll be given a bounty for murder.
  • Random Encounters: Entering supercruise or warping to a star with a live bounty or cargo in your hold has a chance of spawning a level-scaling bounty hunter or pirate that will attempt to interdict you and blow you to bits and/or steal your cargo after sending you a message.
  • Ramscoop: The Fuel Scoop module enables your ship to refuel itself just by moving close to main sequence starsnote .
  • Readings Are Off the Scale: While hyperspace travel between systems looks visually linear, your ship's compass will spin in all directions and its throttle gauge will continuously jump back and forth between 0 and 9,999c throughout the transit.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: Inverted with Elite Dangerous: Premonition, an official novel written by Drew Wagar. With Frontier backing Wagar up by adding in-universe events revolving around the novel's plot, Wagar used the subsequent player turnout and response, such as the killing of the protagonist by CMDR Harry Potter right at the climax of the in-game events, to write the novel.
  • Revealing Cover-Up: There are a number of systems far from populated space that require permits to enter, despite being unclaimed by anyone. Opinions vary as to what they're supposed to contain, but a popular theory is that they're Thargoid systems for a future expansion. One such system? The Thargoids' home system, Polaris.
  • Rule of Three: Material collecting runs on this, until capacity reaches maximum. In Odyssey, each sample of exobiology takes three lines, one-third, of your Genetic Sampler.
  • Running Gag: Gameplay Grading in the game has a particular proclivity toward certain terms: Aside from using Elite to represent the highest attainable rank a player can get in any field of specialization, the lowest and second-lowest ranks a player can have in a field follow the pattern of "(noun)less" and "mostly (noun)less", following how the traditional combat ranking structure famously references The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with its lowest and second-lowest rankings of "harmless" and "mostly harmless", e.g. "aimless" and "mostly aimless" for exploration, "penniless" and "mostly penniless" for trade, etc.
  • Schmuck Bait: A fairly popular joke amongst players is to claim that at Hutton Orbital a player will recive a free Anaconda. Hutton Orbital is a station that requires the player to spend well over a hour in supercruise just to reach it, due to how far it is away from the system centre. Of course, there's nothing to be found at the station but a few fancy (and expensive) rare mugs.
  • Sci-Fi Bob Haircut: One of the hairstyle options available to female Holo-Me characters is a bob haircut, which is surprisingly popular amongst playersnote .
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: This trope has been masterfully averted in Elite Dangerous. One of the game's selling points is its 1:1 scale. From the smallest of ships, to Outposts, Stations, Planets, Stars, and to the whole Milky Way Galaxy itself, are all correctly scaled both in overall magnitude and in relation to each other.
  • Self-Destruct Mechanism: Available via a ship's Functions menu. If you are stranded in a system with no way to refuel, performing a self-destruct is currently your only option (if you can't contact the Fuel Rats). On rare occasions, trading ships will use this if there is no other option to at least take the precious cargo to the grave away from the pirate.
  • Sequel Escalation: The player's overarching goal is to reach Elite rank by any means necessary, just like in previous Elite games. However, Elite Dangerous ups the ante by giving the player up to sixnote  separate roles they can reach Elite rank in: Combat (which is the traditional role), Trade, Exploration, Close Quarters Combat (CQC), Mercenary work, and Exobiologynote ; reaching Elite rank in the first three gives the player the "Triple Elite" status and a nice ship decal.
  • Shaped Like Itself: On the map of the Sol system, Earth is listed as an Earth-like planet.
  • She Is the King: Arissa Lavigny-Duval, following the Emperor's assassination, has become the new ruler of the Empire by decree of the Imperial Senate. This is only possible because the previous Emperor had removed the centuries-old decree that only men could be Emperor and marks the first time a woman has ruled the Empire since Marlin Duval first founded it - however, Arissa bears the title of "Emperor", rather than "Empress".
  • Shout-Out:
    • 2001: A Space Odyssey:
      • The design of the Bowman Class Science Vessel megaship is identical to the Discovery One.
      • Strauss's "The Blue Danube" plays when the docking computer takes control of your ship.
    • The first attainable combat rank is "Mostly Harmless". As this was also present in previous games, it doubles as a Continuity Nod.
    • The message "This is not the trading ship you are looking for." may occasionally be sent by an NPC pilot being scanned by a System Authority Vessel, usually in the vicinity of a station's access corridor.
    • NPC names are full of shout outs to just about anything you can think of. It's not unusual to run into NPCs with names like Jayne Cobb, Zap Brannigan, Bob Ross, Commander Bond, or Twilight Sparkle. The names of Kickstarter backers are also included in the same pool.
    • Red Dwarf :
      • COVAS Leo is voiced by Norman Lovett, who acted as Holly.
      • A planet named Lister can be found in the Wyrd system.
    • There is a starport called Jita.
  • Shown Their Work: The science presented in the game is some of the most sound in Science Fiction - even the Frame-Shift Drive, the setting's One Big Lie, has some amount of scientific theory backing it up. Perhaps the greatest example of this is in its presentation of Black Holes - which aren't treated as all-consuming interstellar vacuum cleaners, but rather as navigational hazards that just happen to have gravity lensing and are much blacker than most stars. Unrealistically though, they do not have any graviational pull on your ship if you get too close. You instead take incredible heat damage, and if you attempt to fly directly into one on purpose you will simply bump into its "exlusion zone" like any other star and be dropped out of supercruise. On top of that, the Voyager Probes can be found in-game where they should be in the 34th Century, and are one of the few things in the game that can be considered to be in truly deep space, since in real life the Voyager Probes have passed through the Solar system's Termination Shock, generally considered to be the outermost boundary between the Solar system and interstellar space.
  • Show Within a Show: Galnet fills this role, though talk shows (like Celebrity Pets) apparently do exist in the 34th Century.
  • Silent Running Mode: Achieved by shutting the cooling vents and deactivating heat-generating systems (up to and including life support), and thus diminishing the ship's thermal signature. As pretty much any system generates some amount of heat, it can continue to build up inside the ship while the cooling vents are shut, eventually causing system damage and/or pilot death. Heat sink launchers can be purchased, which are used to store generated heat while in silent running and are then launched to misdirect enemy sensors and heat-seeking missiles. You can't make your ship totally invisible, though, as any ship coming close enough (~300 meters) will be able to detect your presence regardless of thermal signature.
  • Single-Biome Planet: Justified with Horizons & Odyssey, as the planets that you can land on in the game all have a thin, if any, atmosphere and don't have much to offer beyond "barren and lifeless". You can, however, find useful materials for crafting or engineering, and the occasional interesting sight such as wrecked ships (with salvageable data and cargo), alien ruins or small pockets of organic life (the discovery of the latter two being worth substantial amounts of money).
  • Soapbox Sadie: Aisling Duval is an outspoken Abolitionist... in The Empire, where Happiness in Slavery is the norm.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: In the GDC Trailer, we can hear Chopin's Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2 playing. While ships destroy each other. In a full-blow capital-ship conflict. It is, however, played for an astounding effect.
  • Space Age Stasis: Other than the speed and range of Casual Interstellar Travel, human technology hasn't changed all that much over the millennia, with many of the spaceships available to the player (such as the Anaconda) having entered the market centuries prior and received only minor upgrades since then. Culturally, things aren't much better — corporate entities loom large over democratic governments, slavery not only still exists but is widespread, and one of the three superpowers is a xenophobic Empire ruled by a hereditary monarchy and a Decadent Court. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
  • Space Cold War: Big surprise, The Federation, The Empire, and The Alliance are still at it at the dawn of the 34th Century!
  • Space Fighter: The majority of craft are fighters of various flavors. As of Elite Dangerous, most don't look terribly similar to atmospheric fighters bar some vestigial wings and an overall streamlined aesthetic, with the Eagle being a notable exception with its massive wings. Craft handle very similar to terrestrial aircraft due to the layout of their thrusters, with yaw being significantly weaker than roll and pitch on almost every ship.
  • Space Friction: While you can spin your ship 180º while still moving in your original heading, there are arbitrary limits to the maximum speed a ship can go, and how fast it can rotate around it's axis. Somewhat justified in that it helps to keep the gameplay interesting, as it adds a very dynamic combat environment depending on which ships are engaged in the fight.
  • Space Is Noisy: A more-or-less justified trope. The Devs claim the ship's computer creates an exterior soundscape based on what it's sensors and scanners are picking up. But quite frankly, given Dangerous' astonishing audio design, even the most Hardcore science advocates are glad this trope is in play. Averted when the canopy blows out; all sounds become heavily muffled if not completely inaudible as the ship speakers no longer have an atmosphere to work in and you're stuck with just the tinny headphones on the Remlok spacesuit.
  • Space Pirates: Can often be found attacking miners and traders. However, most pirates will ignore ships that have no cargo, merely cussing out the pilot before moving on; even if there is cargo, some will decide that the target ship is too well armed to be worth bothering. Players themselves can be pirates by ambushing other players and demanding they drop their cargo or be blown to bits.
  • Space Sector: The galaxy is divided up into 1280 cubic lightyear sectors, each assigned a systemic name that is carried over to the systems within it. Additionally, it is also divided up into 42 galactic regions with more evocative names, such as the Inner Orion Spur (where Earth is), Odin's Hold, and The Abyss.
  • Space Station: It's a staple for the series, though the types of Space Station is a bit more limited than before. They include:
    • Outposts, which are further divided by Outpost type (Industrial Outpost, Military Installation, Research Outpost, Civilian Installation, Unsanctioned Outpost, etc.) and don't spin to produce gravity. They have 3 or 4 landing pads and can't service ships that require a "Large" landing pad (e.g. the Imperial Clipper, the Federal Corvette, the Anaconda, the Type Seven and Type Nine-Heavy, and so on) due to their largest pads being "Medium" size. Hutton Orbital in Alpha Centauri, Trevthick Dock (where players begin in Horizons) in LHS 3447, and Wilson Vision in Achenar are just a few examples of the myriad of Outposts in the game.
    • Coriolis Starports are the one station that's been around since the first game. Rotating polyhedrons, these icons of Elite are near-ubiquitous throughout human space and are highly detailed compared to previous incarnations, since these have what can best be described as city blocks lining their exteriors. The legendary Lave Station in Lave, Syromyatnikov Horizons in Nu, and Gotham Park in Alioth are three examples of the station type. Some Coriolis stations also have up to 4 long arms extending from their sides used as high-gravity factories.
    • Ocellus Stations are the newest addition to the family, based on modified Bernal Spheres. They tend to be rarer than the other three station types, though they are cheaper to manufacture than Orbis Starports thanks to their modular design. Obsidian Orbital in the Pleiades (Specifically, the Maia system), Galileo, and Columbus (both in Sol) are some examples of such a station. A handful of Ocelluses have habitation rings akin to Orbis ports, though the Bernal Sphere part of the station occludes them.
    • Orbis Starports are another station type returning from the old games, based on a modified Torus station from Frontier: Elite II. These stations represent the pinnacle of opulence and wealth for a system, and are the most expensive station type as a direct result. Abraham Lincoln in Sol, Dawes Hub in Achenar, Melbourne Park in Alioth, and the roving starport known as Jaques Orbital are all examples of Orbises. Prior to update 1.6/2.2, which introduced a variety of different station interiors to all rotating stations, the Orbis was also unique in that it was the only station type that could have the "wealthy" station interior type, which has a white Ascetic Aesthetic style to it.
    • Asteroid Bases were added in update 2.3. 42 are known to exist, scattered about the galaxy. These hollowed out asteroids can support all three ship sizes and always have at least four services: commodities market, refueling, restock, and repair, making them a very useful port for explorers with damaged ships.
  • Spikes of Villainy: A few optional "Ship Kits" allow you to add rusty metal spikes and other similar gubbins to a couple of ships, in case you want a more sinister raider/pirate look for your ship. The effect can be combined (or completed) with some classy rusted/corroded "paint" schemes for your hull, too.
  • Spot the Imposter: Played with in conflict zones and sometimes in distress signals. Much more frustrating in the former since literally every ship in said conflict is named as a "system security vessel", which one to shoot depends on if they belong to that system or not; choose wrongly and you'll end up with several authority ships on you; It ''really''does not end well for you. In the latter example, you'll sometimes come across two ships fighting; though all you have to do is scan them and shoot the guy with the bounty.
  • Starship Luxurious: An intentional design feature for ships like the Beluga or Imperial Clipper, the former being a very comfortable transport ship, while the latter is meant to show the empire's wealth and beauty. All Imperial ships are like this to some degree, really.
  • Stock Star Systems:
    • Altair and Tau Ceti were among the five founding members of The Federation, the others being Sol, Delta Pavonis, and Beta Hydri. A crisis on Tau Ceti 3 was itself what prompted the formation of the Federation.
    • The Sirius Corporation operates out of the Sirius system, obviously.
    • More generally, the game contains all four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including all of the ones listed above (many of which contain terraformed, inhabited planets). Most of them are Randomly Generated Levels by necessity, but the developers have hand-crafted many of them to match real-world astronomical data.
  • Stone Wall: The Type 9 heavy; and the Type 10 to a lesser extent, have this trope in spades. For their cost, they can equip ludicrously strong defensive shields and heavy armor, and have several hardpoint slots. Too bad they aren't going anywhere fast and have the worst manoverability in the game; dodging projectiles is out of the equation.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: NPCs are a bit on the dumb side when it comes to picking targets, with Eagles (small, jump capable fighter craft) often interdicting or attacking much bigger ships like Asps (midsized, multi-role craft that generally outgun them massively) or even Corvettes (large battlecraft armed to the teeth), just because they happen to be carrying cargo they want. The result tends to be a curbstomp battle in the larger craft's favor. They will retreat when badly damaged, however, but generally they're so far gone at that point that they can't actually get away before being destroyed.
    • They also rather amusingly will continue to tell you "drop the cargo and it'll all be over" Whilst in the middle of having their pirate ass handed to them and even while their ship is exploding.
    • By far the most amusing result, however, is that if they are chasing you they will always follow you to anywhere you disengage your supercruise to and start yelling threats; even if its a highly defended starport with no fire zones or checkpoints literally swarming with authority vessels. The resulting curbstomp they receive is rather amusing one must admit. They will usually make a hasty retreat if its a starport - immediately ceasing fire the nanosecond you reach the No-Fire Zone and running like hell. But they're not always so careful around Fleet Carriers, whose turrets can actually shoot targets well outside the No-Fire Zone and are just as good at turning pirates into small clouds of engineering materials. It's even funnier if the carrier is owned by you, as you can fire weapons around your own mothership freely and assist it in the aforementioned turning criminal ships into upgrade mats.
  • Taking You with Me: The only way that the most basic skimmers can attack is this; which is surprisingly ineffective.
  • Tannhäuser Gate: There is an Orbis Starport by the name of Tannhauser Gate in the Aztlan system.
  • Terraform: Planets that aren't Earthlike worlds but have qualities similar to Earth may be labeled as "Candidates for Terraforming", and most of the Earthlike worlds in human space have been terraformed in the past - examples include Capitol in Achenar (which stirred some controversy since the moon that became Capitol had the first known example of a non-human sapient species that were wiped out when terraforming began) and Mars.
  • The Greatest Story Never Told: In spades. Galnet only highlights Community Goals and major in-universe events that are set in motion by Frontier, which typically happen only a few times each week. Hence, most community-run events and player-instigated events, including most of the expeditions listed on EDSM, and the "Fuelum War", are never mentioned or referred to in-game.
  • Theme Naming: See Animal Theme Naming above, but this also applies to the Lakon Alliance ships, which are named after British tanks; the Chieftain, Challenger and a leaked third name, Crusader.
    • NPC ships have an odd theme with either references to other media or...tea, or tea-related stuffs like toast and bread. Frontier is a British developer after all.
  • To Be a Master: Like in other games, there are various methods of becoming The Elite. Dangerous adds two more categories, one for trading and one for exploration beyond combat ratings.
  • Too Stupid To Live: The NPC pirates in many scenarios pull this. The above tropes list a few examples already so here's a few other hilarious laps in judgment that lead to their demise.
    • If you go bounty hunting and pull a wanted craft out of supercruise you'd expect to start fighting instantly, make a run for it or plea for mercy right? Nope, they instead often act as if they got the drop on you and start scanning your cargo; saying you're a waste of their time in the likely scenario you have none (you're a bounty hunting vessel after all); not caring that the heavily armed bounty hunter just stopped them with 6 pulse lasers pointed at their little vessel.
    • "I'll just pull this heavily armed Type-9 in a wing with two Anacondas out of supercruise and attack it solo with my small Viper; that's a flawless plan!" - the last thoughts of many dead NPC pirates.
    • Pirates don't react to incoming authority vessels at all; if the Authority Equals Asskicking trope listed above is any evidence they really should book it instantly; anytime they show up most pirates get turned to ash in mere seconds. Because of this in high or medium security systems, an effective combat strat for badly armed vessels such as a Type 6 is to just max shields and wait for the pirate to attract his own angels of death; just fire a laser or two at him to get the bounty.
    • Generally a pirate will instantly turn tail and jump out once you reach the safety of a station's No-Fire Zone, but Fleet Carriers are not given the same level of caution. This is universally bad for their health, as carriers are equipped with the same omnipotent turrets as any orbital station and have a firing range wider than the safe zone.
  • Trailers Always Lie: The release trailer for Dangerous is generally truthful about its content (aside from showing people walking around, which is planned for an Expansion Pack), though it presents a significantly sped up image of the game; with apparent Rocket-Tag Gameplay and very agile ships, which is quite the opposite from the actual game. It does at least state in big letters that it isn't in-game footage.
  • Universal Universe Time: Today's date, with a small 1286 year difference into the future.
  • Used Future: Some ships in the game seem to have already seen a lot of use even before you get them, especially Lakon Spaceways ships, where there is a lot of wear and tear around the cockpit, from scuffed and slightly cracked mainenace panels to chipped paint on the edges of the seat and control panel. It's possible to create this aesthetic on the outside of ships yourself by flying around in high speed supercruise a lot and never repairing your paint.
    • Explicitly canon in the case of the vintage Eagle Mark II fighters; Core Dynamics no longer manufactures entire new Mark IIs, though they do still provide spare parts and servicing. Any Mark II you encounter is thus potentially a couple of centuries old and patched together multiple times over by in-game terms. Even the upgraded Imperial Eagle is a hair over a century old by this point.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • When looking for missions to do on the bulletin board of any station, players can occasionally stumble across calls for monetary assistance. There is no immediate reward for completing these missions, only a bit of reputation at best, but they occasionally spawn a follow-up mission which pays more than the amount donated.
    • New players are favored targets by pirates looking for easy kills, but a number of more experienced pilots have made a point of patrolling newbie areas purely to try and stop them.
    • A group of players known as the Fuel Rats recently made in-universe news after their 1000th rescue. How? They transport fuel to players who're stranded in unknown space and cannot obtain fuel themselves and in normal cases would have to die in-game to respawn in a new ship. They've traveled to the other side of the galaxy to do this duty. They volunteer to do this and don't ask for any reward.
    • With Thargoids now attacking space stations, commanders have the option of rescuing people from damaged stations. Occupied escape pods found drifting in space or in planetary wreckage can also be turned in to a Search & Rescue office for a small monetary reward.
    • It's worth noting that when compared to most other online communities Elite's stands out a good bit; if the fuel rat example wasn't enough. Events to chart out the near endless space, help newbies, multi-crew, group wings, bodyguards and just chatting is found in many many examples and there's at least one group for each of the powers that do a good job representing the atmosphere of their allegiance (ie Alliance members are often noob and trader inviting while Independent ones are more combat and experience lovers.)
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • You can easily make money off of human suffering in this game by transporting and selling arms, highly addictive drugs, and slaves. Granted, they all look like menu text and cargo canisters from your point of view, so you never see the cost of your ill-gotten gains (other than the credits flowing into your bank account)
    • You can jettison cargo into deep space, in canisters presumably without life support. Including slaves, Imperial or otherwise, with no punishment whatsoever (save for the loss of some money), as well as occupied escape pods.
    • Speaking of which you can get more money per item if you sell any of the search and rescue items (including black boxes and the aforementioned escape pods) to the black market. It's best not to think about what happens to them afterwards.
    • You didn't think everyone was as charitable as the Fuel Rats did you? Some players (often referred to as gankers or griefers) will actively hunt down and kill others for no reason other than to ruin that persons day (you gain literally nothing for doing this, not even combat rank and only results in gaining yourself a big bounty and noterity). Other players would intentionally crash cheap ships into others at stations causing said ship to murder resulting in it getting shot down (though this was later patched, and the player ganking was even more harshly punished.)
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: ... But if you do such things and get caught, you are going to have to, at best pay some fines, or at worst, be blown to pieces by either the local defense forces or a player bounty hunter. Or both. Killing players who have no noterity will give you not just a huge bounty, but will make their rebuy much less costly and doing this too much attracts Karma enforcers; which will be endless waves of god tier engineered authority ships that have so much firepower a max engineered wing of Cutters will struggle to fight against them.
  • Violation of Common Sense: Submitting to an interdiction causes the FSD to cool down in 10 seconds, whereas failing to evade an interdiction causes the FSD to take 40 seconds to cool down. Especially when it involves actual players, the standard strategy to shake off an interdictor is to submit to the interdiction, then spend 10 seconds evading potential attacks, usually by boosting at the interdictor so that they have to keep turning in order to bring their fixed weapons to bear, while at the same time spewing chaff to scramble the targeting of any gimbaled and turreted weapons the interdictor might have, before jumping out to another system (which is unaffected by mass lock factor).
  • Welcome to Corneria: NPCs have about a dozen lines per interaction interaction, such as scanning the player, and will repeat them ad nauseam. Thankfully, only the station traffic controllers are actually voiced so it doesn't become too grating when Pirate #26278 tells you "I'm surprised you got this far with all that tasty cargo" for the umpteenth time.
  • We Sell Everything: Finding the exact component you need for your fitting, or shopping for a particular ship, can involve checking station after station to find what you're looking for... until you get the system permit that comes with reaching Elite. Jameson Memorial sells all ship components and ships in the game at a discount. Averted with commodities, as most markets only buy and sell general goods, supplies relevant to or produced by their economy, and Rare Goods. At a station's black market, it's you selling anything that fell out of a Type-9's cargo hold, from artwork to mysterious biotechnological artifacts.
  • We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The Empire makes extensive use of slaves and other workers to do jobs other governments, like The Federation and The Alliance, use automated machinery to accomplish. The Empire justifies this by saying that they don't want to become too dependent on technology like other factions have become.
  • We Will Spend Credits in the Future: All financial transactions are carried out using credits from the Bank of Zaonce.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: The galaxy is massive and it's quite easy to find yourself stranded if you go too far in the wrong direction and can't find a station at which to refuel. The Milky Way is modeled according to modern astronomical models via procedural generation. Billions and billions of stars!
  • Zerg Rush: Combat with the Thargoid scouts is this; alone they're completely outgunned by anything better than a Hauler. But in a massive group they're a real threat.

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