Website / SpaceBattles.com

"SB is involved. It's already Gone Horribly Wrong."

— SpaceBattles user SapphireFox, on a new RP

Advertisement:

SpaceBattles.com, often known as "SpaceBattles" or simply "SB", is a message board dedicated to all things science fiction-related. While far from the largest community on the Internet, it's still extremely active with some 13,000 active members.

It has three major sub-forums:

• SpaceBattles General: A subforum based around random stuff involving sci-fi and video games. Includes a general discussion forum, a forum about games in general, a Role-Playing Game forum and a tech support forum.
• SpaceBattles Creative: A sub-forum involving creative enterprises undertaken by members of the forum. Includes a fanfiction section, and rather less popular Art/Animation and Original Fiction sections. It also has a rival Role Playing Game forum. The two didn't use to get along, but it's gotten better over time.

Advertisement:
• SpaceBattles Debates: A sub-forum dedicated to debates. Includes a section for versus debates involving fictitious parties, a section dedicated to actual militaries and equipment and a forum dedicated to news and Real Life.

Compare with StarDestroyer.net, a site with a similar (original) premise to the Debates sub-forum that it had a rivalry with for a while. Its own splinter website is Sufficient Velocity.com, on average Lighter and Softer.

Now has a Twitter account.

Not to be confused with an actual Space Battle (though it certainly loves them)

---

SpaceBattles Works with Trope Pages

• Abyssal Plain (Worm, Ward, Pact)
• A Dead World
• Adorable Murderbeasts
• Advice and Trust
• Alchemical Solutions
• Amazing Fantasy
• Ashes of the Past
• Asuka Quest
• Atonement
• Avatar High
• Awakening (Steven Universe) (Under the title Synthesis)
• Biohazard
• Boldores And Boomsticks
• Boop the Snoot for Critical Damage!
• The Butcher Bird
• But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci
• Cauldron Quest
• Cherno Alpha vs. the World
• Children of an Elder God
• Communication
• Conquest Quest
• Deus Ex Mechanicus Reboot
• Don't Do Brains!
• Don't Lose Your Heart
• Echoes Of Yesterday
• Finishing the Fight
• Friendly Foreign Exchange Student Spider-Man
• Friends of a Solar Empire
• Gambit
• The Games We Play
• A Geek's Guide: Corporation of Occult Research and Extermination
• A Geek's Guide: DeathWorld Earth
• Glorious Shotgun Princess
• Glowworm
• Gospel Of The Lost Gods
• Harry Is A Dragon, And That's Okay
• A Hero
• Heroic Myth
• The Infinite Loops
• Intrepid
• Just an Average Voice in Your Head
• A Knight's Quest
• The Last Daughter
• The Light of Our Solus
• Magica Madoka Veneficus Puella
• The Moon's Flash Princess
• Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!
• Nobody Dies
• No Gods, Only Guns
• Once More with Feeling
• Outsiders
• Paper and Sand
• Point Me At The Skyrim (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Ward)
• Quicken
• Red like Blood
• Renegade
• Sayaka Quest
• Sieg Zeon
• Sleeping with the Girls
• Spark to Spark, Dust to Dust
• Strength of an Honest Soul
• Terran Ingenuity
• Thousand Shinji
• WannaBee
• Warhammer Dynasty
• When Planets Burn
• Witch Quest
• Wonderful!
• Xander Quest: Reborn on the Hellmouth
• XSGCOM
• Your Avatar In The Multiverse
• Your Profile Is You

Advertisement:

---

This website provides examples of:

• Alien Space Bats : BROB (Bastard Random Omnipotent Being) is the universally acceptable term for crossover ideas and versus debate that are mostly implausible and hard to organically come about.
• Armchair Military: Averted to a surprising extent in The War Room, though obviously not completely. This is due to the large proportion of actual military personnel and people who know actual military personnel frequenting the board, as well as some very knowledgeable amateurs. The members of the subforum are fiercely protective of this reputation, and don't suffer idiots gladly; conventional examples of the trope tend to get dogpiled in short order.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't bring up StarDestroyer.net. Really, don't. Even if "Affairs of Other Boards" were not explicitly out of bounds, mentions of that rival website are not welcome.
  • Orion's Arm and Tom Kratman also catch a lot of flak.
  • William Lind and his book Victoria, for a very good reason.
  • Zero tolerance for adult material. No strikes, bring on the banhammer.
  • The local My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans absolutely loathe Chatoyance's take on The Conversion Bureau, to the point that even bringing Her Name up has been unofficially prohibited in order to avoid (re)starting Flame Wars.
  • Do not call World War Z realistic.
  • While thread necromancy is frowned on in general (and worth a strike), doing so in a Creative Writing story thread really pisses readers off.
  • Toucans, due to the DCMA incident listed in Disproportionate Retribution. The site tends to refer to the bird, and images of it in particular, as if it were the site's mortal enemy.
  • Making false accusations is one thing. Falsifying evidence to support said false accusations is the In-Universe Moral Event Horizon.
  • Marco Inaros from The Expanse, with members Doctor Fluffy and Peptuck displaying particular rage whenever he's brought up.
• "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate: An entire sub-forum dedicated to it, divided into fiction and non-fiction sections.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • These sometimes occur within the Vs Debates forum, often causing a response awarding the Vlad Tepes Award to the original poster. Some posters even build up a reputation for creating these, usually inadvertently.
  • The basis of the "One At Sufficient Velocity" meme. The meme basically goes like this: How many X does it take to defeat Y? Simple: One, if it's moving fast enough, AKA at sufficient velocity. People use this to argue that yes, you could destroy a Star Destroyer with a Furby, assuming that it was moving, say, at near the speed of light.
• Deconstructor Fleet: Is very proud of its reputation and ability to deconstruct all fandom tropes.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Once had this done to them. A user posted a seemingly innocuous photo of a toucan and the whole site got DMCA'd with extreme prejudice in response by the extremely touchy creator.
• Ditzy Genius: While quick to engage in Self-Deprecation of the site's shortcomings, a lot of the site's posters are surprisingly knowledgeable about various subjects from physics to law, especially in the War Room and to a lesser extent Versus. There's no shortage of genuinely educated posters who often dispense interesting knowledge, particularly in the Versus section, where Know-Nothing Know-It-All types are frequent. Notable posters include Ixjac (former intelligence officer in the Canadian military who served in Afghanistan), Rufus Shinra (doctor with a PhD in physics), gamesguy (financial adviser and former day trader with a degree in Economics from a top-fifty school), Galorian (has a degree in physics), Gojirason (budding animator and game designer, often calls out posters trying to exaggerate character feats via their ignorance of how animation and physics work), and Ramenth (practicing lawyer who went to a top-level law school).
• Everyone Has Standards: A number of users are... very... dedicated fans of their favourite works, but even they occasionally meet others who carry Fan Wank to levels disturbing even for them.
• Fan Fic: Has an entire subsection dedicated to them, and hosts a few notable fics.
• Gun Nut: A disturbingly high ratio of posters, so much so that it often leads to the very next trope.
• Gun Porn: Conversation regarding any kind of firepower tends to get very detailed, and very intense about their usage and scenarios they can be used in.
• Improvised Weapon User: Weaponized anything really. Spacebattles would find a way to take over the galaxy with a teapot if they had to. And, indeed, they already have.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Pretty much you can be a Jerkass as long as you have a citation that supports your point.
  WhiteDragon25: "This is Spacebattles. You can be as much of an utter condescending dick as you want, as long as you have an actual point."
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite many users' love for Combat Pragmatism and There Is No Kill Like Overkill, the site's Play-by-Post Games participants often choose the morally palatable option over the pragmatic but distasteful one and abhor characters and factions that do otherwise.
• Long Runner: Though the early days of the forum are shrouded in mystery and lost data, it has existed at least since 1998, which is an absolute eternity for a website. For comparison, it's only a year younger than Google, and might actually be older if the suggestions of existence in 1996 are true.
  Atlan: "SB is twenty years old now. As far as forums go, that's not just ancient, that's damn near prehistoric. We're the T-rex of online forums. Kinda big, old, looks funny, weird behavior, and obsessed with killing stuff."
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: Likes to accuse various factions of "incompetently" using their abilities or technology and suggesting better alternatives, though various posters try to argue otherwise. It's gotten to the point that "competence" has become something of a slur, as arguments are usually intense, forcing the moderators to intervene.
• More Dakka: An alternative to the "Nuke 'em" trope seen below.
• Nebulous Evil Organisation: The Club
• Not So Different: The forums can be just as insane as the rest of the Internet at times, despite what some users say.
• Nuke 'em: One of Space Battle's catchphrases is the classic "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."
• Only Sane Man: Some of the users see the site as this in relation the the rest of the Internet. Of course the opposite viewpoint is also brought up often.
• Overused Running Gag:
  • Derision and resignation are common responses to yet another Halo vs Mass Effect debate.
  • The same goes for Xeelee vs Time Lords/Time War Daleks.
    The Imperator: I swear that Xeelee vs. Time Lords/Time War Daleks should just be a bannable offense for starting at this point. It won't go anywhere, and it descends threads into dozen+ page long diatribes of hatred against each other. While everyone else sits back and: [Castle "hold on a moment" GIF]
  • The word "competence." Mostly because when most people ask "What would competent X look like/do" SB quickly creates some completely non-canon version of the faction or character based on fan-Wanking technology and virtual omniscience, often completely disregarding mitigating factors or limitations. This tendency(along with the occasional complaint when a character in a fanfic or even official work fails to do so) has reached the point that even Spacebattles makes fun of it referring to the concept as 'Spacebattles Competence'.
  • The War Room (a subforum dedicated to history and military topics in Real Life) has so many done-to-death topics that War Room rules specifically ban some of them from being discussed.
• Play-by-Post Games: What the Role-Playing Games take the form of.
• Porn Stash: The mods weren't kidding when they said they have a porn collection.
  Jesse Lee: What the... Free porn!?!?!?
  The Observer: We have made it very known for like... ever... that one of the perks of being a staff member is all the pr0n you can consume!
  Connor MacLeod: Free high quality porn is literally the closest thing we get to a salary on this board. And given what we deal with, we earn it!
• Real Men Wear Pink: Has a very large number of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans that unironically like ponies and other cute things as much as they like Stuff Blowing Up.
• Roleplaying Games: A subforum and a sub-subforum dedicated to different versions of this. Including the "BROB" forum, which has had adversarial relations with the other roleplay forum in the past.
• Running Gag: SB has its own memes, like:
  • "Vlad Tepes Award for Excellence" — To anyone inadvertently suggesting a fight that turns out to be a Curb-Stomp Battle. ^note For their "cruelty" in matching the stomped side to the stomper Similarly, the Bolostomp Award, which essentially means the same thing, except without the cruelty.
  • Xeeleestomp for Curb-Stomp Battles where one side outmatches the other by several magnitudes
  • "Dr Henry Glassman Award (for Staggering Incompetence in your Alleged Field of Study)"^note After the Too Dumb to Live Halo 4 character.
  • Back in the day there was a Troll originally named Samael 3^note "Originally" because every post he made was so repulsive he'd get banned near-instantly, which didn't stop him from repeatedly making sockpuppet accounts. who would relentlessly flame stories in the Creative Writing subforum. People noticed he only seemed to target the good stories, leading to the creation of an informal "Sammy Award" as a mark of quality. He hasn't been seen since 2010 at the latest, so it hasn't been handed out in years, and you'll have to ask some of the older posters about him to get the details.
  • "Perfectly Reasonable X Calculations"^note A parody of Fan Wank by taking the most hyperbolic outlier claims and feats at face value and deriving capabilities from them. The results tend to be silly. Example using Mass Effect. invoked
  • "How many X to defeat/destroy Y? One, at sufficient velocity"^note The idea that you can kill anything by throwing anything sufficiently fast at it, thanks to relativity.
  • "Hard Men doing Hard Things (while Hard)"^note A derision of poorly-written Anti Heroes, I Did What I Had to Do, The Needs of the Many and Shoot the Dog moments, and Well Intentioned Extremists.
  • "Swarm Award for Fail◊"^note An equivalent of the Razzie issued to VS. Debates that go beyond Curb-Stomp Battle to just silly and painful. Named after a user with a tendency to post these.
  • "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!!"^note A term for sci-fi and fantasy stories which take Humans Are Special/Warriors to great lengths. used both positively and negatively, depending on the poster
  • Ryuugi's tendency to never finish a fic he starts. This joke has become less prevalent now that Ryuugi has actually finished three of his stories, though it remains his user title.
  • Ever since Silencio started, a number of Worm fics have included mentions of mimes and SHIPPING CHART IA FTHAGN.
  • The SB Shadow Cabal, a grouping of shadowy figures running SB from behind the curtains (actually, just a nickname appropriated by longtime members of SB's unofficial IRC chatroom).
  • "Damn, Ninja-ed", a phrase spoken when a member posts a message, only to find that someone else already posted a message saying the same thing while they were typing theirs. Sometimes changed to "Imped", especially in the Creative Fiction subsection, ever since Worm has become popular on SB. Also commonly replaced in threads about various fandoms or stories with a character, creature, or occupation from that work with a reputation for being sneaky or stealthy("Blake'd" in The Games We Play(and other RWBY fics), "Tenno'd" in reference to Warframe, and "Greninja'd" in Ashes of the Past (as well as most Pokemon threads)).
  • The SB Calendar, in which someone remarks that a thread rehashing a constantly-discussed topic is right on schedule to the point that one can mark one's calendar to when someone brings up the exact same argument yet again. A particular target is Mass Effect versus Halo arguments, which popped up weekly like clockwork.
  • Tom Kratman is often called TOM KRATMAN, SPACE MARINE mockingly, even when it would be more appropriate to use a pronoun, after he argued with an SB user (and former M1 Abrams Tanker) about what exactly an M1 Abrams was capable of.
  • The John Sheridan Nuke of Sufficient Yield: The idea that any nuclear device the commander of Babylon 5 uses will always be powerful enough to destroy his target, no matter how tough it is.
  • Durasnow.^note A counterargument used to mock people claiming incredible weapon yields when discussing battles/settings that supposedly have big yields, yet fail to cause appreciable damage to objects with real-world properties (like snow), usually when dialing down the attack would not have much tactical or strategic use or the attacker is explicitly shown/stated not to be holding back. It derives from a scene in The Empire Strikes Back, where AT-AT walkers firing their laser cannons cause negligible collateral when the bolts hit the ground (which is covered in snow). Several pro-Star Wars versus forum posters for years argued that each bolt actually had the energy of the Little Boy based on the scene where the same lasers spectacularly blow up the Rebel shield generator (it was very obviously a secondary explosion caused by the generator itself).
  • Behold the Mk43 Neutronium UberHammer!^note Another counterargument used for mocking posters who claim that combatants using incredible weapon yields must be using some sort of techobabble to account for the lacklustre collateral damage that such a battle would entail, rather than consider that the battle/setting does not use the incredible firepower that they are arguing for.
  • Saying that the website is on the watchlists of alphabet soup agencies.
  • "Nixon Speed Run" concerning attempts by Donald Trump to hamstring investigations into his alleged ties with Russia, comparing it to Richard Nixon's own ham-handed attempts to cover up his scandals.
  • "Sky bullying"^note Trying to get a (usually non-malicious) rise out of Skywalker_T-65, the author of Changing Destiny, by posting art of his waifu Saratoga.
  • William Lind's novel Victoria was the subject of a very harsh review thread that became very popular and lasted for years, apparently out of sheer Bile Fascination. References to the book, always negative, still pop up on the site, and posters that participated are still receiving likes on their posts in the thread to this day.
• Self-Deprecation: As some of the quotes demonstrate, some members are entirely aware of the site's shortcomings.
• Show Within a Show: Sometimes, a fanfic thread will pick up non-canon stories written by readers. The posters usually refer to them as "Omakes".
  Todeswind, upon finding two Omakes in his story God's Eye: Are you writing fanfiction of my fanfiction - INSIDE OF MY ACTUAL FIC? Is this actually happening?
• Spin-Offspring:
  • Due to some unpleasantness regarding an admin (the abovementioned M1 tanker) being 'retired', Sufficient Velocity was spun-off, with many threads cloned or moved.
  • Dissatisfaction with perceived over-moderation lead to the creation of Frozen In Carbonite.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The usual response when someone asks about the Shadow Cabal, as part of the Running Gag.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks:
  • Creative Writing is viewed by some as a cesspit because, while it is probably the largest attractor of inbound traffic, it also has on-again, off-again issues with NSFW content. Thanks to a major moderatorial purge several years back and better self-policing among the users, this reputation has lessened considerably.
  • The Questing/RP and Non Sci-Fi Debates subforums seem to have picked up the slack, at least where drama is concerned.
    Bullethead: Stay out of most NSFD threads and the Roleplaying/Quest stuff, and you'll miss most of the drama.
  • The worst, in terms of civil conversations, however, is Whitehall, due to the polarizing topic of politics, and that's all that can be said on the matter.

---