Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Difference between revisions
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m Robkelk moved page Earthshattering Kaboom to Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Match the (Merriam-Webster) dictionaly spelling, as per the discussion on the Talk page |
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Some series prefer to have this as the final goal of the [[Big Bad]], with the heroes racing to stop him. In other series, there's no way to stop the Earth Shattering Kaboom, and the subsequent storylines focus on the actions of the few survivors as they try to carry on, seek revenge or simply live with the fact that their home has been completely obliterated.
A slightly less devastating variation of this is to simply blast the surface of the planet until the air hums with radioactivity and nothing can live on it, for example, the "glassing" of planets in the ''[[Halo]]'' verse. This is [[Orbital Bombardment]] and companion tropes [[Colony Drop]], [[Kill Sat]], and [[You Can See the Explosion from Orbit]] taken to the extreme. Compare the [[Planet Eater]].
[[The Other Wiki]] refers to ships and weapons capable of doing this as [[wikipedia:Planet killer|Planet Killers]]. Actually ''shattering'' a world is in fact [http://qntm.org/destroy considerably harder than TV makes it look]. Even if your huge laser manages to blast into the planet, you still have to overcome the gravity of all that rock with some sort of explosion capable of sending all thousands of quintillions of tons far enough away that it won't just clump together again. Sure, anyone on the surface isn't going to be having a good time, but the planet won't actually be shattered. 'Cause if you've just got a big laser, all you're going to do is drill a button hole in it.
Think of it as a [[The Tokyo Fireball|Tokyo Fireball]] on a planetary scale. The full-on Earth Shattering Kaboom is a Class X on the [[Apocalypse How]] scale, often represented with an [[Earth-Shattering Poster]]. Oh, and if you're in the right position, [[You Can See the Explosion from Orbit]]. Of course, some villains one up this by going [[Star-Killing]].
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