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Asteroid Thicket: Difference between revisions
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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|Ace Pilots]] (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.
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 life --dense. Voyager 2 flew through Saturn's G ring--one of the fainter rings--once, at an angle, and there was [http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/040612soi.html "lots of evidence of micrometeroid hits"] on the quite small 4-meter diameter probe. However, aspiring SF writers should know that these planetary ring systems are mostly made up of ice and rocks 0.01 to 10 meters across.
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* ''[[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.
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** 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 way-- in interstellar space, maybe, and so gravitationally bound only to each other? Or the result of a recent collision having not had time to disperse? ...
*** 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.
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** 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."]]
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** 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|Colony Dropped]] to death. {{spoiler|Which was shut down by the [[Big Bad]] and [[Complete Monster]] Gleeman Vox for a Dreadzone challenge. Yeah.}}
* The Meteo area in the ''[[Star Fox (series)|Star
* The classic Space Sim ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]]'' and ''[[Free Space]]'' both used this trope, the former as a [[Death Course]] for fighters. The latter creates a very distinct mix of infuriating and awesome by making the asteroids too slow and clumsy to be a threat to fighters, then having missions where a desperate capital ship plows through them and has its small craft [[Escort Mission|play point defense]] against the [[Malevolent Architecture|Malevolent Asteroids]] that continually appear out of nowhere to converge on the target ship.
** 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...
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* 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 dependant on the existence of your ship.
** 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 100km from end to end with asteroids of various mineral types densely packed together; in some cases the asteroids are so large and so dense that avoiding their collision boxes is an exercise in futility. This is mostly due to decade-old design decisions. The asteroids are used for mining by players, and going from one rock to the other in a realistically sparse asteroid field in clumsy mining vessels would be ''very annoying'' to say the least. Various modifications and reforms to asteroid belt realism and the interactivity/fun of mining in general have been floated by CCP over the past few years, but so far they appear to be on the back burner. Finding a fix that doesn't destroy the economy is bound to be problematic.
* 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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*** 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.
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