- Hi-tech devices can easily be constructed right in your pants pocket, and out of common materials.
- You can make a warp fuel out of a Venus Fly Trap (Oxygen) and a really strong tree (Concentrated Carbon).
- Venus Fly Traps are particularly dangerous, as their jaws are so powerful that they can harm beings sitting a good 50 feet out of their reach.
- “Oxygen,” the element, is different than “oxygen,” the stuff you breathe under water.
- Data is fungible: it doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that you have it. “Navigation data” works to bring your ship to you irrespective of where you got it or where you are, even if it’s the length of the galaxy away.
- Planets are littered with junk and buildings that are useful to you personally. Drop pods are scattered among the wastes of a billion worlds, each broken in precisely the same way, each able, when fixed, to expand the capacity of the space suit of any visitor. When it is done, it’ll continue to sit there in place, repaired but useless, until the end of time, a mute monument to the fact that, at some point, a traveller needed their pocket expanded.
- If a mission calls for culling a herd of creatures that are getting out hand, it doesn’t matter which creatures get culled, or which planet it happens on, or it could indeed be anywhere. They’ll be satisfied if you slaughter tiny helpless beasties, T-rexes, or any combination.
- “Low atmosphere” means exactly the same thing as “low gravity.” They are synonyms.
- The surface of a planet may be too hot, too cold, too toxic or too radioactive, but caves on it are room-temperature and cozy.
- Don’t believe what Kerbal Space Program told you. Orbits are a fiction invented to tell people to keep them out of astrophysists’ business.
Also, this isn’t a science fact or anything, but the rarer planets types were all designed by Dr. Seuss: