Colony Drop: Difference between revisions

 

{{quote|'''Shepard:''' I'm surprised you'd mention [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|vandalism in that bunch]].

 

The Space Age equivalent of [[The Wizard of Oz|dropping a house on a witch]].

Note that in real life, the colony and moon version of this is very, very difficult. It's nearly as hard to take something out of orbit as it is to put it in in the first place, as all the momentum must be shed. The energy necessary to do this is actually more than will be released in the collision.

 

 

Not to be confused with a "Galaxy Drop" from ''[[PlanetSide]]'', where the dangerous payload is merely a platoon of armed troopers and vehicles dropped from a fleet of [[Drop Ship|Galaxy transports]].

 

== Space Colony, Space Station, various assorted artificial Space Stuff ==

 

* The [[Trope Namer]] is ''[[Gundam]]'': dropping large objects ranging from space colonies to asteroids to battlestations is a favorite tactic of the series, though usually unsuccessful. The only way they avoid an [[Inferred Holocaust]] is by making it ''explicit'', though rarely past class 0 on [[Apocalypse How|the scale]].

** In the original series, Zeon dropped one of Earth's space colonies during the [[Backstory]] in an attempt to destroy the [[The Federation|Earth Federation]]'s [[Elaborate Underground Base|nuke-proof headquarters]]. The colony breaks up before impact and misses its intended target, instead completely annihilating Sydney[["London, England" Syndrome|, Australia]] ([[You Fail Geography Forever|which in the picture looks suspiciously like New York]]) and generally making a mess of things. ''Gundam0083'' actually shows the crater left by the drop, making clear that the explosion was equal to about 60,000 MT, and the [[Sega Dreamcast]] game ''Rise from the Ashes'' drives the point home by featuring the continent of Australia (where the game takes place) on the title screen with what looks like a ''bite'' taken out of it where Sydney (as well as Canberra and a quarter of New South Wales) used to be.

* [[Isaac Asimov]] may have originated a cheap way to terraform nearly waterless Mars; adjust cometary trajectories slightly and bombard the planet with big balls of dirty ice. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Blue/Green Mars series, Mars is being colonized and populated even BEFORE the cometary bombardment ceases, requiring some very important Travel Advisories.

** Also in Robinson's trilogy, when the {{spoiler|Space Elevator is destroyed, it falls and [[Crazy Awesome|wraps around the planet several times]].}}

** It's then played straight during {{spoiler|the fall of Coruscant}} in ''[[New Jedi Order|Star by Star]]'', when the Yuuzhan Vong bombard {{spoiler|Coruscant}} with its own orbital defense stations.

* Used as a tactic by [[Brain In a Jar|Titan]] Agamemnon in ''[[Dune|Legends of Dune]]'' during the invasion of Geidi Prime. He sends a cruiser on a collision course for a [[Deflector Shield|scrambler field]] emitter that is keeping the [[Robot War|Thinking Machines]] from invading. The sheet kinetic force of the fall destroys a large part of the capital city.

* In ''[[Footfall]]'' by [[Jerry Pournelle]] and [[Larry Niven]], the alien species the Fithp drop an asteroid the size of a Dino Killer in the Indian Ocean, wiping out India and causing global rain showers.

* ''[[Alex Rider]]'': The villain of "Ark Angel" plans to set off a bomb on the titular space station, which has gone massively over-budget while still in construction. Not content with space-age insurance fraud, he wants to time the explosion so the station will land in Washington, destroying all the government's evidence of his ''other'' criminal activities.

 

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' story ''Revenge of the Cybermen'', the Cybermen [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|(obviously)]] make a second attempt to destroy Voga by crashing the Nerva beacon, laden with Cyberbombs, into the planet. The Doctor and Sarah, who they've left on board, prevent this from happening.

** The Cybermen did the same thing again in ''Earthshock'' when they tried to crash a massive transport ship into future Earth to stop an anti-Cybermen conference. They succeeded. Sort of. Adric inadvertently saves the planet by fiddling with the controls so the thing goes back in time to the time of dinosaurs.

** In the third season, there's an incoming ship that's unidentified until it lands. They don't know what it is, so they start to try and deconstruct the towers that'll let it land safely instead of turning the town into a crater.

* Ending of ''[[Power Rangers Lost Galaxy]]''. The [[Big Bad]] has wrecked the colony, so what will she do now? Drop the dome on the survivors. Oddly, the impact was considered not that dangerous if it didn't hit directly the camp, so having the Megazord redirecting it was enough to avoid carnage (the Megazord is tiny when compared to the colony, but hey, they already did it in ''[[Power Rangers in Space]]'' with an asteroid).

 

=== [[Tabletop Games]] ===

* Played with like Gundam in the rare (but very fun) [[TurboGrafx-16]] shooter Spriggan Mark 2

* ''[[Xenogears]]'' gives us the fall of Solaris. People, when the counterweight/city on the other end of an orbital elevator snaps like a twig, don't be under it when it hits, tends to leave holes in continents.

* ''[[Xenosaga]]'': Albedo attempts to drop the Proto Merkabah on Second Miltia, apparently primarily [[For the Evulz|for his own entertainment]]. Not even a hint of an [[Inferred Holocaust]] here.

* In ''[[Command & Conquer]]: [[Red Alert]] 3'', the Russians get a special power that dumps increasingly larger orbital satellites at an enemy location. The highest level ''drops the Mir space station''. It's [[Slap-On-The-Wrist Nuke|surprisingly impotent for an object that size, though]].

** Even more hilarious once you find out the magnetic beam works on ''Tesla Troopers''. Supplementing the space station with [[Cherry Tapping|powered armored soldiers]] is [[Crowning Moment of Funny]].

** Early in [[Command & Conquer]]: [[Tiberium Wars]] the Philadelphia is destroyed, resulting in massive chaos across the globe as communications are offline (the Philadelphia was the primary GDI command hub) and causing massive collateral damage as the station's remains fell to earth.

* ''[[Mega Man X]] 5'' has Space Station Eurasia hurtling towards Earth. Note that it crashing doesn't end the game. Even though the Hunter canonically destroyed it, the leftover debris still has an adverse effect on the planet.

** ''[[Mega Man Zero]] 4'' historically referenced the above disaster, while also featuring its own orbital space station, Ragnarok, which also predictably was sent on a collision course with Earth. {{spoiler|Failure to detonate the station's core, taking out the station, the [[Big Bad]], and ''yourself'' in the process does yield a game over however}}.

 

=== [[Western Animation]] ===

* In the ''[[Kids Next Door]]'' movie, it looked like Numbuh 1 was going to do a heroic version of this with the moon on the captured-by-evil Earth, but it instead just fired the sizable treehouse-ish moonbase, the KND's headquarters. {{spoiler|The villain shrugs it off too, but the [[Gambit Roulette|real plan]] was to bring the KND's [[Laser-Guided Amnesia]] device down to Earth to use on him}}.

* The fate of Star City in the ''[[Superfriends|Galactic Guardians]]'' episode "Escape From Space City", after Darkseid's failed attempt to turn it into a [[Kill Sat]].

== Asteroids ==

 

* [[Gall Force]]: Earth Chapter has the MARS civ using a device that hurls rocks on the baddies. Funny in that the baddies comment that the previous plan our heros wanted to use, nukes would not have hurt them as bad but now that they figured rocks from space can do almost more destruction w/o the danger of radiation.

* When ''[[Gundam]]'' isn't dropping space colonies on Earth, it's usually an asteroid of some sort, culminating in the attempted drop of the Asteroid fortress Axis in ''[[Chars Counterattack]]''.

* In ''Sigil'' (of [[Cross Gen]]), there is a plot by the [[Big Bad]] (who by that time had been superceeded by a Bigger Bad, however) to ram an asteroid into the humans' capital planet, by equipping said asteroid with a gigantic [[Faster-Than-Light Travel|FTL]] drive. The hero manages to deflect the asteroid {{spoiler|(and save his love, who was on it)}} by sheer force, but the casualties are still great {{spoiler|and we learn that the planet is going to become uninhabitable anyway.}}

* In ''[[All Fall Down]]'', a giant asteroid, Penumbra, threatens to collide with Earth. {{spoiler|It turns out to be an elaborate hoax.}}

 

=== [[Film]] ===

* Precisely-aimed meteors were the [[Weapon of Mass Destruction]] of the "bugs" in the movie version of ''[[Starship Troopers (film)|Starship Troopers]]''. Although it's ridiculously implausible that the bugs could hurl rocks over light years of distance on a sane timescale and with any sort of accuracy, an apparently disposable bit of background chatter suggests the rocks were coming from much closer to home. It may have been a natural disaster that the space Nazis used to justify a war against the bugs (or they could have been [[False-Flag Operation|dropping the rocks themselves]]).

* ''[[The Fifth Element]]'', in which a living ([[Ultimate Evil|and evil]]) asteroid threatens to impact Earth.

 

=== [[Literature]] ===

* In ''[[The Thrawn Trilogy]]'' of [[Star Wars]], one of Thrawn's most brilliant plans involves launching lots of ''invisible asteroids'' at the capital world of the Republic. To protect the public and vital installations, the planetary shields were raised, which effectively kept the entire planet under siege long after Thrawn's fleet had left the system. Also Thrawn didn't actually have that many cloaking devices, so he just had the star destroyers fire their gravity catapults without any invisible asteroids loaded, so the Republic had no idea how many asteroids were really out there. So even after the last asteroid had smashed into the shields or detected and destroyed, they would have no way of telling when it would be safe to lower the shields.

 

* A ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' episode had an evil alien race slowly bombarding another race's colony worlds with giant asteroids, in hopes they'd abandon the colony as unsafe and the evil aliens could simply move right in without a war. Not sure why they wanted a planet covered in craters, though.

** There was a ''Star Trek: TNG'' novel that included a planet BUILT to be used as such a weapon, and inhabited by people largely ignorant of this. Once it was set off {{spoiler|Worf shut it down by [[Explosive Instrumentation|violently destroying the machinery]] that created the wormhole used to deliver it, after complaining about not being allowed to shoot things when he wanted to for the whole book.}}

* The apocalypse in the [[Backstory]] of ''[[Traveller]]: The New Era'' is implied to have included (among just about every other way a [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot|homicidal malfunctioning computer]] can seriously ruin your day) many examples of literal Colony Drops.

* The backstory for ''Cyberpunk 2020'' includes a short orbital war between the US and the EU, ending when the EU-controlled lunar massdriver was used to lob a substantial lump of rock at Washington DC. The rock was deflected by orbital defences, and instead hit Colorado Springs (or, as it became known afterwards, "Colorado ''Sprung''")

* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' has the spells Meteor Shower, Meteor Storm, Shivan Meteor, and Comet Storm. All of these are very effective at killing stuff.

 

* In ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]] II'', when the player is escaping the Peragus mining facility, the whole thing blows up when either the Sith or the player fires on the asteroids. This was the only source of fuel for a station hovering over another planet, Telos. Later on, you can get a Hutt on Nar Shaddaa to send fuel to the station.

* In ''[[Jet Force Gemini]]'', there is an asteroid directed by Mizar to crash into the Earth.

* ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]] 4'' has a giant asteroid that turns out to be computer-controlled. The Navi operating it, Duo, wants to destroy Earth because it is a wicked planet. Mega Man stops the asteroid and convinces Duo to leave Earth alone for a while.

** ''[[Mega Man Star Force]] 3'' uses the same plot with Meteor G, a giant meteor made of crystallized "[[The Corruption|noise]]." Not only is it headed for Earth, but it's interfering with wireless devices and corrupting wave beings. Geo and Omega-Xis later learn that {{spoiler|Geo's father Kelvin, in wave form, has been holding the meteor back since the day the space station Peace was destroyed.}}

* ''[[The Dig]]'' uses the threat of this as the [[Call to Adventure]], when a large asteroid shows up out of nowhere in Earth orbit and threatens to crash into the planet. It's actually a disguised spaceship sent by [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]] to see if we've developed sufficient spacefaring capabilities to go up there and stop it; having done so, the astronauts in question are subsequently whisked away to the aliens' [[Late to the Party|long-deserted]] planet.

* One of the ways to invade a planet in ''[[Galactic Civilizations]]'' is to attach engines to asteroids and slam them into the world before landing troops. This seriously weakens the defenders but also permanently lowers the planetary quality.

* ''[[Earth 2150]]'' has the Lunar Corporation's [[Weather Control Machine]] being outfitted with an asteroid targeting system as the planet's decaying orbit evaporates surface water to the point the machine can no longer influence weather. In gameplay terms, that means the LC can call in meteor showers instead of lightning storms in volcanic and lunar tilesets. And unlike lightning, meteors can '''NOT''' be stopped by [[Deflector Shields]] and no longer ignore buildings in favor of high hills. Each meteor does a fuckton of damage (enough to insta-kill most units and severely damage buildings) but scatter randomly over a very large area. Still, a minute-long carpet-bombing of asteroids is much more [[Rule of Cool|awesome to watch]] than a nuke. Even better: the WCM is the cheapest superweapon in the game and only needs base power to operate so given enough money, you can build dozens of the sucker [[More Dakka|fire them all simultaneously]].

** It gets even better in ''The Moon Project'' where [[Video Game/Levels/Awesome|one mission]] has the Fang being outfitted with the targeting system's prototype. Every two minutes or so, the game calls in a '''triple''' barrage of asteroids on the Fang's location. You have one objective: [[When All You Have Is a Hammer|complete destruction of all four UCS bases on the map]] and since the whole LC campaign plays out on the Moon, collateral damage is not an issue. Apocalypse [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|does not even BEGIN to describe it]].

 

=== [[Web Comics]] ===

== Moons ==

 

* The Achuultani in ''[[Empire From the Ashes]]'' are big fans of this. [[Cool Starship|Dahak]] speculates that they were responsible for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. In the second book, Achuultani scouts steal [[wikipedia:Iapetus (moon)|Iapetus]] from Saturn, cover it with [[Deflector Shield|deflector shields]], and throw it at Earth, using their own ships to further shield it.

* Pug uses a moon to attack a ''single creature'' in ''[[The Riftwar Cycle]]'', by opening a wormhole-like rift connecting a point just in front of the moon's path to a point just above the creature in question. [[Hilarity Ensues]]. To be fair, the creature {{spoiler|had already destroyed two '''dimensions''', and Kelewan was doomed even before the [[Earthshattering Kaboom]]}}.

 

* Non-Earth example: In ''[[Bionicle]]'', {{spoiler|Makuta Teridax is killed when the planet-sized robot he's inhabiting has one of the moons of Bara Magna smash into his head. He was trying to invoke this trope by slamming it into the planet in a destructive manner, whereas Mata Nui was trying to gently merge the planet and moons together.}}

 

 

=== [[Web Original]] ===

== '''[[Insistent Terminology|The]]''' Moon ==

 

* ''[[Tsukihime]]'' has this in the nebulous [[Backstory]], where the Crimson Moon (the guy) tried to drop the Moon onto the Earth only to be stopped by the then-young Zelretch. Zelretch pulled him to an alternate reality and [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|dropped the moon on him instead.]]

** In [[Battle Moon Wars]], one of the attack Warcueid uses is also a moondrop. And yes, Arcueid can really do that in canon; she did something similar in ''[[Melty Blood]]''.

* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'', kind of. It's more a constant rock shower from ''pieces'' of the moon after it got torn open by the Gate Accident, and the main reason why humanity has abandoned Earth.

* In episode 2 of the ''[[Pretty Sammy]]'', Bif Standard attempts to drop the Moon on Earth, so that he can build his own "standardized" world.

 

=== [[Comic Books]] ===

* In the final arc of ''[[Bionicle]]'', {{spoiler|this is how they finally get rid of [[Big Bad|Makuta]] [[Magnificent Bastard|Teridax]].}}

 

* A [[Rule 34]] fan comic of ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' ended with the Princess Yue, Sokka's old squeeze turned Moon Spirit, getting turned on by the naughty activities the main cast gets into and, well, literally decides to come on down ''as the Moon itself'' and join the fun. Yeah...

 

=== [[Film]] ===

* In the '80s remake of ''[[Flash Gordon (film)|Flash Gordon]]'', Ming the Merciless is sending the moon spiraling down into the Earth. It doesn't get there, but it gets close enough that things must have been pretty messed up.

{{quote|'''Doctor Hans Zarkov''': Check the angular vector of the moon!}}

 

=== [[Literature]] ===

* One of [[Larry Niven]]'s prehistoric ''[[The Magic Goes Away (novel)|The Magic Goes Away]]'' stories featured a group of magi seeking out a comatose god on a "mana"-starved Earth in the hope that he will be able to help them land the Moon on Earth. How big can it be, after all? The magi think this is a great idea and awaken the god using the mana left in the comatose worldwyrm of [[Norse Mythology]]. The awakened god shows the relative sizes involved to the magi, who now realize that smashing the Moon into the Earth would be a bad thing, even though the god promises to remake them after. As the god awakens, he stretches up to grab the Moon with his hands and push against it, presumably to stop it from orbiting the Earth.

* In the ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' storyline, Yawgm- er, The Lord of the Wastes is attempted to be killed by {{spoiler|Urza and Gerrard dropping the Null Moon, a storage facility for pure white mana, on him.}}

* The Last Survivors Series features a variation on this theme.

 

* In the [[Too Good to Last|unfortunately shortlived]] ''Three Moons Over Milford'' an asteroid has broken the Moon into three huge (and a number of much smaller) pieces and it is unknown when or if any of them will fall to Earth.

 

=== [[Video Games]] ===

* In the DS game ''[[The World Ends With You]]'', {{spoiler|the second week's game master Sho Minamimoto}} leaves a note saying "Any tree can drop an apple, I'll drop the freakin' moon!". He doesn't actually do it, it's just a note proving his insanity.

** Joshua can actually drop the moon or some sort of astral body ([[Fan Nickname|a.k.a. the Jesus Meteor]]) on your enemies with the right upgrades.

== Planets ==

 

* ''[[Avenger]]'' deals with a dying colony on Mars that's about to be crashed into by one of the moons.

* ''[[Diebuster]]'' inverts this: the human race plans to deal with an extremely powerful (and extremely large) Space Monster by dropping '''Earth''' onto it. Fortunately Nono shows up and stop this plan before dealing with the Space Monster herself.

 

* The [[Marvel Universe]] massive crossover ''Infinity Gauntlet'' takes this one step further: The Celestials throw '''planets''' at Thanos.

** Thanos himself later defeats an enemy by smashing two planets together in his face, along with a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs.

* Lars Von Trier's ''[[Melancholia]]'' revolves around the planet of the title crashing into Earth, obliterating all life in the universe.

 

* This is done in the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' special ''The End of Time'' when the {{spoiler|Master}} opens a link to {{spoiler|Gallifrey}}, causing it to {{spoiler|materialise directly beside Earth.}} The two planets' gravity starts pulling them together.

* Used rather unexpectedly in the series finale of ''[[Smallville]]'', with {{spoiler|Apokolips}} being summoned next to Earth, nearly colliding with it. {{spoiler|It is stopped by Clark/Superman pushing it away with his bare hands.}}

== Stars ==

 

* In the final arc of ''[[Pretty Sammy|Magical Project S]]'', Romio attempts to send the Earth on a collision course with the sun.

 

== Terrestrial objects ==

 

* [[Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's]]: {{spoiler|Yliaster's plan to destroy Neo Domino City and erase Momentum from history appears to involve dropping the [[Ominous Floating Castle|Ark Cradle, a floating fortress]] [[Temporal Paradox|made from the ruins of the future Neo Domino City]], on it.}}

* In ''[[One Piece]]'' {{spoiler|Vander Decken, the infamous pirate captain with the powers of the Mato Mato (target target) fruit decides to kill the Mermaid Princess (who rejected him) by throwing a giant Ark at her.}}

** And Touma crashed the Star of Bethlehem into the [[Archangel Gabriel]].

 

* In a little known comic series called ''[[Meridian]]'', a large number of the population lives on floating islands while the ground (At least most of it) is too heavily polluted. Naturally, the threat of a city-state falling down onto the ground is present.

* In recent years, the [[Marvel]] version of Asgard, a mystical city-state, has hovered over the American Midwest. Recently, during the Seige storyarc, Asgard fell to the ground.

* In ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'', the Laputan emperor's ultimate punishment against wayward earthbound cities was to drop his floating island on them.

 

* In ''[[My Hero (TV)]]'' 6x08, "Believe", Thermoman accidently drops a village in Bavaria on another village, causing them to both catch fire and set alight to a third one. However, no-one actually gets hurt as Thermoman manages to rescue them all from his blunder, though they weren't overly grateful about it.

 

=== [[Web Original]] ===

* The [[Neopets]] story arc 'The Faeries' Ruin' had an ''epic'' [[Wham! Episode]] which revealed that not only was {{spoiler|Xandra}} the villain, she just crashed Faerieland- that is, a giant floating city-state- into Neopia.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Tropes in Space]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:Falling, Dropping, and Plummeting]]