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I definitely remember these books too, especially the cool pictures of spaceships. I read them as a kid in Finland in the 1980s, so apparently they were popular enough to be translated into Finnish. They were hardcover, came in B4 (or at least bigger than A4) size, and had detailed (almost photorealistic), painted pictures of spaceships and space phenomena. I don't remember them having aliens either, and like you said they didn't seem to be tied to any other sci-fi franchise. That's all I can remember, but I'd be interested to learn more about them.
I wonder if one of these is the book I encountered when I was a kid; it also talked as if the events depicted inside were real. However I do recall a picture of a space babe riding a land dragon, sort of the kind Boris Vallejo would draw. And the clearest in my memory was a close up picture of some monocled guy being shot in the ear by some pencil-thin laser, with the title saying this was the assassination/death of this political figure.
While I don't know the book, the description reminds me of something that David Weber or John Ringo would write. Both of them try to deal with humans in a fantsey/hard sci-fi way. David Weber deals more with the space aspect, while John Ringo has more of the fantsey.
sounds like the TTA series, Terran Trade Authority, by Stewart Cowley.
That's definitely them. The author took a whole bunch of random sci-fi art and just stitched it together into a setting.
avatar: Durtal Okay, this might be a long shot, but: does anyone remember a series of science fiction guidebooks from sometime before the early 90s (possibly from the 70s or 80s) that were written as in-universe scholarly books about near future space wars and space ships? There were at least two of them, both hardcover. They had a lot of old-fashioned science fiction pictures, some of which featured spaceships in bright colors like pink and blue.
I used to take them out of the library when I was a kid in the early 90s but never knew why they were written as if they were true, because they didn't seem to be based on any preexisting franchise. I remember I liked the one that seemed to detail the war ships used in a recently ended war among factions in our solar system more than the one that focused on trade routes in a time of peace. I think the universe of the books focused more on our solar system and lacked any aliens or interstellar travel, but I could be wrong.
I'm going nuts. Maybe they really were reference books from the future.