Supermassive Black Hole A*

"Supermassive Black Hole A*" ("A star") is a hard sci-fi webcomic telling stories from a human civilization in the center of our galaxy, and more specifically, the covert search for a particularly powerful bit of Lost Technology, and the lives ruined by it. here, energy and raw materials are abundant and life is cheap. A* is in a black and white cinematic format, and updates Monday through Friday.

Tropes used in Supermassive Black Hole A* include:

• Action Survivor: Vero Plank, our protagonist, is a simple tramp freighter crewman. But the instant shit got real, he Took a Level in Badass.
• Arbitrary Maximum Range: Apparently, the 'boomships' have a greater laser range than standard Mega Corp fighters. Possibly justified, because they are stated to be faster, and therefore more capable of dodging incoming laser fire, and therefore capable of engaging effectively at greater ranges than a slower, less dodgy opponent.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: because the stars are much closer together at the galactic core than they are out in the vicinity of Earth, this is possible despite the lack of Faster-Than-Light Travel.
• Bigger Bad: Oswalt and Perriman are spoken of only in legend, and those legends make it clear they were not nice.
• Body Backup Drive/ Respawn Point: Selenis has a cloning facility with dozens of bodies in reserve. However, the process is... inexact.
• Colony Drop: A ship ten times the size of a galaxy-class freighter,moving at ten percent light speed, hits a planet. Only those important enough to get on the few evacuation ships survive.
• Complete Monster: Selenis. Just... wow. Words are not enough. Trust me, YMMV does not apply here.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Solvan Mar gets the most screen time, but it's implied that he's far from the only one.
• Death by Sex: The rare male example.
• Femme Fatale: Selenis.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Odd, in a comic otherwise extremely hard.
• Lost Technology: Perriman's 'perfected' cloning technology.
• Mega Corp: Many, and powerful. Convential government has been mentioned only one, and only in passing.
• Stealth in Space: A relatively realistic one. Fusion engines leave a radiation trail that can be easily tracked, while chemical engines do not.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted. Distances in the core are much smaller, as noted above.
• There Are No Good Executives: There was one.
• We Can Rule Together