Orbital Bombardment

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Spaceships fire beams at a planet.
Today's weather forecast: Cloudy with a chance of death ray!

Death From Above is cool enough, but can we get much higher? Yes! Consider this subtrope, for there is no higher ground than space, after all.

Perhaps a Space Battle has been won, with the defender's Standard Sci-Fi Fleet crippled or destroyed. Perhaps the defender's fleet was out of position due to diversion or Hyperspeed Ambush. Perhaps the defender didn't have one at all. Whichever the case, all that is left is for the attacker to put the defender's civilian populace to the torch: Orbital Bombardment is the directed, purposeful and systematic attacking of a planet or other celestial body from beyond the Kármán line as a military tactic, be it via spaceship, Kill Sat, natural satellite, or even a powerful enough entity that Can Breathe in Space. From Colony Drops to sufficiently powerful Drop Pods to Macross Missile Massacres nuclear or not, broadsides of Death Rays, Kinetic and Magnetic Weapons and Wave Motion Guns, and more, this trope is for when something in a gravity well needs to be destroyed and you don't want to sully your Cool Starship with the heat of reentry, can't spare the troop conveyance, or can but need to soften up the ground for the infantry. Strong enough instances can lead to Apocalypse How and You Can See the Explosion from Orbit. At the extreme end is Earth-Shattering Kaboom, where the whole planet dies, and which is necessarily carried out by a space-based attacker unless trying for a Taking You with Me.

This trope can be used to emphasise the technological disparity of two sides in conflict. It's all well and good to say that Rock Beats Laser on the ground, but without spacelift ability, the planetbound side can't actually hurt the space-based aggressor and needs to find a different way to resolve the conflict before it gets ground down by what might as well be smitings by an untouchable god. More heroically, perhaps the Godzilla Threshold has been crossed and now It's the Only Way to Be Sure. On the flipside, the unavailability of this can also be a plot driver. Perhaps collateral damage concerns make orbital strikes politically unpalatable, or the defenders have Deflector Shields that can block them but not the advance of ground forces, or perhaps a MacGuffin is at risk and necessitates the deployment of infantry to retrieve it, which The Squad might need to engage or delay.

Examples of Orbital Bombardment include:

Anime and Manga

Fan Works

  • In Kimi no Na Iowa, the abyssals attempt to decapitate the JSDF by dropping an empowered bullet train through an orbital portal at a speed far enough beyond escape velocity as to release over ten times the yield of Fat Man when it impacts the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

Film

  • Alluded to but ultimately not carried out in Aliens with Ripley's famous "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit" line.
  • In Captain Marvel, Ronan and the Accusers are infamous for considering orbital missile strikes the solution to any problem. Torfa is subject to this, and only Captain Marvel's intervention prevents Earth from suffering the same fate.
  • In Men in Black, an Arquillian battlecruiser enters Earth orbit and demands the recovery of the Galaxy lest it destroy the Earth. A blast fired at the North Pole serves as a "warning shot" to underscore the seriousness of the ultimatum.
  • Star Wars:
    • In The Empire Strikes Back, the original plan was to bombard Hoth with Star Destroyers, but thanks to Ozzel's screwup, the Rebels were able to get a bombardment-proof shield up. Hence the ground attack.
    • In The Last Jedi, the Resistance hurries to evacuate its base on D'Qar before the First Order obliterates it with fire from its Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought.
    • In Rogue One, Tarkin eschews using the Death Star superlaser's full power in favour of setting it to "single reactor ignition". It still fires a blast that destroys Jedha City. The Imperial security complex on Scarif is destroyed similarly.

Literature

  • Dale Brown:
    • In Executive Intent, Kill Sats botch an attack on terrorists and accidentally kill many civilians. They later destroy a Russian fighter.
    • A large part of the conflict in Starfire is driven by not unfounded Russian fears that an orbital device that collects solar power and beams it to Earth can be weaponised.
  • Honor Harrington: The Eridani Edict is supposed to ban indiscriminate bombardment of planets on pain of the Solarian League falling on the attacker like a ton of bricks. That said, precision orbital strikes on legitimate, usually military, targets after offers of surrender have been made are still permissible, and do get used several times.
  • In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the lunar rebels take the mass driver intended to ship grain back to Earth and repurpose it to drop rocks on Earth military bases.
  • The Warhammer 40,000 Gaunt's Ghosts series:
    • The Ghosts are called that because Chaos warships fleeing a different engagement with Imperial forces found and glassed their homeworld of Tanith. The eponymous commissar was only able to get a third of the recruits offworld in time.
    • In Ghostmaker, Corbec sends an officer on an Imperial Navy warship that he knows coordinates for a strike on a daemon. Normally, once Guardsmen are on the ground, the Navy is supposed to be hands-off, but with the weather not permitting in-atmosphere air support, they make an exception.

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer 40,000: Many warships have weapons capable of destroying planetary targets. The extreme of this is the Imperium's infamous Exterminatus, which entails cleansing planets that are beyond saving with virus bombs that turn all life into undifferentiated organic matter while releasing highly flammable gas that is usually ignited afterwards or crust-shattering cyclonic torpedoes.

Video Games

  • In Command & Conquer, GDI has the Ion Cannon Kill Sat as its superweapon.
  • In Crysis 3, the danger of CELL using the Archangel satellite to destroy New York with orbit-to-surface fire becomes an issue. At the end, if you take too long with the Zero Effort Boss, it fires a beam that creates a shockwave that can be seen even from orbit to be spreading across the Earth, with the game cutting to black before humanity's presumed extermination is confirmed.
  • In the Halo series, humanity could hold off the Covenant on the ground, but almost invariably lose in space, after which the aliens would glass the offending planet with warship-mounted plasma turrets or energy projectors. This results in the total eradication of life until and unless re-terraforming is conducted.
  • Homeworld has the infamous "Kharak is burning" scene courtesy of the Taiidan.
  • Sword of the Stars: In the backstory, a Hiver fleet chanced on Earth and started doing this, only being beaten by humanity's hasty modification of ballistic missiles for surface-to-orbit purposes. In the games proper, war usually leads to the aggressor bombarding enemy planets with its ships in tactical combat to kill off the planetary population. This can be aided by Assault Shuttles conducting transatmospheric bombing runs and plaguebearing Biowar Missiles. Surface-to-orbit missiles can fight off small early attacks for a while, but Can't Catch Up to lategame heavy fleets with proper point defense.
  • System Shock: SHODAN intends to use Citadel Station's Tachyon Laser Mining Beam on Earth. If the player pushes a certain button, he can give her a helping hand.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • In Young Justice, Mongul attempts to bombard Earth with the WarWorld's weapons in response to the presence of the Reach.
  • The final fate of conquered planets in Invader Zim. After they have been sufficiently weakened and any worth-while creatures enslaved, the surface is subject to an "Organic Sweep" from space-bourne vessels, killing all remaining life so the planet can be repurposed.

Real Life

  • In Real Life, such an attack is considered almost entirely theoretical at this point by humanity, as our technology would not allow for this to properly take place in most respects save something incredibly localized. And, barring contact with a proven alien race that can use this tactic, we are not likely to have such be inflicted on the Earth. The "Star Wars" program proposed during the Cold War was more a shield against ICBMs, but not this trope proper.
  • In 2003 the United States Air Force fielded a proposal called "Hypervelocity Rod Bundles", also known as "rods from God". Based on an idea called "Project Thor" created by science fiction author Jerry Pournelle while he worked for Boeing in the 1950s before becoming a writer, it was essentially a satellite system that would drop 20-foot-long, one-foot-thick tungsten rods (basically solid-metal telephone poles) onto select targets from orbit, with a calculated yield on impact equal in some cases to a small tactical nuclear bomb. The projected use was as "bunker busters", used mostly against hardened targets resistant to more conventional weaponry. Unfortunately for its proponents, it was not sufficiently cost-effective when compared to existing weapons systems designed for such targets, and was never implemented.
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