Here comes the neighborhood.
Shepard: I'm surprised you'd mention vandalism in that bunch.
Jack: That's what the hanar call it when you drop that space station I mentioned onto one of their moons and make a new crater. Heh. They really liked that moon.
Jack: That's what the hanar call it when you drop that space station I mentioned onto one of their moons and make a new crater. Heh. They really liked that moon.
What's one of the most dramatic ways to try and bring about The End of the World as We Know It? Drop a space colony on someone.
Put simply, just set any sufficiently large object on a course toward the Earth, or whatever world is important to the plot, and make sure you're off-world when it hits. Or not, if you don't care about surviving it or you're already going to be dead when it happens.
The sky literally falling has a way of pushing the story quickly past the Godzilla Threshold. It most likely will require Applied Phlebotinum to stop or a large amount of firepower, thus it's also one of the few cases where the Nuclear Option is acceptable. In fact, it would probably be insufficient: even a small asteroid about the size of a house can cause more damage than the atomic bomb
, and this trope is all about objects much bigger and more threatening.
Most often done with asteroids or comets, but very large space colonies often show up too, and provide the added drama of allowing both populations to witness their imminent doom.
If this is done deliberately by a villain, he may warn the world in advance (through their TV sets), so as to give the good guys time to avert it.
A type of Death from Above. When someone is doing this on purpose, this trope often overlaps with Meteor-Summoning Attack and Orbital Bombardment. This often results in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Those who happen to be at ground zero are especially screwed. Even a successfully halted colony drop can be the source of an Inferred Holocaust. If you have a weapon capable of causing these, then it is very likely also a Sub-Trope of Superweapon. Contrast Save Sat, when it's a satellite crashing down and done for a beneficial/defensive purpose. Naturally occurring meteorites are cases of Meteorite of Doom.
Examples having their own pages:
Examples:
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Space Colonies, Space Stations, various assorted artificial space stuff
Anime & Manga
- Aldnoah.Zero: Orbital Knights space stations are also capable of dropping themselves on cities with the force of an atomic bomb, and surviving. Granted it's based on alien tech, but still.
- Battle Programmer Shirase's main character Akira has a 'special attack' where he drops three decommissioned Russian satellites in a row, insuring that the last makes it intact through the atmosphere on the target of his choice.
- The Big O: A mysterious object crash-lands in the city in Day of the Advent. Roger eventually discovers the object is part of a huge defunct satellite made decades ago. Angel informs him that the rest of it will fall out of orbit outside the city domes, causing massive damage. Roger calls forth the Big O and does all he can to repel the falling satellite, finally punching it head-on. A huge explosion occurs, but the area outside the domes is unharmed.
- Date A Live: Some treacherous members of DEM attempt to assassinate Sir Isaac Ray Peram Westcott by causing three satellites to fall on Tengu City, not caring about the collateral damage. Kotori blows up the first one in time, then Shido and his harem blows up the second one, and Origami blows up the third one.
- Parodied in Excel♡Saga: at the end of the Space Opera spoof, the evil puchuu faction tries to ram the Earth with their giant mothership. The good puchuus manage to destroy most of it, then when they learn a remaining piece will still devastate the City of Adventure on impact, declare it acceptable losses and leave as the Puchuu-shaped mushroom cloud rises over Fukuo-excuse me, "F City." (The next episode is a parody of Fist of the North Star that turns quite unexpectedly, and quite effectively, serious in the last third).
- The Andromeda Flow Country from Getter Robo attempt this with their enormous space battleship, in a last-ditch attempt to stop humanity's use of Getter Rays. The favor gets returned later on by the Getter Emperor, a Humongous Mecha so large that it crushes the AFC's planets by flying into them.
- Leopard, the Master Computer running a space colony in The Girl Who Leapt Through Space, spirals downward into despair after he can't fire his Wave-Motion Gun and almost colony drops himself into the Earth. He's pulled out of it just in time.
- Later parodied when Nerval's battle body wraps around Leopard's colony, yells out "COLONY DROP!!", and suplexes him into the lunar surface.
- The Trope Namer is Gundam: dropping large objects ranging from space colonies to asteroids to battlestations is a favorite tactic of the series, though usually unsuccessful. The only way they avoid an Inferred Holocaust is by making it explicit, though rarely past class 0 on the scale.
- In the original series, Zeon dropped one of Earth's space colonies during the Backstory "Operation British" in an attempt to destroy the Earth Federation's nuke-proof headquarters in Brazil. The colony breaks up before impact and misses its intended target, instead completely annihilating Sydney, Australia and generally making a mess of things. Gundam 0083 actually shows the crater left by the drop, making clear that the explosion was equal to about 60,000 MT, and the Sega Dreamcast game Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise From The Ashes drives the point home by featuring the continent of Australia (where the game takes place) on the title screen◊ with what looks like a bite taken out of it where Sydney, Canberra and a quarter of New South Wales used to be. The impact itself and its devastation on Sydney is also shown in gratuitous detail in the opening of Narrative, with the shattered city and surrounding area featuring at the beginning of Thunderbolt Season 2. The Origins manga went on to explain that between the impacts proper and the environmental aftermath, the population of Earth on Impact + 1 month was half of what it was before the drop. If the colony hadn't broken into three pieces before impact (with one-piece breaking up further during reentry), it probably would have been worse.
- Zeta Gundam had a bit of a variation, in that the villains tried to colony-drop a city on the Moon rather than on Earth. Fortunately, the colony was diverted, and, this being the Moon, the environmental aftereffects were nonexistent (by virtue of there not being an environment to ruin).
- Other series in the UC timeline continue the tradition; there are colony drops in Gundam 0083, Gundam ZZ, and Char's Counterattack. Effects differ from the destruction of a city to making the entire planet uninhabitable — happily, that last one is prevented.
- The final stretch of 0083's story revolves around the heroes trying to prevent a colony from being dropped on North America. They fail.
- Parodied in the third Mobile Suit SD Gundam short where both Gundam and Zaku accidentally cause one while competing in a survival marathon for the Olympics. The credits seem to indicate only the Colosseum was ruined.
- Gundam X is an Alternate Universe, set on a near-Class 3a ruined Earth that's been the victim of a whole bunch of colony drops. The Satellite Cannon, perhaps the biggest mech-wielded Wave-Motion Gun in the entire franchise and signature equipment of the titular Gundam X, was developed solely because the Spacenoids were so gung-ho about dropping colonies that the Federation needed a relatively practical way to vaporize them.
- Gundam Wing ends with Heero preventing a colony drop.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, it is revealed that the actual plan for the Gundam pilots was to conquer Earth after they sent a colony drop first. Thankfully, their supervisors and the pilots themselves (except one, who was killed by a technician that had family on Earth and was quickly replaced by another unnamed technician — the man whom we know as Trowa Barton) didn't feel like going along with this and deserted.
- Gundam SEED Destiny, as well as the prologue of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED CE.73: Stargazer features the remains of the destroyed space colony, Junius Seven, being sent towards the Earth by a group of rogue ZAFT Soldiers loyal to Patrick Zala. It is mostly destroyed in orbit, but fragments of the wreckage still make their way through the atmosphere and cause massive casualties.
- A variation occurs in Season 2 of Gundam 00 when the A-LAWS shoot down the African space elevator because it had been taken over by an anti-A-LAWS military faction, in the process killing most of the 60,000 civilians inside and causing it to crash down to Earth in pieces.
- Not a colony, but the Downes battle station in Gundam AGE almost causes a similar effect before being destroyed.
- In ∀ Gundam this happens due to collateral damage knocking an abandoned asteroid colony out of lunar orbit, and Loran has to prevent it from smashing into the moon's capital city. Loran stops it with the nuclear warheads he'd been safeguarding.
- In the OVA Gundam Build Fighters Try: Island Wars, the Scramble Gundam, utilizing the power of the Plavsky Particles Mk. II, summons the original Colony Drop to destroy our heroes. Team Try Fighters pull off an All Your Powers Combined to make short work of the attempt.
- Although not outright shown, it's implied that this happened during the Calamity War in the backstory of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, since much like in the original, a large chunk of Australia is missing from the map of the Earth.
- Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE features Captain Zeon, who uses the Axis colony drop above as a Limit Break. Played for Laughs because GBN is a video game, and he is actually a good-natured paragon of fair play. He dropped the Axis on a bunch of griefers to get them to change their ways. Since Death Is a Slap on the Wrist in GBN, they respawn and agree to behave themselves, suitably cowed after they realize that The Cape really doesn't have any qualms about smashing the three of them with an entire asteroid colony — if they get out of line, he might do it again.
- In the original series, Zeon dropped one of Earth's space colonies during the Backstory "Operation British" in an attempt to destroy the Earth Federation's nuke-proof headquarters in Brazil. The colony breaks up before impact and misses its intended target, instead completely annihilating Sydney, Australia and generally making a mess of things. Gundam 0083 actually shows the crater left by the drop, making clear that the explosion was equal to about 60,000 MT, and the Sega Dreamcast game Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise From The Ashes drives the point home by featuring the continent of Australia (where the game takes place) on the title screen
- In Moonlight Mile, there is a somewhat smaller-scale version — a pilot has to be rescued from a malfunctioning cylindrical German spacecraft called the Doner Kebab and the ship's trajectory redirected before it is expected to fall on Sydney, Australia like in the original Mobile Suit Gundam.
- In Planetes, terrorists plot to sabotage the interplanetary spaceship in lunar orbit and crash it into Luna City. They call it off after the government gives concessions, but just barely.
- Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Attempted by Desslar against his own people in an effort to destroy the titular space battleship. Capt. Okita uses the Wave-Motion Gun to vaporize it before it can impact.
- Space Carrier Blue Noah: Downplayed. The aliens rain down surveillance cameras disguised as meteors onto planet Earth, to scope out whether the planet is worth invading.
- In Transformers Victory, in a final, desperate effort to get revenge on Victory Saber, Deathsaurus attempts to ram his space fortress into Earth, killing everybody. He fails.
- In the third Eureka Seven Hi-Evolution film, Dewey Novak initiates a Colony Drop by destroying a space elevator, intending for the ship connected to it to wreak havoc across Earth as it proceeds toward colliding with the planet. While the impact is averted, Dewey, many of his henchmen and a significant number of his enemies die in the course of it being stopped.
Comic Books
- In one of the earliest Aliens vs. Predator crossover comics (later adapted into a novel), a small backwater colony gets completely infested with aliens. After the few surviving colonists evacuate to a safe distance, administrator Machiko Noguchi heads into the heart of the alien hive with a Predator ally and programs the orbiting cargo ship to crash into the colony.
- The DCU:
- In Superman storyline Reign of Doomsday, Doomslayer's world-ending plan involves crashing a spaceship into Earth at terminal speed.
- Wonder Woman (Charles Moulton): In Issue #15, what is claimed to be a piece of Neptune falls into the Atlantic ocean, causing earthquakes, tidal waves and massive property damage and resulting in a temporary island called "Neptunia". The many "rocks" that fall from it into the sea are actually terraforming devices and bombs disguised as rocks, the event having been orchestrated by the Masters of Neptune.
- In one of the Doctor Who (Titan) Twelfth Doctor stories, the villains are planning to commit a huge blood sacrifice to empower a Life Energy-powered alien, by deliberately crashing an orbiting space colony into the city of Mumbai.
- In Fall of the House of X (Limited Series), It's revealed that Sentinel City, a space station for Orchis, was actually modified under the command of Omega Sentinel and Nimrod to drop on Earth so that both humans and mutants would be wiped out. Thankfully, the X-Men and the Avengers Unity Division stop that from happening.
- Italian Comic Book series Nathan Never has a story arc about the war between Each and its Space Colonies. Urania, one of these colonies abandoned after being wrecked by a terrorist attack, is used to perform a Colony Drop attack against the largest city of Earth.
- Star Wars Infinities: In this What If? version of A New Hope, Luke fails to destroy the Death Star, years later Yoda ends up taking control of it and sets it to crash into Palpatine's palace on Coruscant, putting an end to the Empire and leaving Coruscant... broken.
- In The Transformers: Sins of the Wreckers, the Wreckers have an asteroid space station called Debris which serves as their home base. At the climax of the arc, Impactor has to contrive a way to drop Debris onto a whale in another dimension in order to save the day.
- Ultimatum: After killing Magneto, the heroes blew up his floating fortress, which fell to the ocean below.
Fan Works
- Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has Galaxoid accidentally sending a satellite down to Earth. It's Played for Laughs.
- Happens in the Babylon 5 fanfic The Dilgar War twice, first when the Dilgar use the wreckage of enemy ships as munitions for their mass drivers (that usually fire small asteroids and other rocks) to bomb the planet they were destroying trying to defend (it's implied to be a standard procedure, partly because, as long as you don't want some specific after-effects, it's as effective as rocks, faster and doesn't use the fuel needed to actually gather the rocks, and partly because the Dilgar appreciate the Irony and love to Kick the Dog), and then, when Jha'dur decides to destroy Mitoc and, after having it nuked and hit with mass driver fire and the weapons of the orbital defences, has the orbits of the defensive satellites and starbase degraded so they'll fall on the planet in a few days.
- In the Child of the Storm universe, the Scarlet Witch has apparently mastered this trope as an offensive technique, combining her massive magical power and skills with her probability-altering mutant abilities in order to drop space junk on her enemies with pinpoint accuracy. There's an offhand mention of her doing this to Nicodemus Archleone, and at the climax of the Chaos Reigns spinoff, we finally get to see her pull this move off, in order to severely injure the Mabdhara. Dresden is left in awe at the display.
- The Choices We Make: Jaune broke the Atlas simulation because he dropped Atlas onto Mantle. Ironwood notes such a move should've ended the game immediately, but he had evacuated the civilians first, so all it killed was a number of Grimm so high the simulation couldn't count it.
- Sudden Contact: The Overmind resorted to pulling down an Orbital Platform on the combined terran/turian/batarian/protoss ground forces in retaliation to the deaths of two Cerebrates.
- In the Freedom Planet fic Freedom Dies With Me, this is eventually revealed to be Clone Master's motivation to continue Lord Brevon's work after killing him. Gathering the armies of both Shang Tu AND Shang Mu to the Battle Glacier, he uses the Kingdom Stone to rise the broken Dreadnought as high as it can go and rigs the engines to blow, causing the ship to crash into the Battle Glacier, smashing the Kingdom Stone in the process and nuking the planet to the point of near-armageddon.
- A Nerubian's Journey: When plan A to destroy the zombified giant turtle Shen-Zin Su falls through, Krivax racks his brain and suggests that they crush it with the Nerubians' giant flying fortress — after appropriately reinforcing it.
- With This Ring (2013): When it comes time to attack the Citadel in full and rescue the remaining Tamaranian prisoners with his Orange Lanterns (all two of them), the last word on the battle is Paul wrenching their floating Space Station out of orbit and dropping it on the Citadelian cloning facility, killing untold millions of their endlessly cloned species and putting an end to the horrific Citadelian Empire for good.
Films — Live-Action
- In Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the planet Mül is destroyed by a gigantic ship falling from orbit and detonating. Later on, it's revealed that Commander Filitt ordered the deployment of a superweapon that caused the enemy ship to crash, knowingly sacrificing an entire sentient race to win the battle.
- In Wet Hot American Summer, the climactic talent show is threatened by a falling piece of the space station headed straight for the auditorium!
Literature
- Aeon 14:
- Perseus Gate #2: The World at the Edge of Space: Jessica crashes the stasis-shielded Sabrina into a planet that's been turned into a gigantic bioweapons laboratory, ramming it all the way through the planet and out the other side, cracking the crust to the point where magma resurfaces the entire planet in short order. And they live to tell about it!
- Starfire: The eponymous weapon, "starfire," is a neutronium slug accelerated to relativistic speeds, and fired through a warp gate. Tangel uses it to destroy a moon and end a battle with one shot.
- The villain of Ark Angel plans to set off a bomb on the titular space station, which has gone massively over-budget while still in construction, so he can wash his hands of it and collect the insurance money. Not content with space-age insurance fraud, he wants to time the explosion so the station will land in Washington, destroying all the government's evidence of his other criminal activities.
- Has happened in the backstory of anachronauts: First Age, as the protagonists discover, and the repercussions inform a bit of the plot. Another happens right at the climax, and it's one of the repercussions - the heroes don't quite manage to stop it, but they slow it down enough to minimize the death toll.
- Evolution: Earth is hit by two major cosmic bodies, both causing a mass extinction — the comet that killed the dinosaurs and Eros in the future. Numerous other impacts of this scale occur during the Solar System's dying days, but by that point there's nothing left on Earth for them to kill.
- Isaac Asimov may have originated a cheap way to terraform nearly waterless Mars: adjust cometary trajectories slightly and bombard the planet with big balls of dirty ice. The Caliban series, derived from Asimov's Robot Series, takes terraforming by colony drop to a new level. The normal process is to have a few robot teams cut the comets apart and fire them at the planet with mass drivers, ensuring that all the micro-comets that hit the planet are small enough to burn up on impact without damaging the real estate. But the final novel of the trilogy sends an entire comet at the planet, breaking it apart into large pieces, so that the overlapping craters will dig a channel between the equatorial seas and the north pole, allowing the planet of Inferno to have greater temperature regulation.
- Chanur Novels: A ship coming into a system out of hyperspace is travelling at a very high fraction of the speed of light. In theory, it's possible for a ship to hop out of hyperspace, drop off an asteroid so that it's on a collision course for an inhabited world, and then hop back into hyperspace. Since the asteroid will itself being travelling at a very high fraction of light-speed, not only is it impossible to stop, it doesn't even need to be very big to cause massive amounts of destruction. This form of Colony Drop was never used in the series, but one of the antagonists did threaten its use.
- During the climax of Chrysalis (Beaver Fur), as the Terran's last act, they crash their entire mothership into one of the Xunvir Republic's major manufacturing planets, destroying it. Since that spaceship is also their entire body, it's also a Suicide Attack.
- In the Chung Kuo series, Earth has seven continent-spanning cities and a combined population of 38 billion people. This necessitates large orbiting stations to grow food. One of these falls from orbit and impacts North America causing a hole in the city the size of the Great Lakes, the death of the Emperor of North America as he tries to flee a rioting populace, and a civil war for the next 20 years. It's possible 2 billion people died.
- Cities in Flight: The rogue spacefaring city known as Interstellar Master Traders uses this to rape and pillage planets in Earthman Come Home.
- In Bruno Schulz's story, "The Comet", global disaster is averted because the comet becomes a sensation which subsequently goes out of fashion.
- Allen Steele's 'Coyote Rising' has the colonists employing a Colony Drop in the form of the deliberate de-orbiting of the starship Alabama onto the main base of the bad guys, destroying most of their forces in the process.
- The Dresden Files:
- In order to kill Duke Paolo Ortega, both in retaliation for an offscreen attack in the previous book and because he cheated in his duel against Harry before running his cowardly ass away, Harry's old mentor and grandfather Ebenezar "Blackstaff" McCoy makes sure the vampire gets what's coming to him. By dropping a decommissioned Soviet satellite out of orbit straight onto Ortega's hometown, right where he was healing. Needless to say, there were no survivors, though the village itself was mostly untouched.
- It's not the first time, either. The Tunguska Event? Yeah, that was him.
- A little context. The Duke's home had all sorts of magical protection. No one could get in or out, and trying to use magic to hurt him or storm the castle would not work. Unfortunately for the Duke, gravity is not magic.
- Downtiming the Nightside: The setting in future has Earth fighting an increasingly desperate war against "The Others", genetically modified humans living on the moon. The Others battle plan consists of hurling asteroids at the Earth, the defense of which is rapidly draining resources and leads to desperate measures.
- Dune:
- Starships called 'crushers', which are meant to be deliberately crashed onto a planetary surface to destroy a city/installation/military formation, are employed.
- Used as a tactic by Titan Agamemnon in Legends of Dune during the invasion of Geidi Prime. He sends a cruiser on a collision course for a scrambler field emitter that is keeping the Thinking Machines from invading. The sheet kinetic force of the fall destroys a large part of the capital city.
- The Eschaton Series: In Iron Sunrise, the second strike ship (accelerates to sublight speed and rains Death from Above upon target) is set on a course to smash into an enemy planet after its home system is destroyed by a superweapon.
- Honor Harrington:
- A three hundred-thousand-ton chunk of an orbital shipyard wipes out a fair-sized city by landing almost directly on top of it, to the tune of several million casualties. Though the object of the attack was to destroy the station, and the damage to the planet was just collateral damage/a bonus.
- Also an oft-Discussed Trope. Orbital bombardment of a populated planet is referred to as The Heinlein Maneuver, and the deliberate and unprovoked performing of such is considered one of the few easy ways to provoke The Solarian League into open war.
- In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the rebelling Moon colonists use their electromagnetic catapult to throw rocks down the gravity well at Earth.
- In The Night's Dawn Trilogy, villain Quinn Dexter forces the orbiting dozen or so asteroid habitats circling the planet Nyvan to crash into the planet, wiping out the half-billion or so inhabitants. He later plans to do this to Earth with its much bigger orbital network of asteroid settlements and its population of 39 billion, but is distracted by another plan and pursues that instead.
- Otherland: At the climax of the series, the AI running the Otherland network tricks the heroes into letting it escape its virtual imprisonment. Its first and final action is to attempt to destroy its tormentors by activating its self-destruct sequence, which in this case means sending the satellite that houses its "brain" plummeting to Earth, aimed directly at the headquarters of J Corp. The resulting impact turns a mile high corporate tower into a smoking crater in the Louisiana swamp.
- Overheaven: In 2009, Islamic terrorists bring down India's Asavad-2 space habitat, causing it to crash into the Arizona desert. Nobody on the ground is killed, but everyone in the habitat dies from the heat and G-forces from reentering Earth's atmosphere.
- In the finale of Rama II, the spacecraft realigns is orbit so that it is in a collision course with Earth. The response on the ground is to nuke it. Then the spacecraft realigns its orbit again to do an observational slingshot pass of the planet at the last minute.
- In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, Mars is being colonized and populated even BEFORE the cometary bombardment ceases, requiring some very important Travel Advisories. Also in Robinson's trilogy, when the Space Elevator is destroyed, it falls and wraps around the planet several times.
- Release That Witch: Roland eventually manages to beat Zero in her Mental World by imagining a theoretical kinetic orbital strike weapon that drops thousands of pieces of metal slag from orbit, which under the effects of gravity and atmospheric entry turns it into flaming molten metal moving at high speed.
- Safehold has the Rakurai, a kinetic bombardment weapons platform orbiting the planet programmed to destroy any place which reaches a certain technology level in order to keep the planet in Medieval Stasis. The Lost Colony's founders used it to destroy the enclave of the people who disagreed with their God Guise. One of the protagonists' main issues is finding a way to somehow get rid of the platform.
- Saintess Summons Skeletons: Er'Gakk wraps up the "Hot summer days" event by manifesting a second planet to collide with the first and annihilate everyone. But Sofia manages to kill the spiritual half of the attack, hide in the spiritual plane during the initial collision until she runs out of mana, after which her resistances and Healing Factor let her keep pace with the ongoing damage from sitting in burning plasma.
- An attempt at one is what sets up the events of the Stephanie Plum novel Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight. The Big Bad of the novel, hacker Oswald Wednesday, was seeking revenge for being fired from NASA, with him being able to hack into the International Space Station and plotting to send it on a collision course to Earth whether or not the world governments paid his ransom of a hundred-million dollars. However, before he can execute the plan, a group of hackers that admired him managed to hack into his computer, and when one of the hackers stayed on longer and learned of his plan to drop the ISS on Earth, she proceeded to infect his computer with ransomware to stop the plan, leading to him killing the members of the hacker group one-by-one as a means of retribution.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Chains of Command featured the Enterprise finding a number of planets that had been destroyed by a powerful alien race firing smaller (moon-sized) celestial bodies at high speed.
- Star Wars Legends
- In various reference books it's mentioned that during the Clone Wars The Republic did this by accident; during a battle over the Separatist planet of Pammant, a battlecruiser's hyperdrive was damaged by torpedo droids and triggered a jump which nearly shattered the planet, ending all life and crippling CIS ship production.
- X-Wing Series: Played with twice, using the Executor-class star dreadnaught Lusankya.
- Inverted in The Krytos Trap, where the Lusankya buried under the surface of Coruscant blasts its way out from under the city, causing massive destruction and killing millions of people in the process.
- Defied in The Bacta War when the captain of the Lusankya threatens to crash it into the planet Thyferra rather than surrender his vessel. Instead, his first officer shoots him and surrenders to the Rogues.
- It's then played straight during the fall of Coruscant in Star by Star when the Yuuzhan Vong bombard Coruscant with its own orbital defense stations.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- In The Bleeding Chalice, an Imperial Battleship possessed by a Chaos Plague Lord (or something like that...) is dropped on a planet. Said ship exploded on entering the atmosphere, resulting in not only a rain of debris but the first-ever Airdrop Zombie Apocalypse.
- In the first novel of Black Legion, the eponymous, yet-unnamed warband begins their attack on Canticle City by dropping at it Khayon's late ship, Tlaloc, from the orbit, annihilating it completely.
- In Talon of Horus, Iskandar Khayon telekinetically tows the Tlaloc behind Vengeful Spirit to throw it at the Canticle City on Harmony, destroying the Emperor's Children's fortress and its cloning facilities.
- The Zachary Nixon Johnson series has a race of aliens called the Gladians. Most people believe them to be a peaceful race, as they possess no weapons. The main character's secretary, however, points out that they do possess extremely massive ships, which they are capable of flying into planets at extremely fast speeds. They apparently wiped out the dinosaurs this way, and threaten to do it to humanity, too.
Live-Action TV
- Dead Like Me: In a small-scale variant, Georgia Lass was killed by a plummeting toilet seat that fell from the decommissioned Mir space station.
- Doctor Who:
- "Revenge of the Cybermen": The Cybermen make a second attempt to destroy Voga by crashing the Nerva beacon, laden with Cyberbombs, into the planet. The Doctor and Sarah, who they've left on board, prevent this from happening.
- The Cybermen do the same thing again in "Earthshock" when they try to crash a massive transport ship into future Earth to stop an anti-Cybermen conference. They succeed... sort of. Adric inadvertently saves the planet by fiddling with the controls so the thing goes back in time, to become the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
- "Voyage of the Damned": Max Capricorn attempts to make the space Titanic crash into Earth. His motivation? To drive his former company that he was forced out of bankrupt and get its current owners arrested for exterminating humanity. It narrowly misses Buckingham Palace.
- In the following season, in the alternate universe where Donna didn't "Turn Left", the Doctor died before he could stop the space Titanic. The fallout from the explosion obliterates London, turning the UK into a third world country overnight, forcing martial law, forced housing, and the eventual Nazi-ish removal of foreigners to concentration camps.
- In "The Return of Doctor Mysterio", the Harmony Shoal attempt to drop a spaceship onto New York in order to trick world leaders into hiding out in their reinforced buildings, thus allowing them to perform a Grand Theft Me on all of them. The Doctor accelerates their plan and aims the ship towards Lucy Fletcher's apartment building, broadcasting a message that only one person on the whole planet can hear — Grant Gordon, a.k.a. the Ghost (Superman Expy). Grant catches the ship with one hand and then flies off to Hurl It into the Sun.
- Eureka:
- An episode of has the accumulated space junk accidentally forming into this level of a threat. Not so much a colony drop, but space junk drop to make it implicit to only the title town.
- In Season 3, an unidentified ship is on course for Earth and compelling various residents of the town to assemble towers of unknown purpose. The towers are first assumed to be a weapon, but it's eventually discovered that they're in fact a high-tech safety net meant to stop the ship from hitting Eureka hard enough to turn the town into a crater.
- Very narrowly averted during the Eros incident in The Expanse. Though on a much smaller scale, it is ultimately played straight during the attack on Ganymede.
- The Flash (2014): After being defeated in the Season 4 finale, Clifford DeVoe/The Thinker's last act of spite is to engineer things so that the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite will drop on Central City. Team Flash counters this by using their powers to protect people from most of the smaller debris, with Barry and Nora/XS using a supersonic punch to obliterate the main body of the satellite.
- Foundation: At the climax of the pilot, a terrorist attack severs the tether of Trantor's space elevator from the orbiting space station, causing the cable to fall and, in Brother Day's words, "wrap itself around the planet like a garrote". It leaves a scar 50 levels deep on the city-planet and kills 100 million people.
- The Mandalorian: In the season three finale, the Mandalorians finally defeat Moff Gideon by landing a crashing Imperial Cruiser right on top of his base with him still in it (the base, not the ship).
- Ending of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy. The Big Bad has wrecked the colony, so what will she do now? Drop the dome on the survivors. Oddly, the impact was considered not that dangerous if it didn't directly hit the camp, so having the Megazord redirecting it was enough to avoid carnage (the Megazord is tiny when compared to the colony, but hey, they already did it in Power Rangers in Space with an asteroid).
- Ultra Series:
- Ultraman Dyna: In the two-part story "The Krakov Won't Surface", a jellyfish-like alien being named Spume sets up base in Antarctica to attempt this with an artificial sun recently launched out by Super GUTS, with the plan being that the sun's heat will melt the Antarctic ice and flood Earth so that Spume can have the planet all to itself. Of course, Dyna and Super GUTS were going to have none of that.
- Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle featured a similar-looking artificial sun set up around the planet Bolis that gets damaged during a scuffle with King Joe Black, causing the sun to hurtle towards the kaiju-infested planet during the finale. The problem is ZAP SPACY and a number of space colonists are still trying to get off Bolis as this is going on.
Roleplay
- Destroy the Godmodder: The UOSS was a gigantic spaceship summoned in the second thread. When it was destroyed, its chassis fell onto the Battlefield, killing almost everyone on it.
Tabletop Games
- The Azrael from GURPS: Spaceships uses a ramscoop to reach half the speed of light on its trip to the target. On impact, it has the effect of 40 million megatons of TNT.
- The fate of Cadia in Warhammer 40,000, cracked by a falling Blackstone Fortress.
Video Games
- Ace Combat:
- Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies ends with you having to stop a recently-reactivated weapon called Megalith, a giant facility that launches missiles to hit remaining fragments of the Ulysses asteroid and redirect them into the planet.
- Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has the enemy attempt to kamikaze an enormous military satellite (about 500 meters long, and large enough your planes can fly through the hollow space in the center) named the SOLG (Strategic Orbital Linear Gun) into your country's capital city whilst armed with a nuclear warhead. Your final mission in the game is to destroy it in the atmosphere before it hits.
- Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits: Invoked in one of Maru's attacks. He's got an attack called Hunting Arrow where he shoots an arrow up in the sky and then some kind of pteranodon-like creature drops on the enemies. A second more powerful version of the attack is called Great Hunter and it's pretty much the same, except that is some kind of spacecraft to drop on the enemies. Improbable Aiming Skills indeed!
- Assault Suits Valken: Level 3 takes place aboard a space colony in control by the enemy. When you get inside, the enemies start to shift the colony's course by letting it fall towards Earth. If you don't destroy the engines in time, the next level lets you see the results in the background where a massive explosion is seen and many lives being lost. This also puts you on the route for the bad ending where your crewmates die.
- It turns out that this is what happened to the planet Leeir in Asteroid 5251 — it got blown apart by a meteor shower, turning it into the very asteroid you've crash-landed on.
- Asura's Wrath has the Karma Fortress's head fall to earth, with Chakravartin taking the rest of the fortress to build his own giant form. The scene is a shot for shot redux of the original colony drop.
- Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2: After the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity is disabled by Imperial forces in the prologue/tutorial, a Chaos fleet pushes the wreckage into Cadia, destroying it.
- Bayonetta: During the fight with Balder, after he blasts at Bayonetta with a Kill Sat, he decides to drop the satellite itself onto her. And at the very end of the game, Jeanne and Bayonetta team up to destroy Jubileus's body before it crashes into the Earth and destroys it.
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: Colonel Zarpedon's plan is to destroy Pandora by using Elpis, its moon, as the candidate in order to decimate the Artifact of Doom hidden within the planet. The said plan involves using Helios' Wave-Motion Gun in order for the moon to crumble, as its remains are hurled towards the planet. The plan failed, of course, but it leaves two terrible scars on the man who happened to save both the planet and its moon. One literal, one metaphorical. This plot is revisited in Borderlands 3, except the true nature of Elpis and Pandora are revealed; Pandora is the Great Vault with some kind of multi-planetary apocalyptic horror sealed inside of it, and Elpis is its Vault Key. While the Great Vault remains sealed at game's end, Lilith had to give her own life to stop Elpis' descent.
- Burning Rangers had this plan as their final chapter, in an accidental example. Some scientist's daughter had an initially incurable disease and was placed in a special cryogenic stasis aboard a custom-built space station, with scientist scanning his brain in as the station's AI, complete with orders to send her home when a cure is found. Unfortunately, a combination of years of neglect, the scientist's overprotective tendencies, and an unreliable AI, caused the station to accumulate satellites and other flotsam and jetsam as a shield, ballooning the station's size. When a cure was found, the AI gave the order to send her home, but that order was interpreted to mean "bring her home," i.e. bring the station down to earth. If the orders were followed, it would have destroyed the Earth utterly. Either way, it failed.
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
- The Soviets get a special power (Krasna-45 Orbital Drop Protocol) that dumps increasingly larger orbital satellites at an enemy location. The highest level drops the Mir space station. It's surprisingly impotent for an object that size, though.
- An ability also allows the same Soviet satellite to magnetically pick up vehicles and add them to the satellite barrage the next time one chooses to use it. Hilariously fun if you picked up aircraft carriers and battleships beforehand and chucked them at something. Even more hilarious once you find out the magnetic beam works on Tesla Troopers. Supplementing the space station with powered armored soldiers is a funny moment.
- One of the Challenge missions (and a skirmish map) is under constant bombardment from the orbital drop power, since it's where the Soviets decommission their space assets. To quote the opposing commander when defeated:
I should have known that being showered by trash wouldn't bother you.- Early in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars the Philadelphia is destroyed, resulting in massive chaos across the globe as communications are offline (the Philadelphia was the primary GDI command hub) and causing massive collateral damage as the station's remains fell to earth.
- Creepy Castle: The final menace that Dopterra face is Possessor possessing a living mountain from another planet to crash it into Dopterra, effectively ending civilization as it currently exists.
- Cybattler: What appears to be the remains of some of the Moon have been used to create an Orbital Ring System of connecting chunks. At the end of the first level, one of the largest chunks seems to make planetfall.
- Cyberbots: In Jin Saotome's story, the final battle takes place on a satellite weapon as it is sent falling into Earth's atmosphere. Jin's mentor sacrifices himself to keep the satellite from hitting the planet.
- In Dead Space, on the last level the marker activates, disabling gravity tethers holding a chunk of the planet in space with the Ishimura. This causes the chunk to crash down to the planet's surface, wiping out the Hive Mind.
- In Final Fantasy XIII, the game world features a large, magically-floating hollow moonlet named "Cocoon" floating above a world called "Pulse". Eventually, the heroes learn that the Big Bad's plot involves disabling the moonlet's power supply via a needlessly complex plot involving a Load-Bearing Boss (apparently though they run Cocoon they can't just choose to hit the off switch on the antigrav for some reason), causing it to crash into Pulse for the specific purpose of orchestrating mass murder. This is a bit of a reversal of the usual Colony Drop threat because whereas usually it's the people on the ground in danger from the falling colony, in this case all the people are living inside Cocoon and would die if it fell; Pulse is uninhabited except by monsters and zombies. Though naturally the Big Bad's plot is foiled, much of the plot of the sequel revolves around the peril of the exact same thing potentially happening.
- At the end of the original version of Final Fantasy XIV, the Garlean Empire tries to drop the moon of Dalamud on Eorzea. In a twist, it didn't actually impact the surface, but instead exploded and released the Elder Primal Bahamut imprisoned within, whereupon it tore Eorzea a new one.
- So why isn't this part of the "Moons" category? Because Dalamud was never actually a natural moon — it was a colossal satellite constructed by the Allagan Empire (who else?) to harness Bahamut's aether as a power source for Syrcus Tower. Once it was brought down, it no longer supplied energy to the tower, and after several years, the tower's stasis field wore down, reawakening the last Allagan Emperor, Xande, and causing a big, brand new problem for Eorzea.
- Gundam Breaker 3 deserves some credit for both inverting this trope and playing it straight while having absolutely no reason to do so. It is inverted at end of the main campaign, where Will and your team are invited to a geosynchronous space station for the grand final Gunpla battle of the tournament. However, one of Will's corporate enemies, a Dirty Coward Corrupt Corporate Executive named Viras, unleashes a computer virus that severs the Space Elevator tether, intending to fling Will into deep space as revenge for buying out his anti-virus company and outing him as a black-market virus-writer.
- The DLC also deserves credit for finding a way to include a colony drop in a setting without war or deep space travel. Well-Intentioned Extremist Nazir writes a backdoor worm that gives him access to the space station, intending to crash it onto Earth to destroy the super-efficient solar energy generating technology that would've rendered his oil-industry-dependent home country obsolete overnight. How he expected his country to survive crippling international sanctions amid the backlash of a terrorist action that would've killed hundreds of thousands of people is anyone's guess. Fortunately, he is stopped via Heroic Sacrifice from Robota.
- Naturally possible in Kerbal Space Program, though a spacecraft or space station not designed for re-entry will probably just burn up. Also, good luck aiming; unless you steer the craft down you'll probably miss the target by a few miles.
- This is how Igniz planned to end The King of Fighters 2001, by driving the NESTS space station into Southtown. K' dealt with him before that was to happen, though.
- Marvel vs. Capcom: The Hulk has his "Gamma Crush" super move where he grabs a meteor from space and sends it crashing down into the Earth, while still riding said meteor.
- Mass Effect:
- The codex notes that launching towed-in asteroids at planets is perfectly doable for pretty much anybody able to afford a decent-sized spaceship and a few relatively small (read: two-story building-sized) fusion torches. However, due to the fact that such an impact can easily not only kill all life on a planet, but render the biosphere irreparably damaged thus closing off the planet to all future habitation, dropping asteroids is banned under the Fictional Geneva Conventions. Not that this has stopped some people:
- The codex notes that due to their destructiveness and cheapness, asteroids are popular weapons during total wars between "third galaxy" nations in the Terminus systems.
- During the Krogan Rebellions the krogan began dropping asteroids onto turian worlds when the turians intervened on the Citadel's behalf. They rendered several planets completely uninhabitable this way. This just pissed the turians off even more.
- Additionally, during the invasion of Shanxi the Turians dropped orbital debris from the space battle in order to break pockets of resistance on the colony's surface. A far lesser version than is common in the setting, as the debris were small enough to "only" take out city blocks instead of killing the entire planet.
- A DLC for the first game involved stopping a group of batarian terrorists from dropping an asteroid on a heavily-populated human colony. This is also the first time players laid eyes on a batarian. Not a very good first impression (story-wise, they've been in a state of Cold War with the Systems Alliance for a few decades). One character notes that this particular batarian must be acting on his own initiative rather than on orders from high up, because if the batarians actually did kill the planet, then Mutually Assured Destruction would ensure that the Council races would have to respond with force and would probably extinguish every batarian planet the same way. The Dragon (an unrepentant murderer and slaver) is horrified when he figures out what his boss is planning and even offers to help you stop him, presumably for the same reason. One scientist you discover on the asteroid even gives you a detailed description of what would happen if the impact was not stopped:
"X-57 is twice the size of the asteroid that wiped out the Earth's dinosaurs.note It would be like millions of fusion bombs striking at once. With the heat of the blast, a thousand kilometers away, clothes would ignite. There'd be global wildfires. Air shock will flatten everything for hundreds of kilometers. Terra Nova will die, Shepard — not just our colony, the planet. There'll be a climate shift, mass extinctions, the ecosystem won't recover for thousands of years. Millions maybe."- In Mass Effect 2, Jack recounts her Backstory, including a time where she crashed a space station upon the hanar's favorite moon. The hanar, having politeness as their racial hat, refer to this as "Vandalism".
- In The Arrival DLC, Shepard is forced to invoke this trope by crashing an asteroid research facility to slow down the Reaper invasion, not into a planet, but a mass relay which goes supernova, destroying a solar system and killing over 300,000 batarians. S/he's told afterwards that s/he will have to face trial and a war with the batarians is almost certainly guaranteed, although the arrival of the Reapers en masse at the beginning of the third game mostly pre-empts the larger consequences.
- In Mass Effect 3, whilst on the quarian homeworld, Rannoch, Garrus suggests towing in a few asteroids and launching them at the planet to take out the enemy geth. Tali balks at the idea, pointing out that his tactic would render the planet they're trying to take uninhabitable. Garrus just shrugs, saying that the dust would clear eventually... besides, they're already wearing environmental suits.
- Some characters in the third game suggest using this tactic against the Nigh-Invulnerable Reapers. Unfortunately, the Reapers, lacking any apparent supply lines, don't have planets or space stations to throw meteors at, and the Reapers themselves (as spaceships) are far too maneuverable to fall victim to it themselves.
- At the end-game of Mass Effect: Andromeda, you can hear one of Ryder's teammates having a similar conversation to Tali and Garrus', telling some turians not to try this tactic against the kett, since that'd wreck the planets everyone wants to live on.
- Massive Assault: The Backstory mentions terrorists hijacking long-range shuttles and using them to crash into Earth cities.
- Mega Man:
- Mega Man X4 begins with the player trying (and failing) to stop Mavericks from dropping a flying city, the Sky Lagoon, as a terrorist attack. Repliforce became The Scapegoat and is asked to disarm and come in for questioning, with them opting to start a coup and fight back due to the accusation, and the rest of the game is either fighting off the Repliforce's attacks or rogue Mavericks who are popping up in the wake of the attack.
- Mega Man X5 has Space Station Eurasia hurtling towards Earth. While allowing the space colony to crash into the Earth does not end the game outright, doing so locks you into the Bad Ending; you will no longer be able to play as Zero as well, due to him going "Maverick" from the resulting impact. Even though the Maverick Hunters canonically destroyed it, the leftover debris still has an adverse effect on the planet.
- Mega Man Zero 4 historically referenced the X5 disaster with Area Zero; ironically, it has become the last bastion of nature on the planet, since Eurasia's life support systems have survived and nourished life in the Death World the Elf Wars caused. Later in the game the Big Bad's superweapon is revealed to be another orbital space station, Ragnarok, which predictably was sent on a collision course with Area Zero once its Kill Sat function was forcibly disabled.
- Metroid:
- At the end of Metroid Fusion, Samus originally wants to blow up the BSL space station to get rid of the X Parasites onboard, but Adam counters that this doesn't account for the X Parasites on the surface of SR388 and suggests ramming the station into the planet while simultaneously detonating it. Cue Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
- In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus needs to disable a shield around a Leviathan on Elysia. Since she can't destroy the shield generator, she loads a thermonuclear bomb onto part of Skytown and drops it on the shield, destroying it instead.
- Millenium 2.2 had a lunar colony try to rebuild Earth after it was hit by a 2.2 trillion ton asteroid.
- No Straight Roads: Near the end Kliff causes the satellite to drop to Vinyl City. Fortunately, the combined efforts of Bunk Bed Junction and the NSR artists, including Tatiana, managed to prevent any serious damage.
- Outpost: The ship that brought you and your colonists is mentioned to end crashing into the planet, a victim of orbital decay—with no adverse effects against your colony—some hundreds of turns after you began playing.
- Phantasy Star II: This is a major plot point, where the impact of the Gaira prison satellite results in the total disintegration of Palm (a.k.a. Palma or Parma, depending on who you ask), one of the solar system's three planets. This event is retold in Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, when at the end of Episode 2, the Guardians Colony is knocked from its orbit and crashes into the planet Parum below, causing quite a bit of local devastation but certainly nowhere near PSII's level.
- Power Stone 2 has meteors rain down from the sky and reduces all players' health so low that just tapping someone kills them. This happens when time runs out and initiates sudden death. In sudden death, if the players take too long to kill each other, more meteors rain down and kill everyone, resulting in a draw.
- Space Empires: You can stick lots of explosives on a Baseship and send it on a collision course with a planet. It sadly doesn't do quite as much damage as you'd expect.
- SimCity:
- SimCity 2000 inverts this trope. While the game has no real "win" condition, the closest thing to it is the Exodus, which happens when the player builds enough Launch Arcologies (basically super-structures that combine massive amounts of Residential, Commercial, and Industrial production in the same space), where they are all converted to Colony Ships and take off for new worlds. "Enough" in this case is about 450, meaning the arcologies have to take up about 90% of your city's landmass. Mechanically, the Exodus is represented by the Arcologies all being demolished at once, leaving empty space for the player to develop all over again.
- SimCity 4: One of the disasters is a meteor strike.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Rather frequent across the franchise.
- Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Sonic knocking the Death Egg out of orbit in Sonic 2 serves as the catalyst for Sonic 3. Fighting Big Arm in the Launch Base (as Sonic, anyway) botches the Death Egg's launch, causing it to fall back to Angel Island. At the end of Sonic and Knuckles, you're tasked with averting this trope with Angel Island itself by getting the Master Emeralds as well as the Chaos Emeralds. Failure to do so results in an ending where the island falls out of the sky and into the sea. Unlike most colony drops, though, this one seems harmless for everyone involved.
- Sonic Adventure 2 had the Space Colony ARK dropped. Dr. Eggman's grandfather, Professor Gerald Robotnik, brought to despair over the death of his granddaughter Maria, exacts revenge in spirit by programming the colony to crash into Earth while overcharged with energy from the Chaos Emeralds. The despairing professor even tampered with Shadow's memory of Maria's last words to posthumously prod him into carrying out his apocalyptic vengeance from beyond the grave, with Shadow duping Eggman via Batman Gambit to gather the resources needed to initiate said preprogrammed collision course, until Amy talks him out of it. The presence of the gargantuan Biolizard makes matter far worse, as it fuses with the colony and tries to forcibly drag it down into the planet when the heroes manage to neutralize the energy overload with the Master Emerald. After both Sonic and Shadow power up to their super forms, the duo ultimately slay Biolizard, but with the colony swiftly entering Earth's atmosphere, they have only seconds to stop an imminent doomsday. Sonic's solution to stopping this is to use Chaos Control to send it back into orbit. Shadow, on the other hand... does the unthinkable.
- Sonic Advance 2: The regular ending has the player character falling out of the sky while Eggman's space colony does the same in the background, exploding violently on impact.
- Space Tyrant: The card "One for the Team" sacrifices one Bzzzerk ship to deal two damage to a sieged planet.
- In Spore, new colonies are installed by dropping them out of space to begin with, so it is technically possible to use this as a weapon. However, since colonies can only be placed on uninhabited planets, said weapon can only be wielded against poor defenseless animals who are no threat to you and you reap no benefit from killing.
- Spriggan Mark 2: Played with like Gundam in this rare (but very fun) PC Engine shooter.
- Starsector: Mairaath used to be a beautiful terran world, considered the jewel of its star system, and orbited by three astropoli. Then the Luddic Path decided to ram one of them into the planet, ruining it to such an extent it's now a desert world wracked by storms.
- Starhawk: In this third-person shooter/strategy PS3 game, players call self-assembling structures down from orbiting ships. It's a common strategy to use both these structures and your own respawn pod to OHKO the enemy upon impact, even before the drop constructs itself into a turret or beam cannon (or whatever you happened to call down).
- Star Trek: Judgment Rites: The penultimate mission has Kirk and crew trying to stop a massive alien ship from landing on top of a Federation colony in the Klingon Neutral Zone. Transporting aboard, Kirk discovers that the ship's computer believes it is simply returning home, and refuses to acknowledge the presence of the colony.
- Stellaris:
- One of the possible Precursor civilisations are the Voltaum, who had a tendency to destroy their own colonies as mass suicides attempting to "disconnect" themselves from reality, which they believed to be a simulation. One such colony had the cables of its Space Elevator severed, destroying several urban centres around the equator and killing millions in its collapse.
- Your science ships may chance upon an anomaly concerning a giant impact crater on a lifeless world. Looking into it reveals that it was caused by a small space ship hitting the world at FTL speeds, but it happened so long ago that the crew can no longer ascertain whether it was an intentional maneuver or just an unlucky accident.
- In Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return, the extremist Hawk Faction seizes control of the Solar Congress space station in an attempt to overthrow the Solar Alliance government. Should this coup go south (which it does), they plan to deorbit the station and drop it on the capital city below, killing millions.
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Stern Regusseur was the colony (Merged with Neviim) and Super Robot Wars J Gu-Landon was to use the Moon which was a spaceship covered in debris. The green Earth in Third Super Robot Wars Z: Tengoku-hen is turned into Douzemille (everyone on it is evacuated to the blue Earth) and used by Dix Neuf in an event battle sequence and stopped by Nono like in the show, but one of the reasons is because she was trying to protect the message for Noriko and Kazumi, and she activates it there.
- System Shock: In the first game, SHODAN tries to do this with Citadel Station after the Hacker stopped all of her plans (and backup plans).
- World of Warcraft did this in the first Expansion Pack, with a Magitek dimensional fortress screwing up a small archipelago.
- The games in the X-Universe let players build space stations wherever in a sector they wish. The game mechanic consists of teleporting the station, fully built, out of the cargo hold of your TL-class transport and into its intended position. At some point, somebody decided to see what would happen if they built a cheap station directly on top of an enemy capital ship. The tactic proved quite successful and has become fairly widespread among X fans, under the moniker "station-bombing".
- The destruction of the Earth Torus in X3: Albion Prelude caused millions of tons of debris to rain down on Earth.
- Xenogears gives us the fall of Solaris. People, when the counterweight/city on the other end of an orbital elevator snaps like a twig, don't be under it when it hits, tends to leave holes in continents.
- Xenosaga: Albedo attempts to drop the Proto Merkabah on Second Miltia, apparently primarily for his own entertainment. Not even a hint of an Inferred Holocaust here.
- Zone of the Enders: Dolores i: The finale had the Big Bad of the series, a bitter and psychotic Radam Lavans, try to topple the Earth's orbital elevator, which would cause it to smack the earth like a gigantic slap bracelet. It takes a herculean effort to stop it, requiring the near-sacrifice of Dolores and the actual sacrifice of Radam, his Orbital Frame, Hathor, and several mass-produced Orbital Frames, but things turn out alright.
Web Animation
- This is how Sonic's world was destroyed in Super Mario Bros. Z: Mecha Sonic's escape sent Eggman's Death Egg crashing into the planet.
Webcomics
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Part of the backstory is a war that was started with cargo shuttles being dropped on a city as a shock tactic. Specifically, Centralis, which happens to be the biggest city and home to the heroes.
- Schlock Mercenary: This trope is a good part of the reason why getting a DUI on a starship is an automatic death penalty at minimum, the other part being that you'd need to circumvent the many safeguards against that while sober to even achieve it.
Web Original
- Hermitcraft: In Season 8, the Moon begins to get bigger in the sky, signifying its approach towards the server. Despite the Hermit's best efforts, the season ends with the Moon crashing into the world and wiping out the Season 8 continent.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Angry Marines, a 4chan chapter of Space Marines, will send their battle barges (with colorful names such as Litany of Litany's Litany and Maximum Fuck) crashing into each other in their mad scramble to strike the earth.
Western Animation
- In the Codename: Kids Next Door movie Operation: Z.E.R.O., it looked like Numbuh 1 was going to do a heroic version of this with the moon on the captured-by-evil Earth, but it instead just fired the sizable treehouse-ish moonbase, the KND's headquarters. Grandfather shrugs it off too, but the real plan was to bring the KND's Laser-Guided Amnesia device down to Earth to use on him.
- In Courage the Cowardly Dog, the episode "Courage The Fly" features Di Lung attempting to "make a satellite fall" onto Courage's house using a giant magnet; shockingly enough, he actually kind of succeeds.
- After his Villainous Breakdown, General Lunaris from DuckTales (2017) intends to crash his spaceship into Earth to destroy it, himself included. He thankfully gets prevented from doing so and instead, his ship gets stuck permanently in the planet's orbit as "Earth's second moon".
- Parodied in the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage", in which the guys from Planet Express must stop a big ball of garbage from splattering against New New York.
- In the final episode of Justice League (pre-Unlimited), "Starcrossed", Batman destroys the hypergate generator by piloting the Watchtower into it.
- Kenny from South Park is squashed by the crashing MIR space station in the first-season Halloween special, "Pinkeye".
- In Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "I Have No Bones And I Must Flee", Mariner, Ransom and Gary unwittingly trap the moopsy inside the main control room of the intergalactic zoo they're in and it randomly hits buttons to make deorbit. They have to lure it out so they can save it, themselves and the various creatures inside.
- Superfriends: The fate of Star City in the Galactic Guardians episode "Escape from Space City", after Darkseid's failed attempt to turn it into a Kill Sat.
Real Life
- In 1978 the Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 broke up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the Northwest Territories of Canada, spreading radioactive material all over the wilderness around Yellowknife because there was a nuclear reactor on board. The Soviets eventually paid $3 million Canadian dollars to help with the cleanup.
- Some bits of Skylab actually made it through the Earth's atmosphere in July 1979 when the failed space station succumbed to Earth's gravitational pull, although none of the pieces was large enough to cause significant damage. Nowadays, most expiring satellites are given remote-control commands to come apart in small pieces that won't survive reentry, and/or to land in the oceans, so as to avert this trope. Even more hilarious: some of it fell on Australia, and NASA had to pay a $400 USD fine for littering. Life Imitates Art in this case, as this happened just a couple of months after the Mobile Suit Gundam episode depicting a Colony Drop on Sydney, Australia.
- Same for the Russian space station Mir, that fell in March 2001 on the Pacific Ocean (not on Paris during the 1999 solar eclipse, as fashion designer-turned-astrologer Paco Rabbane predicted).
- China's space station, Tian Gong 1, reentered the Earth's atmosphere on April Fool's Day 2018 having lost control in 2016. By sheer coincidence, it landed in the South Pacific, somewhat north of the established spacecraft graveyard near Point Nemo.
- Typically rocket's first stage note detaches before the whole vehicle reaches orbit and falls back to earth relatively close to the launch site. Since the Chinese Long March 5B rocket consists of just the first stage, side boosters and the payload, after launch the whole first stage ends up on decaying low Earth orbit. This tends to cause some problems when it inevitably reenters the atmosphere few days or weeks later.
- After the rocket's maiden launch in May 2020 its first stage crashed into the Gulf of Guinea, but some pieces reportedly fell on the Ivory Coast.
- Following its flight with the Tianhe space station the spent rocket fell into the Indian Ocean not far from the Maldives.
- While most space agencies tend to launch their rockets on paths that take them over the sea, so any spent stages land harmlessly in the water to either be left there or recovered, China has a nasty habit of taking their rockets on paths that lead them over remote areas of their own countryside. The reason for this isn’t exactly clear, but it’s speculated that this is to avoid particularly ugly disputes with the Koreas, Japan and other nations along the East Asian coastline. In any case, this has led to a ‘fire and forget’ attitude which causes rocket stages, sometimes still loaded with fuel, to fall on rural villages and towns, regularly causing death and destruction.
- There is a kind of hypothetical orbital superweapon commonly termed "Rods from God" which is literally a rod made from some quite dense metal — such as tungsten - suspended in high orbit, ready to be dropped at any time. The kinetic energy accumulated and subsequently released by such an object is roughly the same as a nuclear weapon without needing to worry about all that nasty fallout and may technically be able to not violate agreements such as the Outer Space Treaty. The US military has even considered making one for real, called Project Thor. The catch is that Tungsten is an extremely dense metal, and getting enough of it into space would require a lot of effort and money.
- One of the retaliations threatened for interference in the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 is that they could purposefully de-orbit the ISS on a city in Europe or the USA, although this ability doesn't actually exist.
- NASA's Deep Impact and DART missions against the comet Tempel 1 and Dimorphos, a moon of the asteroid Dydimos, respectively. The former used an impactor to study the properties of such comet by excavating a crater, and in the latter the entire spacecraft was crashed in kamikaze fashion with Earth-based telescopes and a microsatellite accompanying itnote studying the impact's aftermath as a test for the deflection in similar ways of asteroids that could be a hazard for Earth.
- In 2024, a homeowner in Florida filed a claim against NASA for a hole in their roof caused by space debris, identified as belonging to a battery pack that was jetissoned from the International Space Station in 2021.
Moons
Anime & Manga
- Shelter is a short film about a young girl named Rin who lives in a world she can control at will, however towards the end of the film we learn it's because she's in a simulation. Her body is unconscious in a drifting escape vessel which was built by her father. The reason he did so is made obvious through various background clips as we see a massive object the size of the moon (it's never confirmed it actually is the moon) on a collision course with Earth. The implications are Earth either was destroyed or, at the very least, humanity was decimated by the incredible impact. All that is left is Rin and her memories.
Comic Books
- Buck Rogers knocks Phobos out of orbit to destroy a Martian invasion fleet.
- The Marvel Graphic Novel The Futurians has this as part of the backstory. In Earth's distant future, there are two major powers, locked in near-constant war: the city-states of Ghron and Terminus. Ghron developed a weapon called the Sky-Grabber, and used it to pull the moon towards the Earth so as to collide with Terminus. Terminus survived thanks to an extremely powerful forcefield and is self-sufficient enough to live in total isolation for centuries, but 95% of all other life on the entire hemisphere Terminus is situated on died. Ghron was no worse for the wear, being located on almost the exact opposite side of the planet, though obviously there was some embarrassment that such a huge endeavor ended in failure. So they fled to the past and tampered with the sun just to spite Terminus.
- In the Sonic the Comic story "Return of the Nightmare", Super Sonic pulls Mobius' moon out of its orbit and sends it crashing into the planet... in what turns out to be an illusion created by Ebony.
Fan Works
- The climax of the third Godzilla MMD, Planet Eating Wings, sees King Ghidorah attempt this after being overpowered by a Mothra empowered Godzilla Earth. Ironically, Godzilla Earth overpowers him in the resulting Beam-O-War and kills him by slamming the moon into him and blowing both of them up.
Films — Live-Action
- Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos uses the Power and Space Stones to shatter one of Titan's moons and launch the fragments at the good guys. They survive, but everyone except Iron Man and Doctor Strange is taken out of the fight.
Literature
- Empire from the Ashes: The Achuultani are already fond of hurling asteroids at planets, but in the second book, after Earth mounts a fierce resistance against them and prove themselves capable of destroying any asteroids the Achuultani scouts launch at them, the scouts decide to crank it up a notch and steal Iapetus from Saturn, cover it with deflector shields, and throw it at Earth, using their own ships to further shield it. The moon is stated to be much larger than the kind of projectiles they typically use.
- The New Jedi Order: The extremely xenophobic machine-hating race called the Yuuzhan Vong are introduced by using their ships' gravity controlling features to smash a planet apart with its own moon. Among those killed is Chewbacca. They later duplicate it during their successful invasion of Coruscant, using the planet's orbital defense stations. The Yuuzhan Vong actually have a name for this tactic: Yo'Gand's Core. Supplemental material indicates that overuse of this tactic in a war in their home galaxy is why they spent hundreds or thousands of years travelling to a new one.
- Pug uses a moon to attack a single creature in The Riftwar Cycle, by opening a wormhole-like rift connecting a point just in front of the moon's path to a point just above the creature in question. Hilarity Ensues. To be fair, the creature had already destroyed two dimensions, and Kelewan was doomed even before the Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
Live-Action TV
- Rocky Jones, Space Ranger's first season ends with the story arc "Crash of Moons", in which a free-flying planetoid is on a collision course with another moon. Both are inhabited, and the story's main conflict is driven by the refusal of one ruler to evacuate her homeworld, choosing to attack the encroaching world instead.
Roleplay
- A rogue moon in The Gungan Council crashed into Taris on Xyra's command, wiping out everything on the planet's surface.
Toys
- Non-Earth example: In BIONICLE, Makuta Teridax is killed when the planet-sized robot he's inhabiting has one of the moons of Bara Magna smash into his head. He was trying to invoke this trope by slamming it into the planet in a destructive manner, whereas Mata Nui was trying to gently merge the planet and moons together.
Tabletop Games
- The D20 fantasy setting DragonMech is in the middle of having its moon descend upon the planet. This is quite possibly the worst thing to happen to the world of Highpoint in a very long time, given that it's already destroyed the societies of several different races and it hasn't actually hit yet.
- In one of the black books for the Horus Heresy series, it's mentioned that Autek Mor of the Iron Hands Legion destroyed Bodt, the World Eaters' main recruitment world, by dropping the planet's moon onto its surface.
Video Games
- In Dead Space 3, it turns out that the moon in orbit around Tau Volantis is a gigantic necromorph. Isaac manages to kill it, at which point it falls onto the planet. The Awakened DLC reveals that both Isaac Clarke and John Carver somehow survived the impact, which confuses the two of them as much as it does the player. Isaac guesses the alien Phlebotinum they used to kill the moon had something to do with it. Carver thinks that's a stupid idea, but he can't come up with a better explanation.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind includes a fantasy version of this in its backstory. Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness attempted this by hurling the rogue moon Baar Dau at Vivec City. Vivec, the Tribunal deity, froze it in place above the city. It would later be hollowed out for use by the Tribunal Temple as the Ministry of Truth, a high-security prison for heretics and blasphemers. Vivec tells his followers that it is held in place by his people's love for him, and that should they stop loving him, it would fall. As a result of the Nerevarine's actions, Vivec disappears following the events of the game. The stop-gap measure implemented by the Temple to keep it in orbit is destroyed, so the moon resumes its fall with its original momentum. Vivec (the city) is destroyed, Red Mountain erupts, the mainland of Morrowind is devastated by tsunamis and choking ash, and, even some 200 years later, the crater/bay that lies where Vivec used to be still has its waters boiling. Notably, this later led to the fan joke in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion that, when Sheogorath executes you for attacking him, he isn't teleporting you a mile above his execution grounds to let you fall to your death; rather, you remain stationary and he hurls the whole damn planet at you.
- The Last Federation: The Hydral homeworld was destroyed when the Acutians strapped a moon full of engines and sent it into a collision course with it. With enough influence, you can convince them to do it again to a faction of your choosing.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: As part of the Skull Kid's "game" due to the influence of Majora's Mask, he pulls the Moon out of its orbit and plans to drop it on Termina in three days. The Moon hangs over you in gameplay, complete with its Nightmare Face, and if Link can't revive the Four Giants in those three days, the Moon obliterates all of Termina and everyone living in it (which means a Game Over).
- Stellaris (yes, this game is very Colony Drop-happy) has an archeology event called Moon Bump on a previously life-bearing, now barren world. Investigating it reveals that its late inhabitants had the bright idea to pull their moon closer to the planet for easier exploitation, but a minor miscalculation in the giant Tractor Beam they built to facilitate this ended up dragging the moon into the planet's gravity well, sending it on a very slow but unstoppable collision course. The pre-FTL aliens could do nothing but watch in horror as their inevitable doom crept closer by the day until it eventually hit, ending all life on the planet.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses: Moon Envoy◊ attacks by summoning a (relatively) small moon and crashing it onto the enemy monster.
Webcomics
- Drowtales: In the distant past, the elves apparently managed to take a piece out of one of the nine moons, and the resulting impact from one of the pieces hitting the planet is implied to have created the underworld where the story is set. The city of Sha'shi contains the most complete fragment of this piece of the moon, and it's implied that something about the moon is responsible for the elves mutating into drow and the reason that later generations have a higher rate of health problems.
- Homestuck: The Big Bad cuts the moon loose from Prospit, sending it crashing to Skaia below and killing Dream Jade.
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation: SCP-736 is an unknown anomaly that very slightly nudges the orbit of Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons, every so often before returning it to normal. Then they ran simulations of the predicted trajectories and received large amounts of radio transmissions from Iapetus's surface. As it turns out, something lives on Iapetus and wants to exterminate humanity in particular, so they're planning to slingshot one of Saturn's moons at us by smashing Iapetus into it, and the fluctuations in orbit are them taking aim.
Web Animation
- The shattered Moon of RWBY is the result of this happening in ancient times. After wiping out Humanity as punishment for Salem's rebellion, The Brothers abandoned the world of Remnant. While the God of Light simply teleported away, the God of Darkness smashed through the Moon as he departed, hurling chunks of it down onto the planet. Salem's curse of Complete Immortality meant she survived the destruction, but was left alone in a ruined world for untold eons.
Western Animation
- Amphibia: The Core is revealed to have had a contingency plan if it was ever defeated- it filled the moon with advanced technology and rocket boosters so in such an event, it could crash the moon into the planet and thus destroy everything that led to its downfall. In the Grand Finale, it ends up attempting to do just that after it is overthrown, and it takes a Heroic Sacrifice from Anne to defeat the Core once and for all.
THE Moon
Anime and Manga
- Aldnoah.Zero: A catastrophic malfunction of the Hypergate blew the Moon to pieces, bringing an abrupt end to the first Terran-Martian war. The event, known as Heaven's Fall, sent enormous pieces of debris crashing down to Earth, killing hundreds of millions and permanently altering the planet's geography.
- Cowboy Bebop, kind of. It's more a constant rock shower from pieces of the moon after it got torn open by the Gate Accident and the main reason why humanity has abandoned Earth.
- The whole point of The Last: Naruto the Movie is stopping the moon from crashing into Earth.
- A moon drop is used as part of a sequence of Stock Visual Metaphors in My Bride is a Mermaid. Yes, Amazoness!
- In Episode 2 of the Pretty Sammy OAV, Bif Standard builds a series of tractor beams across Earth to drop the Moon on Earth, so that he can build his own "standardized" world.
- Dropping the Moon on Earth is the Anti-Spiral's failsafe plan for eliminating humanity if it looks like they're getting too uppity in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Though technically speaking, it was actually the battleship Cathedral Terra that was transformed into a moon. On the other hand, Lagann-hen successfully ups that by having the Moon transform into Cathedral Lazengann and try to punch the Earth.
Board Games
- In Netrunner, normally the corporation can target the hackers with goons and hit squads, which deal two or three damage out of the hacker's five live points. A corp willing to go that extra mile can use the card "I Got A Rock", which drops an asteroid on the hacker for a total of fifteen damage.
- What's this? Risk 2210 AD has the moon as a playable map and gives you several blank cards for your own rules? Sounds fun. Who wants to play a game?
Comic Books
- In the final arc of BIONICLE, this is how they finally get rid of Makuta Teridax.
- In Black Moon Chronicles, when the leader of the Black Moon is defeated, his vengeance consists of dropping the moon onto the planet over about a week.
- In the Justice League story "Terror Incognita" the Martian Manhunter is confronting dozens of powerful White Martians on the Moon after those same White Martians have all but conquered Earth. While The Manhunter has them distracted the rest of the Justice League pulls the moon toward Earth so that the entry into the atmosphere will burn the Martians to nothingness if they do not surrender and enter the Phantom Zone. Spell Casters cast a massive spell to keep the gravity of the Moon from destroying Earth, and the Justice League (after imprisoning the surrendering White Martians) pulls the moon away from Earth before it can impact and destroy the planet.
- A combination of "THE Moon" and "Asteroids and Comets". At the end of the Superman storyline Time and Time Again, Superman is ejected back to the present from the 31st century of the Legion of Super-Heroes when the Linear Man reactivates a bomb that ends up destroying the Moon. The following LoSH comic after this deals with the aftermath with the Legion trying to stop as many pieces of the Moon from striking the Earth.
Fan Works
- A Rule 34 fan comic of Avatar: The Last Airbender ended with the Princess Yue, Sokka's old squeeze turned Moon Spirit, getting turned on by the naughty activities the main cast gets into and, well, decides to come on down as the Moon itself and join the fun. Yeah...
- "The End of Ponies" has the moon Falling to equestria in the cataclysmthat brings an end to the ponies, with the exception of the protagonist.
- Played for Laughs in the Friendship is Witchcraft short "Star Waving Mad" in which Twilight gets bored of playing with the Moon and unceremoniously drops it on Ponyville.
Films — Animation
- Babylon 5: The Road Home: In the timeline where the Shadows won the war, the Vorlons decide to destroy Earth. However, because Earth is a fairly large planet compared to most habitable planets, instead of using their planet buster directly, they use it to push the moon out of orbit and into Earth, achieving the same effect with less energy expenditure.
- In Despicable Me, Gru tries to steal the Moon by using a prototype shrink ray to make it pocket-sized. It turns out that the shrinking is not permanent and the shrunken Moon is now on Earth...
- While he did manage to push the moon back in space in time, it is implied that the new orbit is much closer to Earth and may not be stable.
- Inverted in Titan A.E..: When the Drej blow up Earth, a piece of it shatters the Moon.
Films — Live-Action
- In the '80s remake of Flash Gordon, Ming the Merciless is sending the moon spiraling down into the Earth. It doesn't get there, but it gets close enough that things must have been pretty messed up.
Doctor Hans Zarkov: Check the angular vector of the moon!
- In the 2002 film incarnation of Wells' The Time Machine, the extinction of most of humanity, leading to the Eloi and Morlocks evolving, is caused by lunar colony construction causing the moon to break apart.
- In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling on a collision course with Earth.
Literature
- One of Larry Niven's prehistoric The Magic Goes Away (Niven) stories featured a group of magi seeking out a comatose god on a "mana"-starved Earth in the hope that he will be able to help them land the Moon on Earth. How big can it be, after all? The magi think this is a great idea and awaken the god using the mana left in the comatose worldwyrm of Norse Mythology. The awakened god shows the relative sizes involved to the magi, who now realize just how bad it would be... but the god thinks it's a fine idea, and even promises to remake them afterward. As the god awakens, he stretches up to grab the Moon with his hands and push against it, presumably to stop it from orbiting the Earth.
- In the Magic: The Gathering storyline, Yawgm— er, The Lord of the Wastes is attempted to be killed by Urza and Gerrard dropping the Null Moon, a storage facility for pure white mana, on him.
- Neil Gaiman's The Matrix short story, Goliath, had inexplicably pissy aliens follow one of the Machines' "seed-probes" back to Earth. The aliens begin dropping rocks and warn that if the Machines do not surrender immediately, they'll drop the moon on them.
- This trope is best summed up with Jack McDevitt's book Moonfall. The dust jacket explains thusly: "A comet is coming. It is going to hit the Moon. And the Moon is going to fall. ON US."
- In the Nightside novels, John Taylor notices that the moon is absent from the skies when he visits an After the End future and theorizes that it's fallen and caused the devastation all around him. Twice subverted when he A) finds out it was a war between himself and his mother, Lilith, that was to blame, and B) ultimately prevents it from happening.
- A major theme of The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin is a traumatized girl's plan to end oppression on Earth by crashing the Moon into it and ending everything. Averted.
Live-Action TV
- The first series finale of The Sarah Jane Adventures, where Mr Smith, Sarah's Magical Computer, who is revealed to be from a race of alien sentient rocks attempts to smash the Moon into the Earth to free members of their species who are stuck in Earth's crust. The episode before also had The Trickster, the living embodiment of Chaos, remove from the Earth the person fated to stop a large meteorite naturally smashing into the planet.
- In Three Moons Over Milford, an asteroid has broken the Moon into three huge (and a number of much smaller) pieces and it is unknown when or if any of them will fall to Earth.
Tabletop Games
- In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Baron Blade, the nemesis of Legacy, is so caught up in his Roaring Rampage of Revenge that he is willing to do this while standing on the earth. He has created a Lunar-Terra inplosion beam, essentially a Tractor Beam powerful enough to pull the Moon out of its orbit and into the Earth, killing everything on it and obliterating the planet. In game terms, you have to defeat his first side before he gets fifteen cards in his trash, or else the beam finishes pulling the Moon down and everything dies. As the hero Luminary, he uses a smaller beam that pulls pieces of the moon down and drops them on OblivAeon's forces.
Video Games
- The Tower Defense game Canterlot Siege has Princess Luna drop the moon to attack enemies as a superpower.
- In Daemon X Machina, most of the Earth was rendered uninhabitable after a chunk of the Moon suddenly broke off and collided with the planet.
- In Dark Chronicle:
- When Griffon can no longer keep the Moon Flower Palace aloft, he sets it on a collision course with Palm Brinks. It takes a Humongous Mecha the size of a mountain to stop the impact.
- We learn the Precursors that created the three Atlamillia stones realized that bringing them all together would invariably corrupt their wielder with limitless power. Therefore, they rigged the stones to summon the Star of Destruction upon said person — namely, the Blue Moon itself. It's just too bad for anyone else standing in the wielder's vicinity.
- Disgaea:
- Amusingly, this is exactly what the Entei's team attack in Disgaea Dimension 2 accomplishes, via transforming itself into a chain that its partner uses to yank the moon out of orbit.
- Before either of these was the Cannon Shower spear skill in Disgaea 3, which had the user shoot the moon out of orbit and down onto their enemies.
- In Donkey Kong Country Returns Donkey Kong punches the moon into Tiki Tong's tower. DK isn't trying to destroy the world, only the tower, and the resulting explosion pops the moon back into place.
- Don't Escape 4: The entire premise of the game is that the planet is being decimated by countless meteorological and environmental disasters, the insectoid life is mutated, and society has almost entirely collapsed in little more than raider gangs and roving bands of survivors. The reason? The Moon was split in half by a mining expedition and is now on an inevitable collision course with Earth. To make things worse, we eventually learn this has happened probably a good dozen times as the company responsible uses bizarre dream technology to essentially jump host from a doomed planet to a planet where they haven't started mining the Moon yet and try again, often with the same disastrous result. It's entirely possible the mutations are a result of the crystals this organization is obsessed with getting and exist within the Moon.
- In the best ending of Hyper Princess Pitch, the title character inflicts the Galactic Princess Buster on Mecha Santa, which consists of slamming him into the moon before bringing the moon back down on Earth with him inbetween. This sets off a chain reaction that results in the destruction of the entire galaxy.
- In the DS game Infinite Space, during the Irvest Sector war, Kalymnos attempted to obliterate Najbaro by crashing its moon-equivalent, Monarho, to said planet.
- I Wanna Be the Guy: Occurs several times, with the first one being a Brick Joke of sorts: you go past a screen that prominently displays the moon in the background, and a few screens later it falls on you and tries to kill you. It gets to the point of being a Running Gag: if the moon appears on screen, sooner or later it will try to kill you somehow.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The whole point of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is to prevent what may be the creepiest moon known to man from plowing into Clock Town and killing everybody in Termina. You get three days. Fortunately, you have the Ocarina of Time to help.
- This Moon (or a magical recreation of it) reappears in Hyrule Warriors during "The Shadow King" scenario, where the Great Fairy pulls it from the sky and drops it on top of Argorok to weaken it. One of Link's combos with the Great Fairy weapon has her do something similar. Young Link also has an attack where he summons the Moon only to slice it in half while wearing the Fierce Deity Mask. It also appears as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
- Serious Sam 3: BFE: At the end of the game, Mental decides to finally take matters into his own hands and sends the Moon on a direct collision course with Earth, despite already having wiped out all of humanity barring one person. Sam is unable to stop it from happening, but he manages to escape at the last possible moment by jumping into the reactivated Sirian Time-Lock, leading directly into the events of The First Encounter. The ending credits show the Moon crashing into the planet, the impact being so severe that there's nothing left but billions of rubble pieces floating through space.
- In Skies of Arcadia, one of the special party skills is called Prophecy, where the party throws the Silver Moon at the enemy.
- Stella Glow, The True Final Boss attempts this after her defeat in the Golden Ending
- The World Ends with You: the second week's game master Sho Minamimoto leaves a note saying "Any tree can drop an apple, I'll drop the freakin' moon!". He doesn't actually do it, it's just a note proving his insanity. Joshua can actually drop the moon or some sort of astral body on your enemies with the right upgrades.
Visual Novels
- Dead End Aegis: During the initial C.C. invasion, Lisette summoned a giant made out of light to launch the Moon out of orbit and towards the alien mothership, destroying it. This event was the key for the victory of mankind and would be known as the Lunar Orbit Battle.
- Melty Blood, Red Arcueid's Arc Drive, the "Blut die Schwester", is this, where she summons the moon to fall from the sky. Provided that she's not hit for a short time after sending the moon down, it hits with an unblockable attack that covers the entire screen. She can also perform a similar attack in Battle Moon Wars, where the way it's used is expanded upon — Red Arcueid roars before throwing her arm into the air and sending a mass of chains flying into the moon, which dig into it and allow her to rip the damn thing from orbit, before launching it into her helpless opponent, all while a remix of "The End of 1000 Years" plays. It needs to be seen to be believed.
- Tsukihime has this in the nebulous Backstory, where the Crimson Moon (the guy) tried to drop the Moon onto the Earth only to be stopped by the then-young Zelretch. Zelretch pulled him to an alternate reality and dropped the moon on him instead.
- The Blut die Schwester appears in the second episode of Carnival Phantasm, where it's used to simply score a point in volleyball. To be fair, Arcueid's opponents use their supernatural powers as well.
Web Animation
- A Running Gag in The Demented Cartoon Movie! is that when an object of any size crashes into the Moon, the Moon will fall and crash into the Earth, which then falls into the Sun if it doesn't just explode.
- Vegeta tried this on Shadow in one DEATH BATTLE!. Chaos Control put it back where it belong.
- Gaming All-Stars: Part of the Greater-Scope Villain's primary scheme in The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered is to send the moon hurtling toward Earth in order to trophify everyone he can.
- How to Kill a Mockingbird: The only way to kill a mockingbird was by hitting it with the moon.
- Kurzgesagt deconstructed the entire trope in their video "What Happens if the Moon Crashes into Earth?", including the fact that due to the Moon's mass and velocity, anything short of magic or apocalyptic circumstances would barely move the moon, let alone send it on a collision course with the Earth. And even in the case of the Moon falling towards Earth, it would never collide as the Earth's gravity would rip the moon apart once it crosses the Roche limit. While the duration leading up to the Moon's destruction would kill off the vast majority of human life through floods, earthquakes, volcanic activity and the collapse of civilisation, the odds of such an event killing off enough people to cause Humanity's extinction are surprisingly low, and any survivors would at least get to rebuild society with the view of beautiful rings in the sky.
- Yahtzee for his review of Sim City Societies had it to where God dropped the moon on him.
Western Animation
- In a Dexter's Laboratory episode, Dexter launched a tractor rocket that moves the moon so he will gain strength from the rays of Saturn. But suddenly, the rocket gets broken so the moon will come crashing down into Earth, wreaking havoc by rolling across the city and then his laboratory.
- In Megas XLR Gorrath tried to ram the Moon into Earth by strapping a giant engine to it. Coop instead flip the engine so its tail end pointed down, blasting a huge crater into it. It permanently altered weather patterns on Earth.
- PJ Masks: In "Owlette's Luna Trouble", Romeo steals Luna Girls' magnet and uses it to try and make the moon crash on the PJ masks' HQ. In "Gekko's Special Rock", Luna Girl likewise tried to pull the moon to earth, though not with the intention to destroy something.
- In Rick and Morty, the action movie parody Two Brothers has an escalating series of disasters, ending with the moon crashing into the Earth.
- In the SheZow episode "Null and Void", after SheZow destroys a comet the titular villains sent his way with his "Mega Ram-tastic Super She-Punch" before it can hit anything, Void sends the moon itself falling towards the Earth. With great effort and some help from Null and Void (after they realized they would go down with everyone else), SheZow manages to throw it back into space, saving the Earth from certain destruction.
- In an Itchy & Scratchy show in The Simpsons, Itchy takes Scratchy's tongue and ties it to a rocket. The rocket makes several circles to the moon, ties the tongue around it, and begins to fall. When Scratchy realizes that the moon is falling over him, he tries to hide inside a closet.
- In The Tick, evil boy-genius Charles randomly gets the idea to smash the Moon into the Earth using a tractor beam, simply to demonstrate how smart and/or evil he is. Either it doesn't occur to him that he will still be on the Earth when the Moon smashes it, or he simply doesn't care, because it's the most evil thing he can think of.
- Season 2 of Transformers: Cyberverse begins right in the middle of a Decepticon scheme to crash the Moon into the Earth. They plan to destroy the Earth and sift around what remains for the Allspark.
Planets
Anime and Manga
- Avenger deals with a dying colony on Mars that's about to be crashed into by one of the moons.
- DieBuster inverts this: the human race plans to deal with an extremely powerful (and extremely large) Space Monster by dropping Earth onto it. Fortunately, Nono shows up and stop this plan before dealing with the Space Monster herself.
- In the episode before they Lal'c earned the nickname "She Who Moves the Stars" by using her powers to throw the core of a (fictional) gas giant at the same Space Monster. The plan using the Earth was actually inspired this stunt, except that time they decided to up the ante by accelerating the Earth up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
- Pecola: It's believed that a planet is headed towards Earth in "Constellation Pecola" after Dr. Hornbender sees it has been knocked out of orbit. That's only because Pecola rearranged the stars on his rendering of the solar system to look like his face.
Asian Animation
- Episode 14 of Happy Friends is about Smart S. having a battery installed in him that enhances his Magnetism Manipulation abilities. The episode's climax has the magnet become so overpowered that it nearly causes nearby Planet Gray to fly into Planet Xing. Planet Gray native Big M. nevertheless gets excited since this might be his chance to finally return to his home planet.
Audio Drama
- In the Big Finish Doctor Who War Doctor story The Heart of the Battle, a faction of Time Lords are negotiating a peace treaty with the Daleks, in which the Daleks maintain control of a region of null-time containing a thousand worlds, which they can do with as they wish. And, to the shock of the lead negotiator and almost nobody else, what they wish is to replace all the worlds' cores with warp engines and fire them straight at Gallifrey.
Comic Books
- The Marvel Universe massive crossover The Infinity Gauntlet takes this one step further: The Celestials throw planets at Thanos. Thanos himself later defeats an enemy by smashing two planets together in his face, along with a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs.
- In The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman), this is the end result of an Incursion if nothing is done: both Earths collide and are destroyed, which also obliterates both universes as well.
Comic Strips
- "Spaceman Spiff"note did it to solve a math problem for Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes. It Makes Sense in Context.
Fan Works
- In Shinji and Warhammer40k Kaworu slams Pluto and Charon into the moon to attack Lilith.
Films — Animation
- In Green Lantern: First Flight, Hal takes a page from Lensman below, crushing the Yellow Lantern Battery between two massive moons of some gas giant.
- The follow-up movie, Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, has the Lanterns defeat their planet-sized antimatter enemy by hitting him with a planet, both of which are then crashed into the nearby star.
Films — Live-Action
- Dr. Nazo's plot in Golden Bat is to redirect the rogue planet Icarus to smash into the Earth. The heroes fortunately destroy it in time with their Super Destruction Cannon.
- Lars Von Trier's Melancholia revolves around the planet of the title crashing into Earth, obliterating all life in the universe.
- When Worlds Collide has the Earth getting run over by a brown dwarf or rouge giant planet. Fortunately and in defiance of all physics, it also brings in with it a Earth-sized planet that ends up in a habitable orbit around the Sun out of the plane of the debris. A Lottery of Doom follows for the limited spots on spaceships to escape Earth for the new planet. Based on the novels by Wylie and Balmer.
Literature
- The Dwellers, from the Iain M. Banks novel The Algebraist, crank this up: fuck with them and one day, though it may come far, far, far in the future, and they will throw a planet at your homeworld. Surrounded by moons, which are in turn surrounded by thousands of asteroids, which are in turn surrounded by millions of smaller chunks of rock. And the whole horrific mess is traveling at a sizable fraction of light-speed...
- Mixed planet/moon example in the climax of All These Worlds. What's the best way of dealing with a Swarm of Alien Locusts scouring nearby star systems to build a Dyson Sphere? Take a small planet and a large moon, accelerate them to very close to the speed of light and slam them into the local star (one from the "north" pole and one from the "south") and let the resulting nova sterilise the system.
- Lensman probably takes this to its most ridiculous extremes when they variously squash a planet between two planets (the "Nutcracker"), colony-drop on a planet and its sun with two planets moving faster than the speed of light, drop a planet-sized load of antimatternote on a planet, and used planets and planet-sized buckets of antimatter as anti-missile-missiles. There's a reason we call it the Lensman Arms Race.
- Unique variant: In The Shattered World, a fragment of a planet collides with a bigger, inhabited chunk of the same planet, causing massive death and destruction. This is possible because magicians intervened when their world was broken to bits a thousand years ago, and equipped the pieces of world with Artificial Gravity and a shared atmosphere. Unfortunately, the spells that keep the fragments safely confined in their orbits are wearing out, so this isn't the last Colony Drop in the offing. Also, a Colony Drop strike by another planet, not the Necromancer, is what really shattered the world.
- In Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Sunstorm, it's discovered that the reason the Sun is going berserk (soon to send out a 24-hour pulse of energy that will destroy life on Earth) is that thousands of years ago vastly powerful and paranoid aliens saw sentient life had developed on Earth, figured we'd eventually be a threat, and flung a Jupiter-sized planet into the Sun. The idea was that this caused instability in the Sun that would (thousands of years later) cause it to lash out and cook us. However, one does wonder why they didn't simply fling the gas giant at the Earth, thus saving time and solving the problem directly (and preventing the primitive humans from doing anything about it, unlike how things turned out).
- In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. The one headed for Earth is barely diverted but causes the Sun to become a red giant star.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "The End of Time", the Master opens a link to Gallifrey, causing it to materialise directly beside Earth. The two planets' gravity starts pulling them together.
- Used rather unexpectedly in the series finale of Smallville, with Apokolips being summoned next to Earth, nearly colliding with it. It is stopped by Clark/Superman pushing it away with his bare hands.
- A two-part story in Ultraman Leo saw the Land of Light, the home planet of the Ultras themselves, face catastrophic collision with Earth when an alien named Babalou steals the Ultra Key, the artifact that keeps the Land of Light in orbit, when disguised as Leo's brother Astra in order to start a civil war amongst the Ultra heroes.
Roleplay
- Destroy the Godmodder: One of the players performed a special attack that lined up every planet in the solar system and slammed them all into Minecraft. The Battlefield was leveled.
Toys
- BIONICLE: Makuta finds himself, while controlling Mata Nui's original body, on the receiving end when Aqua Magna returns the favor.
Video Games
- The Tera Star spell in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten drops most of the solar system on the target.
- Final Fantasy:
- Happens in Final Fantasy XIII's ending cinematic, wherein the floating planetoid of Cocoon is sent crashing down towards the lowerworld of Pulse after the god-like machines, the fal'Cie are defeated with the death of their leader, Orphan.
- Inevitably, this becomes part of the main plot for Final Fantasy XIII-2. Three quarters through the game, we learn that Caius Ballad is responsible for causing the potential world-ending paradoxes that ultimately end in Cocoon's collision with Gran Pulse. He doesn't seem to mind living in a cold, lifeless, crapsack of a future, so long as he saves Yeul from falling victim to her own visions. Meanwhile, Noel, living in the same dull, lifeless future, travels back in time and works with Serah to resolve these paradoxes. Although the fall of Cocoon still manages to happen anyway, they are able to give Hope enough time to construct a new Cocoon. Caius STILL tries to turn the launch into a disaster.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the final boss of the Endwalker expansion (and the original story), the Endsinger, does this twice, creating and dropping planets on your head. the first time, you need to use a Tank Level 3 Limit Break to survive. The second time, the Scions bail you out with The Power of Friendship, which sends the Endsinger into a Villainous Breakdown.
- The point of The Guardian Legend is to prevent this from happening to Earth. However, the planet that's zooming toward it is alive and filled with hostile life forms. Should the planets collide and somehow not destroy all life on Earth, the survivors would have to deal with all kinds of freaky Mechanical Lifeforms and organic multi-legged things After the End. Not fun at all.
- At the end of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Kirby separates Elfilin from his "other half", Fecto Elfilis, after the Final Boss battle. Realizing that their body is starting to melt, Elfilis attempts to use the last of their power to create a huge dimensional rift and hurl Kirby's homeworld of Planet Popstar through it (for bonus points, the boss theme is titled "Two Planets Approach The Roche Limit", referring to how close a celestial body can be to another before tidal forces overcome its gravity and tear it to shreds). They don't get the chance.
- In Makai Kingdom, mere moments after Zetta finishes restoring his netherworld after accidentally incinerating it, Salome immediately crashes her own world into his.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story pulls this one, as the planet of Expel is destroyed by crashing into Energy Nede, a planet made out of Pure Energy and populated by one of the most ancient and knowledgeable races in the series' existence. Makes sense that their artificial planet would be powerful enough to vaporize anything else it hit. They never intended to hit anything anyway, but that's what bad guys are for...
- This was the Great Fall disaster that the heroes of Tales of Eternia are trying to avert.
Webcomics
- During the [S] GAME OVER animation in Homestuck, one antagonist uses her powers to telekinetically throw planets at another antagonist. Who responds in kind by using her own powers to move another planet in the way of an incoming shot, blocking it. While no character dies on-screen as a direct result of planets getting launched into each other, when all is said and done a grand total of six planets have been involved in devastating collisions.
- Schlock Mercenary: Done unintentionally here where a group of characters destroy a gas giant colony planet by crashing it into another planet, along with at least one other planet that got caught in the ensuing catastrophe and screwed up the ecosystem of the one planet in the system that actually had one.
Ennesby: They crashed a gas giant.
Tagon: You mean they crashed into a gas giant?
Ennesby: They did that, too. They crashed one gas giant into another.
Web Original
- "Humanity, united, thinks this should be a big enough rock."◊
- SCP Foundation: SCP-4100 is planet Earth millennia in the future. The Stellar Congressional Protectorate, a large galactic power implied to have been founded by the Foundation, has classified it as desolate and without interest beyond the home planet of the extinct human race. That is, until a massive, red entity called the Destroyer in human legends (and implied to be the Scarlet King) shows up in the system and attacks the planet. Turns out the Foundation left a little gift for their old enemy.
We can't contain you. But we can destroy you. We've waited for millennia to say this:
Our planet has FTL. And I don't mean our ships.
Western Animation
- In an episode of The 7D, Hildy Gloom has her eye on the largest diamond in the universe, the size of a small planet. She and her husband Grim try casting tractor beam spells to obtain it. At the end of the episode, it crushes their house.
- In Carol & the End of the World, Earth is doomed to be destroyed by an incoming planet in mere months. Knowing death is inevitable, everybody on the planet has whipped out their bucket lists and indulged in their most shameless, fearless whims.
- Subverted, Double Subverted, then run the whole gamut of Subversion gymnastics in the Futurama episode "A Farewell to Arms". To summarize, Amy determines a prophesy says that Earth will be destroyed by a solar flare, so a crew of the best Earth has to offer is assembled to colonize Mars, with Fry giving up his own passage to give Leela a seat. Subverted when it turns out the prophesy really said that the flare would hit Mars, not Earth. Subverted yet again with the flare sends Mars on a collision course with Earth, though ultimately the collision is narrowly avoided and Mars winds up in orbit around the Earth.
- In the Invader Zim episode "Battle of the Planets", Zim discovers that Mars is actually a planet-sized spaceship and takes control of it, planning to roll it around Earth and squish all its inhabitants.
Zim: People of Earth, prepare to taste the mighty foot of my planet!
- A close call with a "runaway planet hurtling between the Earth and the Moon" kicked off the collapse of civilization in the backstory to Thundarr the Barbarian. Neither Earth nor the Moon was struck, but the Moon cracked in half, while Earth suffered massive tsunami, quakes, etc.
- In The Transformers, Galavatron's plan in the series finale involved crashing Cybertron directly into earth.
Stars
Anime and Manga
- Magical Project S: In the final arc, Romio attempts to send the Earth on a collision course with the sun.
Comic Books
- When Deadpool temporarily become a Herald of Galactus, he created a star out of energy and tried to drop it on a planet to kill the Silver Surfer. Surfer caught it and threw it back at him.
Fan Works
- Aurora (PonyholicsAnonymous): At the story's climax, the Princesses decide to destroy the evacuated Canterlot in order to kill Dawnbringer and his army of monsters, which they accomplish by having Luna call down dozens of stars (which in this setting are "only" a few hundred feet in diameter each) like missiles in order to obliterate the city.
- RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: Princess Luna can call down stars like orbital missiles (stars in this setting are a lot smaller than in Real Life) as a counterpart to Corona's ability to invoke solar flares to roast things she doesn't like.
- Sharing the Night:
- When Luna fell, became Nightmare Moon and was banished from the world, the night sky became destabilized and several stars fell to earth, eventually gathering together to become the star beasts.
- Much, much earlier than that, a far more disastrous version of this occurred when the two moons that existed at that time crashed into and destroyed each other, scouring the world with a hail of burning rocks that lasted for years, wiping out the ancient world's civilizations; the bits of wreckage that remained in the sky became the first stars.
Films — Live-Action
- The film of When Worlds Collide, if it was a passing star that ran into Earth rather than a planet. The filmmakers could not seem to make up their minds, calling Bronson Alpha / Bellus a star in the script but labeling it a planet on promotional posters and depicting it as being comparable in size to Earth.
Literature
- Archchancellor Ridcully of Discworld reminisces about the time a star crash-landed near his family's estate in one of the Science of Discworld books. Of course, in his Verse, stars are balls of flaming rock only a few feet across, so it wasn't a particularly-destructive example.
- The Xeelee Sequence features the extreme colony drop option where a Neutron Star is accelerated to high fractional C and smashed into a Cosmic String.
- Other examples ramp up the magnitude, including accelerating entire galaxies to use as projectiles.
Tabletop Games
- In Magic: The Gathering several Red spells are related to throwing stars at your opponents, though in some cases it's ambiguous if these are meant to be actual stars or falling stars.
Video Games
- Asura's Wrath: Chakravartin's Basic projectiles in the first phase of the fight with him are both Planets and Stars, and even includes a Red Giant in his arsenal.
- Psycutlery: DeVoide Corp plans to Mind Control Astranura into crashing into Geozaic to have the Distortion absorbed into the CPU of her crown which is actually the mother computer.
- In SaGa Frontier 2, The Egg's final form has a skill called Xenocide, where he'll throw the fucking sun at you! He'll use this skill every other round.
- Sonic Forces: Once the Phantom Ruby reached its full power, Dr. Eggman initiated his plan to eradicate the Resistance: have Infinite drop an artificial sun onto them.
Visual Novels
- Dropping stars at his opponents is part of Mercurius' standard arsenal during the final battle in Dies Irae. They count among some of his less outlandish projectiles, as he can also toss singularities, galaxies and even the frickin Great Attractor at his foes.
- In Tavern Talk, a "star rain" happens at the end of Chapter 4, which Kyle initially mistakes for fireworks. The next day, your patrons talk about the near-catastrophic damage it did across Phesoa, including one falling star impacting the center of Zenyth and forming a huge crater in it.
Western Animation
- Inverted in The Transformers, during the episode "The Revenge of Bruticus" when Onslaught attempts to fling the Earth into the Sun. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?
Terrestrial objects
Anime and Manga
- A Certain Magical Index:
- Radiosonde Castle was intended to be used in one of these to kill Touma and destroy Academy City.
- And Touma crashed the Star of Bethlehem into the Archangel Gabriel.
- In "Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture", this is the ultimate fate of the Damocles sky fortress, being dropped by the villains in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the city of Sapporo. They fail in this attempt.
- In Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Gamma 2 does this with himself, using up all of his energy for a Suicide Attack on Cell Max and dive-bombing him from orbit. It doesn't finish him off, but weakens him enough for Gohan to deliver the killing blow.
- In Fairy Tail, King Faust plans to use the lacrima of the Fairy Tail guild as a magical bomb on Extalia.
- Heaven's Lost Property, with flu medicine. We wish we were kidding.
- In Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is the tactic of Sahaquiel, the massive eighth/tenth angel, dropping itself from the Earth's orbit to impact Tokyo-3.
- One Piece:
- Vander Decken, the infamous pirate captain with the powers of the Mato Mato (target target) Fruit decides to kill the Mermaid Princess (who rejected him) by throwing a giant ark at her. It should be noted that this is an ark nearly the size of an entire island.
- The villain of the tenth movie, Shiki, can do this with battleships or entire islands because he has a power that can make anything float.
- Kaido's Evil Plan involves moving his private skull fortress, Onigashima, into the sky with his cloud-generating powers, flying it over the capital of Wano, and then dropping it onto the city (inevitably killing the thousands upon thousands of people gathered there for an annual festival). This turns Luffy's battle with him into a Race Against the Clock, as he has to defeat Kaido before it gets there.
- In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, the Seed of Magic transforms the defeated Lurguat into a spherical mass of flesh large enough to flatten a city as large as Akarina. It takes the Maximum Kizuna Kaiser pushing it into space to avert this disaster.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Yliaster's plan to destroy Neo Domino City and erase Momentum from history appears to involve dropping the Ark Cradle, a floating fortress made from the ruins of the future Neo Domino City, on it.
- In Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i, Radium Lavans attempts to drop a space elevator on the earth by destroying the large mass at the top of it that is acting as an anchor. Dolores prevents it by compressing the space between the earth and the moon to increase the moon's gravitational pull on the space elevator until enough mass can be added to keep it stable.
Comic Books
- In a comic series called Meridian, a large number of the population lives on floating islands while the ground (At least most of it) is too heavily polluted. Naturally, the threat of a city-state falling down onto the ground is present.
- In later years, the Marvel version of Asgard, a mystical city-state, has hovered over the American Midwest. During the Siege story arc, Asgard fell to the ground.
- Sonic the Comic:
- Done by Knuckles, who punches a fault line near the Carnival Night Zone. Since the Carnival Night Zone was built on the edge of the Floating Island, Knuckles completely smashed off that portion of the Floating Island, removing the Carnival Night Zone from the island and sending it falling to Mobius, slightly cushioned by some remaining power of the Master Emerald. The crash-landing of the ruined Carnival Night Zone was a shock to one Emerald Hill boy who had just before wished that the Carnival Night Zone was closer then it crashes in front of him.
- In the Sonic Adventure arc, in order to stop Chaos from absorbing the Chaos Emeralds, Knuckles hesitantly ejects them from the island, which without any power then crashes down into the sea.
- In an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man in the '90s, Spidey and the original X-Men teamed-up against Professor Power who was in control of a floating castle. They defeat him and his Mooks but the castle is sent plummeting toward New York. Obviously, they stop it just in time.
Fan Works
- Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: Near the end of Chapter 18, a recently-resurrected Darth Nihilus uses the Force to telekinetically pull General Ironwood's Cool Airship down from the sky and crash it into the Vytal Festival. The resulting explosion obliterates the Vytal Festival's fairgrounds, destroys most of Beacon Academy, and knocks most of the heroes unconscious while killing dozens of students and Atlas soldiers.
- The Moonstone Cup: One of the possible futures that Twilight sees after Draining the huge mass of clouds she's standing on is the corpse of Najstariot the dragon queen, who in her true form is about the size of a city, falling on top of Canterlot and utterly annihilating it.
Films — Animation
- Astro Boy: In the 2009 movie adaptation, the power goes out in the floating city during the climactic fight, which causes it to start falling. Astro slows down the fall enough to avoid a catastrophe.
- The LEGO Movie: Lord Business and Bad Cop attack Cloudcuckooland with their aircraft (a Fluffy Cloud Heaven in this world), causing it to fall into the ocean. Only Emmet, his team, and Captain Metalbeard make it out — all of the other inhabitants are arrested or presumably perished in the waters below, as Bad Cop finds no signs of life after scouring the area.
- In The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, the Big Bad levitates Dr. Venture's skyscraper into space and he has to find a way to bring it down safely so it doesn't destroy Manhattan or get blown up by the OSI with him in it to prevent it. In the end he manages to safely bring it down where his old house was with a Humongous Mecha and the help of the OSI and the Monarch.
Films — Live Action
- In Avengers: Age of Ultron, when denied the access to nuclear codes, Ultron decides to "restart" the world by lifting a whole city into the atmosphere via a connected set of jet engines and drop it at a suitable altitude in a crude replication of the K-T Extinction Event.
- The school in Sky High (2005) has its floatation device disabled by Royal Pain. Will just barely manages to slow down the school long enough for his friends to fix the device and stop it from crushing a neighborhood.
Literature
- Chrysalis (RinoZ): Greystone Fortress is a tremendous mountain, that has been artificially expanded to stretch from ground level all the way to the top of the fourth stratum. The golgari blast a chunk of it free, the size of several cities, in an attempt to squash Anthony and his fleet.
- In the Dragaera novels, every floating castle in the Dragaeran Empire fell out of the sky when sorcery stopped working at the beginning of the Interregnum.
- In Gulliver's Travels, the Laputan emperor's ultimate punishment against wayward earthbound cities was to land his floating island on them. However, this punishment is more of a controlled descent than a drop, or otherwise Laputa would be badly damaged. The Laputan emperor explains this as the love of his people being so great, he wishes to permit them every chance of survival.
Live-Action TV
- In My Hero (2000) 6x08, "Believe", Thermoman accidentally drops a village in Bavaria on another village, causing them to both catch fire and set alight to a third one. However, no-one actually gets hurt as Thermoman manages to rescue them all from his blunder, though they weren't overly grateful about it.
- Power Rangers RPM: To finally defeat Venjix, the Rangers blow up the Corinth control tower and drop it on Venjix's head. The Stinger suggests he's Not Quite Dead however...but it would take 10 years for this to become relevant.
Music Videos
- The Gorillaz' floating windmill ends up being shot down by pirates in the video for "El Manana".
Toys
- BIONICLE: when Mata Nui crashes onto Aqua Magna thanks to Makuta.
Video Games
- In the Arc the Lad series, the Sky Castle rises and drops no less than 3 times. The first time causing The End of the World as We Know It, subsequent falls are nowhere near as destructive because the plot says so.
- Breath of Fire II has an unusual heroic example as part of the Golden Ending, requiring the party to have the airship: instead of the player character sacrificing himself to seal the gate to the underworld, dropping the airship on it and burying it under several thousand tons of solid rock works just as well.
- In the standard ending of Cave Story, the entire floating island crashes to the ground after defeating the final boss. In the Good Ending, defeating the Perfect Run Final Boss will save the island from falling.
- The destruction of Zeal in Chrono Trigger results in the floating kingdom falling from the sky. Between Lavos generally causing havoc and chunks of islands falling from near-orbit, the world is destroyed and flooded. It gets better, though. In fact, it's implied that the disaster is what ends the Ice Age, in the same way that Lavos's arrival started it... which qualifies for this trope as well.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy VII: In the double-decker city Midgar, one of the villains manages to drop a large section of the affluent layer of the city above onto the slums below, killing thousands of people.
- In the grand finale of Final Fantasy XII, Sky Fortress Bahamut is fatally damaged by the Undying's unrelenting assaults on it during the Final Battle. The miles-and-miles-tall Floating Tower falls from the sky in a collision course with Rabanastre, to everyone's horror. Although the lowest bits crash into the city's Paling, it's obvious that this shield won't hold, and last-ditch, desperate actions are taken to ensure the city's survival, from suicidally ramming it away with a capital ship, to staying behind to rig emergency power to its engines.
- Final Fantasy XVI: Clive, while in Ifrit's form, defeats Titan Lost by dropping one of its large stone tentacles onto its head. Titan Lost is a mountain-sized version of Titan, meaning its stone tentacles are the size of small mountains at least.
- In Legend of Legaia, after you defeat Zora and reach the Mist Generator in the Floating Castle, Songi destroys said Generator, causing the castle to tumble toward the Earth. In an unusual twist on this trope, Songi wants to use said Colony Drop to kill the people in the castle, not necessarily anyone on the ground.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Link wishes to the Triforce to destroy the Imprisoned for good. It grants the wish by causing the statue of the Goddess in Skyloft to break off and fall, landing directly on the sealing pit just as the Imprisoned is breaking out of its seal, squishing it.
- In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals Doom Fortress was used to attempt to destroy Parcelyte as a last-ditch effort by Daos.
- In Septerra Core, the nation of Ankara uses this method to destroy its Shell 5 rival Janam, slamming the continent into the base of Shell 3.
- As mentioned above under Artificial Space Stuff, in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Angel Island's levitation is powered by the Master Emerald, which means Dr. Eggman stealing it to power the Death Egg causes Angel Island to start falling. Unusually, no real damage happens with this, as Angel Island is always over the open ocean, it has fallen and risen many times in the past, and the things on the island are designed to withstand the impact. The danger is what happens afterward, as the Death Egg is capable of destroying the planet and Sonic cannot let that happen.
- Angel Island is also shown falling into the ocean in Sonic Adventure after the Master Emerald is shattered, freeing Chaos. Again, the island itself survives unscathed, but this time the impact is shown to produce a massive, circular tidal wave, and Angel Island itself (at least, in-game) is shown to be much closer to land...
- Bombing planets with mass driver packets is a possible tactic in Stars! (1995), albeit one that really only works in small universes because by the time you can fling large packets, your opponents will likely have the technology necessary to catch them.
- RyuKohOh and it's derivatives in the Super Robot Wars Alpha games typically have an attack that warps a small mountain directly above the enemy's head.
- It's an odd example, as the city starts on the surface and then falls through the crust and into the planet's poisonous-gas-filled yet oddly populated core, but this is pretty much what happens to Akzeriuth in Tales of the Abyss.
- The Solarian tethered sky colony Etrenank in Xenogears smashes into the surface and erupts into a nuclear fireball after Id shoots it down For the Evulz. Its counterpart and rival Shevat suffers a similar fate off-screen, but remains somewhat intact on the surface.
Webcomics
- 8-Bit Theater: A pissed-off Sarda teleports Black Mage away "to Hurt". BM ends up in the middle of the ocean, next to a sign reading "Welcome to Hurt, Australia". As he's wondering what an "Australia" is, the reader's view is pulled back so you can see the Australia-shaped shadow looming around him.
Web Original
- The Neopets story arc 'The Faeries' Ruin' had an epic Wham Episode which revealed that not only was Xandra the villain, she just crashed Faerieland — that is, a giant floating city-state- into Neopia.◊
- In Worm a member of the Thanda, a group of Indian supervillains, uses his teleportation powers to shift skyscrapers or small landmasses into orbit so that they fall on his targets.
Western Animation
- Dave the Barbarian: There's a strange example in "A Pig's Story". To destroy the kingdom of Udrogoth in what is explicitly acknowledged as a family-friendly manner, the Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy has a gigantic sausage—either turkey or chicken, but definitely not pork—dropped on it.
- Invader Zim: In "The Wettening", Zim levels the city with a meteor-sized water balloon dropped from orbit in response to Dib hitting him with one.
- My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "Flight to Cloud Castle, Part 2", once the spell that created the flying castle's magic is broken, it promptly falls out of the sky — which is something of a problem for the characters, as they're all inside it when this happens.
- We Bare Bears: In "Braces", Panda, gone power mad thanks to his new electrokinetic powers gotten from his braces, attempts to destroy San Francisco using the bears' cave and every Smartphone in San Francisco to create a makeshift meteor.
