| abstract
| - Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, a webcomic by Ralph Hayes, Jr. and a Spin-Off of Tales of the Questor, deals with one of Quentyn's descendants centuries down the track, In Space! Unfortunately updates can be thin on the ground, since Hayes only updates once the donation meter reaches a certain amount - and the meter resets every month.
* Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Robots and food
* Alien Non-Interference Clause: There's a law preventing con artists from setting themselves up as gods on more backward planets, and then there's... "Eight million counts of negligent homicide??"
* Anxiety Dreams
* Body Horror: One reason why Organic Technology is not more popular.
* Cool Starship: Both Quentyn's own ship, the Thunderbird, and the Sapphire Star -- a luxury cruise ship with a diameter measured in kilometers.
* Badass Boast: Page 12
* Beware the Nice Ones: Two Words: Stellar Lance.
* Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Patoodines have a rather unique legal system: they launch criminals from a catapult a distance calculated by adding up the total and severity of your crimes. If you live, you're free to go. But if your crimes are severe enough, they'll launch you at the moon with a rail gun instead.
* Expy
* Identical Grandson
* Death World
* Digital Regulation Is Evil: The RIAA Wars. RH throws an anvil here - his opinion is that we either chill out about it or let the regulators eat our brains - literally. It Makes Perfect Sense - In Context. I invoke Wiki Magic. Read and contribute!
* Disproportionate Retribution: When the Kvrk-chk ate a Racconan colony ship's passengers, the Empire retaliated by roasting one of the more populated Kvrk-chk star systems with a stellar lance.
* Fantastic Racism: not so much subverted or inverted as turned completely inside out with the W'naybeans, a race of behavioral and cultural mimics (modeled on the real life Mimic Octopus.) Their habit of imitating not just other races and ethnicities but other race and ethnic STEREOTYPES caused them a great deal of trouble with various easily offended PC types, but eventually they became so ubiquitous that they are routinely employed in various tourist traps preferentially over the very natives they imitate as being "more authentic." The author's point is that "nobody seemed to be too upset as long as it was SOMEBODY ELSE being mimicked..." Ergo, if seen humorously, both racism AND ethnic hypersensitivity are easy to recognize as ridiculous.
* Famous Last Words: Oops.
* Force Field Door: Unlike in most common fiction, the Space Rangers have a strict policy concerning Force Field Doors.
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* No Waterproofing in the Future: Easiest. Jailbreak. Ever.
* Good Republic, Evil Empire: Seemingly subverted, the hero works for the "Empire of the Seven Systems" while the Star Trek Parody Federation is highly incompetent (and socialist). But according to Word of God the Empire is a parliamentary republic and the emperor is mostly there to look good on TV.
* Great Escape
* MacGyvering
* Gunboat Diplomacy: Part of standard Imperial First Contact procedure
* Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?: In the "Federation" arc, Groonch the G'norch makes a point of emphasizing his warrior-race pride (his hat, given by Captain Pidorq, is "token noble savage") - only to have it brutally subverted when it's pointed out that his "race" has dozens of languages and hundreds of cultures, and "noble warrior" isn't even in the top ten....
* Home, Sweet Home
* Horde of Alien Locusts: That have shells worthy of being used for the hull of a spaceship.
* In Harm's Way: A space ranger has got to love it. In main character's own words, they're Oops Boys, as the most common last words on their black boxes tend to be "Oops".
* Lost in Transmission: why he should keep an assassin alive.
* Mega Corp: The RIAA, eventually they started destructively uploading elderly scientists and artists and the Empire declared war.
* Not to mention religious and political figures, like the Patoodines Pilgrim King.
* Multicultural Alien Planet: Ralph is on record as stating that monocultures can only exist under fascism.
* Odd-Shaped Panel
* One-Way Visor: The cabbie mimmic, despite his eyes being on the ends of his "Rasta dreads".
* Only Sane Man: The titular character and his AI companion seem to be this most of the time.
* Organic Technology: Deconstructed with the usual thoroughness here
* Plausible Deniability
* Planet Eater: That chants "OMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM" while it's eating.
* Planet of Hats: Subverted.
* Pleasure Planet: The Sapphire Star, though actually a massive starship.
* Also (mentioned in passing) "Queela Quoola," which translates roughly as "Planet of casual sex and cheap beer..."
* Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Kvrk-Chk are explicitly stated to be under the Nazi category, with their entire civilization being under an absolute dictatorship that allows no variation in culture, law, beliefs, anything in their society. This is a society where the nail that sticks up isn't just hammered down, it's violently ripped out and eaten on sight. And this is a civilization that occupies multiple star systems.
* Secret Art: Lux spells. When the Racconans Sufficiently Analyzed Magic to the point that Magitek became commonplace, the development of natural lux talents fell out of use - why spend decades learning how to throw steel-smashing lightning from your fingers when handguns exist that permit anyone to do it after a week of training? Military forces train lux users in down-and-dirty techniques that prove why it's a stupid idea to attack an "unarmed" Racconan, but the dazzling displays of power exercised by Quinn's ancestors are all but unknown. This just makes the few who still practice the arts among the most lethal beings in existence: one adept demonstrates this by walking around invisibly without fifty kilos of atomic crystal arrays, then catching a sizzling stun-bolt in her hand, reshaping it, and tossing it aside in a single motion.
* Space Pirates: The first arc deals with them.
* Along with an object lesson in why it would be a seriously bad idea to take it up as an occupation.
* Starship Luxurious: The Sapphire Star. Those sapphire skylights that make up most of the outer hull, actual sapphires.
* Or, in other words, Transparent aluminum. Yes, that's what sapphires ARE.
* It'd be more surprising if they didn't have industrial sapphire production considering they grew plants that refined bauxite into sapphire centuries before.
* Take That: Big ones concern Star Trek, running from Page 14 to Page 44, with a postscriptum later; The Cold Equations took a turn from 113 to 137.
* Along with a generous helping of Author Appeal: RH obviously feels that Wesley Crusher Needs More Love.
* A rather gratuitous one at that, given that most of the subjects he brings up were addressed by either Deep Space Nine or the TNG movies.
* Also seems to have elements of Affectionate Parody, considering the obscurity of some of the Trek references (e.g.: rice-harvester accident, "make things go", etc.).
* A later storyline includes a shot at the RIAA.
* Time Dilation: A narratively brilliant example, which should be used more often - though Faster-Than-Light Travel is fairly Casual, the amount of time trips take is randomly inconsistent, since time doesn't "flow" homogeneously through the galaxy, due to gravitational anomalies, the rotation of the galaxy, and distance from the galactic core. This means that years can pass while a traveler is gone for a few months. It forces more independence on the setting, and hardcore spacers Can't Go Home Again.
* to give the reader some perspective: the mere gravitational difference between the Earth's surface and orbit is high enough that the atomic clocks on GPS satellites have to be readjusted by software on a continual basis, otherwise the satellites would be off by 38 microseconds--- and their coordinate readings by TEN KILOMETERS--- in a single day.
* Too Dumb to Live: Somehow a large portion of the universe's population seems to fit into this category.
* Thankfully, there appears to be a large number of unimaginably powerful beings that roam the stars, taking care of species like this. Of course, sometimes it ends up in an equivalent of
* Walking the Earth
* What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The source of much debate on the Cartoonist's own forum. The Kvrk-Chk are made of pure Obviously Evil, and they commit a truly grotesque act of aggression. Even so, it's disconcerting to see the heroic Empire of the Seven Systems unleash a Class X-2 Apocalypse on "one of (the Kvrk-chk's) most heavily populated solar systems".
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