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{{trope}}{{Needs Image}}
{{quote|''You win again, gravity!''|'''Zapp Brannigan''', ''[[Futurama]]''}}
<!-- %% Animated film examples go in the FILM section, NOT the western animation section. -->
 
{{quote|''You[[Gravity winIs again,a gravity!Harsh Mistress]].''|'''ZappThe BranniganTick''', ''[[FuturamaThe Tick (Animationanimation)|Futurama]]''}}
 
{{quote|''[[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress]].''|'''The Tick''', ''[[The Tick]]''}}
 
When it is mentioned at all, the force of gravity is often portrayed as a sort of cosmic quicksand, an intractable mire that can yank spacecraft out of the sky without any consideration of inertia. Frequently accompanied by exclamations like, "We're caught in the planet's gravitational field!" or "We're being sucked in!"
 
[[Useful Notes/Black Holes|Black Holes]] are particular offenders of this nature, not only in fiction but also in many people's perceptions in the real world. Few people seem to understand that a black hole will exert (roughly) the same amount of gravitational force as the star it was formed from.<ref>When you're at the same distance from the center of the black hole as you were from the center of the original star, that is, assuming that distance is greater than the radius of the original star itself. If you go to a spot near the black hole that would have been inside the radius of the original star, the gravitational force will exceed that for the star at the same distance. And if you pass the black hole's event horizon, you can only go inwards, no matter how hard you try not to.</ref>.
 
The trope stems from a naive Aristotelian view of gravity, coupled with [[Space Friction]]. After all, a baseball falls to the ground; why shouldn't a spaceship? The answer, of course, is that the ship ''is'' falling, it's simply missing. If the ship is moving at any significant speed relative to the planet, in a direction other than straight up or straight down, its momentum will carry it past and it won't actually hit. This, boys and girls, is called an "orbit". Unless something like a gas cloud acts on the ship to slow it down, it will continue to miss the planet until slight variations in the path happen to bring it into the planet itself, which can take quite a long time.
 
As ''[[The HitchhikersHitchhiker's Guide to Thethe Galaxy]]'' tells us, flying is simply the art of throwing one's self at the ground, and missing...
 
Despite this, fictional spacecraft have the nasty habit of plummeting from the sky like bricks the moment their engines go off-line.
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A subtrope of [[Space Does Not Work That Way]] and the cousin of [[Space Friction]]. See also [[Gravity Master]], when a character has the power to control it.
 
{{examples}}
 
== Anime ==
 
* In ''[[DragonballDragon Ball]]'', the gravity from King Kai's miniature planet, which manages to be pull at 10 times the force as on Earth despite its size, doesn't affect anything unless it gets within a few hundred feet, then you immediately get pulled toward it. To be fair, that ''is'' in the afterlife, so there's no reason the physical laws would be the same, or even exist. Actually it's all about the radius, a few hundred feet is at least 10 times its radius, so according to that by that distance it would only be one tenth of Earth's.
* In ''[[Pokémon Giratina and The Sky Warrior (Anime)|Pokémon: Giratina and The Sky Warrior]]'', there is '''A LOT''' of sucking in and out of the Reverse world through super gravity portals. It happens so much, it's not even funny.
 
== Film ==
 
* When Mike crashes into, then attempts to save, the Hubble telescope in ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000|MST3K: The Movie]]'', it immediately drops away and falls to Earth. An incredulous Mike [[Lampshade Hanging|points out]] that it couldn't possibly do that.
* ''[[Star Trek III: theThe Search For Spock (Film)|Star Trek III the Search For Spock]]''. When the ''Enterprise'''s [[Self-Destruct Mechanism]] activates, the explosions in the saucer section are sufficient to knock it out of orbit and plummet dramatically as it burns up in the atmosphere.
* In the 2009 ''[[Star Trek (Filmfilm)|Star Trek]]'' film, Kirk, Sulu and [[Family Guy|Ensign Ricky]] drop straight down toward Vulcan's surface as soon as they jump out of the shuttlecraft.
** Perhaps [[Justified Trope|justified]] since the [[Big Bad]]'s ship is clearly not orbiting the planet either and the shuttlecraft is approaching much slower than orbital velocity. It is likely both are using antigravity technology.
* In ''[[Star Wars]]'', the Star Destroyers fall (into a planet, moon or even Death Star) immediately after being severely hit. [[Fridge Logic]] hits when you realize [[No Endor Holocaust|this doesn't happen to the Death Star at Endor]].
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* ''The Astronaut Farmer'' has loads of horrible physics, but one shining example is the eponymous character's reentry. After a de-orbit burn lasting less than a few seconds, the craft appears to stop, and just drops straight down.
* ''Supernova'' has one scene where the medical ship Nightingale drops like a rock toward a moon as soon as it completes its FTL jump. Most of the movie's physics are accurate, but the ship would have retained the velocity and momentum it had before the jump. Even if the ship's velocity relative to the moon was below the moon's escape velocity, it would not have plummeted straight down.
* The logical (illogical) extension of this occurs in ''[[Treasure Planet]]''. The absence of gravity is the presence of antigravity. When the ship's gravity generators fail, everything falls up immediately -- andimmediately—and continues to accelerate upwards, even if it isn't touching anything else. [[Fridge Logic|Which begs the question of why they didn't just build everything on the ceiling and forgo the gravity generators.]]
 
== Literature ==
* [[Inverted Trope]] in ''[[Charlie and Thethe Great Glass Elevator]]''. When the Elevator gets "too high", it spontaneously starts orbiting the Earth.▼
 
▲* [[Inverted Trope]] in ''[[Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator]]''. When the Elevator gets "too high", it spontaneously starts orbiting the Earth.
* Actually averted in the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] novel ''Vector Prime'', where the weird gravity device used by the [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|Yuuzhan Vong]] to [[Colony Drop]] Sernpidal's moon onto the planet does not cause a "sucking" effect, but instead the moon's orbit decays more or less realistically every time it passes over the device. Not that there's anything realistic about a superweapon that produces a gravitational force greater than a planet's.
 
== Live Action TV ==
 
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Voyage of the Damned", the starship ''Titanic'' begins to predictably crash into the Earth as soon as its engines fail. {{spoiler|This might be justified, though, as the ship's owner was planning to crash it, so it was already on a collision course to begin with.}}
** Let's not forget "The Impossible Planet", where the Doctor repeatedly says that it's "impossible" for a planet to be in orbit of a black hole - and when the artificial gravity machine fails, the planet gets sucked straight inward, as is the spaceship in which the humans are trying to escape.
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*** Every hyperspace jump shows the ship still moving at its original speed afterwards, and the ship in question had a velocity: Before the hyperspace jump it was being shot into the air by a supervolcano eruption. They used the hyperspace jump just before the eruption would have destroyed the ship, but they didn't really have time for the calculations, since the ship was ''just'' repaired when they thought up the plan and the explosion happened less than five minutes later.
* In an early episode of ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'', a number of space dog skeletons (or whatever they were called) were piling up onto the space station in such numbers that they were weighing the station down to the point where it was dropping the orbit. Remember the [[MST3K Mantra]].
* ''[[Star Trek: theThe Original Series (TV)|Star Trek the Original Series]]'' may be an example of this; loss of power will usually result in a "decaying orbit" with a time to impact measured in hours. For this to be true, the "standard orbit" must be ridiculously low, on the order of 50 miles. However, said "standard orbit" seems to never have the ship out of line of sight communication with the landing party, suggesting a geostationary orbit, which would be much higher for any reasonably Earthlike planet.
** Easily resolved! "Standard orbit" is not a free-falling orbit at all - rather, it is planetostationary but atmosphere-grazing and requires continuous thrust from the engines to maintain. We don't do that with our existing spacecraft because we cannot possibly provide the necessary thrust, but a starship has energy and to spare. So you get the benefit of being in low orbit but line-of-sight, and the dramatic license to have interesting things happen when the power fails (a thousands-to-one long shot which, of course, affects the ''Enterprise'' with suspicious regularity).
 
== Video Games ==
* ''[[Unreal (Video Game)|Unreal]]'' features Na Pali, a planet that is notorious for puling ships into its gravity field.▼
 
* In ''[[Galaxy Angel (Videovideo Gamegame)|Galaxy Angel II Zettai Ryouiki no Tobira]]'', Kahlua loses control of her ship because it will only respond to her [[Super-Powered Evil Side]], and it plunges toward a planet.▼
▲* ''[[Unreal (Video Game)|Unreal]]'' features Na Pali, a planet that is notorious for puling ships into its gravity field.
▲* In ''[[Galaxy Angel (Video Game)|Galaxy Angel II Zettai Ryouiki no Tobira]]'', Kahlua loses control of her ship because it will only respond to her [[Super-Powered Evil Side]], and it plunges toward a planet.
* In ''[[Defense of the Ancients]]'', the Enigma's Black Hole [[Last-Disc Magic]] [[Limit Break]] acts like the stereotypical black hole, sucking stuff towards itself.
* The actual phrase appears as a graffiti in a prison cell in ''[[Space Quest]] 6''.
* As in the Film examples, Star Destroyers in the ''Star Wars [[Rogue Squadron]]'' series are prone to make sudden vertical 90-degree turns as soon as they're critically damaged; Rogue Leaders who aren't careful during the Battle of Endor will suddenly find the Star Destroyer they'd disabled [[Yet Another Stupid Death|swooping forward to crash into them]].
* ''[[Touhou]]'' has Suika and her ability to manipulate density. As this includes the creation of Black Holes, this trope is naturally present in the games she appears in.
** Also Utsuho and her last spell card in [[TH 11]]. Koishi of the same game has a similar spellcard, but it pushes you away instead -- toinstead—to a wall of danmaku with KILL written all over it.
* ''[[Recca]]'' has [https://web.archive.org/web/20131125195204/http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/recca/recca-15.png this boss] who fires out two kinds of gravity wells, blue ones which suck your ship towards them and white ones that repel your ship. Note that this is an NES game...
* In [[Halo]], Pelican dropships are shown dropping like a stone the second they are released from the ship suspending them above the surface of the planet below. Possibly justified if the parent ship deliberately flies low enough before releasing its cargo, but that's certainly not how it looks in the game. Notable because, like a lot of ''Halo'', it is cribbed from [[Alien|Aliens]]s.
** Justified in that the dropships aren't just released, there is a minor propulsive force to put distance between the Pelican and the ship. Even then, they don't fall - they drift along until they engage their own propulsion. A more extreme mechanism is used for the ODST drop pods - they aren't dropped, they're literally shot out of the ship.
* In ''[[Dead Space (Videovideo Gamegame)|Dead Space]]'', the ''Ishimura'' ends up in a decaying orbit, and you have to restart the engines, and later {{spoiler|Kendra tries to kill you by [[Colony Drop|dropping a piece of the planet on you]].}}
 
== Western Animation ==
* Explicated and averted in ''[[The Magic School Bus]]'' episode "Out of This World". It helps that it's a science show.▼
 
▲* Explicated averted in ''[[The Magic School Bus]]'' episode "Out of This World". It helps that it's a science show.
 
== Web Original ==
* This trope is mentioned several times in the following 'Cracked' article: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130518085253/http://www.cracked.com/funny-6051-6-awesome-facts-about-black-holes/ 6 Awesome Facts About Black Holes]▼
 
▲* This trope is mentioned several times in the following 'Cracked' article: [http://www.cracked.com/funny-6051-6-awesome-facts-about-black-holes/ 6 Awesome Facts About Black Holes]
 
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Tropes in Space]]
[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]
[[Category:Orphaned/Sandbox/Astronomy Tropes]]
[[Category:Space Does Not Work That Way]]
[[Category:Artistic License Astronomy]]
[[Category:Gravity Sucks]][[Category:Pages with comment tags]]
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