Gravity Sucks: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}{{Needs Image}}
{{quote|''You win again, gravity!''|'''Zapp Brannigan''', ''[[Futurama]]''}}
{{quote|''[[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress]].''|'''The Tick''', ''[[The Tick (animation)]]''}}
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!"
[[
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.
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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 ==
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== 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: The Search For Spock|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.
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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
== Literature ==
* [[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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== Video Games ==
* ''[[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.
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* 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
* ''[[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
** 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 (video game)|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:
[[Category:Space Does Not Work That Way]]
[[Category:Artistic License Astronomy]]
[[Category:Gravity Sucks]]
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