Spacer lexicon and glossary

[Flying_Circus]

I'ill add some, if I may:

HAPPENINGS
Pop - when a cargo ship bursts and releases it's cargo.
Spotty - after a target starts to cook, it 'goes spotty' (starts emitting sparks)
Turning purple - applying fuel injectors
Disco Diva - any ship that habitually travels with it's nav lights flashing
Going lonely - travelling out of the space lanes


PEOPLE
Shiny Shifters - Rock hermits, for the discount prices they sell 'shineys' (pllatinum, gold, gems, etc.). Rock hermits are also known as Grog Hobibts, for the inflated prices they pay liquor
Soccer Monkeys - Station crew, from the supposed resemblance of stations to footballs
Aruga Cruisers - any pilot currently hired out on government work, because of their habit of flying towards the situation that everyone else is flying away from

GEAR
Long hammers - Military Lasers
Party Kegs - Quirium Cascade Mines
BlinkandImissyous - Energy Bombs

SHIPS
An Iron Womb - the Wolf Mk 2, possibly because of the way it takes care of its occupants, but mostly because of the incredibly cramped seats. Wolf Mk2s are also known as 'Coffin fillers'
Bog Goblins, Kraits


PLACES
The big coffin - deep space
Downhill - surface-side on any planet, although 'Going down the long hill' refers to sun-skimming


'I cooked him some, with the long hammers and I thought he was gonna pop, but just as he went spotty the critter flung his nose over and went purple on me. That's the Thrid Iron Womb, I've seen this week, pull that stunt on me! So I '

[Flying_Circus]

Some more:

Big Red Switch - the eject key

Dumbkop - a Galcop who 'goes orange' and becomes involved in a
gunbattle with his own side, ultimately getting blasted to bits

Going Orange - turning hostile, as seen in the scanner, but more widely applied in social contexts: 'Hey, dude, don't be going orange on me, everyone thinks Acer make rubbish diocking computers, not just me!'

A trip to the cleaners - long journeys across insterstellar space, which masquarade as business trips, but which are actually intended to allow one's trail to go cold, and thereby 'clean' one's legal status

Bottom Feeder - also known as the 'Bottom Dwelling Scum Sucker', the Bottom Feeder, is an extremely poor trader, just starting out, with a very weak ship - usually a coffin

Purple Glue - the secret, encrypted communications channel used by the GalCops, insystem. Unscrupulous traders will pay good prices for the 'Purple Glue Solvent' - a decoder box, for said channel.

Boat Anchors - any of the series of fixed locations within a system, such as the Witchspace beacon, Nav Buoy, Sun, et cetera, that can be used, along with the advanced space compas, to orientate onself in space - especially if one happens to be Going Lonely

A Bohr Situation - any situation in which the outcome is a fairly certain (although usually extremely adverse) result

A Hiesenberg Situation - the opposite of a Bohr Situation, except that the outcome is also very likely to be adverse

Bondage-and-discipline - the period of trading, early on in one's career, when one is flying a very basic ship, with Pulse lasers, no scanners, no docking computers, et cetera (i.e. when one is a bottom feeder)

Bozotic - something which at first appears exotic and cool, but actually turns out to simply be a well-polished turd. Good examples might include a Cobra Mk1 with a naval energy unit, or Windows Vista.

Cargo Culting - relying on short trip trading, in reliable goods, between closely adjacent systems of widely differing economic status for predictable, but uninspiring, profits.

Chernobyl Eggs - Qurium Cascade mines (for reasons no one is too sure about)

A Chernobyl Chicken - a ship that looks quite high tech, welll armed, well equiped, but driven in such a sissy manner, that it suggests it might drop a Chernobyl Egg, at the least of provocation. This phrase is used, not only by pirates, but by legitimate traders. A trader might say: 'Watch out for that Chernobyl Chicken in the Python - if things get hot, let's just leg it - I hate to think what would happen if we were all to open up on the bad guys, and one of use were to inadertantly hit that s-o-b, in the python, and cause him to lay one of his egg in our midst'. A Chernobyl Chicken is often comically portrayed as a pilot in a ship that cannot outrun his own Party Keg.

A Hiesenberg's Cat (very rare, but everyone knows what it means) - a ship with a cloaking device. EDT: I meant, of course, a 'schrodinger's cat'

Finally I return to the Wolf Mk 2, Rattle Cutter, and any other pirate-owned shipps with multiple forward repeater-lasers. These ships are also known as a 'Sierras' - not after that famous jelly-mold Ford, of that name, but inrecognition of the acronym SOM, or 'Sierra Oscar Mike' - short for 'Son of a M*ther*rf*ck*r'

[Captain Hesperus]

Last Chance Box - see also Coffin with a View. An escape capsule.

Walking Home - Having your ship destroyed so far out from the station that your Last Chance Box is flying for a week or more to get you to the station....

Q-Monkeys - Woma fuel transporters.

Q-Trailers - Woma Sidewinder escorts.

Moneyboxes - see also Piggybanks. Any luxury passenger liner, originally coined with the Coachwhip Liner in mind.

Scrape and Tape - Ship servicing and maintenance. Scraping the detritus from the hull and taping over the holes and frayed wiring.....

Captain Hesperus

[Flying_Circus]

Devil Theorists: trigger-happy gun-lovers who engage in firefights with whomsoever accidentally hits them during a major brawl. Devil Theorists are the first to take offence and the last to forgive.

Dodecadiddly -becoming extremely drunk, after visiting a station bar at the end of a long trading run.

Heads Down Display - a reference to sleep, or dreaming: 'I need to consult the heads down display, for a bit'

Kahunas - docking computers

Cherryblossom - A 'cloud' of attacking Thargoid Robot Fighters

The Priesthood - collectively, witchdrive specialists. Anyone who understands the first thing about witchdrive -especially if this renders them incapable of normal conversation.

Mandelbrots - Witchdrive schematics, as referred to by non-members of the Priesthood.

Rain Dance (also known as the 'silly walk' or the 'Waving of the Dead Chicken') - the countdown sequence to a witchdrive jump. Any similar, and seemingly arbitrary delay cycle, put in place to allow wiggle-room for slow and archeological on-board systems to catch up with each other.

Ungeziefers - Thargoids

Bad News - Witchdrive fuel: the only thing known to travel faster than light

Existence Failure - death

Buckey Monkeys - see Soccer monkeys

The Bresenham Machine - the Space Compas

[Roberto]

In the Elite world of my imagination, anyone who walked into a station bar and said any of this stuff would, at best, get some very strange looks, and more likely get the s*** kicked out of them!

Oh, and the one term I like, spacer, shouldn't be "attrib. Arexack_Heretic", as it was used in The Dark Wheel...

[Captain Hesperus]

In the Elite world of my imagination, anyone who walked into a station bar and said any of this stuff would, at best, get some very strange looks, and more likely get the s*** kicked out of them!

I agree that some of the above quotes are a little, errrm, eccentric and likely to be the product of space psychosis-disordered mind. But tell me, which terms other than 'spacer' *do* you like?

Oh, and the one term I like, spacer, shouldn't be "attrib. Arexack_Heretic", as it was used in The Dark Wheel...

Well, it has been a while since I read that and I only had the entry from the Wiki to go on, so my apologies.

Captain Hesperus

[Captain Hesperus]

The Priesthood - collectively, witchdrive specialists. Anyone who understands the first thing about witchdrive -especially if this renders them incapable of normal conversation.

What about 'Witch Doctors'

Captain Hesperus

[Flying_Circus]

I agree that some of the above quotes are <snip /> likely to be the product of space psychosis-disordered mind.

I am the owner of said brain.

In the Elite of my imagination people are less po-faced (or, possibly, drunker?).

[Roberto]

I guess there are a few that I like: Annie, hardhead, albatross… and Witch Doctors kind of does it for me But the vast majority of contributions are (IMO - sorry!) neither funny nor clever nor useful abbreviations - and some are just downright inexplicable!

T'ain't a matter of being po-faced - I ain't gonna laugh if there's nothing to laugh at! Unless, as you suggest, I'm really drunk…

To end on a more positive note, I like the phrase "packing military" to mean "equipped with a military laser" (it may have been Drew who originated it - not sure), and I'd suggest "Sally" and "Corrie" for Salamander and Coriolis, and maybe "lurker" to describe a pirate who hovers at the edge of a space lane, waiting for a suitable victim...

[Captain Hesperus]

It does make sense to reduce ship names to something like female names, 'Sally', 'Annie', 'Ferdie' (yeah, I don't know any girls called Ferdie, either but....) where possible.

Captain Hesperus

[Flying_Circus]

My suggestions are more playful, than designed to provoke - honestly .

For instance, you may want to hunt back, on Google, as to why I suggest "Ungeziefers" for thargoids. (the hint is "Franz Kafka" - or, more specifically, how he was translated).

Most of my suggestions are either physics-related, occasionally literary-related, or down to various in-jokes from ancient hackerdom, and based on Larry Niven novels. They usually date back several decades (if not centuries). They weren't intended as serious suggestions to the lexicon .

If anything, I'm guilty of intelectual w*nking, nothing more (Hell, my grilfriend thought some of them were quite funny - mind you, she has that secret girl-geek 'get out of jail free' card, that protects her from male-geek flamage: "You love us because we're just as dysfunctional as you are - but we're girls, so our existence helps justify your own social-inneptitude")

My intention was to stimulate curiosuity, not spark a Realigeous War:,Hunt the reasons, if you wish, or ingnore them - it's an an arbitrary (or largely irrelevant) joke.

[JensAyton]

”Bresenham Machine” seems more appropriate for the scanner, although it’d make more sense if the lines weren’t all perfectly vertical.

[Flying_Circus]

Hmm, perhaps. What I was after, was the idea of hunting for a vector, pointing yourself at it, and then hitting the J kay to go straight at it. More of a 'work out the vectors and fly at it' sort of thing? Maybe I wasted that one....

I'd like to think that Elite/Oolite captains would be receptive to jokes about Maths or Physics. maybe the computers do that all for us in the future?

[TGHC]

The Priesthood - collectively, witchdrive specialists. Anyone who understands the first thing about witchdrive -especially if this renders them incapable of normal conversation.

Mandelbrots - Witchdrive schematics, as referred to by non-members of the Priesthood.

Rain Dance (also known as the 'silly walk' or the 'Waving of the Dead Chicken') - the countdown sequence to a witchdrive jump. Any similar, and seemingly arbitrary delay cycle, put in place to allow wiggle-room for slow and archeological on-board systems to catch up with each other.

Brilliant!!! esp Mandlebrot

[Arexack_Heretic]

The term spacer should not be attributed to me, it is a common SciFi terminology, coined probably even before the internet was a kernel.