Star Scraper



A Star Scraper is a seriously tall building - so tall, in fact, that you probably won't read the caption under this page's image until you're near the bottom of the page. Common in Speculative Fiction, these buildings tower over their surroundings, or may be part of a city of similar buildings. Indeed, it is not uncommon for them to be a single city in their own right.

To qualify as a Star Scraper, a building must be clearly over 1,000 metres tall. The tallest building on Earth, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is 828 metres tall. For a city entirely made of those, see Skyscraper City.

Compare Space Elevator.

Anime and Manga

 * Eureka Seven: Most people live near or in some very, very tall tower-cities.
 * There's one above the Dungeon in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, so tall that we never see its top, no matter how far up the camera pans.
 * The mysterious tower at the centre of The Place Promised in Our Early Days reaches past the clouds. Built in Hokkaido, it is visible from Tokyo, over 800 kilometres away, on a clear day. That's over double the distance between London and Paris, or one-fifth the distance between New York City and Los Angeles. Deriving from how the 3,776m-tall Mt Fuji is about 100km away from Tokyo, the proportionate height of the tower to be visible from eight times the distance is likely at least 30km. The Soviet Superscience needed to build such a behemoth is almost as impressive as its true purpose.
 * Aincrad, the giant floating castle that is the setting of the original Sword Art Online. While it "only" has 100 floors, each is a biosphere unto itself, with floors holding features like towns, cities, forests, mountains, and even lakes. Shaped like a ziggurat, the bottom floor was ten kilometers in diameter, with the additional floors getting progressively smaller.

Comic Books

 * The Megacities of Judge Dredd have these.

Film

 * Coruscant in Star Wars is filled with these buildings. "Watch your step, or you'll be falling for hours."
 * Blade Runner.
 * The Fifth Element. Made startlingly clear when Leeloo escapes from the medical facility, goes outside, and looks down, down. Earth is starting to resemble Coruscant complete with oceans being drained. See how New York City looks when the starliner is leaving.
 * The Towering Inferno.
 * The Clamp office building in Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
 * The Thief and the Cobbler: ZigZag, the Evil Chancellor, has a tower that is ridiculously tall. The minaret with the three golden balls is supposed to be the tallest in the city, but seems fairly normal in comparison.

Literature

 * The Mile High MacIlwaine from Nancy Farmer's The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm is... Well... Exactly What It Says on the Tin- a hotel one mile tall.
 * Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 contains four towers that reach from the earth to geostationary orbit. Which means they're about 36 thousand kilometers tall—nearly three times the diameter of the planet itself—and several kilometers in diameter. "Seriously tall" doesn't begin to describe it.
 * They also double as space elevators, and link up to a single ring structure that's at geostationary orbit that completely circles the world to form a massive spaceport.
 * Not a skyscraper but a pyramid, the Last Redoubt/Great Redoubt from The Night Land easily qualifies - the main pyramid is seven miles tall, with a 3/4 mile observation tower on top of that.
 * The Tyrant's Dark Pyramid in Outernet is so high it reach the outer space.
 * While not quite an extremely tall building, the starscrapers in Peter F. Hamilton's Nights Dawn Trilogy are named such - as they are skyscrapers IN SPACE. Literally hanging off the outside edge of rotating space habitats.
 * Common in the Honor Harrington universe. Justified by the ubiquity of counter-grav technology.
 * The Cylinder from K. W. Jeter's Farewell Horizontal. A specific size isn't given, but most of humanity lives inside (or on) it, and most of the habitable area is well above the cloud layer.
 * In The Divine Comedy, Purgatory is a giant mountain on the world's southern hemisphere, its peak as far from the Earth's surface as the surface is to the center of the Earth.

Live-Action TV

 * Several examples exist in Doctor Who. Satellite 5, for instance.
 * The Thompson Tower in Thunderbirds was one of these... until it came crashing down.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

 * The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was a tower built by people who settled in Shinar, which they intended to reach Heaven. For their audacity and hubris, God cursed them so that every worker spoke a different language, so they could not communicate with each other and the tower collapsed. Which is why humans no longer have one language.
 * While the Bible does not say how far they got before it collapsed, the Book of Jubilees mentions the tower's height as being 5,433 cubits and 2 palms, or 2,484 m (8,150 ft), about three times the height of Burj Khalifa, or roughly 1.6 miles high.
 * One historical site believed to be a candidate for the "real" Tower of Babel is Etemenanki, a ziggurat temple in Babylonia whose name meant "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth". Most modern engineers and scholars estimate it was about 91 meters tall - not nearly a Star Scraper by the definition given above, but quite a marvel of engineering for a civilization with Bronze Age technology.

Tabletop Games

 * Warhammer 40,000:
 * Hive Cities, most notably Hive Primus from Necromunda.
 * Fang, the fortress of Space Wolves. It is so high, spaceships dock to its peak.
 * Sharn, the City of Towers in Eberron. Its towers average at around 2 km tall with some of the tallest having half to a full kilometre more. Above them is a flying district of rich people called the Skyway. The city's three-dimensional nature means most of the transit takes place with flying vehicles such as Soarsleds and Skybarges.
 * Arcologies in Shadowrun can be this.
 * The Cardinal's tower in Mutant Chronicles is so high that on the top floor, gravity is negligible.
 * In the Ravenloft realm of Bluetspur, Mount Makar, the fortress of the illithids who rule the domain. Calling this structure a "mountain" is a "wild misnomer", as it is a "malignant deformation on a planetary scale". No summit can be seen from the surface of Bluetspur, its "contorted slopes stretch into the toxic heavens, and its focus occupies the periphery of viewer's attentions no matter which way they look". Whatever the case, it is not a natural structure, and whatever motive the illithids had for building it is difficult for humans to comprehend, but one thing is certain - it enhances their psionic powers and that of the God Brain that is the Darklord of Bluetspur, making the fiend near-omniscient.
 * Planescape is known for gigantic fortresses (mostly in Splat books, as it wouldn't be feasible for a party of PCs to explore them) mostly in the Lower Planes (not that the Upper Planes don't have them, those just aren't as interesting to write about). The most notorious is Khin-Oin the Wasting Tower in the Grey Waste, the seat of government (such as it is) for the yugoloths. Situated in the center of the Grey Waste making its location the center of the Lower Planes, the structure is 20 miles tall above ground, and it had subterranean floors that extend another 20 miles below ground. Most disturbingly, the tower looks like a giant spinal column, because that's what it is. It was built out of the spine of a primordial deity whom the yugoloths claimed to have killed eons ago. The floors within contain libraries, laboratories, meeting rooms, drill fields, planning rooms, and exquisite suites for ultroloths, many of them places where mortals are better off not exploring and even more they are better off not even knowing about. The highest floor contains the Siege Malicious; whatever yugoloth successfully claims this magical throne is considered the Oinoloth, ruler of the yugoloth race.

Video Games
""LMC knew they had found an excellent arena at the very top of a newly constructed Galaxyscraper SuperStructure. Thanks to the modern miracle of super tensile solids, these three buildings reach a staggering 12 miles high at their pinnacle. The thin atmosphere and reduced influence of Earth's gravity provide an interesting test of the tournament athlete's ability to adapt and conquer in extreme environments.""
 * The Citadel in Half Life 2, although that is an alien entity.
 * The Sunspire in Unreal, which shows up in the skyboxes of several maps before you actually reach it.
 * One of the arenas in Unreal Tournament, DM-Morpheus. To quote the map description:


 * The map returns in Unreal Tournament 2004 (DM-Morpheus3) with a similar companion in 2003 and 2004 (DM-Plunge).
 * Whittlebone's (driver of Mr. Slamm) dream is to build one in Twisted Metal 2.
 * The Karma Temple in Digital Devil Saga.
 * The Tower of Salvation in Tales of Symphonia. It literally reaches "unto the heavens" and the player never sees its top from the outside.
 * The entire point of SimTower, where the player can build a fully functioning hotel/office complex that spreads over several square blocks, ten underground levels, and up to 500 stories.
 * The Tower of the Gods in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is so tall it can be seen from almost anywhere on the map.
 * In Ar tonelico, the eponymous tower actually reaches out into space. All of humanity lives on it or one of two similar towers, since they're the only things tall enough to reach over the sea of plasma enveloping the Earth.
 * The Tower of Babel in Illusion of Gaia. After climbing to the top, the player can look out at the background and see the curvature of the Earth. It also might double as a Space Elevator, since the allows the main character to simply fly into space to fight the Big Bad, without worrying about any pesky little details like "gravity".
 * The Cardinal Shaft in Hellsinker.
 * Tartarus in Persona 3 has floors. You spend most of the game climbing it.
 * The Syndicate Tower in Saints Row: The Third barely misses the mark at having been calculated as 900-plus metres. It and some peers still far exceed ordinary skyscrapers and can be seen from almost all the map.

Web Comics

 * In Homestuck, players of SBURB (or SGRUB) alter each others' houses with the game. Since one of the main goals is to reach increasingly high-up Gates in the sky, their houses eventually become these as a matter of necessity. Examples include John's house, Terezi's, and Jade's.

Western Animation

 * Phineas and Ferb: one of the many things they built and lost in a single day is a star scraper that touched the earth's moon.
 * Dr. I.Q. Hi's office in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century is in a Star Scraper.
 * In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “The Least Dangerous Game”, Dulaine is a planet with a thermosphere of charged ions, meaning transporters cannot be used to go to or from the surface. Instead, the Dulainians use orbital lifts (or “space elevators”, as Mariner calls them) to board orbiting starships. These towers are so impossibly tall that should the elevator malfunction (which is has in this episode) the surface can be accessed by skydiving, and the second time Mariner has to do so, she is able to take a 10-minute nap while in freefall before pulling her ripcord.

Real Life

 * Frank Lloyd Wright's fantasy plans for a "mile high building" in Chicago.
 * X-Seed 4000 is the tallest building fully envisioned with design plans. It's not meant for serious construction, though.
 * In August 2011, Saudi Arabia announced plans and contracts signed to build a 1000-meter building called the Kingdom Tower. Yep, that's an even kilometer. Its original planned height of one mile was reduced to a mere kilometer when the local geology proved unsuitable for supporting a building that tall. (Even so, it will still be the tallest structure in the world when complete.) Since renamed the Jeddah Tower, construction on it began in 2013. While it was is expected to have been be completed in 2020, politics in 2017 caused a halt to construction one-third of the way through the project.