Posleen War Series

The Posleen War Series, also known as The Legacy of the Aldenata, is a science fiction universe created by Military Science Fiction author John Ringo. The series started in the year 2000 with the publication of A Hymn Before Battle, set Twenty Minutes Into the Future. As you can imagine, it is now Alternate History. The story starts with the Galactic Federation, a coalition of seemingly, note the operative word here, benevolent races make first contact (not really though for numerous reasons) with Earth. That's the good news.

The bad news is that they are being invaded by the Posleen, or People of the Ships in their language, and for various reasons the Galactics can't fight worth a damn. This combined with humanity's long history of military confrontation means that Humans Are Special and get offered a job as Hired Guns for the Galactics, defending them from the Posleen in exchange for advanced tech. Oh, and a chance to defend Earth from the Posleen which are headed our way. And the rulers of the Galactic Federation, the Darhel, are a bunch of Corrupt Corporate Executives that want to turn all of humanity into slave soldiers to keep them in power. After the Posleen are defeated, however, The Federation is invaded by enemies worse than the Posleen, and all the mismanagement and cynical manipulation done by those Corrupt Corporate Executives starts to bite them in the ass.

Between the top-notch military action, dark humor, political intrigue and back-stabbing, this series is one of the best works of Military Science Fiction out there.

Tropes used in Posleen War Series include:
  • Abusive Precursors: The Aldenata, long since vanished, are known to have meddled with every race asides from humanity, generally never with results for the better. And the other races aren't so sure that the humans haven't been messed with, too. To be more explicit? The Aldenata are the reason why the Darhel become comatose after killing something - anything - despite clearly having evolved to be very efficient predators; the adrenaline triggers the release of tal which seems to be an endorphin-equivalent - the problem is, the release triggered by killing is so severe the Darhel in question becomes functionally, permanently chemically lobotomized. Most of the other races are quite sure that the Aldenata used to use the Posleen as shock troops in a war of some sort. This worries people, since they have no clue why the Aldenata vanished, or who they would have been using the Posleen against. But the heel face turn of the Posleen in the latest book seems to shed some light.
    • In Eye of the Storm it is revealed that the Aldenata have ascended, but are still able to respond to petitions from the lesser races.
    • In The Tuloriad it comes out that the Posleen were the first race the Aldenata encountered when they began exploring the galaxy. The Aldenata used the Posleen as a guard force for exploring hostile planets, taking advantage of the Posleens' belief that they were gods, until some Posleen questioning Aldenata divinity sparked a civil war. Afterward, the Aldenata abandoned the remaining Posleen on a prison planet, having found the other galactic races (Darhel, Indowy, Tchpht) better-suited to their needs. Eventually, the Posleen escaped. It is also implied that the Aldenata are responsible for fragmenting the Posleen race into God-Kings, semi-sentient cosslain, and stupid "normals"—remnants of ancient Posleen civilization depict only the first type.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Galactics tried to design AIs to fight the Posleen, but the AIs tried to take over. Subsequently, the AI devices (AIDs) the Darhel provide to humans turn out to have backdoors that allow the Darhel to learn exactly what the humans are doing, and pass that information along to the Posleen. (On the other hand, an AID that went "insane" turned into one of mankind's staunchest allies.) Meanwhile, the best human-made AI devices, Buckleys, have highly unstable personalities and are prone to crashing if their AI emulation is set too high. the original Buckley wasn't too stable when he was alive though...
  • Alien Invasion: The Posleen are this trope personified.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: On the side of light, so to speak, are the Bane Sidhe and the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who are working together against the Darhel, an evil Ancient Conspiracy aided by collaborationist humans.
    • In Eye of the Storm, it comes out that the Darhel used to use humans as a labor force, with tame Posleen to train them in the ways of fighting. This turns out to form the basis for legends of Atlantis, and of ancient Greek centaurs.
  • Animal Wrongs Group: "Greens" conspire with the Darhel to sabotage the war effort and let most of humanity die.
  • Anyone Can Die: Few of the characters from the first book with any development at all survive to the current book of the series, and sometimes they die or are believed to be dead several times, and not just Buckleys (see Designated Victim, below).
  • Apocalypse How: Multiple levels:
    • Earth gets put through between a Class 1 and a Class 2
    • The Posleen pull Class 5s so often they have a term for it.
  • Arbitrary Maximum Range: Averted with the M-300 grav rifles carried by the ACS. The just-barely-sublight pellets have no real maximum range. The only practical limits are those of the targeting system. In Layman's Terms, if you can target it, you can reach it.
  • Author Appeal: Ringo likes S&M apparently.
    • Other interests of contributing authors that make it into this series include devout Christianity (in The Tuloriad), Sluggy Freelance, favorite music (see Autobots Rock Out below), and attractive women with oversized endowments (Cally in her "Sinda Makepeace" body, Daisy Mae, Glennis LeBlanc[1], etc.)
  • Author Avatar: Michael O'Neal has a rather similar background to the Author. Including the same career, similar family structure, same hobbies and so on.
    • Ringo is just one out of a long tradition of sci-fi authors who are real-life wunderkinds; Robert A. Heinlein, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Travis S. Taylor, etc. It perfectly justifies the trope when you realize that these people could probably do stuff like this if the situation ever presented itself. (Or like to think they could, anyway.)
  • Author Tract / Writer on Board: Watch is this according to the after-word, with the baby-eating lizards standing in for Islamistic Terrorists. No, seriously! Expect Fridge Horror en masse upon realization that Kratman is not taking Refuge in Audacity . In fact pretty much any novel with Kratman as a co-author will qualify as this.
  • Ascended Fanboy: When the Galactics contact Earth and tell them about the incoming Posleen fleet, Earth assembles a brain-trust to come up with ways to defeat the incoming horde. A large chunk of said team are science fiction authors; who are recruited because they actually think about this kind of crap all the time. They then get to help make some of their dreams reality. Then someone notices that the military suddenly recruited all these people...
  • Autobots Rock Out: Michael O'Neal, Jr uses a lot of older rock for inspirational music before battle, as well as for pacing ACS marching, since the long, loping strides of ACS don't lend themselves to traditional marching cadences used by unassisted soldiers.
  • Badass Bookworm:
    • Michael O'Neal, Jr is a self-professed geek who has written and published science fiction stories, who was working as a website designer before being called into service. His exploits in the story are numerous and varied, but hand detonating an impromptu anti-matter bomb, and surviving the resultant explosion (if not without some serious damage) is certainly at or near the top of the list.
    • Another Badass Bookworm is Tommy Sunday, whose earliest appearance is as a computer geek and strategy gaming buff whose father is frustrated isn't going out for the football team. He is subsequently responsible for a number of combat simulation programs that are so good that they are used by the ACS itself.
  • Badass Family: Michael O'Neal, Sr is the patriarch of just one of many families that prove themselves a credit to their species.
  • Better to Die Than Be Killed: In Gust Front, Tommy Sunday, Jr, and his future girlfriend make a promise that if one is unable to kill themself, the other will do it for them, instead of leaving them alive for the Posleen to find and invite for dinner.
  • BFG: Way too many examples to list, pretty much anything carried by the ACS and the Posleen.
  • Big Bulky Bomb: In Gust Front, the Fredericksburg Executive Building in Fredricksburg, Virginia is filled with propane for the purpose of turning it into a giant fuel-air explosive that, when detonated, completely levels the town, as part of a deception to keep the Posleen from locating the impromptu bomb shelter the townspeople are using to hide from the aliens.
  • Big Damn Heroes: The ACS often serve in this role, particularly the units headed by Mike O'Neal, Jr. In one charge to the rescue in Gust Front, at the battle in Washington, DC he even plays Yellow Ribbon, the anthem for the US Cavalry, over the suit speakers.
  • Blade on a Stick: The Swiss Guardsmen's halberds from The Tuloriad.
  • Blue and Orange Morality: "Aliens are alien! is pretty much a mantra in the Cally series. Pretty much ignored in the rest of the novels.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece:
    • Museum ships like old battleships are reactivated and upgraded to fight the invading alien Posleen. A WW 2 cruiser, the USS Des Moines, is brought back into service and upgraded with Galactic Federation tech to help secure the Panama Canal region in Yellow Eyes
    • Elderly retired soldiers are rejuvenated with tech from more friendly alien allies to fight as young soldiers again. The "rejuv" pills become a major part of the plot, especially when they run out before the enlisted men are called into action, leaving the U.S. military top-heavy with officers. In Watch on the Rhine, the Germans break out the Nazis, albeit under protest.
  • Brick Joke: Aelool makes the Posleen Tula'stenaloor "an offer you can't refuse" at the end of Hell's Faire... but it takes until The Tuloriad half a dozen books later for the outcome of that offer to be shown.
  • Canon Discontinuity: As Co-Authors came in, the Author's original list of surviving nations as published is retconned out of existence. Notably except for scattered survivors the original Arc ended with only the US and Canada between the Rockies and Appalachians being functional. Later books add at least survivor states for Germany, Panama, Sweden, Japan, China and Nepal. One of the co-author books, the farther-future-setting Hero, was declared by Ringo to no longer canon, due to the epilogue of Watch on the Rhine and Eye of the Storm.
  • Can't Argue with Elves: Subverted rather brutally. Humanity in fact says "Screw You, Elves", and post-Posleen war our way of screwing people involves genocide to the tune of at least one Colony Drop.
  • The Cavalry: The end of Hell's Faire, when a Fleet/Fleet Strike task force, acting against Darhel orders, shows up just in time to not only save the 555th's ass, but to finish breaking the back of Posleen activity on Earth. Naturally, the Darhel react by killing or torpedoing the careers of every officer involved....
  • Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: The French troops involved with the expeditionary force on Diess are treated well by Ringo in Gust Front. Their political leadership, in Watch on the Rhine, however, is most certainly not.
  • Colonel Badass: Colonel Cutprice, a rejuvenated Medal of Honor winner and one of the most decorated Korean War veterans. Later he's leader of The ten Thousand, an elite fighting group arguably more badass than the ACS as a whole, as the Ten Thousand fight without the benefit of Powered Armor. It's explicitly stated that he refuses promotion above the rank of Colonel.
  • Continuity Snarl: The recovery of the Des Moines is depicted in The Tuloriad as happening in 2013, but in Yellow Eyes and Eye of the Storm as happening after "decades", around 2060. Presumably this was because the authors later realized there would not be adequate time for the events in The Tuloriad (which was written last) to unfold unless the recovery was pushed up a few decades.
  • Cool Starship: "Daisy Mae," after her upgrade. Arguably, the Federation Fleet warships qualify when used as intended. The performance of the Lexington IV in Eye of the Storm is probably a good example of how superdreadnoughts are supposed to be used in battle.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: the Darhels' Hat.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: In A Hymn Before Battle during the events of the defense of Diess, Lt. O'Neal had acquired a reputation for plans that sounded crazy but were thought to possibly work, due to the successes of his unconventional campaign against the Posleen.
  • Doorstopper: John Ringo's novels tend to be somewhat long but not long enough to qualify, in general; however, the last two books of the original set for the Posleen War Series, Hell's Faire and When the Devil Dances, were originally to be one novel. The events of 9/11 threw off Ringo's muse, according to him in the afterword for HF, and the work was broken up to get a book to the printers before it got ridiculously late (instead of the actual somewhat late). Had the two been printed together as originally planned, the resultant work would've easily cleared the lower limit for door stopper page counts.
  • Designated Victim: The Real Life Joe Buckley's fate as Baen's DV started with this series, as an originally unnamed ACS trooper who had a hand blown off by a grenade, then part of a destroyed Posleen warship dropped on his head, plus other abuses until the character's final death in Hell's Faire. By the time of Cally's War there is an AI upload of him that's the only known semi-stable human AI. Under high enough performance levels and enough stress, the AI will hard reboot dozens of times a second, each reboot killing him off again and reloading a back up copy of the default personality.
  • Dungeon Bypass: The "Screaming Meemie" units accompanying the 7000 ton "Bun Bun", in When the Devil Dances and Hell's Faire, tend to take full advantage of the passage of the SheVa smashing everything in its path flat. The resultant path is still impassable for wheeled vehicles, but for the tanks[2] traveling through the impressions that each section of tread leaves isn't a problem.
  • Efficient Displacement: Lt Rogers, in Gust Front, is said to leave a "vaguely human shaped hole" in a building he deliberately ran straight through, at the battle in Washington, DC, when stopping to turn would have put the troops he was leading at a tactical disadvantage. As part of an ACS unit, the building was the clear loser of the event.
  • Explosive Instrumentation: During the Posleen assault on the Rabun Gap wall, in When the Devil Dances, one of the consoles in SheVa 14, supporting the wall's defenders, explodes after a plasma gun hit penetrates into the command center.It's immediately Lampshaded by the SheVa's commander. And then it turns out that it killed another crew member, who had been surrounded by monitors in an almost 360-degree circle. When the power surge hit "there were thousands of volts all of a sudden going nowhere." The poor guy was "carbonized".
  • Fantastic Religious Weirdness: Because of the wiping out of five-sixths of Earth's population and the need to repopulate not only has the Catholic Church decided to permit priests and nuns to marry it has also decided to allow polygamy.
  • Five Rounds Rapid: Given Ringo's background, it's not surprising he zig-zags all over the place with this trope.
  • Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: the super monitor class ship has a spinal mounted Mass Driver that fires a huge slug packed with a gooey antimatter center for taking on the battle globes of the Posleen as they enter. A single round is said to be able to destroy a significant percentage of the ships in the formation of hundreds.
  • Framed for Heroism: The battleship USS Missouri, in the second book, fires a full salvo from one of its main turrets at a Posleen warship in a desperate attempt at destroying the vessel. The craft is destroyed, but it wasn't the battleship's rounds that did it: a nearby Planetary Defense Center armed with a gun designed to defend against those kinds of ships actually made the killing shot. However, from the perspective of the battleship's crew, their rounds were the fatal shot, as the PDC was completely destroyed by orbital bombardment from another Posleen warship immediately after firing. The notion of the battleship's rounds making the kill was ultimately responsible for the creation of the SheVa mobile artillery pieces featured in the third and fourth books.
  • Gambit Pileup: Much of the plot's unfolding is due to many different Companies, Governments, and Secret Societies master plans thwarting each other. Bane Sidhe versus Darhel are quite notable, and human groups like the Cyberpunks or Waffen-SS that don't use the Aides.
    • Especially when a group shuns the use of Aides does that mean the carefully crafted scheme is about to fall apart. The groups normally tapping the Aides will either guess or use misinformation designed to lead them into a trap.
  • Genre Shift: While the main series and most spin offs are following the ground war, the Cally Arc is a Series of Spy Novels.
  • Green Aesop: Broken, taken down to the ground and beaten to death for good measure. Anyone who is a member of the Green Party, or environmentalists period will be carrying the Idiot Ball in this series.
    • There is a specific reason: most of the Greens politicians we see have been using the green movement for power and don't really care about it. It's implied the Darhel made this so over long years to have a political group they could get a good handle on when the time came.
  • General Failure: A few examples, in a subversion they usually aren't around long after proving their incompetence.
    • Mostly because they die rather soon afterwards.
    • Post-Posleen War, the Fleet is chock full of them (which is the way the Darhel like it -- venal and corrupt brass make the Fleet a wonderful plaything for the Elves). Fleet Strike is less so.
  • Groin Attack: Several of them, throughout the series:
    • In When the Devil Dances, Captain Elgars disables an attacker with a kick to the crotch when ambushed in a Sub-Urb passageway.
    • In Hell's Faire, Major LeBlanc punts the civilian technician helping run the damaged "Bun Bun" between the legs, for an earlier event caused by a wrong setting on a Geiger counter that resulted in the major stripping down for an anti-radiation wash-down, after being splashed by water that was thought to be highly radioactive.
    • In Yellow Eyes, one of the named Posleen tromping around in the Panamanian jungles has a Cayman bite on its genitalia, to which a Normal replies with its Boma blade, only missing due to the victim's thrashing around, and cutting off part of the God King's member instead.
  • Higher-Tech Species: The only way most Galactic tech makes sense.
    • Some of it, such as the fractional speed of light rifle rounds that penetrate rather than explode like bombs, is pushing .SufficientlyAdvancedAlien in seeking narrative acceptance.
  • Hollywood Silencer: In a fairly rare slip-up regarding firearms, in A Hymn Before Battle, Ringo has an assassin using a silenced Colt .45 with the shots described as "four rapid huffs", with no one reacting until the targeted people fall into the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument. However, the assassin was hired by the Darhel, who could've just engineered a more effective silencer.
  • Horde of Alien Locusts: the Posleen.
  • How Do I Shot Web?: all technology the Posleen have they inherited from the Aldenata and they have only a limited understanding how it works. This leads to some rather humorous scenes like when a fire control computer helpfully informs a Posleen commander of incoming artillery fire and he just stares at it like an idiot.
  • Humans Are Warriors: We're the only sentient species besides the Polseen who can be reasonably expected to fight a war and have plenty of practice in doing so. All other species either have a legitimate biological reason and contribute to the war effort in other ways or have been engineered to effectively become invalids after an act of violence.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: Michael O'Neal, Jr's justification for ordering a massive nuclear strike on the continental United States; including an area where his father and daughter lived.
  • Idiot Ball: Arguably, carried by humanity, or at least parts of it in positions of power. However, since the Darhel had a vested interest in seeing all of humanity wiped out save for just enough to be slave mercenaries, they were the ones who passed humanity the idiot ball most of the time.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: the Posleen will eat just about anything, including each other, and guess what's at the top of the menu, at least on Earth.
  • Kangaroo Court: Pretty much how the entire Galactic Federation's judicial system is constructed, as shown in The Eye of the Storm.
  • Kill It with Fire: A tanker truck, a fire truck, and an intentionally damaged bridge that the Posleen have to cross provides much fun for the humans defending Fredricksburg, in Gust Front.
  • Left Hanging: The fate of the transplanted humans on Ackia (and Julio and Unhat who were last seen ducking for cover), who come as part of a major revelation in the beginning of Eye of the Storm—but then vanish entirely for the rest of the book. Of course, there have been fairly significant danglers in the series before that were eventually addressed—for example, the fate of Tulo'stenaloor and his band was left hanging from the end of Hell's Faire until The Tuloriad half a dozen books later.
  • Long Running Book Series
  • Magic From Technology: The Indowy Zen manufacturing techniques.
  • Meaningful Name: In Gust Front, we meet "town bicycle" Wendy Cummings, and geeky Tom Sunday. Subverted: Wendy is a virgin; all of the guys she's dated thought she would put out, and lied when she didn't, and Tom went to a military training camp where the teenage campers were screwing like bunnies. She loses her virginity to him, and they're still dating five years later. In the next book, she tells someone her name and winces at the anticipated joke.
  • Mega Corp: The Galactic Federation's society and culture is dominated by these. Unlike most however, they use a "cottage production" rather than industrialized method. There are economic, political, and in some cases religious reasons for them to use this method.
  • Military Mashup Machine: The Tiger IIIs from Watch on the Rhine are land battleships.
    • The SheVa unit "Bun-Bun" has added weapons and equipment to arguably make count as a land battleship, but it still isn't quite on the same level as the Tiger IIIs. Other SheVa units, however, are more akin to just really big mobile artillery pieces.
  • Monumental Damage: Washington Memorial and Lincoln Memorial, in the third book. Subverted in the case of Arlington National Cemetery, thanks to Posleen spiritual beliefs regarding the dead.[3]
  • More Dakka: Tons of it, since that's the only practical way of fighting the Posleen to a standstill, let alone defeat them.
  • Narrative Profanity Filter: In Gust Front, Captain April Weston, commanding the frigate Agincourt, is said to curse two minutes straight without repeating herself, in reaction to an official e-mail.
  • Neglectful Precursors: The Aldenata. You would think that they just might have realized their experiments on the Posleen and the Darhel might generate negative consequences. Afraid Not.
    • It has also been hinted a few times that the Posleen killed and ate them, though some books have also hinted that they might still be around (and Eye of the Storm outright revealed that they are still around and will respond to petitions by the lesser races).
  • Nuclear Option: The Chinese used nukes to try to slow down the Posleen, but failed to slow them for more than a day, winding up not only destroyed as a fighting force, but poisoning the Yangtze River for thousands of years.
    • In When The Devil Dances and Hell's Faire, deployment and use of nukes is a significant issue, thanks to a president that's very against them. However, they do eventually get authorized for use, as area denial weapons to kill large numbers of Posleen, after the Rabun Gap defenses are breached, including flushing the nearly the entire US nuclear missile arsenal to nuke the Gap, just to get some warheads past the absurdly accurate anti-air fire from Posleen hardware.
  • Old School Dogfighting: The sole Space Fighter scene averts this trope. The fighters in question using guided missiles to engage the enemy, and there's even an evasive maneuver that takes advantage of being able to change the direction one's pointing without changing vector until thrust is applied.
    • The few scenes with the larger ships also avert the trope, maneuvering as one would expect massive battlewagons to handle, and not more like really big airplanes.
  • Older Than They Look: All rejuvenated personnel qualify for this, appearing to be in their early twenties, while dating back, in some cases, to World War Two and earlier.
  • One-Hit Polykill: Rounds fired from the rail guns used by the ACS, traveling not much slower than the speed of light, will rip through multiple Posleen before running out of kinetic energy.
  • Our Elves Are Better: Subverted. The Darhel are Space Elves and everyone is a Corrupt Corporate Executive to boot.
    • Space Elves descended from a carnivore species and have extremely sharp teeth. The precursors modified them to digest plants and then put a mental block preventing them from directly harming any sort of animals or eating meat. If they do such an act they will go catatonic. As a result of this modification their survival became dependent on getting others to do their fighting for them. They succeed, until they try to mess with Humanity, who just says "Screw You, Elves!", and proceed to show the Darhel why pissing off humans is generally a bad idea.
  • Point Defenseless: Posleen defensive hardware is very dangerous to anything flying under its own power (even if with stealth equipment), but completely useless against unguided rockets or artillery shells. Not even the heros, save Mike when he singlehandedly takes down a Battle Globe, are immune.
  • Powered Armor: The ACS (Armored Combat Suits)
  • Punctuation Shaker: Posleen names, as well as their language, demonstrated with the Posleen that get Character Development.
  • Putting on the Reich: A fairly controversial subversion of this trope (i.e. the S.S. are actually "the good guys") is the entire plot premise of Watch on the Rhine, where the German Chancellor resurrects the Waffen-SS in order to save his country.
    • There is also a great deal of discussion and infodumps on the history of the special forces units versus the special prison units (and Karmic deaths for those with the prison units), and the SS groups are deliberately kept out until the last possible second as a futile last hope and specifically sent on the worst missions to die. However their operational parameters make them more resistant to the sabotage occurring to rest of the army using the Aides.
    • Yellow Eyes has a unique case of putting on the purple. Panama during the war eventually tosses out the corrupt elected leader in a military coup. Many terms such as master of the horse are Roman in origin.
  • Recycled in Space!: Watch on the Rhine could be described as The Iron Dream IN SPACE! and IN UNIRONIC!
  • Sapient Ship: The USS Des Moines in Yellow Eyes, after the insane AID is installed as part of her upgrades to fight the Posleen.
  • Self-Made Orphan: Mike O'Neal, twice -- the first time when he mistakenly believes his father and daughter did not escape a nuclear blast he detonated to destroy attacking Posleen (they were rescued by Bane Sidhe, then went deep undercover), then when he unknowingly kills his own father during a raid on a Bane Sidhe base in Honor of the Clan.
  • Sharpened to a Single Atom: The monomolecular blades used by the Posleen.
  • Shout-Out: the supertank named "Bun-Bun" is a reference to Sluggy Freelance, a webcomic that Ringo really likes.

Hail to the God-King, Baby!

    • Honor of the Clan includes a dual shoutout to both Star Trek and Mobile Suit Gundam. Included repeated discussions of a rebel base with normal weapons under assault by a superior armored force and requests to make the commander's suit black, with a dome helmet. Which leads to the quote:

Dom! Dom! Dom! I'm A Dom! I'm A Dom!

    • The "Daisy Mae" is converted from a wet navy cruiser, the USS Des Moines, to space navy dreadnought complete with a direct reference to a series involving the similar treatment of the Battleship Yamato.
    • Ringo also drops a brief reference to the computer game StarCraft when one character mentions they considered using part of its code in their new weapons' control systems but did not want them to mistake Himmit for enemy "Ghosts". (Interestingly enough, the backstory of the Starcraft setting with its vanished Xel'Naga precursors bears more than a passing resemblance to the history of the Aldenata.)
  • Space Fighter: The Space Falcon, developed to supplement the makeshift frigates guarding the solar system. It's explicitly stated that they are not capable of operating in an atmosphere.
  • Spaceship Girl: In Yellow Eyes, a US Navy cruiser, the USS Des Moines (CA-134), is converted to serve as a weapon platform for combating the aliens (it's a Sci Fi novel, after all) and has a AID installed to control it. However the AI was left on while shipping to earth, and developed more sentience (and some mental instability, due to sensory deprivation) by thinking the human equivalent of 5000+ years (in real terms a month or so, because AI think fast). the AI then proceeds to buy a cloning device on eBay (a Running Gag in the book is that you can find anything on eBay) and the clothing of a famous actress for DNA, and creates a living avatar for the ship. This is more of a Ship Girl, though, because it is a wet navy ship.
    • The AID's personality later merges with the "gestalt" of the original ship (basically a composite of the leftover traces of her crew's strong emotions, and in The Tuloriad she and several similar entities are rebuilt as starships using materials from the original ships because the non-AID portions of their "programming" make them resistant to several security flaws in the original AID design. Which proves to be of great benefit to humankind.
  • Strawman Political: Loads, almost entirely as obstacles for the protagonists to overcome.
  • The Federation: The Galactics have a pretty nasty version.
  • Tank Goodness:
    • Eye of the Storm has SPACE TANKS. And the Hedren have 'Continental Siege Units.' If only the Humans had Bolos.
    • Ordinary (if heavily upgraded) tanks also play a big role, earlier in the series. At one point, Mike O'Neal, Jr credits the conventional forces, which included German, French, and American tank units, with holding against the Posleen swarm until he could pull out the miracle that broke the Posleen army's back. And then there's the tank unit accompanying Bun-Bun in the final blitz of Hell's Faire.
  • Technical Pacifist: Thanks to Aldenata meddling the Darhel are this. The Indowy and Tch'pht border between this and Actual Pacifist. They won't, in fact can't, commit any violence themselves but are very reluctantly willing to let humans fight for them
  • This Is Gonna Suck: In A Hymn Before Battle, an ACS trooper[4] comments, just before getting his hand blown off by a grenade he had planted as part of an effort to escape from a collapsed building, "this is gonna hurt".
  • Tired of Running: In novel Gust Front, this is one of the reasons given for why The Six Hundred defended Washington, DC, after a horrific rout, compounded by Darhel interference and loads of General Failures, shredded US forces.
  • True Companions: Lampshaded. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. In years to come, men at home now in their beds will think of this day and do you know what they'll say? 'Jesus, I'm glad I wasn't with those poor doomed ACS assholes or right now I'd be dead'. But what the hell, that's why they pay us the big bucks. Board ships."
  • The Villain Makes the Plot: In the first two books the main commanders of the Posleen forces are of average or below average intelligence. In the next two books the Manipulative Bastard Tulo'Stenaloor becomes the new Big Bad and nearly streamrolls the humans with his brilliant tactics. In addition to his individual brilliance, Tulo'Stenaloor explicitly tries to recruit as many intelligent Posleen as possible to increase the pool of ideas he can draw from.
  • We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill: Subverted, as described in the page intro discussing the plot.
  • We Have Reserves: this goes a long way to describing the Posleen's mentality at waging war.
    • This is also Darhel philosophy towards Humans. specifically they want all but a small token minority that's under their thumb dead to prevent humanity from taking over the galaxy once the war is over
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Aldenata, arguably. Their legacy is a sullenly-gleaming example of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
  • Write Who You Know: Ringo does this enough that it could almost be called his signature style. Just one, of the numerous examples of this is early in a A Hymn Before Battle O'Neal wants to speak with a science fiction author named David who specializes in space naval combat. This is probably a reference to either David Weber or David Drake, fellow Baen Books writers with whom he is friends.
    • Another example of this is Joe Buckley, who works for Baen Books (who publish pretty much all of Ringo's works), although his character wasn't specifically given a full name until the third book in the Posleen War Series.
    • O'Neal himself is a former military man in the 82nd Airborne Division who left the service and went into private life in a technology-related job. Guess what Ringo was doing before he got his book contract?
    • Colonel Cutprice is explicitly based on Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most decorated soldiers in the US Army.
  • You Don't Want to Die a Virgin, Do You?: Lampshaded, then carried out a few chapters later, with Tom Sunday Jr and Wendy Cummmings during the Fredericksburg engagement in Gust Front.
  1. ↑ based on a real person
  2. ↑ The MetalStorm turrets replace the regular turrets on otherwise normal M-1 Abrams tanks
  3. ↑ Specifically, by burying the dead instead of eating them, their souls are left wandering around. Given Arlington is a military cemetery, by Posleen beliefs this results in a lot of very hostile warrior ghosts haunting the area. The thought scares even the sapient God Kings, and if the non-sapient soldiers knew it would probably send them fleeing in panic.
  4. ↑ identified in a later novel as Baen's Designated Victim, Joe Buckley
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