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Asteroid Thicket: Difference between revisions
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{{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]]s (i.e, the protagonists) ''may'' be able to slalom through without getting reduced to space dust, but [[Aerial Canyon Chase|any pursuing enemy fighter ships will get picked off one-by-one by giant, malevolent space boulders]]. Any capital ship who can't just blast a path through them with its [[Wave Motion Gun]] will have to rely on their [[Deflector Shields]] to bounce the rocks off.
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A subtrope of [[Artistic License Astronomy]], [[Space Does Not Work That Way]] and [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]].
Compare [[Space Clouds]], a trope about the similarly unrealistic portrayal of
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== 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.)
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*** 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.
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== Live Action TV ==
*
** 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 ''[[Blake's 7|Blakes Seven]]'' episode "Mission To Destiny" features a space storm that appears as an [[The Asteroid Thicket|asteroid thicket]]. An interstellar one.
* The pilot (episode, not the character Pilot) of ''[[Farscape]]'' had an [[The Asteroid Thicket|asteroid thicket]].
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== 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-Fi Fleet|escorts to capital ships]]) must take a command check, and if failed can take crippling damage in a single instance.
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== Video Games ==
* The [[X (video game)|X-universe]] series of games plays this trope straight 90% of the time; one sector has about 80 asteroids (about 1–2
* 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 [[2-D Space|the player]].
** Clearly the player's ship is actually a huge arrow-shaped tower.
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** ''[[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 ''[[EVE Online]]'' suffers from this trope in that of the 5000+ solar systems, a large majority of them have at least one "Asteroid Belt" orbiting a planet, and some have upwards of 20 or 30. This alone isn't enough... the asteroid belts themselves are composed of a belt maybe 100
* 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.
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