Planetville: Difference between revisions

[[File:Gateway_Galaxy_Planet_2310Gateway Galaxy Planet 2310.png|link=Super Mario Galaxy|rightframe]]

{{quote|''"When you live on a planet the size of a town''<br />

[[Adventure Towns]] [[Recycled in Space|IN SPACE]]! Most [[Space Opera]] stories are lifted from other genres, then transposed into outer space. And the most obvious way to do it is to make everything take place on a planet. Not just any planet, but [['''Planetville]]''', the planet that serves the same function in space that towns and countries do in Earth-based stories.

By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire.

Unfortunately, because [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]], stories about [[Planetville]] make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is -- everythingis—everything in [[Planetville]] takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated [[Wild West]] story, the outlaws are "exiled from the planet" just like they'd be exiled from Dodgeville, and the outlaws have to leave... instead of challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet in which to hide. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And when the crew of the [[Cool Starship]] finds the cure for the alien plague, the issue of distributing it to an entire planet rarely gets mentioned at all. These considerations are [[Hand Wave|minimized]] [[Easy Logistics|or left out entirely]] in many stories.

This might work if technology was really advanced -- ifadvanced—if transport were so fast that crossing a planet took as much time as crossing a town or Earth country does today. But that almost never happens. Besides, even if Planetville were a global village in terms of travel time, a planet still has thousands of times as many people, thousands of times as many hiding-places, thousands of times as many strategic locations, thousands of times as many and as much of everything as a city on Earth today has.

A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet's equator, or its polar caps -- itcaps—it's the whole planet or bust.

[[Planetville]] instantly explains these [[Speculative Fiction Tropes]]:

* [[It's a Small World After All]]: [[Planetville]] is as small as a town, so finding things is the same.

* [[One World Order]]: A country has one government except in civil wars. [[Planetville]] has only one except in civil wars.

* [[Single -Biome Planet]]: Do Earth towns have both a frozen and a jungle region? [[Planetville]] doesn't have them either.

Not to be confused with planets that are ''literally'' covered by a single city--thatcity—that's an [[City Planet|Ecumenopolis]], a subtype of the aforementioned [[Single Biome Planet]] (and one of the few that is remotely within the realm of possibility).

* ''[[Lucifer (Comic Bookcomics)|Lucifer]]'': The birth of a new "creation"--explicitly—explicitly described as a new "multiverse"--seems—seems to consist of approximately one region the size of Europe being made.

* Oddly inverted in a [[Marvel Comics]] miniseries, ''Captain Universe''. Gladiator, a [[Flying Brick]] alien, flies to Earth from across the galaxy. That sort of travel is usually hand waved in comics as those characters being just that darn powerful. It gets odd when Gladiator has to fly from one part of the globe to another once he gets there and uses the Captain Universe [[Power-Up]] in order to grant himself enough speed to make the flight in time. So essentially, space is smaller than the planet Earth, according to this story.

* Both ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' and ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' are very consistent with this. Nothing of interest happens more than a few kilometres from a Stargate, most planets seem to possess a few thousand people at most, and conquering/purging/eating an entire planet is apparently a very simple affair. The characters even seem to be aware of this, as one episode featured Carter and O'Neill trapped in a frozen cave and ''immediately'' thinking they were on an [[Single Biome Planet|ice planet]] -- but—but it turned out that they were really {{spoiler|on Earth, in the Antarctic}}. On the few occasions that a planet has more than one state, such as Jonas Quinn's homeworld, they are always at war with each other.

* Justified in ''[[Firefly (TV series)|Firefly]]'', as all the planets there are colonies of varying sizes, usually initially settled by a cohesive group of people in just one area.

* Both averted and played straight in ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'', where the background fluff suggests that capturing a planet can involve tens of millions of soldiers and require weeks or months in order to wrest control of strategic locations, and afterwards the occupation forces might have to wage a low-intensity campaign for years in order to root out the remaining resistance... but in gameplay terms, world- or system-spanning campaigns may be decided by small-scale battles held by players around the world.

** Justified in the cases of Hive Worlds, where pollution forces the inhabitants into a few gigantic cities surrounded by endless ash wastes, and [[Death World|Death Worlds]]s, where the local geography and/or wildlife makes widespread population growth impossible.

** Played straight with the Space Marines, as less than a thousand of them can crush entire rebellions and purge whole worlds. Than again, aside from being extremely powerful [[Super Soldier|Super Soldiers]]s, and most citizens thinking of Space Marines as literal angels, believing them to be divine agents of the God-Emperor, their strategies revolve around swift, brutal strikes that decapitate the enemy's command structure, before or after some judicious use of [[Death From Above|orbital bombardment]], so it's less blatant than normal.

** ''[[Star Wars: The Old Republic]]'' is similar: a planet is roughly equivalent to a zone in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', and the ''largest'' "worlds" are fleets or space stations rather than planets.

** They also do ground assaults to destroy the ground-based generators which power the planet's [[Kill Sat|orbital]] [[Magnetic Weapons|MAC]] [[Wave Motion Gun|cannons]] which are pretty much the only weapon humans have which can reliably destroy Covenant ships.

* ''[[Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers|Galaxy Rangers]]'', being a [[Space Western]] of the same era also rocked this Trope: Tortuna was a [[Wretched Hive]] with a few domed cites that [[God Save Us From the Queen|Her Travesty]] didn't nuke into ashes. Ozark was an isolated [[Lost Colony]] backwater. Granna and Nebraska were farm worlds. The justification for using the Trope was that large-scale human colonization had only been going on for a decade at most, and sleeper ships only launched about 50 years prior to the series.