Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
214,620
edits
Asteroid Thicket: Difference between revisions
→Webcomics
(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.AsteroidThicket 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.AsteroidThicket, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
|||
| (23 intermediate revisions by 8 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:gradius-meteor.jpg|link=Gradius|
{{quote|'''Leia''': "You're not actually going IN to an asteroid field?"
'''Han Solo''': "They'd be [[Try and Follow|crazy to follow us]], wouldn't they?"
'''Leia''': "...you don't have to do this to impress me."
|''[[Star Wars]]: [[The Empire Strikes Back]]''}}
In science fiction movies and TV, asteroids form a vast, hyperkinetic, obstacle-strewn [[Death Course]]: Enormous rocks spin like tops and whiz around all over the place, frequently even smashing into each other. Trying to navigate one is like asking a chicken to cross a busy Los Angeles freeway during rush hour: Small nimble spacecraft flown by skillful [[Ace Pilot
It's unfortunate that [[Real Life]] asteroid fields, while they do exist, don't have such a flair for the dramatic; [[Real Life]] asteroids are strewn much farther apart from each other; ''so'' far that the chance of even ''seeing'' one (let alone crashing into one) is pretty much nil; scientists have sent space probes through our friendly neighborhood asteroid belt for decades (and haven't lost a single one in the process).
Conversely, planetary rings are (relatively) much more sparse in fiction than real
A subtrope of [[Artistic License Astronomy]], [[Space Does Not Work That Way]] and [[Sci
Compare [[Space Clouds]], a trope about the similarly unrealistic portrayal of
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== Anime and Manga ==
* In the second season of ''[[Uchuu Senkan Yamato|Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers]]'', Yamato attempts to elude the Earth Defense flagship ''Andromeda'' by flying at high speed through our solar system's asteroid belt. (To his credit, Captain Gideon of the ''Andromeda'' simply flies ''around'' the asteroid belt and is waiting for our heroes on the other side.)
Line 25:
* ''[[Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko]]'' episode 5.
* Episode 6 of ''[[Super Dimension Fortress Macross]]'' used the "rings of Saturn" variation.
* ''[[Galaxy Express 999]]'' episode 3 depicts our solar system's asteroid belt this way. Granted, the series runs on [[Rule of Cool]], but the asteroid field isn't some futuristic device designed to look like an old-fashioned inaccurate sci-fi asteroid field... it just ''is'' an inaccurate sci-fi asteroid field.
* In ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'', Earth is surrounded by an incredibly thick asteroid field. It was born when an experimental jumpgate exploded near the Moon, and a good third of it blasted into pieces, raining down into Earth's gravity field. And daily meteor showers because of it.
Line 32:
* In the [[Marvel Comics|Marvel]] ''[[Transformers Generation 1]]'' comic, our solar system's asteroid field is portrayed in precisely this manner; in fact, the ''Ark'''s mission was to destroy a bunch of asteroids so that Cybertron could pass safely through.
** To be fair, although the asteroid belt is portrayed incorrectly, at this time in the comic Cybertron was said to be "Saturn-sized". This size would make the chances of a cataclysmic impact more likely (though still very low).
* The trope is turned [[Up to Eleven]] in ''[[
Line 38:
* In ''[[Star Wars|The Empire Strikes Back]]'', Han, deprived of his hyperdrive, has to [[Wronski Feint|slalom through densely packed asteroids to evade an Imperial fleet]]. And then echoed in ''Attack of the Clones'' when Obi-Wan is trying to evade Jango Fett in a planetary ring.
** The asteroid density from ''Empire'' is apparently nothing unusual in the galaxy far, far away. Rather, C3P0's cited statistics indicate they're ''all'' insanely-difficult to navigate.
*** The thicket is described as an asteroid ''field'', which is presumably different from a belt in some
*** A planet in the middle of formation? In such situation there could be plenty of flying rocks in close vicinity to each other.
*** They could have rewritten it to be the remains of Alderaan, although it would be kind of goofy for the rebel base to be in the same system as Alderaan...
** The unreality of the ''Empire Strikes Back'' sequence is lampooned in [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/482.html this] [[Irregular Webcomic]]. See also the page quote.
** In "A New Hope", though, it's [[Justified Trope|justified]]: the "asteroids" are really fragments of Alderaan, which has ''just been destroyed''. So obviously they're everywhere.
*** Is it? To stop the pieces of planet from falling in on itself and becoming a new planet, the asteroids would have to be flying apart at close to the planet's escape velocity so even by the time Han Solo and Co. get there, they should have already scattered an awful lot.
**** So what if Alderaan's remains will eventually reform? It was never stated in the films that they wouldn't.
***** Perhaps it wasn't stated, but the scene depicts Alderaan's remains are being flung out at a rather high fraction of ''c''. It's not coming back together. Mind you, that raises a whole host of other issues, so eh.
Line 49:
*** The second ''[[Rogue Squadron]]'' game had the Rogues guiding transports through an all-concealing nebula, and later going on a mission through an asteroid thicket that was ''very'' dense.
**** Interestingly, while dense, the asteroids barely move and as such, the fields are very easy to navigate. Even the bonus level based off of the Millenium Falcon chase scene has nowhere near the amount of danger implied in the film.
* [[Titan
* Variation: Instead of an asteroid field, ''[[
** This begs the question of someone building a giant minefield [[In Space]] in the middle of nowhere. It's not as if there is a concept of a choke point in space.
** No, but there are likely common entry and egress points to a system, and getting closer to a planet...
Line 56:
* ''Meteor'' shows our solar system's own asteroid belt being like this, with two large asteroids close enough that when one gets hit by a comet, a spacecraft orbiting the other gets destroyed by the debris.
* The lunar shuttle in ''[[Airplane!]] II: The Sequel'' encounters a ridiculously dense asteroid belt after it goes off course. Made [[Rule of Funny|doubly ridiculous]] because of the way they're going: know any asteroid belts between the Earth and the Sun? Me neither.
** Though there might be [
*** It's a comedy. Shush.
* The introductory zoom-scene from ''[[Contact (
** The team that created the opening said they did it on purpose partly for [[Rule of Cool]] and partly because [[Viewers
* In the 2011 film ''[[Green Lantern (
* ''[[Armageddon]]'' explains the cloudburst of meteorites as the result of a comet passing through the asteroid belt and bouncing shrapnel into Earth's vicinity, including an asteroid "the size of Texas," whatever that means. This is doubly wrong, once for thinking that a single comet could collide with so many asteroids and conveniently shove them in the same general direction, and twice for thinking that a comet (size range 100 meters to 40+ kilometers) could knock a Texas-sized piece of anything out of the belt entirely.
== Literature ==
* Averted in ''[[
** This is another example of Clarke getting stuff right. When ''2001'' was written, scientists weren't sure if it was even ''possible'' to travel through the Asteroid Belt. In fact, this was one of the reasons why Pioneer 10 and 11 even were launched, to make sure that the more expensive Voyager probes would be able to make it. While they were wrong about the
*** In addition, one of the planned approaches to Saturn would have taken one of the Voyagers through the [
** Speaking of being chock full of lovely dust: Although ''2001'' portrays the asteroid belt as being nearly empty of '''big''' rocks, it also describes ''Discovery''{{'}}s main communications antenna dish as being riddled with extremely tiny holes, punched by the micrometeorites that permeate the asteroid belt.
* Averted and explained in ''The Martian Way'' by [[Isaac Asimov]], who says that perhaps the spaceships didn't have to waste propellant to go around the asteroid belt, since, while on map it looks like a swarm of insects, it would take real stroke of bad luck in order to hit a rock.
** Asimov's first published story, ''Marooned off Vesta'', embodies this trope; but as explained in the 2001 example above, this is [[Science Marches On]], not [[Did Not Do the Research]].
Line 74:
*** In ''The Stars like Dust'', Gilbret claims he discovered {{spoiler|the rebellion planet}} when his ship was damaged by a stray asteroid and they rescued him.
*** In the short story "Feminine Intuition", important information about a possible nearby life-bearing planet is being transported via an aircraft. The aircraft is hit and destroyed by a meteorite. Because of how improbable it is, the characters speculate as to whether some higher intelligence orchestrated the meteor strike to keep Earth from learning about their alien neighbors. The odds against this happening are astronomical.
* [[Robert A. Heinlein]] said the same thing in ''[[Farmer in the Sky]]'' when the narrator observes that the
** In the universe of this book, the Asteroid Belt is more densely packed than it is in Real Life, as it's stated a couple times that the Belt used to be a planet. This is a case of [[Science Marches On]]; it was once thought that the Asteroid Belt might have been a planet that broke up, until we discovered there's not nearly enough material in the Belt to have ever made a planet-sized object.
* Justified in Tobias S. Buckell's ''[[Halo]]'' novel ''The Cole Protocol.'' The Rubble is explicitly said to be very unusual, the asteroids having been tethered together, and is kept stable by constant adjustments controlled by an AI.
** With the outer colonies glassed by the Covenant, it seems Insurrectionists have chosen to colonise asteroids instead, as the crew comes across one in ''First Strike''.
* Subverted in Allen Steele's ''A King of Infinite Space,'' where the protagonist claims to expect the asteroid field to mirror his recollections of ''[[Star Wars|Empire Strikes Back]]'', only to discover the scientific reality of the asteroid field.
* Justified and lampshaded in ''[[Starfire|Crusade]]'' by [[David Weber]]. It first comes up in the context of a closed warp point (a [[Our Wormholes Are Different|warp point]] without a significant/detectable gravity field) that happens to exist in the middle of an asteroid belt, which led to the immediate destruction of small ships transiting due to collisions - a situation immediately stated as freakish and unique. One chapter later, an enemy uses an asteroid cluster in a different star system [[Stealth in Space|to hide a fleet]], while musing that only in a handful of clusters do [[Take That/Literature|"conditions even approach those... in popular entertainment."]]
Line 84:
* Completely averted in [[Larry Niven]]'s [[Known Space]] universe. Larry is well known for [[Shown Their Work|Showing His Work]]. Belters are explicitly described as spending months at a time alone, flying their singleships between asteroids on prospecting runs. He even extrapolates and uses the ramifications in his stories. Not everyone has the kind of personalty to handle that amount of nothing for the length of time that is required to get from place to place. The ones who can't never come back to port. Belter society is made of the ones who can.
* ''Future Hope'' features a cocky, crackerjack space ace whom the author attempts to characterize as the greatest in the solar system by describing how he was famous for being the only pilot to ever safely navigate through the asteroid belt without his navigation tools on.
* It's strongly averted in [[Stanislaw Lem|Stanislaw Lem's]] ''[[
* Averted in ''[[
* The Boneyard in the ''[[Star Trek:
*
▲== Live Action TV ==
▲* ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined (TV)|Battlestar Galactica]]''. Guilty as charged. Rather surprising given that it's usually relatively accurate when it comes to astrophysics.
** Might have been justified when they were in the debris disk around the black hole. Every other instance, however...
** Actually, the 'asteroid field' in ''Scar'' was argued to be a protoplanetary disc, because the science
* The ''[[
* The pilot (episode, not the character Pilot) of ''[[
** In the ''Peacekeeper Wars'' wrap-up mini-series, [[The Dragon|Braca]] leads a fighter squadron through a planetary ring in order to strike at the rear of the Scarran battle fleet. Plausible (not the thicket) in that radiation would keep the squadron's approach masked from enemy sensors.
* The ''[[Lost in Space]]'' episode "The Reluctant Stowaway" (the premiere) featured the ''Jupiter 2'' being pummeled by asteroids as it drifted off course into the belt.
* The 2007 4th season premiere of ''[[Stargate
* ''[[
** The ''[[Star Trek:
** In the
** In a
** In the ''[[Star Trek: Voyager
* Part of the race course in the ''[[Stargate SG
== Tabletop Games ==
* The ''[[Star Wars]]-Risk'' boardgame used an impenetrable asteroid field to represent planets destroyed by the Death Star, rendering travel in the region.
* ''[[Twilight Imperium]]'' features asteroid belts that take up the same amount of space as a star system and pose a serious problem for the movement of certain classes of starships.
* The Asteroid fields in ''[[Battlefleet Gothic]]'' are an [[Egregious]] example, probably caused by [[The Coconut Effect|the target audience expecting]] [[Space Is an Ocean|"terrain" to fight around]]. The effects of asteroid fields are thus: Anything unguided (a space hulk, torpedoes and so on) are automatically destroyed upon entry. [[Old School Dogfighting|Attack craft]] have a 1 in 6 chance of destruction and full space ships (from [[Standard Sci
* ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'' actually manages to avoid this. There are asteroid fields, but they're exactly as they are in reality.
* In ''[[Star Fleet Battles]]'', asteroid fields are thick enough so that any ship or seeking weapon passing through them has a significant chance of taking damage, possibly enough to destroy it. They also interfere enough with sensors to allow ships and bases to hide within them.
* The Cularin system, where nearly all of ''Star Wars'' d20's [[Living Force]] campaign was set, has an asteroid thicket at the edge of the system. Cularin's depiction is unusual in that it avoids both the lack of clear spots and [[2-D Space]] at the same time. There ''are'' clear spots, but they need to be calculated and are only big enough for smaller ships, while larger ships go over/under it. The belt is only a hazard because the gravity well (alongside some other oddities in the system) takes ships out of hyperspace and forces them to travel sub-light within the system and prevents quickly escaping the system.
== Video Games ==
* The [[X (
* One must mention the classic arcade game ''[[Asteroids]]'', where the asteroids just go through each other: either they cheat, or their dodging skills make them smarter than [[
** Clearly the player's ship is actually a huge arrow-shaped tower.
** It's worth noting that some Asteroids clones do feature collision detection and the asteroids will carom off one another.
* The first set of starship battles in ''[[Ratchet and Clank Going Commando]]'' take place in such a region, though again this may be justified by the fact that it seems to be gathered around a possible mining station.
** On the other hand, ''[[Ratchet: Deadlocked]]'' has a planet whose orbit takes it through an asteroid field so dense, the residents put up a planetary shield so they didn't get [[Colony Drop
* The Meteo area in the ''[[Star Fox (
* The classic Space Sim ''[[Wing Commander (
** You think that's bad? Try a game breaking bug that prevented the capital ship from jumping to safety at the end of that very mission...
** ''Wing Commander'' is worse than ''FreeSpace'' as it features mines as well as asteroids. In either game, you can shoot rocks out of the way. In ''Wing Commander'', if you shoot a mine, it goes
** And then, you got the bug in ''[[Wing Commander (
* ''[[Freelancer]]'' carefully examines this trope. First, due to their thickness, most asteroid fields in the game are hiding places for criminals. Second, also due to their thickness, several asteroid fields are also suitable for mining operations. Third, some of these asteroid fields are actually made of junk (one of them is even a minefield!). And finally, the spacecraft manufacturers must be very aware of the difficulty of navigating these places by hand, because in order to get across an asteroid field, you just have to set a waypoint to your target, press the Go To button, and the computer will do the slaloming for you.
** Which is a very bad habit to form if also playing the above mentioned [[X (
* The ''[[Escape Velocity]]'' series (plays like ''Privateer'', looks like ''Asteroids'') has immensely thick asteroid belts, but ships cannot collide with them. Their purpose is simply to interfere with weapons fire (though they can also be mined in the third game).
** These asteroids are identical in appearance to those in ''Maelstrom'', a clone of ''Asteroids'' which was Ambrosia Software's first published game.
* In ''[[
** Averted, actually. The "asteroid storm" is the result of exiting hyperspace in the tail of a humongous comet. They were supposed to show up in the gas tail, but miscalculated and ended up in the debris field. It's still a touch iffy, but if we're talking a cometary body that's hundreds of kilometers across and it's on an approach vector to its sun, then it could be in the process of breaking up. The "asteroids" couldn't be harvested until blown apart, suggesting they were icy bodies.
** In another mission, a large asteroid is deliberately steered into the path of the mothership (via a huge engine built into the asteroid's "back"), as it cannot change direction when in hyperspace, and will automatically exit hyperspace when a potential collision is detected.
Line 137 ⟶ 135:
** ''[[Empire At War]]'' uses them as well; large ships will usually fly around them to avoid losing shields.
** Stage 3 of ''[[Shadows of the Empire]]'' has the ''Outrider'' trying to escape from the Empire in an asteroid field, but Dash leaves the piloting to Meebo, so the player really doesn't even have to think twice about them.
* The PS3 downloadable title ''Super Stardust HD'' has asteroids that swoop down, and then start orbiting around the planet you're guarding. This appears to be because of an incredibly powerful planetary shield whose existence is for some reason entirely
** The [[All There in the Manual|backstory]] explains that the asteroids are being thrown at those planets by the attacking aliens to distract you when they attack.
* The MMORPG ''[[
* Avoided in the classic 1984 space simulator ''[[Elite]]'' and its sequels. Whereas the first game had several classic examples of [[Did Not Do the Research]] such as no star system containing more than one planet and one sun, it did, more or less, bang asteroids on the head. As the game was randomly generated, it was not unusual for players to never come across an asteroid ''ever'' when playing the game!
** In the sequel ''Elite: Frontier'' star systems were more realistic, usually having several planets of various sizes.
* Averted in ''[[Metroid|Super Metroid]]'' and ''[[Metroid|Metroid Fusion]]'': the Ceres Research Lab is stationed in the middle of an asteroid field (possibly ''the'' Asteroid Belt, given the name of the station) and the asteroids therein are completely static in relation to one another, if densely packed. In the sequel, Samus only crashes into an asteroid because the X Parasite infection had knocked her out.
* Averted in ''Darkstar One'', where navigating an asteroid field is pretty easy, with the asteroids being large, slow and very dodgeable. The only marginally difficult part is entering into special asteroids to collect pieces of the Darkstar.
* Justified in ''[[Dead Space (
* Doomsday Zone from ''[[Sonic 3 and Knuckles
* In the classic TI-99/4A game, ''Parsec'', asteroid belts are unusual indeed. The game is a [[Horizontal Scrolling Shooter]], where you fly a ship ''around the planet''. Despite this fact, you encounter asteroid belts regularly! And each "belt" contains an identical pattern of asteroids, starting with a huge column of rocks coming at you. Each subsequent belt comes ever faster, which suggests they should have crashed into each other ages ago.
* ''Edge of Chaos'' has this in spades. The asteroids will blow up like bombs if you shoot at them a few times. There was even a mod that turned this up to 11 by making the asteroids fly around at ridiculous speeds, pelting everything like a space hail storm.
Line 154 ⟶ 152:
*** Omega was broken apart several centuries earlier by an impact with another asteroid. The asteroids that surround it are probably remnants from the impact - but they should have drifted away by now, unless the mass effect fields that protect the station have some sort of effect on them.
** The end sequence of ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'' also manages to create an awesome asteroid-maze sequence with fewer scientific issues. When the Normandy goes through the Omega-4 relay, it emerges in a frequently-replenished junkyard of wrecked ships that have passed through without the proper preparations and run into things.
* ''[[Conquest: Frontier Wars]]'' has plenty of these, conveniently on the edges of map, these thickets slowed down ships travelling though them.
** [[All in The Manual|The manual]] explains that the fields in the game are just representations of what is actually going on, and that the ships slow down in order to navigate through the field (the slaloming is not actually shown in the game). The nebulae are even weirder with their strange abilities (knocking out [[Deflector Shields|shields]], decreasing weapon effectiveness, hiding entire fleets, etc.).
* In ''[[Star Control]]'', every single space battle, no matter where it occurs features a ridiculous amount of ship-sized asteroids. They are continually spawned to maintain a stable number, never lose momentum, and are sometimes spawned aimed directly at your ship. Fortunately, they can't actually hurt your ship, unless they bump it into the planet (another feature that's always somehow present regardless of where the battle takes place). They can be a major nuisance for the slower ships that need to spend quite some effort to get going in any specific direction.
* If you fight a battle in an asteroid belt in the ''[[Space Empires]]'' games, they tend to damage missiles and fighters heavily. They can even damage capital ships in strategic movement sometimes.
* In ''[[The Babylon Project]]'', the raider bases are generally located here.
* ''[[Halo: Reach]]'''s introductory cinematic at one point passes through a very dense ice belt. A collision between two ice bodies can actually be seen as the camera moves onward.
* Averted in ''[[
** In the original game, however, the tactical battle map in some systems had squares randomly occupied by asteroid patches. Ships can't pass through them, and any missile clusters trying to pass through one of those squares get their count reduced, potentially<ref>if not regularly, statistically speaking</ref> turning a [[One
* In ''[[Millennia Altered Destinies]]'', the first probe to be sent to the Outer Solar System gets destroyed while passing through the Asteroid Belt. The technicians then apologize for not anticipating how dense the field is and claim the next probes and ships will fly above or below the belt. Interestingly, this does not add to the travel time. The Belt is also used for [[Asteroid Mining]].
* In ''[[Space Quest]] V: The Next Mutation'', the crew of the SCS ''Eureka'' is forced to evade the SCS ''Goliath'' and hides the ship in a nearby asteroid field. While the asteroids are not shown moving or colliding, they do spin quite fast and appear to be close together. When Roger is forced to go EVA to rescue Cliffy, there is a mini-game that requires the player to navigate the EVA pod. However, the asteroids are only in the background and do not pose a danger.
Line 168 ⟶ 166:
==
* ''[[Drive (
** Subverted, in that it's not your typical [[Space Is an Ocean]] thicket - they could easily go around it, and it's only dangerous because they're navigating it at FTL speeds.
* ''[[
== Web Original ==
* [[Invoked Trope|Invoked]] in the [[AH Dot Com the Series]] episode ''The Machine'', in which Captain Dr. What (whose knowledge of how the universe works is mainly based on old movies) tries to hide from [[Lawyer
* In ''[[Pay Me, Bug
Line 186 ⟶ 183:
**** That's not fair. Futurama does not endorse the cool crime of robbery.
* ''[[Invader Zim]]'' had this in one episode. Zim piloted a ship into the asteroid belt during a dogfight with Dib and it was destroyed by the asteroids. They were, respectively, piloting ''Mars and Mercury.''
* The episode "Little Girl Lost Part 1" of ''[[Superman:
* Averted/lampshaded in the ''[[Family Guy]]'' [[Family Guy Presents Laugh It Up Fuzzball|adaptation]] of [[The Empire Strikes Back]] when Threepio (played by Quagmire) says in the asteroid scene "Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 2-1!". To which Han (portrayed by Peter) replies "Never tell me the o-oh... well that's not bad. Never mind, let's keep going."
* This happens in the first episode of ''[[
* ''[[Star Trek:
== [[Real Life]] ==
* Until the [
** And there's the [http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov DAWN spacecraft] whose mission is to explore the asteroid Vesta and after that go to the [[Science Marches On|minor planet]] Ceres.
* At least one extrasolar asteroid belt has been discovered, with measurements indicating that it's much more densely packed than our own.
Line 203 ⟶ 200:
[[Category:Tropes in Space]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Space Does Not Work That Way]]
[[Category:Artistic License Astronomy]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
| |||