New Kashubia Series
Leo Frankowski's last Science Fiction Series. Although 6 books were planned 3 were published before Leo Frankowski passed away: the first A Boy and His Tank (1999) set up the series, the second The War with Earth (2003) defined it, the third Kren of the Mitchegai (2005) introduced the universes Big Bad, the next was planned to be their first major conflict, followed by the long hard war, ending in a epic resolution.
It should be noted that for 2/3rds of the series LF coauthored with Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.
Tropes used in New Kashubia Series include:
- BFS: Armed tanks with big fancy kukris.
- Cannibalism Superpower: Aliens eat babies for youth and learning.
- Cold Sniper: This series weapons are so powerful that one needs armor to protect against ones own guns One-Hit Kill for everything else.
- Cool Tank: Overlaps with Hover Tank, although with the proper add-ons the "tanks" could fly in space.
- Cyberspace: How your tank is run ... it generates problems later.
- Distant Finale: The interspaced narration by humanities successors Uplifted Animals
- Inertial Damping: Via inertial dampening fluid.
- Mitchegai ships can turn inertia off leading to some nifty maneuvering, not quite a Reactionless Drive but used as an alternative to Deflector Shields.
- Lensman Arms Race: The series starts of pretty spectacular, and then gets more impressive with sequential books.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: Similar to Stargate there needs to be two points to travel, however if you have good enough computers one of those points can be moving, and since your rockets don't need to carry their own fuel anymore you can go quite fast.
- Power Floats: Via intense magnetism the tanks even have little bars that act as treads.
- Remote Body: The hero spends most of the second book as the controller for a telepresence human-ish robot.
- Rocket Jump: The RC humanoid drones have this built into their legs.
- Single Biome Planet: The Mitchegai absolutely sterilize planets having just one animal (themselves) and one plant leading them to form several thousand "Grass Planets" via Terraforming.
- New Kashubia itself used to be a gas giant, after a local supernova however, it has been rendered into a concentric sphere of different metals, which was great for manufacturing but sucky for anything else.
- Starfish Aliens: Two types Shapeshifting Crabs and Explosive Breeder lizards.
- Spaceship Girl: Tank girls and boys In Space thank you very much.
- Super Reflexes: Combat Speed is a new development on the VR front, it makes for very neat tanks.
- Terraform: Several human planets and all Mitchegai planets.
- Weaponized Exhaust: Mentioned in passing.