Video Game / Space Rangers

A series of top-down Wide-Open Sandbox games released for Windows by Russian developer Elemental Games. So far, two games have been released, with both games having very similar gameplay.

In Space Rangers, a powerful alien ship called "Makhpella" and its fleet of battleships known as the "Klissans" invade our region of the galaxy. Five races have formed a loose confederation against it, known as the "Interstellar Coalition": The brutish Maloq, the lawless Peleng, the tech-loving Faeyans, the enlightened Gaalians, and the business-minded humans.

The player takes the role of a young pilot voluntarily enlisting into the titular organization known as the Space Rangers. Space Rangers are tasked with defeating the Klissans, but are given full freedom in deciding how to do so. You can fight the Klissans directly on your own, salvaging their technology and researching ways to defeat them. You can trade commodities between planets and earn enough money to turn your ship into a juggernaut. You can raid civilian ships as a pirate, and you can even perform diplomatic errands. Whichever way you choose, your ultimate task is to become powerful enough to drive the Klissans back and eliminate the Makhpella.

On the whole, Space Rangers is played as a top-down, turn-based tactical game coupled with considerable RPG Elements. You fly your ship from star to star, planet to planet, fighting the enemy (whoever you choose it to be at any given time), upgrading your ship, trading cargo, and so forth. Everything is done using a simple point-and-click interface. However, at many points in the game, gameplay changes radically, incorporating mini-games that are very different from this style. Major diplomatic quests require playing text-based mini-adventures (some of which are remarkably complex). Wormholes take you to another dimension which plays like a classic Shoot 'Em Up. The second game even features a rudimentary Real-Time Strategy mini-game with giant robots for units (inspired by ZX Spectrum game Nether Earth). Overall it's no surprise That Other Wiki classifies it as a "Multi Genre" game. Of course, since the game is extremely open-ended, no one forces you to play any of these if they do not suit your style.

Very importantly, the game world is constantly being simulated in the background regardless of what the player is doing. The program controls all enemy ships, civilian and military ships, and even a slew of other Space Rangers who are constantly competing for the highest ranking. While the player may be passing time waiting for his satellites to finish scanning a dead planet, entire battles are fought over star systems on the other side of the quadrant. The enemy and the Coalition send ships at each other, attempt to stay technologically ahead of each other, and prices change according to the lively traffic of trading ships across all sectors of space. In fact, on the easier difficulty levels it is possible for the Coalition to push the enemy to the brink of destruction all by themselves!

The second game (Space Rangers 2) can be seen as an advanced version of the first game, offering many features that the first game did not have while keeping the same gameplay style. The story is almost the same too: The defeated Klissan mothership Makhpella has given rise to three separate races of machines that now seek to destroy the Interstellar Coalition as well as each other — so now you have three major enemies instead of one, but everything else is largely the same. Nonetheless, thanks to the success of the original, the second game features much higher production quality, and a lot more content.

Although released for the Russian market, which consistently shows more interest in slower, smarter games, Space Rangers 2 did surprisingly well in the West for its genre. This is despite an entirely inconsistent quality of translation, which left some texts almost undecipherable (and some quests ridiculously difficult to complete). Both games were eventually released as a complete box set known in Europe and Canada under the name Space Rangers: Reboot, which contained both the original and Rise of the Dominators combined with the expansion pack. Don't be fooled too much by the name, though. In America, Space Rangers: Reboot refers only to the expansion pack. Both games used to be on Steam, and 2 also used to be available on GOG.com, but every version was taken off of all storefronts by the publisher, when it turned out that the games used the MP3 codec without paying for a license.

Now, before that happened, a group of Russian fans created a fanmod called Space Rangers 2: Revolution, which added in HD support, tons of quests, items, and music. They were then hired on to make an HD remake of the game, which backported about half of the content from the mod that they could legally use, and made their own additional features. This HD remake, titled Space Rangers HD: A War Apart, primarily changed audio to use OGG instead and added a third major faction besides the Coalition and Dominators — the Pirates. The Pirates fight the Coalition as well as Dominators, and players can infiltrate the Pirates to destroy them from inside — or to betray the Coalition and take over the galaxy. Fitting its past, A War Apart is still a Wide-Open Sandbox beyond belief. Unfortunately, the only game in the series that can be purchased is the HD remake, which makes the games preceding it very difficult to obtain. Thankfully, it also got a much improved translation.

Not to be confused with the short-lived 1993 television series of the same name, with Power Rangers in Space, or Buzz Lightyear's job.

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This work contains examples of the following tropes:

• 100% Heroism Rating: The player can improve their relationship with planets by protecting them from enemies. Note, however, that not all planets consider all "bad guy" to be enemies...
• 2-D Space: The space in the game is represented this way. The main consequence of this is that you can't evade kligs, missiles, and asteroids just by moving vertically, and that a star will always damage a ship flying over it.
• Achievement Mockery: The Steam version adds several achievements for such things as:
  • Angering all races of the Coalition.
  • Going to prison.
  • Dying while having paid for insurance.
  • Failing to pay your loans.
  • Failing delivery quests.
  • Catching all the diseases.
• Addled Addict: Taking too many stimulators will cause you to suffer an addiction, which gives a penalty to combat and repair stats. You can't even mitigate this penalty by taking another stimulator.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Mugged a couple of traders for their cargo and money? Four months in prison! Sold too many drugs at once? Four months in prison! Attacked and destroyed an entire military fleet, leaving a planet defenseless against killer robots? Four months in prison! That is, of course, if you manage to reach a planet in order to be arrested at all; otherwise the system military will simply blast you of the sky.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: You can visit a gay bar in one of the text adventure mini-games in the first game. When you enter it, you are immediately harassed by a Camp Gay man and promptly start running for your life.
• All Up to You: The "Stealth" quest has you get hired as a pilot for a mission to steal an invisible spaceship, with the idea being that the commandos escorting you will handle all the resistance. Unfortunately, one of the commandos fails to show up, while your car gets ambushed and destroyed, leaving you alone to complete the mission.
• Already Done for You: It's possible to accept an assassination mission, only for your mark to be killed by someone else in an random fight. You can still collect the bounty on them, though.
• Anarchy Is Chaos:
  • While averted with Coalition planets in the state of anarchy (as they still function just fine and even have prisons and militaries), any system taken over by the pirate clan will be plunged into anarchy, while the planet's background and the government official make it clear that corruption and violent crime are commonplace.
  • Choosing anarchy as the form of government in the "Colonization" quest will result in complete chaos breaking out, with the entire colony falling apart in an orgy of violence, culminating in the survivors deciding to execute you.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the endings of HD where the pirates are defeated, the Player Character, having faked their death and started a new life, ultimately ends up signing back as a ranger after seeing a recruitment ad.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game always autosaves right before you start text quests, letting you retry them if you fail.
  • Because the final text quest of the pirates is extremely long and has several opportunities to die, it has two checkpoints (which are technically separate quests), thus making death less of a setback to your progress.
• Anti-Grinding: Using Transfactor Beacons causes radiation sickness, that can't be cured (only waited out) and drastically lowers any experience you receive. The idea was to counter infamous exploit, where lots of beacons were used to summon giant fleets of Dominators, only to then destroy them all in one massive Herd-Hitting Attack and reap massive harvest of Dominator loot and easy experience points. Eventually, disease was weakened and then removed outright, replaced with another countermeasure: now, Dominators simply wouldn't react if you use the beacons too often.
• Arms Dealer: As weapons are one of the trade goods available, and the second-most profitable after drugs, trading in them can be rather profitable. Many planets consider them to be contraband, however, so any arms dealer is liable to be arrested.
• Arrested for Heroism: Some seemingly-good actions can actually deteriorate your relationship with certain planets, down to the point of them turning hostile and potentially arresting you:
  • Maloq and Peleng planets can get angry at you for shooting down pirates (except Faeyan pirates, they specifically are fair game, for some reason). Additionally, the pirate's homeworld always lowers relationship with you when you kill them, regardless of race. This only applies to "normal" pirates, the Pirate Clan ships are treated as hostile targets by everyone.
  • For some reason, attacking Pirate Bases counts as the crime against Coalition.
• Artificial Stupidity: Pirates will often fly straight through nearby stars in order to get to you, causing serious damage to their ships in the process. Black Hole ships also seems unable to escape from gravitational traps, allowing you pretty much a free kill if they get too close to one.
• Artistic License – Space: Uranus is inexplicably missing from the Sun system, even though Neptune, the other ice giant, is present.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Promotions in the Coalition military and the Pirate Clan are primarily based around combat. While it is possible to gain Coalition promotions via funding military bases, and Pirate Clan promotions via smuggling, both of these are rather slow methods.
• Asteroid Miners: Destroying an asteroid will yield you a few minerals, which can be sold for a small amount. The Industrial Laser is a weapon made for this, yielding more minerals from asteroids.
• Asteroid Thicket: The chase in the intro takes place inside one. Averted in the game, where asteroids fly around at great speeds and obey both solar and planetary gravity.
• Attack Drone: The Tranclucators. Building a fleet of these is somewhat easier in the HD remake, and makes your ship significantly more dangerous — at the cost of requiring a lot of micromanagement during combat.
• Attempted Rape: One of the possible situations you may encounter in prison is a trio of prisoners trying to rape the infirmary's nurse. One of the ways you can stop this is to attack them, which may lead to an awesome beatdown scene if you have a sufficiently high strength stat.
• Auto-Save: The game auto-saves when launching from a planet and when starting a text quest. In case of the text quest, failure immediately gives you the option to reload.
• Back from the Brink: The game starts this way, with the Klissans or Dominators having conquered most of the galaxy and the player being part of the effort to take it back. On the higher difficulties, the game might end with the enemy finishing it for good.
• Back to School:
  • The "Pilot" quest involves you taking an exam to earn a license for piloting cargo ships (so that your questgiver can make forgeries), even though you're already a perfectly capable pilot with a Universal Driver's License.
  • The "Megatest" quest involves you testing a graduation exam for rangers that is constantly being failed by trainees, so as to see if veteran rangers are able to pass it.
• Badass Bystander: All traders, diplomats and passenger liners are armed and tend to help each other. It's not uncommon to see an unfortunate pirate fleeing from the ship he was trying to mug, constantly hailing his pursuer and offering money for leaving him alone.
• Badass Pacifist: The player can be this in the second game. Each Dominator boss has a way of defeating them without actually fighting them. ^note Convince Keller to search somewhere else for his creators and make him Somebody Else's Problem; Hack Blazer and make him land somewhere where he can't escape; and trick Terronoid into trying to assimilate a star which is more than what his body can survive. There is even an achievement for finishing the game without destroying a single ship — Dominator or otherwise.
• Bait-and-Switch: During "Banquet" text quest, you're given a prompt to drink Maloq booze, in attempt to show to prince (whom you must impress) that you're not a coward. If you actually dare, the ranger would drink it, expecting it to be an exotic suicide method (it's way too strong for non-Maloqs), but turns out that it's... juice. The prince would confirm that it was indeed a test of courage; he didn't put there actual Maloq booze, knowing that you would likely die from it.
• Beneficial Disease: A few diseases will grant bonuses to one's stats, at the expense of others:
  • While Holy Fanaticism slightly reduces your Charisma stat and makes you hallucinate Dominators, it also boosts your Leadership and combat stats.
  • The Mysterious Luatancia removes your ability to rob ships and makes your aim worse, but you gain Charisma bonuses and will occasionally get free money.
  • Aka Sesiyanka worsens your Accuracy and Tech stats, but improves your trading ability
  • The Great Malososus makes you so fat that your ship moves slower, but improves your Trading and Leadership skills
  • New Molison prohibits you from selling food and drugs (as they become poisonous in your presence), but improves your combat skills.
• BFG: The Vertix and IMHO-9000 are the largest weapons you can mount on your ship, with a minimum weight of 148 and 108 respectively. However, they do an extremely high amount of damage, and are capable of hitting multiple foes at a time.
• Big Red Button: A quest involves delivering an entire shipment of them. It seems that Maloqs don't appreciate how one is supposed to gently press a Big Red Button, smashing them every time they use them.
• Bilingual Bonus: There are many, though most of them only work in the original Russian text, and have been lost in translation. For example, a "Mentoshoop" — a sort of a radar used by Dominators — can be read as either "mental probe" or "one who gropes cops".
• Blind Jump: The black holes which sometimes appear at the edge of star systems allow you to make a fuel-free jump to another star system; Instead the price is having to fight the enemies inside the black hole, and ending up in an unpredictable location (in a system that's 50 parsecs deep into the enemy territory, for example).
• Boarding Party:
  • One of the planetary battles involves you boarding a Kelleroid ship with just two robots.
  • Hacking Terron with the Submodem gives you the option to disable its planetary defenses, allowing you to land and deploy a platoon of robots to destroy the core.
  • The final quest of the Pirate Clan has a massive version of this, as a military base docks with Rogeria. Judging by the numbers shown, there are thousands of fighters on both sides, with heavy vehicles being utilized.
• Board to Death: Your final promotion in the Pirate Clan comes with a ceremony that involves you being invited to Rogeria, with every high-ranking member attending it. This turns out to be a way for Chuskach, the baron of the Clan, to get every troublesome member into one place, so that the Coalition can lay siege to Rogeria and kill/arrest them all.
• Bottomless Magazines: Zig-zagged:
  • While fighting in real space, all weapons can be fired continuously, though missile weapons have finite amount of missiles which have to be restocked at planets or bases.
  • In hyperspace, all weapons have infinite ammo reserves (including missile weapons), but when fired continuously, gradually overheat and shut down temporarily (even though they don't do that in real space).
  • Some text quests grant you infinite ammo, others track ammo (even down to each individual round), and a few give infinite ammo to certain weapons while tracking shots for others. The "Drugs" quest also has a justification for the buyable pistol having infinite ammo, as it's explicitly advertised as a gun with infinite ammo.
• Breakable Weapons: Equipment wears out only if used. For example, a repair bot will not wear out if your hull doesn't need repair, and weapons don't wear out if you don't fire. Also, if something is broken enough, it starts malfunctioning — for example, a damaged fuel tank starts leaking fuel, and a sufficiently damaged engine will slow you down to a crawl.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The "Banquet" quest allows you to pay 100 credits to a peleng to ask him when the next part of Space Rangers will be released. The resulting scene is rather surreal, as he flashes between when the real games were made, and when the fictional versions of them were made, still developed by Elemental Games, but in 3000 and 3300 respectively, ending with him having a mental breakdown from his visions. HD even further expands on the scene by adding mentions of pirates and the release of HD by SNK Games.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": In the "Xenopark" text quest, you must feed five animals with five different types of food; the problem is that all the names are insane and non-sensical, so you have to figure out what's what, and organise the feeding. For example, "Ferriferous No-Oodles" is a telephone wire, while "Desert Ship" from Mars (which is also described deliberately confusingly) is a camel, which is even more counter-intuitive in original Russian version, due to "Ship" (but not the "Desert") being phonetically transliterated to Cyrillic letters, making it sound like Russian for "thorn".
• Call-Back: The "Easy work" quest in the second game has a possible puzzle in which you tie a rope to a tree to climb a 100-meter cliff, which has a ledge halfway down, only to find out that you only have 75 meters of rope, though you can use a laser pistol to cut the rope appropriately. In Reboot's "Volcanic Island" quest, the fortune-teller asks you how to deal with a similar situation, albeit with the ledge replaced with another tree, the rope pre-cut, and the laser pistol replaced with a knife. However, she won't accept the original quest's solution, claiming that it's the wrong answer.
• Call That a Formation?: NPCs never follow any sorts of formations in combat, simply charging at the enemy, often causing the slower ships to be left behind. This makes it particularly easy to deal with dominators by kiting them, as you'll usually only have to deal with 1-3 dominators at a time.
• The Can Kicked Him: One of possible endings of the Prison quest involves other prisoners sticking your head into the toilet until you suffocate.
• Cassandra Truth: The secretary in the "Ministry" quest doesn't believe you when you tell her that there isn't any office in the basement (where she tries to send you off), adding yet another complication to the byzantine bureaucracy of the island.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Simply fly to the edge of a star system, and you're off. Hundreds of AI-controlled ships do this constantly every single turn of gameplay. Interstellar trips only last for a week at most, no matter the distance.
• Chromosome Casting: Downplayed, but applies in normal gameplay, unless you count Makhpella, a Hive Queen of a race of non-organic crystal-based lifeforms. Other than that, every single pilot and government official (all of whom share a single model per race) are male. What's weird is that, according to lore, Pelengs can change their sex at will, while Faeyans are naturally hermaphroditic, but all of them are almost always treated as male. The second game allows the player to choose a female portrait, but it doesn't change the dialogue at all. The HD Revolution version finally introduces female NPCs in the form of a separate NPC type, special agents. They, however, are all human, and women of other races remain unseen. Text quests are a bit more willing to have female characters, but you still have a lot more men than there are women, and many quests don't have any women at all.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The security guard in the "Ministry" quest imagines himself to be a communist guerrilla, speaking in a military manner to any visitors.
• Colonized Solar System: Humanity has managed to colonize Mars and Venus, though the rest of the planets remain unsettled.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • Your enemies in hyperspace know if a random powerup is going to be a good one or a bad one. This includes your ship's Auto-Battle AI though (which also always knows where your enemies are hiding) so a good strategy is to let it handle the flying while you only take control when an enemy appears.
  • The enemies can fire multiple weapons at the same time in hyperspace, but they don't do it often.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Somewhat averted. Flying too close to a star will damage your ship (and flying across one will do even more damage) unless you have an artifact designed specifically to counter the effect. The heat from a star will also detonate nearby missiles, making the act of hiding behind one a highly effective way of avoiding enemy missiles.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: In the "Ministry" quest, the boss of the titular ministry turns out to be this, as he gives you an inane test of common sense, then extorts a bribe if you don't give him the answers he wants.
• Corrupt Politician:
  • So long as you're not actually considered a criminal, a planetary government will gladly accept a "donation" from you in exchange for fixing your relationship with the planet.
  • Diplomatic ships have a tendency to carry weapons and drugs, even if they're illegal on the planet they're arriving at or from.
• Cooking Duel: Some text quests follow this formula. This includes drawing contests, cooking pizza, racing, robot fighting, an MTG-like card game, fishing, and elections.
• Copy Protection: In the HD edition, failing the copy protection will make the game severely increase the range at which a star can damage you, along with spawning hundreds of asteroids at once, causing everything in the system to be swiftly destroyed.
• Cosmetic Award: The most common awards for completing quests are medals, which do nothing but look good, though they can also raise your Ranger Rating (which is a Bragging Rights Reward).
• Creator Provincialism: Since the game was developed in Russia, there are a few cases where the game references things that specifically relate to the Russian culture and geopolitics. This is particularly noticeable with prisons, as they're based on the Soviet/Russian prison culture.
• Crew of One: Although various lines make it clear that some ships (such as military ones) have a crew, your ship is only operated by you, regardless of size.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted, as extra weight (including that of the hull itself) does slow down your ship. That said, just one unit of excess cargo and your ship isn't going anywhere.
• Critical Existence Failure:
  • Your ship can function perfectly fine regardless of HP. While equipment can break, it usually takes several times your HP in damage for it to break from combat.
  • Text quests that track your health allow you to keep fighting and running perfectly fine even if you're at the "About to die" status. The "Mafia" quest downplays this, however, as you can only make a difficult billiards shot if you're perfectly healthy, rested, and satiated.
• Dance Party Ending: In Space Rangers 2, all of the endings have you attend a modest concert in space, prepared just for you.
• Data Pad: In Space Rangers 2, the human governor carries one. It has a transparent back, to give it a nice sci-fi look.
• Deflector Shields: Defensive field generators reduce the damage a ship receives by a percentage, and also block the use of scanners.
• Developer's Foresight: One Pirate Clan's story quest involves you being sent after pirate named Makarov. If he lands on the planet, he would be arrested and sentenced to 100 years in prison, requiring plan "B" to take him out right on the planet. If you instead try to actually wait it out, he would die in prison after 75 years; it would count as success due to Loophole Abuse, but the pirates would get angry at you (not only did you waste a lot of time, but Makarov snitched on everyone whom he knew), and refuse to give any extra rewards.
• Digitized Sprites: For virtually everything.
• Disc-One Nuke: Missile launchers do a respectable amount of damage, have a very large range, and damage-increasing micromodules tend to effectively double their collective damage. The only drawback is their limited ammo, but expect to rely on missiles to both Alpha Strike targets and kite slower enemies while chipping them until more ships make use of Damage Reduction.
• Disposable Pilot: Inverted, and done before the pilot actually pilots anything, in the "Stealth" quest, as you're supposed to act as the pilot of the invisible spaceship that you're supposed to steal (in fact, you're not even meant to shoot at anybody), but your escorts die in an ambush, leaving you alone to finish the mission.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Hitting the guard's booth with the crowbar in the "Ministry" quest will result in him grabbing a plasma shotgun and trying to kill you, instead of calling the police or trying to detain you, even though the booth didn't have any dent in it. Just to make it weirder, he won't be offended if you punch his booth
• Disqualification-Induced Victory: In the text-quest where the player must determine the next shape in a sequence, getting second place allows shaking the hand of the victor. This reveals that the opponent was using a cheating device, and you'll win instead. (Note that the player can likewise cheat by looking at the list of possible rules from a walkthrough, but this is not detected by the game.)
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • Virtually any Acrin equipment boosts some stats, and reduces the others. Like, upping weapons of specific type at the cost of weakening the droid, or hull that sacrifices speed for extra durability.
  • Many micromodules provide both benefits and negatives. For example, Klein (a level 3 micromodule) amplifies the firepower of select weapon... at the cost of reducing its range.
  • Some artifacts shut down certain slots (and you must actually have them, or they wouldn't work), but open up the others, mainly extra weapon and artifacts slots.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect:
  • "The Breed" text quest from first game tasks you with breeding a perfect combat penchekryak; you're supposed to achieve perfectly balanced stats by mixing different stats-boosting food (if any stat is below or above the others, your hirer would reject the penchekryak as unfit for combat), while also avoiding making any of them go above 12, or you would fail the quest immediately (too strong penchekyak would break the cage; too agile penchekryak would make a lockpick; too loyal penchekryak would die from a heart attack; and so on).
  • The "Frame-Up" text quest tasks you with planting drugs into an apartment, but also making sure that they can be found. It's possible to fail the quest if you hide the drugs too well, as the cops fail to find them.
  • When fighting against non-military Coalition ships, destroying your target in one turn will deprive you of the credits/trade goods that you can earn by beating them into low HP and robbing them afterwards.
• Downer Ending: The ending where you kill both the pirate baron and the Coalition admiral (thus returning the pirates back to the old days of doing what they please), and then defeat the Dominators for the Clan. Because the pirates aren't properly organized, the whole galaxy falls into complete chaos with the planetary governments fighting each other. In the end, history will know you as galaxy's least successful hero.
• Early Game Hell:
  • You start off with weak equipment. Some races may or may not hate you depending on your starting race and type. You start off with only one point in two skills and even that puts you at a significant disadvantage against most pilots who have significantly higher stats. If you participate in any large-scale combat event such as an invasion so early on expect your ship to be destroyed.
  • The pirate fleets added by the HD Remake are far more dangerous than the average pirate ship, often boasting pilots with high combat stats and equipment that makes use of the many unique effects added by the Remake. In pirate systems there is always a chance that one or two will immediately try to rob you (or shoot you down if you don't comply with their demands). Their destruction of most space bases such as Trading Centers, Ranger Stations and Research Stations will also force you to travel more to make use of those services.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The text quests of the first game were darker in tone, had more swearing, and sometimes had sexual content. The text quests made for the sequel and its expansions toned all of this down, bringing them into a more humorous and light-hearted vein.
• Eldritch Location: The planet visited during the "Hallucinations" quest turns out to have the propensity of making people's thoughts and fears come true, which caused the local scientific expedition to die out as everyone succumbed to their fears. In addition, it appears to randomly cause hallucinations in visitors, along with having multiple bizarre events that don't seem to be connected to anybody's thoughts.
• Election Day Episode: One of the text quests require you to become elected leader of the planet. The loser gets blasted by security guards, due to an existing law. Within the following seven days, you organize advertisements, press conferences, and try to convince citizens to vote for you. It's made more complicated by the planet having all five races inhabiting it, so you have to plan your campaign around their racial gimmicks.
• Elite Mook: The largest Klissan/Dominator ships serve as this, with a high durability and a lot of high-tier weapons.
• Encounter Bait: The Transfactor Beacon, an artifact that causes the star system to be attacked by Kelleroid Dominators — useful both for Level Grinding (until a certain patch, at least) and for causing Enemy Civil War.
• The End... Or Is It?: The "Cybermind" quest ends with the player receiving a threatening call from the Cybermind, even though they may have succesfully destroyed the building. (Un)fortunately, nothing comes out of it.
• Enemy Chatter: Any non-Dominator/Klissan ship will communicate with other friendly ships while in battle, giving you an early warning if they decide to team up in order to attack you or your allies.
• Enemy Civil War: The Dominators have three factions who fight each other for territory alongside the Coalition races. Not that it makes much difference from the latter's point of view (as organic life is still doomed if any faction of Dominators comes out on top), but sometimes the player can exploit their conflict, even if it's just scoring a cheap system liberation by picking off the winner of a Dominator-vs-Dominator battle before they can reinforce.
• Enemy Mine: Whenever Klissans/Dominators enter a system, everyone stops fighting and attacks them. Or escapes.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: Investing in projects in business centre is perceived as an act of charity, but they can create stations (improving the defense of systems and making it easier for you to get their services) and help you gain experience (Ranger bases) or Coalition promotion points (military bases). The investments that don't create stations, meanwhile, improve your relations, with donations to the victims of the war being particularly good for this.
• Equipment-Based Progression: While you do have upgradable skills, they're secondary to your ship's equipment, which is the main factor of success in combat.
• Eternal Prohibition: Most non-anarchic non-peleng planets hold to this, with drugs being illegal to trade. Some go a step further and ban alcohol, with these bans being enacted by Maloq/Gaalian dictatorships and monarchies, as well as Faeyan democracies and republics.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Yes, the independent pirates are bad... but they are still part of the Coalition and they still protect systems in case of Klissan/Dominator attack. For this reason, it is strongly recommended not to kill Ranger-pirates on higher difficulties.
  • This applies to ranger-pirates, but not regular pirates. In most cases, regular pirates will just pick up any valuable debris they can reach and then run for their lives.
  • Clan pirates will destroy every installation that isn't theirs when they conquer systems. With the notable exception of Medical stations as even they need good healthcare.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Any player who plays an Anti-Dominator pirate suffers from this. Everyone — as in everyone — will consider you a good source of loot: Pirates, Dominators, Rangers, and even traders will find you a decent opportunity for profit. For endgame players, however, this trope can also be played in an inverted fashion.
  • Heck, even asteroids can become your undoing, seemingly generated by the game specifically to collide with your ship at high speed.
• Evil Debt Collector: Apparently, you become this after your long journey into becoming the new Baron of the pirate armada, allowing you to collect taxes off pirate-controlled planets with ease. At least it's illegal, right?
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The conflict of the pirates with the Dominators. The former rob and kill people, with the Clan in particular wanting to take over all the known planets, but the victory of the latter will result in extinction of all organic life.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: The Dominators in the second game carry their own set of items that's roughly equivalent to what you can buy in stores at that point in the game. Dominator equipment has its own benefits and drawbacks, though — most notable being that while these items might not cost anything initially, and have no racial restriction on micromodules, upgrading and repairing them costs nodes, which can only be acquired by shooting down more Dominators. These items are also typically less reliable than normal store-bought items.
• Exploding Barrels:
  • Fuel cisterns explode if struck by an attack, though they don't deal much damage.
  • The quark bomb isn't a barrel, but it works like one in spirit, as you set it up, then shoot it in order to produce a highly damaging explosion. Notably, it's considered to be an artifact due to its power.
• Explosions in Space: Quark bombs and fuel barrels explode when shot, damaging everything nearby. All spaceships also explode after being destroyed, but they don't damage anything.
• Explosive Overclocking: Some hulls have access to afterburn, which significantly boosts the ship's speed, but causes the engine to break within a matter of days. As such, it's typically used in order to get away from enemies, and only for a day or two at a time.
• Eye Scream: The Banquet allows you stab a Maloq prince in the eye with a fork, then laugh at him. He's rather nonplussed and simply pulls out the fork and stabs you right back in the eye, instantly killing you.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Hyperspace jumps allow a ship to travel to another system in 3-5 days.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: Since the Ranger corps exists only during the time of a great crisis, it is understood that it will be disbanded after you deal with the current threats to the galaxy. The Coalition ending of HD where you only defeat the Dominators makes it more clear, as most of the rangers return back to a peaceful life. You do, however, manage to hire a few ex-rangers into your own security agency.
• Fictional Board Game: Some of the text quests include fictional games, including both reskins and originals. Eeeke Baana is a reskin of Nim. Klugg is a custom-built betting/bluffing game, unique to the universe. Elus is a pattern guessing game, implemented in-universe on a computer. Barabum is a Maloq strategy game that's a version of the fox-and-geese puzzle.
• Fictional Sport: A text quest mentions Hachball. It evolved from from an almost-forgotten Human game of "football" and traditional Pelengan wrestling "Hach-hryap", and appears to have some betting and back-door match rigging.
• Find the Cure!: "Sibulosovt" text quest opens with you getting stung by a poisonous insect, native to the planet you arrived to; it's fatally poisonous to all five races of the Coalition, and, without proper treatment (not available in your conditions), only way to not die within few hours is to find another insect (as the ranger made a mistake of stomping this particular one), and not just any one, but of same sex (in our case, it's male). All while trying to avoid dying from the symptoms worsening, other dangerous wildlife, or simply not fulfilling main objective in time.
• Fission Mailed:
  • The "Lost Hero" quest in the second game has this after your flier crashes. It's easy to see it coming because it happens at the second location, and you don't have many choices in the first location.
  • The "Ministry" quest has one after you try to open the baseement door with your bare hands, only to have the handle fly back into your head. However, your reply is "Game Over" instead of "The life of a great ranger has ended", so it's obviously a joke.
• Game Mod: A War Apart has support for them built in. The most famous one is actually a giant mod pack consisting of ~110 individual mods and known by different names depending on iteration, but it's most commonly referred to as the Shuniverse or Universe Mod and is often considered as close to an actual Space Rangers 3 as we can get with Elemental Games no longer existing. Among many other things the mod brings back the Klissans as a fourth faction (complete with a new storyline about them returning), adds a lot of new equipment/ships and upgrades, a ton of QOL improvements/bug fixes as well as all the non-story related content from the first game, such as the text quests and missions.
  • As of 2023 not everything is translated from Russian and there are currently two rival groups doing separate English ones for, well, messy reasons. The most complete (with the aftermentioned text quests from the first game being a notable exception) is called Space Rangers Universe Original and can be found at this Discord link. While the other is simply known as Space Rangers Universe and can be found here also on Discord.
• Flipping the Bird: The security guard in the "Ministry" quest will flip you off (at least, you think so) if you punch his booth.
• Fork Fencing: The "Banquet" lets you stab the Maloq prince in the eye, with a fork. He'll respond by pulling it out and stabbing you right back.
• Frame-Up: The "Frame-Up" quest tasks you with planting drugs in the apartment of a politician, so that they get found when the cops search it.
• Game-Breaking Injury: Taking damage in space combat can sometimes cause you to suffer an injury, greatly lowering your stats until sufficient time passes or you get it treated at a medical center.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Every time you're arrested, you're thrown into the same Hellhole Prison, regardless of the planet's race. This even includes Gaalians, who are far too humane for such prisons to exist.
  • In the end of "Sibulosovt" text quest, you're told that the cure provided to you now is only temporarily solution, and the poison would resume wracking your body if you don't get a more permanent one (by going back to the questgiver). You're completely free to ignore turning that quest in for the rest of the game, with no risks.
  • During "The Core" planetary battle (part of Pirate Clan storyline), you get told to be careful with where you shoot, as if something breaks, entire planet would explode. The core, along with pipes leading to it, is actually invulnerable; according to the mapmaker, it was supposed to be breakable, but idea was scrapped when it turned out that the pipes are too easy to hit by accident.
  • The Pirate Stations are still considered a part of Coalition faction, so attacking them counts as hostility — despite it being known as pirate den, full of dangerous criminals, and you being advised to avoid it. It's made even more ridiculous in HD version, where there's actual Pirate Clan faction, hostile to Coalition, who receives the reinforcements from pirate bases, yet you still can get into troubles if you attack them.
  • The goal of the "Pilot" quest is to get a license to pilot cargo ships. In the actual game, however, you can freely buy any kind of cargo ship and pilot it with zero legal issues.
• Game Within a Game: Most text-quests can be considered to be games within the game, since they are almost entirely disconnected from the main game, having their own, fully self-contained plots and gameplay mechanisms.
  • An important person is stuck playing an MMORPG. You need to free him of his addiction. The solution? Beat him at the game!
  • One quest that stands out in this regard is one where you are hired to pay a ransom for the release of some guy who got into debt with a local crime gang. This text quest plays out as a miniature game of Space Rangers — except in multiple choice form. You get a truck which you drive around between locations on the map, buying and selling goods, avoiding motor gangs, upgrading your equipment and running into all sorts of random encounters and mini-quests.
  • In another quest you play as a Space Ranger from past. It's just like the main game — but in text-adventure form!
  • And a fourth quest asks you to test a bad virtual reality RPG, so that it can be tuned to your race's brain. You only play the demo, but judging by the claims made at character generation, it has a ridiculous amount of content.
• Gameplay Roulette: Normally a simultaneous turn-based space-based Action RPG, but then sometimes you shift genres into a 3D Shoot 'Em Up, or into a Real-Time Strategy game (which can alternatively be played as a Third-Person Shooter), or an Interactive Fiction game which might range from adventure game to economic simulator. If you want to avoid any of the above, simply don't engage in the relevant activity.
• Gentleman Thief: Ranger-pirates are essentially this, stealing loot from trader ships across the galaxy, but still ultimately striving to put an end to the Klissan/Dominator menace.
• Global Currency Exception: Several text quests that track money will use a distinct currency from credits, so as to prevent you from breaking the intended balance by using your vast bank account to buy everything you need. A few will give you a way to convert credits to local currency, but with a ridiculous exchange rate.
• Golden Ending: Three exist in the HD edition.
  • Defeat the Dominators for the Coalition: After becoming a Living Legend, you reject going into politics. Once the Ranger corps has been disbanded (since the pirates were defeated), you end up founding an elite security agency with your ex-Ranger buddies, which wins fame across the entire galaxy for it's combat prowess. In the end, you retire as a well-respected person.
  • Defeat the pirates: Having realized that the clan's survivors will avenge their baron, you decide to fake your own death with the help of the Coalition, and start with a new identity with enough money and opportunities to do whatever you want. In the end, however, you end up rejoining the Rangers after seeing a recruitment ad.
  • Defeat both the pirates and the Dominators: Same as the above ending, but your retirement only happens after an assassination attempt.
• Government Conspiracy: Some corrupt members of the Coalition collaborate with the Clan, and their fingers run very deep, to the point that they're able to hinder the anti-pirate agency. And as the ending of the Clan questline reveals, one of the admirals is working with the baron in order to become one of the galaxy's rulers.
• Gratuitous English: Used frequently in the Russian version, primarily in regards to micromodules
• Guide Dang It!: Many of the text adventure segments of the second game completely lack obvious hints, or even hints at all, about how to get through them, necessitating either brute-force trial and error or a guide.
  • For instance, the "Megatest" quest demands you to pass a Ranger exam, and several of the questions in there demand you to go back to the first game and its quests. A few other questions also don't have clear answers stated in the game, meanwhile, such as the one that asks you to choose a correct line for a Maloq song, and another that asks how to greet a peleng (which, even with sufficient info, has you choose between a handshake or folding your arms on your chest and nodding, the latter being correct). This is even lampshaded in the quest itself, as Ranger trainees consistently fail to pass it.
• Hack Your Enemy: Being machines, the weaker Dominators are susceptible to viruses and other malicious software that you can upload to achieve various effects. The "science" path to beating each of the three bosses actually involves this trope in some way.
• Harder Than Hard: Difficulty options normally go from 50% to 200%. However, in HD version, it's possible to unlock more difficulty options, allowing you to go up to 500%. At maximum difficulty, the game becomes impossible without cheating (by dumping your save to see what's where, and abusing known exploits and cheesy tactics) and constant Save Scumming, as the galaxy will be grinded into paste by the Dominators without your help.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • The higher the total difficulty is, the bigger the quotient to multiply your points would be. Additionally, more enemies means more experience and loot (once you gear up enough to manage them), and Enemy Mine becomes much easier to utilize; while narrowing the prices range makes it harder to trade, but drastically increases amount of exp you receive from it.
  • When accepting planetary battle, you may pick either more frequent reinforcements, or bonus armour for your units; denying both increases money and experience reward.
• Hate Plague: Holy Fanaticism makes the diseased person see Dominators everywhere (with normal ships and gear being replaced with their Dominator equivalents), along with suffering fits of madness.
• Haunted House: In one of the text quests, the player is hired to help a company with a "project". When they arrive at the company HQ, they find an abandoned mansion and get trapped inside. They have to fight horrifying monsters and experience the tragic story of a young female Peleng's ghost. In the end, it is all revealed to have been the company's newest amusement ride, which the player was unwittingly hired to test.
• Have a Nice Death:
  • Dying in normal gameplay will explain what happened, tell you that your family has received your life insurance, and show a picture of your funeral (which depends on race).
  • All deaths in text quests are uniquely described, and your reply in all cases is the same - "The life of a great ranger has ended".
• Hellhole Prison: Exaggerated by the fact that every prison in the galaxy, regardless of race, is one - the warden is evil, the security guards take any excuse to beat and rob prisoners, and your fellow inmates will often mug or steal from you.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: There are several weapons capable of hitting multiple enemies at once.
  • Atomic Vision creates a sphere that hurts everything inside of it.
  • Turbogravir causes anything killed by it to release a huge electrical discharge that jumps to nearby enemies — potentially killing those as well and propagating the effect even further.
  • The Dominators have their special weapons, Vertix (creates a massive energy wave around the ship) and IMHO-9000 (powerful, but short-ranged cannon with serious splash damage), which are designed to fight enemy fleets and are only installed on bigger ships. It's possible to loot those and install on your own ship, but they're tend to be very heavy.
• Heroic Build: In the "Testing" quest, your avatar in the VR game turns out to be a human male built like an intimidating thug.
• High Times Future: While mostly averted, drugs are considered legal in Human monarchies and Faeyan dictatorships. The same applies to anarchies and peleng planets, but these places are too lawless to ban anything in the first place.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Baron Chuskach tries to kill you and other troublesome Clan members in the final quest of the Clan questline, by locking down the system and having Durdym lay siege to Rogeria. Instead, your attempts to survive result in him being either arrested in the pro-Coalition ending, or killed in the pro-Clan endings.
• Hollywood Density: All items have a minimum weight of one ton, and quest items often have weights higher than that, even for items meant to be liftable by a single person. This can result in, say, a planetary shield remote (which looks like a TV remote) weighing 2 tons, with the receiving government official having no issue using it.
• Horrible Judge of Character: The Pirate Clan never questions your status as a Ranger when you join it (even though you're the only Ranger in it), nor does anybody try to verify whether you did your quests honestly, even when it should be obvious, such as when you defend a system from Dominators that were supposed to destroy a business centre. This allows you to climb up the ranks with a clean conscience, and allows you to eventually get close enough to the baron and the corrupt admiral Durdym, possibly getting the former arrested and the latter killed.
• Hover Mecha: Robots in planetary battles can be put on an "acroplane"-type chassis, resulting in this.
• Human Popsicle: Screw up too many quests to get promoted to Khan in the Pirate Clan questline, and that'll be your fate if you accept the Honorary Ataman rank.
• Incomprehensible Entrance Exam: The "Megatest" quest tasks you to test an exam for rangers, as trainees keep failing it. Judging by the questions, it's no wonder they keep failing it, as the questions in there ask about extremely minor things (Maloq songs) and irrelevant trivia (klissan classifications, even though the war ended 300 years ago), or demand answers that go against common sense (if you're overwhelmed by dominators, the correct answer on the test is to go for a suicidal charge, instead of retreating or calling for reinforcements). All of this is justified by the fact that it was designed by a maloq.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Hulls of the "Ideal" series have all slots unlocked. At the same time, they're a rare find, and are rather costly
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The old unique hulls that have to be enabled in the settings, as they have steep requirements to even purchase in the first place, and are extremely costly. If you do pay for them, however, you end up with a large ship that has all the slots unlocked, and also comes with several stat bonuses.
  • The Shadow of the Empire hull requires getting lucky with finding a crystal on an uninhabited planet, and it still costs a lot to buy afterwards. Howeve, it has nearly all the slots available (except for two weapon slots), and comes with several unique abilities.
• Interface Screw: A few diseases will alter the way things look:
  • Blindness will turn objects transparent, making them difficult to see
  • Holy Fanaticism will make ships and equipment appear like Dominators.
• Interface Spoiler: The fact that the "Easy Work" quest is not a simple delivery quest is spoiled by the fact that you have the option to reject it outright, something that is only available for text quests and planetary battles. There's also the fact that you're being promised a much higher payout than a delivery quest should have, as well as not having an item deposited into your inventory upon accepting.
• Intrepid Merchant: Ranger-traders, who combine trading with performing missions and fighting the Klissans/Dominators/Pirate Clan. You can also get in on the action.
• Irrelevant Sidequest: Two types of missions — cargo delivery and planetary text-adventures — have no impact on the game beyond your bank account (and possibly a secondary reward item which could make you more powerful). The other three — assassination, escorting a ship and defending a system — can have marginal impact if your interference causes or prevents the target from doing something helpful or harmful within a system.
• It's Up to You: Downplayed, as while the Coalition can capture systems on their own, the Dominator bosses can only be killed if the player is in the same system as them, and most NPCs are hopelessly outmatched against them
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Rangers have the full authority to kill pirates on the spot, which is recognized by all non-peleng planets, and are rewarded for it with points towards promotions. This is in contrast to military ships, who will destroy pirates only if they resist arrest or are actively attacking a ship.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • Rangers are allowed to kill pirates on the spot, and doing so will give them points towards promotions in the Coalition military. However, peleng planets don't recognize this authority, and will treat it as a crime, possibly leading to you being thrown in prison for killing pirates.
  • If you're hostile with multiple planets in a system, the various military ships will demand that you land on their planet. As such, they'll shoot at you while you're surrendering to another planet.
• Karma Meter: Your rating serves as a downplayed version of this, indicating your tendency towards being a pirate, warrior, and/or trader. They determine what quests and medals you can receive, and rapid advancements in a rating will grant you an experience bonus (warrior or trader) or penalty (pirate).
  • Warrior rating is increased via "good" military accomplishments - killing enemies of the Coalition (pirates and Dominators/Klissans), funding the construction of military bases, and freeing systems for the Coalition.
  • Pirate rating is increased via crime - killing Coalition members, selling contraband, robbing ships, funding the construction of pirate bases, buying nodes/protoplasma from pirates, and repairing at pirate bases. It also grants you a discount when repairing at pirate bases.
  • Trader rating is increased via honest trading activities - selling legal trade goods at a profit, funding business centres, taking out loans and paying for them, and turning in Dominator parts at science stations.
• Kill the Creditor: If you took a bank loan, one way to avoid payment is to blow up all the business centres. This is rather difficult in most cases, but works wonders if most of the systems are occupied by pirates or Dominators.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: In the beginning to mid-game stages, rocket launchers rule. They are light, have a very long range, and deliver appreciable damage. By the late-game however, more exotic weapons like the "Vertix" and "Turbo-Gravir" take the lead.
  • Shrapnel weapons are quite effective in the mid-to-late game. The Fragment Cannon hits hard and scales excellently with tech levels while being quite cheap. Then you get Flow Blasters with their awesome range, and Multi-Resonators with their splash damage — both very effective in Hyperspace, too. After that there are only energy weapons left.
• King of Thieves: The baron of the Pirate Clan serves as one, with them having uncountable influence over the criminal underworld and the Coalition. Chuskach is the current baron, and you can replace him after completing the Clan's quest line.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The "Megatest" quest in the HD edition asks you to pass a test that Ranger trainees constantly keep failing. Because the questions in there depend on you playing the first game, and also going through all the text quests in both games, a newbie player will also keep failing the test, while an experienced one with good memory can pass it with ease.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: Stabbing the Maloq prince in the eye with a fork during the "Banquet" quest will result in him pulling the fork right out, then taking an eye for an eye.
• Long-Range Fighter: Ships with missile weapons benefit from an extremely high range. However, they suffer in close combat due to limited ammo, low damage, needing at least two turns to hit the enemy (as the rockets spend their first turn locking onto them), the rockets being destructible, and only being able to attack one enemy at a time.
• Loot-Making Attack:
  • There is a combat program that causes a Dominator to drop a random piece of equipment ripe for the taking.
  • In Space Rangers HD, some Pirate-made weapons have a small chance of forcing the target to drop something from their cargo bay.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • A few of the text adventure mini-games can render themselves unwinnable due to bad die rolls. Justified in some cases, as in the "Casino" quest.
  • If you want to escape prison while being transported there, doing so relies on randomly getting lucky while trying to shoot one of the guards. Failing to land the shot will cause you to be killed on the spot.
  • The "Cybermind" quest is an extreme case, as there's no safe branch, and you have at least a 12.5% chance of dying to pure randomness (or even 50% in some branches). If you don't want to reload your save after dying, doing the quest is effectively akin to gambling with your life.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Stabbing the Maloq prince's eye out with a fork in the "Banquet" quest will result in him just casually talking about how he'll just have his eye reconstructed, right before pulling the fork out and killing you with it. Of course, given that Maloqs are established to be very tough, it's understandable.
• Malicious Slander: During the "Elections" text quest, you may try to use slander to hurt your opponent's position and reinforce your own. It can be tried more than once, but has a chance to backfire on repeat uses.
• The Many Deaths of You: While there are few ways to get a game over in normal gameplay (usually by getting your ship blown up), the text quests have hundreds of ways to die, even in quests that lack any obvious danger (such as passing out or getting too drunk in "Musical Festival", thus getting murdered by the local delinquents).
• Marathon Level: The final text quest of the Pirate storyline is extremely long, to the point that it offers you two checkpoints in order to avoid losing all your progress if you die.
• Masochist's Meal: Faryuks are considered to be delicacies, with even a single one being extremely expensive (on par with a large gem), as they're only produced on a single planet. The "Faryuks" quest shows that they also have an extremely awful stench, with everybody on the farm (even the rats) wearing a gas mask, and even that not being enough to fully block out the smell.
• Medal of Dishonor:
  • Failing quests and destroying innocent ships will lead to you being given special medals for it, all of them meant to shame you for your behavior.
  • The Honorary Ataman rank is given by the Pirate Clan to those who fail too many Khan promotion quests with anybody accepting it being immediately frozen.
• Medals for Everyone:
  • Once a system is liberated by the Coalition or captured by the Pirate Clan, every participant will head to a specific planet in order to receive their awards, usually consisting of medals, micromodules, and anti-dominator programs.
  • Defeating any of the enemy factions will result in you being told to head to a Ranger Centre in your parade uniform. Once there, you'll be congratulated and given a medal.
• Mental Time Travel: One of the text quests sends your mind back to the 22nd century.
• Midair Repair: Repair bots (or "droids", if you will) will restore a ship's integrity with each turn, even in thick of battle. Needless to say, they are almost mandatory for any kind of space combat.
  • The title screen of one of the versions of the second game depicts two droids that endlessly repair a ranger spaceship in decidedly Star Wars-like manner. Until they accidentally take off the ship's wing, that is.
  • Normal droids, unfortunately, don't work in arcade-based hyperspace battles... but there's a rare artifact that does, and fixes the ship in real-time.
• Mind Virus: A few of the diseases you can catch have a mental effect:
  • Holy Fanaticism makes you obsessed with Dominators, seeing them everywhere, along with suffering fits of madness.
  • The Sad Pelenosha makes you so hopeless with tech that your ship's equipment starts rapidly breaking down.
  • The Mysterious Luatancia removes your ability to rob ships.
  • Chekumash makes you randomly see hallucinations in space.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: In the "Easy Work" quest, a failure of the client's representative to appear leads to you discovering a plot to fatally scan the brains of rangers and soldiers in order to create a new series of dominators, with the deliveries being a way to lure in victims, the latest one being intended to be you.
• Mini-Boss:
  • Bertors for the Dominators, with their huge size and good equipment, along with the abilities to buff nearby ships and create kligs.
  • Flagships for the Coalition, with a similarly large size and lots of equipment, along with the ability to use nodes for repair (both equipment and hull) or a buff to a ship.
• Mini-Game: Lots of. Text quests? Check. Arcade battles? Check. A 3D Real-Time Strategy game with an optional element of Third-Person Shooter? Check.
• Mirror Match: At the end of the Haunted House text quest, you have to fight a demonic but really, just holographic evil version of yourself, armed with the same weapon you are.
• Mole in Charge:
  • Chuskach, the baron of the Pirate Clan, is secretly collaborating with some members of the Coalition in their plan to unite both factions and rule the galaxy.
  • After killing the admiral in the baron promotion quest, thus destroying the Clan, you still become the baron, though you're effectively powerless due to sending the Clan into disarray.
• Money for Nothing: While averted during normal gameplay (as you constantly need money to upgrade your equipment, and endgame repair bills can be extremely high), text quests don't account for galactic inflation, and tend to price things so that they're affordable in the early game. Thus, it's possible for a quest to ask you to pay 300 credits, all while you already possess 100k credits.
• Multiple Endings: HD added several, depending on your choices during the pirate story-line and whether you did or did ignore your Ranger duties.
• Near-Rape Experience: If, while jailed, you encounter an attempted rape of the prison nurse, it's possible to tell the perpetrators to walk away. If you have a sufficiently high respect with prisoners, they will comply.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: During the last parts of the Clan quest line, you find out that Durdym, one of the Coalition's admirals, is working with the Clan, but is untouchable due to his position. However, the final quest involves the baron helping Durdym attack Rogeria in order to eliminate all the troublesome pirates. This gives you an opening to sneak onto the admiral's base, allowing you to kill him in order to destroy the Clan and arrest the baron.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • Couple cheats from first game (both pirates-themed) have negative side effects, subtly punishing the player for cheating (these specific ones boost firepower), by severely dropping everyone's opinion on the player (by 50-60%); one of them (called "Sell the soul" in-game) also turns you into pirate, even if you had other personality before.
  • In the first game, and early versions of second one, there was limit on how many cheats you can use; all of them have a cost in certain "cheat points", which you slowly accumulate at the rate of 1 point per day spent without cheating; using the cheat resets the counter. The price ranges from 10 or couple of dozens for weaker ones, to few hundreds for "major" ones (like equipment size reduction). The second game eventually scrapped that system, albeit it still notifies you of how many points you used. Additionally, HD version removed cheat codes for planetary battles, as the game has no means to track you cheating there, and thus disqualify unfair playthroughs from going to the leaderboard.
• Non-Combat EXP: In the sequel, besides combat, one can obtain experience via delivery and text quests, turning in nodes (although it's produced as the result of combat, you can scavenge it from battlefields), trading at a profit while avoiding bad deals, and funding the construction of ranger centres at the business centre.
• Non-Indicative Name: The questions of rent in the "Ministry" quest are handled by the chief of the transport department, for whatever reason.
• Non-Standard Game Over: The typical game over is having your ship destroyed. However, there are also other ways to get a game over:
  • If a settled planet is taken over by the Klissans/Dominators while you're on it, you'll die instantly.
  • Downloading Terron into your brain, which leads to you either dying on the spot or becoming a Dominator. Either way, your game ends.
  • Accepting the rank of Honorary Ataman due to screwing up Khan quests will result in you getting frozen, serving as an example of failure for the Pirate Clan.
  • Many text quests allow for the possibility of dying, though this is mitigated by the game always autosaving before you start one. In an even more non-standard way, a few text quests also give you a game over if the quest's events make it impossible for you to continue being a ranger, even though you remain alive.
• Noticing the Fourth Wall: The "Banquet" quest implies that this is what happens to the peleng server if you ask him as to when the next part of "Space Rangers" comes out, as he starts flashing to the releases of the real games in 2002, 2004, and (if you play HD) 2013, with him eventually having a mental breakdown in confusion.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The "Ministry" quest is all about dealing with them - the guard imagines himself to be a communist guerrilla and refuses to talk until you put a side cap on, the secretary is unhelpful (as she's not aware that the clerk is in the toilet rather than the basement) to the point that you have to beat her in strip 21 so that you can steal the side cap, the clerk sits in the toilet and refuses to open the door (unless you tell him that you have an important government task), the common sense test is inane (and seems to be a way to get a bribe out of you), the whole thing with the documents turns out to be pointless because rent questions are handled by the chef of the transport department, and the chief himself fails to give you time to explain yourself, forcing you to catch a fish so that he gives you some time.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • To fight with popular scheme of players buying tons of goods by cheap price, stockpiling them all on the planet and later selling when price goes up due to artificial deficit you've created, one of the patches for first game made it so goods in the storage now count towards total amount of goods on the planet, thus reducing the selling price. This practice was carried over into second game. Due to an oversight, however, this doesn't apply to stations, but they don't have large quantities of goods to begin with.
  • Using a Transfactor Beacon gives you radiation sickness. It's an incurable disease that lasts a couple months (the more you use the beacons, the longer it lasts) and dramatically reduces any experience you receive. This change came as a response to an exploit where, once you get a cool enough ship, you can load it with Vertixes, IMHO-9000s and Resonators and destroy entire crowds of enemies very quickly. Getting a load of Transfactor Beacons and summoning huge clouds of enemies used to be an insanely effective way of experience farming. The sickness was eventually weakened and then removed outright, replaced with other countermeasure.
  • The weight of Turbo Gravirs and IMHOs dropped by Dominator ships was increased in Reboot (each weighs at least 100) after veteran players found it too easy to rock 4-5 of them as early as 4 years into a game, even at 200% difficulty. For some reason, the Turbogravirs you get from wormholes weren't covered by this patch, and weigh much less than the ones you can get in real-space.
  • The game tracks you using cheats in real space, rendering your run ineligible for record tables, or earning achievements. However, planetary battles weren't programmed to register cheat codes in any way, letting players to abuse those for easy money and experience without disqualifying themselves. To fight this, a patch for HD version removed cheat codes from planetary battles altogether.
• Opening the Sandbox: Only a small portion of the sectors is initially open. If you want to unlock sectors, you have to buy maps from the planetary governments in adjacent sectors.
• Orgy of Evidence: If you plant the drugs in the open in the "Frame-Up" quest (such as by dropping them on the floor), you'll fail the quest, as the cops realize that you were framing your target.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Fly into a wormhole in one system and exit to another, after surviving a shooting mini-game with potentially valuable equipment and artifacts as your reward.
• Outlaw Town: Pirate bases serve as this, with their services being mostly useful to pirates and smugglers. Any system taken over by the pirate clan also serves as a large-scale example of the trope.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The main tone of the game is that of a somewhat light-hearted sci-fi romp, with some comic relief. However, a few quests differ from that.
  • The "Cybermind" quest is a full-blown "AI gone bad" horror that never lets up and contrasts greatly with the usual tone of the game. It also has a blatantly supernatural event, with the protagonist being forced to move while fully conscious.
  • "Master of Ikee-Baana" uses the justification of the player character playing a virtual reality MMORPG to justify a very sudden turn towards a (rather parodic) High Fantasy role-playing game experience, complete with an impressively complex magic system, character stats to increase, a whole inventory's worth of magic items to find, quests to finish and monsters to fight.
  • The premise of the "Hallucinations" quest is based in the supernatural, with a planet that makes the thoughts of sapient beings (primarily their fears) come true. Thus, it has a ton of bizarre occurences happen outside of hallucinations/virtual reality, including a few obviously unnatural ones (such as a flask shattering when it shouldn't be capable of doing so).
• Pacifist Run: It's entirely possible to win the game without ever destroying any ship, with HD even having an achievement for doing so.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Encouraged against independent pirates, as there's little punishment for attacking and robbing them (even Peleng planets will care only if you blow them up), except for pissing off other independent pirates (but not Clan pirates). If you're in the Coalition, you'll even gain promotion points for killing them.
• Planetville: All planets are treated as having a single unified government. However, incidental dialogue in text quests reveals that Earth still retains distinct countries, as a man tells you to go to Russia if you pester him too much.
• Police Are Useless: Each Coalition planet has its own armed peacekeeping fleet, but it is rarely deployed for day-to-day peacekeeping — which is why you often get missions to patrol a system against pirates for a few months. The fleet will sometimes scramble to take down wanted pirates, but most of the time they stay down on the planet and there is no way to call for their assistance.
  • If a planet doesn't like you personally, they're more likely to send their ships to hunt you down just for being nearby, instead of the raiding pirates in question.
• People Puppets: The "Cybermind" quest has the titular AI be capable of that. Fortunately, it's possible to break free, as the Player Character and a security guard have managed to do so.
• Phony Veteran: The security guard in the "Ministry" quest is implied to be this, as he still acts like a communist revolutionary, and regales you with wild tales of his partisan exploits.
• Poor Communication Kills: The "Volcanic Island" quest has you get confronted by the native chieftain and his warriors. While he's actually very easy to placate with polite behavior, you're also given the option to kill him in what seems to be self-defense due to his aggressive behavior. This then escalates into you killing all the natives, setting fire to their village, and blowing up the island.
• POW Camp: An unusual variation in that a regular prison is used as one - because waging war against the Coalition/Pirate Clan is treated exactly the same as commiting ordinary crimes against them, being captured as an enemy soldier will get you thrown into a civilian prison.
• Prefer Jail to the Protagonist: Because pirates don't take their relationships with planets into account while choosing a place on, it's possible to damage them so badly that they'd rather go to prison than risk death or a chase.
• Press Start to Game Over: Nearly every text quest will give you the option to immediately chicken out from the very moment it starts, with quite a few killing you for that (due to the people giving you the briefing taking the refusal really badly). Some also have opportunities to die right from the start, such as if you attempt escape while being transported to prison, only to get shot by the guards.
• Prisoner Performance: Prison will have a concert each day, with each performance being oriented towards a specific race, with the human part being the closest to this trope. You can take part in it in order to improve your reputation among inmates, and possibly among the administration and guards.
• Prisoner's Work: You can work in prison in order to improve your relationship with the administration (possibly securing an early release), though your fellow inamtes will look down upon you.
• Prison Level: Each time you get arrested, you're thrown into a text quest about your time in prison. Serving your time is the standard way of ending it, but you can also try to escape or get an early release.
• Prisons Are Gymnasiums: When sent to prison, one of the main activities you can do is working out. Not only does this help you survive various encounters and be better at shaking your fellow inmates for money, it can also secure you an early release if you win the prison's fighting tournament.
• Product Delivery Ordeal: The "Easy Work" starts this way - the client's representative fails to meet you, and you don't know where your client is, forcing you to find their address on your own. Then the client fails to make a stamp to confirm delivery. Then he gets murdered, forcing you to destroy a cult in order to finally get your stamp and be able to get paid.
• Psycho Serum: The stimulators that you can take at medical centers are extremely powerful, granting large boosts to your abilities. However, they're all addictive, and some also have negative effects.
• Rainbow Speak: Words in text quests will be highlighted in blue/yellow (depending on whether you use the dark or white background) if they mention your name, are related to the terms of your quest (names of planets and systems, your payment, deadline to finish the quest), or are important to the quest itself.
• Random Drop: Semi-averted. You can usually scan enemy ships to see what kind of equipment they have. However when their ships explode, what is salvageable depends on what weapon finished off the ship, how much money you have, what day it is, etc. — in short, how lucky you are.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The trio of prisoners who may try to rape the prison nurse while you're jailed are noted to be hated by other prisoners, and you'll gain respect with your fellow inmates if you stop them.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: The "Hallucinations" quest has you find out that the planet you're on has the propensity of making people's thoughts (especially fears) come true. This has caused the local scientific expedition to fail, as everybody succumbed to their fears. The Player Character, meanwhile, ends up losing track of their ship due to being afraid of not finding it, forcing them to survive on the planet until rescuers arrive.
• Real-Time with Pause: Simultaneous Turn Resolution. During space battles, the game pauses at the beginning of each "day". You choose a direction to fly, as well as which weapons will fire at which target. Then unpause, and watch all spaceships in the battle duke it out simultaneously. Correctly anticipating where the enemies will end up at the beginning of the next day is crucial.
• Recursive Canon: Apparently the real games do exist in the canon of the series, as the "Banquet" quest allows you to ask a peleng as to when the next game comes out. The resulting visions involve him having flashes of when the real games being released, which greatly confuses him.
• Regenerating Health: Droids provide it for your ship. However, they don't fix equipment and will themselves break sooner or later, so you'll still eventually have to land on a planet or station for repairs.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Downplayed. One of the text adventures in the first game has an experimental time travel device that allows the player character to relive the previous day, but they will forget everything that had happened the previous time around due to so-called "temporal amnesia". However, the player character will still experience a strong Déjà Vu effect when reliving the events for the second time.
• Robot War: The second game takes place during one, with the Dominators suddenly emerging 6 years prior to the game's start, and attacking the Coalition for various reasons:
  • Blazer wants to destroy any form of life that isn't like it.
  • Terron wants to convert everything into terronoids.
  • Keller wants to study things by disassembling them.
• Rockers Smash Guitars: In one of optional text quests you must create a band for participation in a musical contest. During the concert proper, you can smash your guitar in order to fire up the crowd. It does get you a lot of fan support, but not only does It Only Works Once (because the show's team has no more spares), it also degrades the quality of your music, because of an unfamiliar and quite crappy guitar your guitar player will have to use after having their own destroyed.
• Rule of Fun: Space is Noisy. The ships and stations are a little too big compared to the planets. Each planet is like a single city, with only one type of economy and political stance. Hyperspace is an arcade minigame. But who cares? As long as players have fun playing it.
• Running Both Sides: The Coalition-Clan war is being secretly manipulated by top-ranking members in both the Clan and the Coalition, which is why some systems get ignored while others get attacked, and some Coalition politicians get kicked out by the Clan while others are allowed to work for it. As you find out at the end, this is done in order to merge both factions, allowing baron Chuskach and admiral Durdym to Take Over the World.
• Running Gag: Your 10k life insurance (or 20k, if you paid for the business centre) gets a few mentions in text quests, usually before getting into a life-threatening situation (or even right after dying). In one humorous instance, you reminiscence of your family getting the insurance as a door's handle (which you accidentally yanked off) is flying back into your forehead, only for you to merely get a bruise from it.
• Sanity Meter: The "Ranger's Bad Day" and "Hallucinations" quest track the player's sanity, which functions as a second health meter. If it runs out, the quest will be immediately failed.
• Save Scumming: For a lot of things, like government-issued quest rewards, artifacts gained for completing a black-hole minigame, rare micromodules for sale at Ranger Centers, and drops from destroyed enemies. That last one is extremely important, especially at harder difficulties where it is vital to get the best equipment in the shortest amount of (in-game) time possible.
• Schmuck Bait: If you screw up too many quests to get promoted to Khan, you'll get offered a promotion to Honorary Ataman and a peaceful retirement. Retirement in a cryo chamber, that is.
• Sci-Fi Horror: The "Cybermind" quest, which features an evil AI that seems to hate all living life, and is capable of making zombies and taking over the bodies of people.
• Sequel Hook: In the HD edition, the ending where you defeat the pirates results in you finding a Ranger recruitment ad, even if you've defeated the Dominators, hinting that a new threat to the galaxy has emerged. Unfortunately, since SNK has been disbanded, there's no hope of a sequel coming out.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens:
  • The Dominators in the second game.
    • Blazer has an absolute hatred for anything that isn't like it, so it desires to wipe it out
    • Terron is obsessed with replicating itself, using everything else as components.
    • Keller desires to study everything, not caring for the destructiveness of it's research methods.
  • Makhpella is also this, until you manage to talk to it. As it turns out, Makhpella believed our spaceships were intelligent, and that we (the humanoids flying them) were a disease. It simply tried to eradicate the disease in order to help the spaceships. Once you explain this, Makhpella actually apologizes.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: You can spend money to repair your reputation at planets. Even if a planet's military is hostile towards you, you can contact one of their ships and offer money to end their hostility. This can be even used to get rid of murder charges. In particular, it's possible to use business centres to donate to the victims of the war. This improves relations with all planets, even if you're part of the Pirate Clan and thus responsible for creating the war's victims.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Some of the text quests let you escape right at the beginning. Some give you a chance in the middle. Sometimes you can do it at any moment.
  • Other Rangers do this all the time when attacked by a superior force. Even mercenary Rangers you've hired to fight alongside you might run away at the first sign of danger, making them effectively worthless.
• Sdrawkcab Name:
  • One of text quests involves investigating a tribe of Akabos, who are basically anthropoid dogs. The name is backwards for "sobaka", Russian for "dog". Three named members of the tribe are Kibob, Kizut and Kirash — backwards for "Bobik", "Tuzik" and "Sharik", Russian stock names for dogs.
  • One of the assassination quests involves neutralizing a ship that pretended to be a Dominator in order to steal from a city. The ship's name is "Labean", which is backwards for "Naebal", a Russian swear word that can be translated in the context as "(I) fucking scammed (you)". It's also a common name in Russia for organizations created for the sole purpose of performing a scam.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism:
  • The Absolute Weapon program will give the targeted dominator a self-destruct order, causing them to instantly explode.
  • The "Diver" quest has you deal with one of these, as the station you're infiltrating trips up the self-destruct in response to your intrusion. Fortunately, it's possible to turn it off if you collect all the keycards.
• Sex Slave: In the first game's text quest "Spy", it's possible to run into a group of Depraved Homosexuals (no explanation is given what they're doing in the president's palace), who would decide to appropriate you as their new "toy"; picking the wrong door when escaping from them would result in them capturing you, and putting on a chain in a cage for the rest of your (mercifully short) life; it counts as your ranger dying, and triggers an immediate Non-Standard Game Over.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The whole dance with the bureaucracy in the "Ministry" quest turns out to be pointless, because the documents you obtain have nothing to do with rent, and these issues are handled by the chief of the transport department. And catching fish for him turns out to be pointless, because he would've just helped you if you asked (though he fails to give you the time to explain yourself earlier).
• Shop Fodder:
  • Two micromodules (one generic, and stronger Gaalian-only variant) exists solely to increase the price of equipment, letting you to get better profit from selling it afterwards.
  • Klissans (in first game) and Dominators (in second), besides equipment usable by your ship, may also drop smaller pieces which would highly interest the scientists (as it advances research program), who would pay you their full price (or even twice more for particularly valuable items). Once research gets finished, those may still be sold for extra money. Dominators also drop nodes, which essentially serve as secondary currency, to fund researches, buy micromodules and repair Dominator equipment.
• Shout-Out: Lots of.
  • Maloqsoft is a software company that produces really crappy software.
  • Linux is the name of a planet, as well as the name for superior software.
  • One space-disease causes the player to hallucinate images of space objects that are not really there. Don't be surprised if you see Babylon 5 or the Death Star hanging around in a star system you've just entered.
  • One of the text adventures in the first game features a race of sapient birds called the alkaris.
  • One delivery mission has you carry a power source in the shape of a little golden ring to another planet, where a "Volcano" generator has been set up to receive it. The person who issues the mission is an old professor with a wide-brimmed hat and long grey beard called Gen-Doolf, and he is looking for a short Ranger with hairy feet and a pure heart to carry out the task. You're also urged to gather escorts from all the five Coalition races to protect you, because the notorious pirate Siriman is also after this ring. Ring any bells yet?
  • The "Volcanic Island" quest has you go around collecting keycards in the normal route. Eventually, your character will start thinking of a video game, the description of which makes it clear that it's [1].
  • Many achievements' names are references to various songs, movies, books, etc, with original Russian version mostly referencing Russian and Soviet works.
• Simultaneous Warning and Action: While normally averted with military ships, who'll simply escort you if you decide to surrender (by setting a route to their planet), their inability to instantly change actions in response to yours means that they'll spend a turn shooting at you if you start out within their weapon's range, and then decide to surrender.
• Socketed Equipment: All pieces of equipment (except artifacts) can have a single micromodule inserted into them, which improve certain statistics of the item, sometimes at the expense of others. Adding nuance is the fact that many micromodules have racial restrictions, and that unknown equipment isn't compatible with any micromodules.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: The conflict between the Pirate Clan and the Coalition has shades of this:
  • The Pirates are Warriors, with their members even being officially called warrior-pirates. Their warriors rely on overwhelming numbers and have a lot more personal initiative, with them often taking the opportunity to grab items or mug a passing ship. However, they're also much more cowardly, and it's very hard for them to organize offensive operations or come to the defense of an attacked system. Their victory condition is to simply capture all systems of the Coalition.
  • The Coalition is a Soldier faction. Their military is much more disciplined and brave, doesn't get sidetracked, and is better at organizing offensive operations. Their victory condition is to have a ranger infiltrate the Clan, rise to the top ranks, and then destroy the Clan from within.
  • The Ranger Corps, though part of the Coalition, is Warrior with a few shades of Soldier, as everyone has a high amount of personal initiative, having to equip themselves out of their own pocket, and they tend to be far less disciplined than the military. However, they're still part of the Coalition's military structure, with the ability to receive promotions and pay for military operations, and their freedom to act makes it far easier for them to come to the defense of systems under attack, as well as allowing the player to be the one who can defeat the Dominators and the Pirate Clan, something that a conventional military wouldn't be able to do.
• Solve the Soup Cans: The text quests commonly have these thrown at you. The "Testing" quest, in particular, allows you to lampshade this when an old man tries to make you answer a riddle in exchange for his gauss gun, as you can respond simply by grabbing him and ranting about how every idiot on every planet tries to shove a puzzle down your throat, which may get him to give the gun away for free.
• Space Friction: Overloading a ship or removing the engine will make it instantly come to a complete stop, even if it was traveling at its maximum speed.
• Space Is Air: Ships turn around just like aircraft, and have a limit on their speed
• Space Pirates: Three kinds; regular criminals who go around attacking ships, members of the Pirate Clan, and Space Rangers who choose this way of life. The player can be a pirate too.
  • Many Peleng are space pirates, since their culture values personal freedom above all and thus holds pirates, thieves and other professional criminals in high regard. Maloqs consider pirates to be largely the same as regular merchants — but more honorable because there's shooting involved.
  • In the HD Remake, pirates now form a fourth hostile faction comparable in threat to the Dominators. However they do fight against the Dominators, and can occasionally "free" star systems from their control — to establish their own rule. Still, pirate-owned systems are less hostile than Dominator-owned systems, where everything tries to destroy you without question.
• Space Sector: The map is divided into sectors, which contain systems. This mostly matters for the purpose of purchasing maps.
• Space Station: Stations are common structures, all specialized for certain roles and providing protection for the system they're in.
• Space Trucker: The transport ships fill this role, with human transports even being referred to as truckers
• Spiritual Successor: To Star Wars. Not the behemoth franchise, but a small indie game no one except the developers have heard about. The enemies were going to be named "Klings" in homage to it, but this was changed to avoid similarity to Star Trek.
• Spiteful A.I.: Both Dominators and pirates will (if given the chance) shoot and blow up dropped equipment rather than let it fall into your hands. Even rival Rangers jealous of your success might do this, if they are within range.
• The Spook: The unknown ships found in black holes. Nothing is known about their race (assuming there's a pilot inside), their motives for attacking Coalition ships, whether they exist outside of black holes, and why their equipment works better with artifacts.
• Starting Equipment:
  • Every starting option is guaranteed to provide you with an engine, fuel tank, gripper and radar, all of tier-1 by default. Some starting options either provide extra equipment (like Human warriors being equipped with defense field generator), or improve the quality of default equipment (like Peleng warriors starting with tier-3 engine).
  • You're guaranteed to start with at least one weapon. If your starting option doesn't provide you with specific weapons (like Peleng pirate starting with missile launcher), you would receive tier-1 Industrial Laser instead, which is pretty much the weakest weapon in the game, and, as the name suggests, only suitable for asteroid mining.
  • When starting new game, you would receive two pieces of equipment of your choice for free; those would be of tier-2 level. On easier difficulties, those would also be upgraded.
• Stock Puzzle: Some text adventures include various forms of stock puzzles. They are played up as part of tournaments that grant galactic prestige.
• Stop, or I Will Shoot!: If you're hostile to a planet, their military ships will demand that you land on their planet. If you don't, they'll immediately respond by trying to destroy your ship. This is justified by the fact that there's no other way to stop your ship, as well as your ship almost always being armed, possibly to the point of being a One-Man Army.
• Storming the Castle: The final quest of the Pirate Clan questline ends with an assault of Rogeria via a military base docking with it. The twist is that you're fighting on the side of the bad guys (whether to get an opportunity to take out the baron, or simply deal with the siege and get your long-awaited promotion), and that the sieger (admiral Durdym) is actually a bad guy as well, doing it at the behest of the baron.
• Strip Poker: The "Ministry" quest involves you playing Strip 21 against the secretary, so as to take away her glasses, allowing you to steal a side cap from the trash can in order to make the security guard respect you.
• Strolling on Jupiter: Because the game treats all unsettled planets as the same, it's possible for a text quest to have you literally stroll on Jupiter or any other gas/ice giant.
• Subspace Ansible: The radars of the ships function as FTL communicators, allowing you to easily hold entire conversations from halfway across the system
• Subspace or Hyperspace: There's a typical Elite-like hyperspace jump. There's also a different kind of hyperspace, accessible near black holes and leading to a... Shoot 'Em Up arcade mini-game.
• Subsystem Damage: The various equipment of a ship can be damaged individually with use or combat. However, weapons can only target the ship as a whole, not specific equipment.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: While averted with most ships, who'll try to pay off their attackers and flee if badly damaged, military and Pirate Clan ships will often fight until destroyed.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • The plot of first game started because pirate Rachekhan lured the alien species, Klissans, to attack the Coalition, so it would be too busy to intervene into his affairs.
  • In the sequel, the Transfactor Beacon summons an army of Dominators, usually Kelleroids. Since the Dominators are broken into three factions which are at war with each other, it is possible to summon them upon a system infested by another Dominator faction and watch the two fleets duke it out — then pick off the survivors (or collect the remains).
• Surrender Backfire: If a ship pays money/cargo to you in order to get you off their back, the game doesn't prevent you from immediately blowing them up afterwards. The consequences of this aren't any worse than conventional murder.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Declaring anarchy in the "Colonization" will result in complete chaos breaking out, with everybody fighting each other and the whole colony falling, with the survivors executing you for destroying the government. Considering the extremely tense situation in the colony, with barbarians attacking colonists and the populace being generally unhappy, and the fact that the announcement comes in the form of a speech saying "Down with the president! May anarchy reign!" instead of something more proper, it's not exactly unexpected that people won't simply cooperate with each other.
• Status Infliction Attack: Several weapons have extra effect on top of just dealing damage:
  • Tretons briefly slow down the attacked ships, letting you easily finish them off with other weapons (as Tretons' own damage output is low).
  • Esodafer has a chance to temporarily lower attacked ship's armour (with low-health targets having bigger chance).
  • Cafasitor, on top of normal damage, applies Damage Over Time.
  • Lirecron has a chance to temporarily reduce the effectiveness of various systems of attacked ship: weapons range, power of protective shield, etc.
• Take a Third Option: A pirate player is obliged (but not forced) to take the third option of fighting both the Dominators and the Coalition at the same time.
  • This trope is taken for granted if you decide to kill both the admiral of the Coalition military and the old Baron of the pirate armada, allowing said pirates to return to their old roots with you as their new leader. This also serves as a good ending for you and the pirates.
• Take That!:
  • There are couple of references to virus called "Windows", with anti-virus software being called "Linux".
  • There's an IT company called "Maloqsoft", which frequently gets referenced across the game; it's the main supplier for various Maloq structures, military included, and, in true Maloq fashion, produces software that's cumbersome, primitive, vulnerable and badly-optimised, but still popular amongst Maloqs due to the fact that even they can understand it (that, and patriotism).
  • In the Banquet text quest, the conversation around the table veers into a discussion about the bust size of Human actress Paloma Underson.
• Team Killer: The murder of one's fellow non-pirate rangers is particularly despised, as a special medal (a rusty nail) exists for such rangers.
• Team Switzerland: Medical centres are completely neutral in the Clan-Coalition conflict, and thus won't participate if there's a battle in the system between them. The Pirate Clan, in turn, doesn't destroy them, as everybody needs medical services.
• Temporal Sickness: A text-quest in the first game involves using experimental Gaalian Time Travel tech. It is explained that the shock of time travel scrambles the conscious memories of the rewinded period in the displaced individual, but leaves the subconscious memories intact, which manifest in constant strong deja vu. This is known as Temporal Amnesia.
• Tier System: Each item is assigned a "technology tier" to determine how powerful it is. Space Rangers 1 gives a different color to each tier, while Space Rangers 2 shows this with a bar graphic (as well as providing a letter code for weapons). In both games, non-weapon items have different names based on their tech tier.
• Timed Mission:
  • All off-world quests given by planetary governments (escort, patrol, assassination, etc.) are timed. Asking for a "harder" or "easier" mission simply alters the allotted time (along with the reward), rather than the objectives or the difficulty of the mission itself.
  • Several text quests will have time pass when you do anything, with you failing the quest or dying if you run out of time. A few will also invert this, as they require you to survive/hold off the enemy in order to complete the quest or progress further.
• Torches and Pitchforks: A sci-fi variant can pop up if a civilian ship is attacked by a pirate, as their calls for help will often be answered by other civilian ships, possibly resulting in the pirate getting blasted apart by the resulting mob of ships.
• Tractor Beam: Most ships are equipped with one, allowing them to grab items in space.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: A variation - in the "Easy Work" quest, the quest giver (the government of the planet that gave you the quest) is innocent. However the people who actualyl ordered the delivery are members of a cult, and the delivery was a way to lure you in and fatally scan your brain. Fortunately, their representative's failure to meet you allows you to uncover the plot.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: It is guaranteed that you will replay most of the text adventure mini-games several times before completing them, as the winning path often only becomes obvious after several failed attempts. Fortunately, the game is built to ensure that you can always repeat the mission until you complete it successfully, if you so desire.
• Truth Serum: A courier mission has you transport a pizza recipe. The volunteer that receives the pizza then quickly blurts out everything he thinks about the local planet's authorities (his wife's mother-in-law doing the same).
• Turn-Based Tactics: A rare example using Simultaneous Turn Resolution without a grid-based playing field. Otherwise, the degree of customization of the player's ship and its actions during each "day" of combat makes it a very strong example of the genre.
• Under the Sea: Two of the game's text quests take place underwater:
  • "Diver" tasks you with retrieving a warhead from an underwater tracking station with a missile silo that recently had a disaster. To make matters more complicated, you've accidentally tripped up the self-destruct system, making this a Timed Mission.
  • "Depth" has you control a submarine to retrieve an object that fell from space, all while trying to avoid being killed by a Sea Monster.
• Underwater Base: The "Diver" quest has you dive into an underwater tracking station with a missile silo, which recently had all personnel die, in order to retrieve the warhead from its missile.
• Unfriendly Fire: The final quest of the Pirate Clan involves you killing the admiral (pro-Coalition), baron (pro-Clan, pro-collaboration), or both (pro-Clan, anti-collaboration) during the siege of Rogeria, while you're an undercover agent in the former ending or a loyal Clan member in the latter two. Either way, the pirates won't realize that you're the one who killed the baron or got him arrested, since the only witnesses were Coalition soldiers, so you end up being the new baron afterwards.
• Unstoppable Mailman: Apparently inverted with the Mail of Karagon (the human native sector), as you get the achievement of the same name by failing delivery quests
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: In text quests the Player Character will often kill mooks with guns, but rarely gets an option to pick up said guns. When the writers bother to explain this, they mention fingerprint scanners on the trigger.
• Unwinnable by Design: The text quest mini-games have examples ranging across the entire extended cruelty scale, but generally tending towards the crueler end. For example, the one where you have to rob a Pelengi bank would rate around Tough or Nasty (it is easy to miss the winning path but generally there are clear hints what to do), while the quest where you have to deal with the native Menzol race is definitely Cruel if not Evil, as it is extremely easy to lock yourself out of the winning path by spending all your money and valuable items in the wrong places.
• Updated Re-release: Twice. Firstly, there's the Reboot expansion/box set/it's kind of complicated depending on region, released in 2009. Secondly, there's the expanded, re-translated HD Remake released in 2013.
• Vague Hit Points:
  • In space combat, not having a scanner powerful enough to penetrate the enemy's shield will result in their HP being displayed as ???, turning dark orange if their ship is badly damaged.
  • While some text quests use exact HP values for the player and/or enemies (and their vehicles), the majority use descriptions to show how damaged they are.
• Vampiric Draining: In HD version, Tretons not only slow down the target, but also heal your ship, depending on how much damage you've dealt using them.
• Venturous Smuggler:
  • Buying and selling illegal goods can be a rather profitable activity, though it does worsen your relations with planets.
  • The "Faryuki" quest has you smuggle out the eponymous stinky plants out of their farm with the assistance of a trio of pelengs, with the quest being given to you explicitly because you're thought of as a skilled smuggler. The farm is extremely well-guarded due to how valuable these plants are, but achieving a specific value of smelliness will make the security checkpoint's smell analyzer fail.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The sandboxy mechanics of the game allow you to rob and attack anybody you desire, civilian ships and stations not being an exception.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Indulging too much in violent crime will eventually result in an angered message that causes you to lose experience, along with the possibility of receiving bad medals for doing so. If you're part of the Coalition, you'll also lose points towards progressing to the next rank.
• Vigilante Man: Civilian ships (even liners) tend to be very eager to fight pirates, gladly joining the lynching even if the pirate didn't yet do anything wrong. If you piss off civilians, they will also turn hostile to you and take potshots if you pass by them, though they generally don't tend to give chase.
• Wardens Are Evil: The wardens of the galaxy's prisons are all evil bastards who don't care about the guards abusing prisoners, and will actually order a beating if you complain about the prison or refuse to become a snitch.
• The War Sequence: In the end of the Pirate storyline, The system with Rogeria will be invaded by the Coalition, resulting in a huge battle involving dozens of ships in any given day, along with a military base landing on Rogeria itself. If you don't want to finish the storyline normally by doing a text quest, it's even possible to score a win for the Coalition by killing a thousand pirates, which requires clever tactics in order to deal with equipment degradation.
• We Buy Anything: You can sell any type of goods (like food, medicaments, drugs, etc.) and equipment (including unusable Dominator equipment) on any planet. However, some goods are marked as "illegal" on some planets (drugs are banned almost everywhere) meaning you cannot sell those without ruining relations with that planet, and Dominator parts sell as junk, unless given to science stations, which specifically ask for those. All of this is justified on planets, however, as the populations of them are measured in tens of miliions (if not hundreds), so there would exist at least one buyer for your junk.
• We Can Rule Together: The ending of the Pirate Clan's questline will have the baron and the admiral offer you to join them and become one of the galaxy's rulers. In reality, though, this is just a way to get your guard down so that they can kill you.
• Western RPG: The game mostly follows Western conventions. Interestingly, the developers were originally based in Vladivostok, which is as close to Japan as you can get without actually living in the country itself — thus geographically making it an Eastern RPG. This was "fixed" later, when they moved to Europe.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • Killing too many civilian and military ships will eventually result in you being sent a message that calls you out for not acting like a proper Ranger, along with either a loss of experience or being "awarded" a medal.
  • If you land on the planet while it's in the middle of invasion, and try to ask for a mission, the government would angrily call you out, and obviously refuse to give any. The game sometimes may take couple of days to recognise that attack is over, however, resulting in you being chewed out seemingly for nothing.
• Win to Exit: The "Testing" quest has you playtesting a VR game. The only way to leave it, however, is to win by earning enough money to complete the main quest.
• With This Herring: At the start of the game, you get an unimpressive ship, low-tier equipment, and only 1-3 low-tier weapons. This is justified by the fact that the Rangers are meant to fund themselves, in exchange for having the freedom to do whatever they want.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Many quests that track time will also have a hunger mechanic. Unless it's a Timed Mission, they usually lack renewable sources of food and money, so you'll eventually starve to death if you can't complete the quest.
• Wretched Hive: Any system belonging to the pirate clan ends up as this, with the warrior-pirates frequently mugging any ship that passes by (and ganging up on anybody who refuses to comply), while the planets suffer from a constant state of lawlessness.
• You Have Failed Me: Screw up too many Pirate Clan quests to get promoted to Khan, and you'll get offered the Honorary Ataman rank, which ends with you being frozen as a memorial of failure.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The "Testing" quest has you testing a VR game so that it can be tuned to your race's brain, with the waiver you're signing mentioning the possibility of pseudodeath. Indeed, if you die in the game, you'll die for real.
• Zerg Rush: The pirate clan lacks access to the Coalition's flagships and rangers, or the larger ships and bertors of the Dominators. However, as every ship of theirs is a combat one, they often overwhelm the Coalition via sheer numbers.

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