Gravity Sucks: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|''[[Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress]].''|'''The Tick''', ''[[The Tick]]''}}

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.

 

 

Despite this, fictional spacecraft have the nasty habit of plummeting from the sky like bricks the moment their engines go off-line.

== Anime ==

 

 

== 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.

** 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]].

== Literature ==

 

* 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.

 

*** 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]].

** 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 ==

 

* 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''.

* 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]].

** 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.

 

== Western Animation ==