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Death From Above

Close your eyes and see the skies are fallin'
—Queens Of The Stone Age, "The Sky is Fallin'"

Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.
—Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and Magnificent Bastard extraordinaire(who clearly never witnessed someone get their legs blown off by a mortar shell)

Whether it's (un)holy smiting, meteor showers, nuclear weapons, bricks from bi-planes, ordinary ordnance, or good old napalm, there's lots of ways to rain Death From Above on those below. There's something about Death raining down from the sky that is almost biblical, it's fear and awe inspiring because there is nothing the target can do to avoid this airborne doom but "duck and cover". It is at once a powerful and impersonal way to threaten or actually kill someone, hence a great way to establish a villain's power and threat as being on a planetary scale; on the flip side it also makes the airborne cavalry come to save the hero look angelic and omnipotent in comparison to the efforts of the heroes. Listed below are a few ways to rain this holy judgment:

Occasionally leads to Riding The Bomb.

For a more personal version of this trope see Vertical Kidnapping.

To make this a self demonstrating article, please find a window and someone to drop your computer on.

Examples

Anime and Manga
  • The Colony Drop and related forms are absolutely adored by the Gundam franchise. To wit:
    • The original Mobile Suit Gundam's backstory includes an attempted colony drop on Brazil that was derailed to Australia. Gundam 0083 gives us a decent peek of the ensuing crater bay carved from the 50-mile radius around what used to be Sydney.
    • Char's Counterattack more or less revolves around Char doing this and even begins with a preliminary meteor drop on Tibet.
    • Operation Meteor of Gundam Wing infamy was drafted as a plan to drop an asteroid on Earth, then seize control with the Gundams as the populace runs around in terror. Of course, we wind up seeing what happens when the Gundams jump the gun and their pilots' humanity interferes, but Dekim Barton decides to double back and try it right in Endless Waltz.
    • After War Gundam X starts with the Space Revolutionary Army devastating the Earth with mass colony drops. The series proper takes place After The End with everyone who's left scrambling to control the titular Gundam, whose Satellite Cannon was designed to shoot the things down.
    • The second season of Gundam 00 gives us the collapse of one of its orbital elevators and a massive Enemy Mine scramble to clear the ensuing debris before it lands on someone's head.
    • Gundam SEED Destiny features an attempt to drop a destroyed colony on Earth. Despite the efforts of both the Federation and ZAFT, who together actually manage to take out the majority of the thing, enough damage is caused to re-ignite a second Bloody Valentine War.
    • Even SD Gundam Force gets in on the action towards the end of its first half, when Chief Haro conducts the largest-scale Bright Slap Homage ever by dropping the hand-shaped Blanc Base on the Dark Axis's Big Zam.
  • Servant Caster from Fate/stay night is rather fond of this, especially in the sequel hollow ataraxia. Being able to create Frickin Laser Beams with a single word (whereas the regular magus would need 30 seconds and a small ritual), and capable of flight, she Beam Spams her enemies who have almost no chance of fighting back.

Western Animation
  • Done in grand fashion in X-Men Evolution, the animated series on the WB. Apocalypse is running amok somewhere in Mexico, all other X-Men around have failed to dent him. Enter the new fully evolved Magneto, cape billowing behind him. He proceeds to use his powers to slam man-made satellites into Apocalypse.
  • Not strictly Death From Above, but in Dream Works' The Prince of Egypt the fiery hail is gloriously rendered as a serious, sky-lighting event.
  • Obligatory Avatar The Last Airbender example: Aang and the inhabitants of the Northern Air Temple defeat a vastly more powerful Fire Nation army by having complete domination of the skies. They manage to rout the whole force using no ground troops at all.
    Sokka: They may have tanks and firebending, but we have the skies. Which means we're gonna win this battle the way battles ought to be won. By bombing the crap out of 'em!

Comic Books
  • Nextwave. Widdle cuddly bears... of death! Then subverted by Aaron Stack. "Fear my robot head."
  • Another Warren Ellis comic global Frequency featured the threat of kinetic spears; weapons designed to be dropped from satellites, heat up on re-entry, and strike the ground with the force of a tactical nuke, and as hot as the edge of the sun. Part of a 'die-back' protocol.
  • In the Sonic The Hedgehog Archie comic, Dr. Robotnik assembled a fleet of airships and bombed Knothole into a crater, forcing the cast to relocate.
  • The skyfurnaces in Christian Gossett's The Red Star, mile-long, heavily armored airships armed with Warkasters (military sorceresses). Each kaster is suspended in a special chamber that allows her to project herself temporarily as a concentrated beam of heat. The effect is pretty terrifying.
  • The Cavalry version of Big Damn Heroes coming from above can be seen in Kingdom Come, in which it is dubbed a "Force from on high". Also subverted, as the superheroes involved do not kill anybody.

Film
  • Sometimes, it's just simply the most expedient solution to your problem. After all, why stomp around on the ground, wading through hordes of enemies just for the hell of it? As Ripley states in Aliens, "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
    • Which is why this movie is one of my favorites, because they actually listened and did try to do the smart thing and leave- and still got screwed.
  • In Starship Troopers, carpet bombing a planet is shown to be much more effective than simply dropping the Mobile Infantry on the ground and letting them shoot it out.
    • The (much better) novel originally dealt with this much more logically: humanity develops a planet-busting bomb during the war, but it's only used on planets that weren't previously occupied by the Mobile Infantry and thus don't have Prisoners Of War to rescue; before that, the MI had to go in and destroy the "royalty caste bugs" to make sure that the planet was "pacified."
    • The penultimate scene of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder has the Marauder team dropping from the night sky (first appearing as a halo of lights around Holly's head) in answer to Holly and Lola's prayers. After they're rescued a Q-Bomb is then used to destroy the entire planet.
  • There's a particularly cool bit in The Mummy with Brendan Fraser where it literally starts raining fire from above. Not only does this look awesome but the flames make a satisfying low whoosh sound as they hit the ground and set red-shirts alight.
  • The various Star Destroyer type vessels in Star Wars are equipped for orbital bombardment; the expanded universe says they were designed around the task, which is part of why they so heavily outgunned everything else in space at the time and had such an advantage against other vessels designed for starship combat. Notably, in the novel Rebel Dream, a Super Star Destroyer uses this tactic while defending - by using ground troops to force the enemy into specific locations on the planet below, where they could safely be blown to bits. Repeatedly.
    • And of course there's the Death Star designed specifically to blow up a planet.
  • Red Dawn. After the Soviet army and even Spetznaz commandoes prove ineffective in wiping out the American guerillas, the Reds bait a trap with some supplies that 'accidentally' fell off a truck, then send in three Hind gunships.
  • An unusual take on the trope occurs in The Boondock Saints. The Mafiya soldier is about to execute one of the protagonists when a toilet drops on his head.

Literature
  • Three or more times in [[Animorphs]] they have a plan that involved having one of them (usually Cassie) fly as high as possible, then turn into a whale over water. Proof that Nice doesn't mean Weak, because she (like all of them) has to turn human in between.
  • In the Darkwar Trilogy of the Riftwar Cycle, an epic-level demon is going through a portal connecting from the Dasati dimension to the world of Kelewan. Pug's answer? Evacuate the world and drop the moon on top of the portal.
    • Pug did it a couple of decades before, by firebombing the flagship of an invading fleet. His fireball bounced back, however.
  • Anathem had Rodding. Very simple. Drop a large dense rod from orbit at hypersonic speeds into a dormant volcano. Boom. Repeat.
  • Used to unnerving yet hilarious effect in one of the Dresden Files books, where a frozen turkey falling from a commercial airliner kills a vampire in a "freak accident" caused by a malicious curse.
    • The 'done' button popping out was a nice touch.
    • This happens offscreen earlier in the book when Harry is told that an early victim of the curse was hit by a runaway car... while waterskiing.
    • Also Ebenezar McCoy killed a vampire who had challenged his former apprentice, Harry Dresden, to a duel (and had cheated). He did this by pulling a soviet-era satellite from orbit and making it crash onto the vampire's compound, killing the vampire and most of his retinue (sadly it also killed the humans they fed from).
  • In the Chronicles Of Narnia book "A Horse And His Boy", the main villain, having somehow found himself at a higher elevation than his enemies, declares "The bolt of Tash falls from above!" leaping upon his enemies... and getting caught on a hook halfway down to dangle helplessly for the rest of the battle.
    • As if that wasn't bad enough, the villain - having not learned his lesson - repeats the above line again during a rant against the heroes, prompting one of them to rub it in by asking, "Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway?" Apparently, yes, it does.
  • A similar system is described in Robert A Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where a Moon colony uses metal-sheathed multiton rocks tossed at Earth as a weapon - a highly effective and cheap weapon.
  • Similarly, Shatterpoint had DOKAWs, De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapons, described as 200-ton metal rods with thrusters on them. They were lethal, if somewhat less than accurate.
  • In the fourth book of the Legacy of the Aldenata series by John Ringo, the heroes, and the entire population of earth, are totally screwed, until the fleet unexpectedly returns and uses kinetic bombardment to destroy every important target on the ground.
    • O'Neal's team finds out what it's like to be on the receiving end of it, in The Eye of the Storm (free sneak preview available here, containing the scene in question in Chapter Four).
  • The Western Galactic Empire of Robert Zubrin's The Holy Land uses Psioray bombardment. Capable of wide-area bombardment, accurate to within one-tenth of a percent of the range fired, can be tuned to only affect specific groups of beings (even more specifically than species), and reduces the targets to less than an inch in height, while leaving, for instance, local birds, lizards, and predatory insects the same size. Poor Peru. Poor Iowa.
  • The Ganymede Takeover (by Philip K Dick and Robert Nelson) has The Shaft, a miniature psychotropic autonomic dart fired from a satellite, used to kill (on an individual basis) a vast number of key technicians and leaders during the alien invasion.
  • The War Against The Chtorr. In an interesting inversion, a group of renegades attempting to booby-trap a helicopter landing field are exposed to a counter-ambush when an orbiting solar mirror is suddenly turned on the area.
  • The Reality Dysfunction (part of the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton). A special forces team floating down a river through enemy territory get some sudden and unexpected support when 5000 precision-guided kinetic energy harpoons fired from a spaceship slam into the banks on either side. The harpoons are falling so fast no-one hears them until after they land. Then they really hear them.
  • In Footfall (by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) the alien invaders have two versions of this. First, they use space-based lasers and the 'Rods From God' described below to destroy Earth's military forces and insurgents; later, after Kansas is nuked to defeat their first invasion they land the eponymous 'Foot' (an asteroid) in the Indian Ocean to try to force Earth's surrender (it doesn't work).
  • A form of this is featured in the climax of the final novel of Tad Williams' Otherland series. The Other tricks the heroes into giving it control of the satellite that it's imprisoned on, and sends the satellite plummeting to Earth, aimed directly at the headquarters of J Corp. Boom.
  • In Bones of the Hills, when Jochi and Jebe are being pursued by Khalifa, Jochi sarcastically suggests dropping boulders on the Arabs. Jebe thinks that's a great idea. And it works.
  • In Mercedes Lackey's Dragon Jousters series, Jousters ride dragons and Air Joust each other, when there are Jousters on each side of the war. When Jousters either don't find their enemy counterparts or manage to drive off or kill them, they turn on the ground armies, swooping down to have their dragons snatch up a commander, carry him high into the air... and drop him on his own forces. This is said to be highly demoralizing. One of the good Jousters, Ari, has a Heroic BSOD when the group of Jousters he was with, having some spare time, does this to the civilians in an enemy village, even joking about painting a target next time for more sport.
  • In Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett it's orbital bombardment with eggs:
    flying bot: Crackdown in this area is forecast in ten minutes. Don your protective clothing or seek chthonic safety.
    flying bot: Crackdown! Crackdown! Beware of the eggs!
  • Since flying warriors (Knights Aeris) are pretty much standard in any army in the Codex Alera, this was inevitable. But Tavi's idea for how to use his vast numbers of mediocre Knights (most of whom couldn't fly properly) against an army in the third book really takes the cake: he had them scale up a telescope spell, and had Max use the giant lens to turn the sunlight into a freaking Death Ray.

Live Action TV
  • In the pilot episode of Dead Like Me, a toilet seat drops onto the main character from orbit, killing her instantly.
    • Likewise in the opening of the TV spy movie Blue Ice, Michael Caine is attending the funeral of a friend killed by a chunk of ice that fell off an aircraft.
    • And yet again in CSI: New York, when a construction worker is found dead inside a port-a-potty, and the fecal residue found in the injury (a hole in his head, right through his hard hat) is justified early on as contamination from the scene. Turns out, he was the victim of a very, very unlucky (and timely) leak in an airplane stall.
    • Actually, he had taken his hard hat off when he got hit.
  • Battlestar Galactica begins with the nuclear annihilation of humanity by the Cylons.
  • Stargate Atlantis has a scene similar to Battlestar Galactica when the Atlantis team wipe out the Asurans with a new naquadah-enhanced bomb.
  • Robot Wars had the drop zone, where an immobilized robot would be placed on a spot on the arena floor and something would be dropped from the ceiling (including a television, an oven, bowling balls, and one of the Video Games dropped a grand piano!)
  • At the end of the second season of Babylon 5, the Centauri use "mass drivers" to bombard the homeworld of their long-time enemies the Narns. In Season 3, the effects are shown — including altered climate due to atmospheric dust.
    • Also almost the fate of Earth, at the end of Clarke's presidency of the Earth Alliance.

Tabletop Games
  • "Death From Above" is also a maneuver from the miniatures wargame Battletech, father of western mecha, in which a jump- or flight-capable combat mech aims to land directly atop an opponent, with its plasma-based jumpjets firing. This manuver is generally one of desperation because it stands a good chance of dumping both attacker and attacked on the ground where they will be easy targets for whoever wanders by or gets up first, but its effects are often devistating since mechs mount their cockpit in the head. Some larger mechs are specifically designed to carry it out such as the 90-ton Highlander, leading to the term "Highlander burial" for a light mech getting landed on by an assault-class.
    • Given their firepower and bomb capacity, the larger fighters (aerospace or otherwise) of the setting can also qualify with regard to ground forces if used in the game. (Though the rules give the targets a fair chance of dropping even the biggest fighter out of the sky with a single hit.) The ultimate example, though, at least before the Jihad era brought nukes back onto the battlefield, may be orbital bombardment like the infamous destruction of the city of Edo on the planet Turtle Bay by Clan Smoke Jaguar.
  • The CCG Net Runner has a powerful card named Death From Above.
    • With a telling bit of flavor text: "They drop rocks; I commandeer battlesats." Needless to say, there's also a card with the meaningful name I Got A Rock that will under the right circumstances hit the Runner with enough 'meat damage' to flatline him or her about three times over...
  • Warhammer 40000, where many Imperial vessels are capable of Exterminatus - an extreme version of Death From Above, which leaves absolutely nothing living on a planet it hits.
    • 40k also includes each and every type of Death From Above listed-even hails of arrows on feudal worlds.
    • The photo at the top of the page is from an Exterminatus under progress in the video game adaptation Fire Warrior.
  • Numerous Dungeons And Dragons spells such as Flame Pillar, Flame Strike, Meteor Shower, Storm of Vengeance, Hail Storm & Call Lightning. It's more common amongst Divine Spellcasters, because Gods enjoy this kind of smiting.
    • There's a frequently devised tactic relying on summoning and creation spells. Create a large rock five feet above your target's head and they die easily enough, or summon a horse over them, or whatever.
  • Warhammer Fantasy gave us the spells Comet of Casandora, Forked Lightning and Uranon's Thunderbolt. Pretty much Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
  • Nuclear War. 'nuff said.

Video Games
  • Of note here are the A.I. characters from Marathon, one of whom described a plan to destroy the power station of the Pfhor on the planet Lh'owon as, effectively, "Step one: drop an asteroid on the roof of the (underground) power plant. Step two: drop the Bad Ass protagonist down the hole." This is about 25% of the way through Marathon 2: Durandal, and similar plans occur elsewhere in Bungie games (The Master Chief in a drop pod is more dangerous than a warship)
    • In Marathon 2, the titular Durandal tells you he is "Introducing the Pfhor (the main enemies at that point in time) to the joys of orbital bombardment". Of special note is that throughout this level, as you progress, the occasional distant and muted rumbling boom can be heard. Presumably Durandal enjoys what he's doing a little TOO much. Then again, he is QUITE rampant.
      • It's worse. That's Durandal once he's STABLE.
  • The Big Bad proves herself able in Drakengard when she launches fireballs that explode with the force of a nuclear blast against the recently-victorious army of the protagonist.
  • After having become the incarnation of magic; Big Bad, Complete Monster Clown and Nietzsche Wannabe Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI picked up the nice little hobby of annihilating any- and everything he didn't like with the "Light of Judgement", a massive, magical beam from the skies.
  • "Death from Above" also happens to be the name of a giant bee Notorious Monster in Final Fantasy XI, which fits under the Giant Flyer subsection.
    • The Dragoon class from throughout the series qualifies, since their main ability is just to jump up into the air and crash down into enemies with their spears.
    • The Yovra enemies in Al'Taieu also qualify for this trope. They hover around in the sky and can't be targeted...until they hear you, promptly dropping down to dispense death to the unlucky party.
    • The recurring Comet and Meteor spells certainly count.
  • Although all the biggest lightning spells come from above, Final Fantasy 9's Thundaga definitely looks the most impressive, almost like a small-scale reverse-Eden.
  • In the later Dynasty Warriors games, jumping into a group of enemies from a high enough elevation (usually on horseback) results in an 'Ambush' situation, where the enemies are temporarily terrified (causing them to attack rarely, while also reducing their defence.)
  • Appropriately enough, Call Of Duty 4 has a level called Death From Above in which you provide close air support from an AC-130 gunship. For the uneducated, the AC-130 has 2 left-side-mounted 20mm M61 Vulcan Cannons, 1 40 mm L/60 Bofors cannon and 1 105 mm M102 howitzer. The M61 has been mounted on aircraft before, but the Bofors was usually used as an AA gun, and the M102 is usually used in an indirect-fire artillery role. Using it as a direct-fire weapon from the side of a large cargo plane was something of a stroke of genius. Check The Other Wiki for more.
    • You can also call in airstrikes during the missions Safehouse and Heat, or during multiplayer if your kill streak is high enough.
    • Sequel Escalation gives Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer sentry guns that drop for you to place, a missle from a Predator drone for you to control as it falls, a targeted airstrike, a Harrier airstrike followed by a fourth Harrier that loiters in the area, launching missiles and firing its Vulcan, a Cobra or Hind (depending on which side) helicopter to fly around the battlefield attacking enemies, a heavily armored (two missiles to kill instead of one) Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low to fly around attacking enemies even more effectively, a B2 Spirit bomber which delivers an airstrike that the enemy cannot see coming, an AH-64 Apache with you in the gunner seat, an AC-130 gunship with you again at the guns, and if you can get a 25 kill streak... you can launch a tactical nuke which kills everyone and ends in game in your favor. For balance reasons, you may only use 3 of these in a single killstreak. You may also call in care packages for you in Modern Warfare 2 for help which don't kill anyone alone — unless the crate falls on someone.
      • The Care Package or the Emergency Airdrop (4 Care Packages in one go) however may randomly contain any of those killstreak rewards, meaning you can get Death From Above [[Department Of Redundancy Department in]] your Death From Above.
  • Worms has plenty of powerful airstrike Superweapons. Mail Strikes, MB Bombs, Mike's Carpet Bombs, French Sheep Strikes, Concrete Donkeys, and Armageddon all rain death on opposing worms. Ok, that last one, as you might expect from the name, rains death on everyone, but the point stands.
  • In Dawn Of War, the Space Marines special unit - Assault Marines has this phrase as a battlecry. The same faction also uses drop pods in a planetary assault. The commander unit can call in an Orbital Bombardment as well.
    • In Dawn Of War 2, the Assault Marines actually do damage in the single-player by dropping down - in the multiplayer, they knock infantry down.
  • In Company Of Heroes the paratroopers have this as a battlecry, as well.
    • They can also use the more direct version of this trope with the ability to call in strafing runs and bombing runs from P-47s. Meanwhile, the Panzer Elite Luftwaffe tactics can order Henschel Hs-129s to patrol a point, wiping out whole fleets of Allied vehicles with their 75mm cannon, and the Brits can call in gliders full of Commandos. And let's not even get started with the artillery...
  • Chrono Trigger's Big Bad destroys the future by borrowing from the ground, and then pelting the globe with its spines. While fighting it, it also does something similar with a move called "Destruction rains from the heavens!"
  • The upcoming real-time strategy game Halo Wars will let players who are playing as the UNSC faction call down fire from the MAC gun (Magnetic Accelerator Cannon) of an orbiting warship. In addition the Covenant Prophet faction can call down an orbital laser beam which can be left active indefinitely (and steered around) assuming you have the resources.
  • The Bard class in the text game Achaea has an ability named Death From Above, which allows them to jump from the trees directly onto a target to deliver significant damage. (they even scream out "Death From Above!" when they do it)
  • Golden Sun has several varieties, mostly in the form of summons:
    • Giant Flyer - the Fusion Dragon, more or less. Also, the Eclipse summon, which is essentially a dragon which breathes lasers.
    • Kill Sat - Judgement and Catastrophe; arguably also the Finishing Move of the Phaeton's Blade
    • Meteor - the Meteor summon, and a more localized version in the Sol Blade's "Megiddo" skill
    • Nuke Em - would be several, if the party didn't mysteriously disappear at the beginning; most egregiously Charon
      • Or alternatively, the Doom Dragon's attack, Cruel Ruin, which appears to shoot a chain of exploding beams, each destroying massive areas of land. Also, the Daedalus summon, which brings out a giant ancient-looking robot that shoots several small missiles that hit immediately and a final, huge one, which three turns later, hits for a large explosion.
    • Rain Of Arrows - Atalanta
  • The aptly named "Galaxy Drops" in perpetual MMOFPS Planetside are carefully organized raids involving a fleet of Galaxy transports, each carrying a full squad of troopers, exosuit warriors, and a fully staffed vehicle, along with the Galaxy's own gunners and other air support.
  • One of the most dangerous scenarios in Battlefield 2142 is a fully-loaded Air Transport. Though less menacing than Planetside's drops (since there are at most two transports available per side), there is more than enough destruction aboard in the form of two vehicle-mounted cannons for infantry, engineers with anti-vehicle weapons and mines, as well as two engineers designated as mid-flight repairmen (who can easily repair most damage). Only a concerted attack by the enemy (or an extremely lucky kamikaze transport pilot) can hope to stop the assault.
  • The Ground Pounds, like Bowser's Bowser Bomb in the Super Smash Bros series certainly applies as a certain kind of Death From Above, as does Link's Down Air attack.
  • In Metroid Prime 3, Samus can call in an air strike from her Cool Ship once she has acquired the correct Power Up and is in an open area. This kills most ordinary Mooks and is needed to destroy certain objects her suit weaponry cannot destroy.
    • The Screw Attack usually functions this way.
  • The Orcish Wind Riders of Warcraft III will sometimes scream "Death From Above!" when given an order to fly in and throw envenomed spears at enemies below.
    • Rawrbomb.
      • For the ignorant, a "rawrbomb" is a maneuver pulled off by Druids; shapeshift into a flying form, find a convenient location over your target, then shift into bear form and drop like a stone. When you get within range of the target, pop "CHARGE!" and hurl yourself at the target, smashing into them and landing without damage. Tricky to do, easy to fail, and impressive to see.
      • Warriors can pull off the same trick.
  • Before the development patch that changed the mechanics of the archetype, a common method of garnering a high amount of damage very quickly for a Blaster in City of Heroes was to gain altitude (either through a flight-based power or by ascending a skyscraper) and to drop to the ground below, near the enemy. The original Blaster design included an advantage wherein more damage would be dealt by suffering damage, and since the game doesn't let you die from falling damage directly, you were assured to ring off at least one good blast before you inevitably were torn to pieces.
  • Sakura's THE CREATE super in Magical Battle Arena has her dropping a ton of King Penguin playground slides all over the battlefield.
  • Storm's snow storm super in the Marvel vs. Capcom games. Or, as this video would say, MAKE IT RAIN!
  • In Red Alert 3, the Soviets can drop orbital debris ranging from satellites to space stations on their enemies, along with any vehicles they picked up with their magnetic satellites.
    • No idea how RA 3 got on here without the original Command and Conquer, but um... Ion Cannon.
  • Phantasy Star Online loves doing this with the final bosses of Episodes 1, 2, and 4 with each boss having an attack that rains destruction on the party. Dark Falz has "Heaven Punishment", in which he puts a slow-down effect on the party before firing skywards, raining beams of light down randomly (which are somehow dodgeable), Olga Flow has "God's Punishment" which is an instant kill if it connects, and the snake trio in Episode 4 has "Divine Punishment" which fires down a single beam that causes a shockwave that can't be avoided, but does less damage the farther away you are.
    • Player characters can do this as well with the "Divine Punishment" special, which targets up to 16 enemies in front of them and blasts them with light-elemental beams. Of course, since it's the player using it, it's nowhere near as effective.. unless it's tagging enemies for experience points, or an area that's extremely allergic to holy rays of death.
  • Gears Of War includes the Hammer of Dawn, the targeting laser for an Orbital Death Beam. The sequel adds the Mortar, which has a nearly vertical arc allowing the player to wreak death from above. Then you include the BigDamnGunships, the Kryll, and the razor-sharp killer ''rain'' and it just goes bananas.
  • Unreal Tournament has an ion painter, a targeting laser for two flavors of Death From Above; either an Ion Cannon from a Kill Sat, or a bomber that cruises across the sky and splodes the whole place up.
  • Doctor Weil holds the world hostage by way of Kill Sat in Mega Man Zero 4. When that plan gets foiled, he decides to use the space fortress for a Colony Drop - two versions of the trope for the price of one villain.
  • In the Halo verse, the Covenant fleet plasma-bombards planets into molten glass.
  • Meteos revolves around this; every populated planet and non-planet in the universe is being bombarded by multicolored meteors that, if left by themselves, will make the planet explode.
  • An Umgah representative in Star Control 2 mentions doing this for the lulz: "It so much easier to make good jokes without boring old Ur-Quan slave laws! We wanting to pull a real good one on those stupid nosers from Draconis for long time but since they battle thralls too, we not allowed do even small pranks on them like, say... dropping planetoid in their ocean. Big waves! Big waves! Har! Har! Har!"
  • Star Craft not only features the many, many kinds of aircraft (such as Zerg Guardians) that can gun down your poor defenceless Protoss Zealots from above, but there's also the Terran nuke, which does either 400 points of damage straight up or two-thirds of the target's max health (enough to kill the Overmind itself in two shots). And in the upcoming sequel, the Protoss Mothership will possess the ability to concentrate vast amounts of damage straight down, crispy-frying anything not able to run away.
    • If you could get the resources together to build them, nothing was more awesome than tooling around with a squadron of battlecruisers (except possibly tooling around with a squadron of carriers).
      • Trump Card: On certain levels, a squadron of battleships AND a squadron of carriers.
  • The Tasen and the Komato in Iji have what is called the Alpha Strike, which involves a bunch of ships firing lasers at a planet. The Tasen use it before the game (at half power!) to kill almost all of humanity (along with most other life), and the Komato almost fire it at at full power near the end, which would have destroyed the planet.
  • How could you miss WorldInConflict? Half the point of the game is calling in a truly vast array of support firepower - small mortar strikes, large artillery barrages, cluster bombs, smart bombs, chemical strikes, carpet bombing, and even the infamous nuke.
  • Destruction Derby-like game Demolition racer has this: when a car lands on top of another car, the bottom car is immediately destroyed, resulting in the Death from above bonus, which gives you substantially more points than any other attack. It's also the hardest move to perform and only a handful of tracks give you the opportunity to perform a high enough jump to crash on top of your opponents.
  • Pokemon has four attacks that fit this: Doom Desire, Judgment, Thunder and Draco Meteor. Doom Desire sends up a wish that, after a few turns, results in an enormous blast of silvery-purple light that completely annihilates the opponent. Judgment is similar, but it requires no charge time, is much stronger, can be any type, and is only learnable by Arceus, the creator of the universe. Thunder calls forth a bolt of lightning from the heavens to strike down the foe, and Draco Meteor creates a catastrophic meteor storm.
  • Far, far, far too common in Armored Core arena fights against the heavies near the first rank. Most players have more trouble getting to the dude at rank 1 than beating him. The grenade happy psycho ex-con in AC 2 destroyed many a PS 2 controller.
  • There's a tactic called "Death From Above" in the Mechwarrior games, which involves using your jump jets to levitate your 'Mech and then crashing it down on top of an enemy 'Mech. Obviously, since this will damage your 'Mech as well (and requires very precise piloting to pull off), it's viewed largely as a last-ditch desperate gambit... but Ramming Always Works, So Yeah.
  • Mercenaries 2 lives and breathes this trope, allowing the player to call in everything from Tomahawk missiles to Tac Nukes... for the right price.
    • So much so that Yahtzee calls the game "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes" and this article's Quotes page has no less than three quotes involving it.
  • Mario And Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has a partial example with the Goomba Storm technique. Bowser orders a squad of Goombas to Zerg Rush the enemy. The player must then tap at the Goombas with the stylus to make Bowser set them on fire, upon which they leap into the air, raining fiery death upon the enemy at the end.

Webcomics
  • The cry "Death From Above!" occasionally appears in the webcomic Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire. Dominic's cat, Spark, uses it as his catchphrase when dropping himself onto the head of a (usually much larger) enemy. The same series subverts the entire idea during one story arc, as a villain notes how the city he's threatening was designed to defend against aerial bombardment... then calls up an attack from beneath the earth.
  • This incident from Dresden Codak. Admittedly, it's proven later that this thing is a giant walker and not a giant flier, but it's taller than most buildings. I think that qualifies as "above", don't you?
  • Inverted in this strip of Least I Could Do, wherein young [[Jerkass Rayne]] has been waiting somewhere (on the ceiling?) for his mom to wake up so he can give her a hug.
  • An odd version in Order Of The Stick, where Vaarsuvius is saved from a death knight by the severed head of a zombie dragon falling on it. Also the eternal fate of the Flumphs, although they always survive it.

Music
  • Marduk's album Panzer Division Marduk has tanks, bombs and death as its theme. The song "Baptism By Fire" has the lines:
    Death from above - The hellfire will soon be unleashed
    Death rips the sky - Domination gives praise to the beast
    Death from above - Explosions is tearing your soul
    Death rips the sky - The bombing is reaching its goal
    Death from above - Death or glory, there is no way back
    Death rips the sky - Attack, attack, attack!
  • Dance-punk band Death From Above 1979

Real Life
  • Operation Thor (also called either "Rods from God" or "The Sword of Damocles") would have placed bundles of power pole-sized tungsten rods into Earth orbit, with a retrorocket and guidance system attached to each one. The idea was to call down the poles at need, with the rear-mounted guidance system assuring pinpoint accuracy. Sort of a modern-day Rain of Flaming Arrows, save each hit at terminal velocity would have been in the kiloton range. Note that tungsten is the densest metal except for a few that are horrifically expensive; it's nearly twice as dense as lead.
    • Are we sure that they'd be moving at terminal velocity? If they're dropped from high enough they may still be slowing down by the time they hit.
      • Objects which have fallen long enough to hit terminal velocity don't stop traveling at terminal velocity until they hit something. Their terminal velocity can change, if the atmosphere gets thicker, but the object will still be traveling at the terminal velocity for that atmospheric pressure. Most of the time when terminal velocity is referred to it's terminal velocity at 1 atmosphere of pressure (just as when people say the speed of sound they generally mean at 1 atmosphere), thus the minimum speed for the rods (after they reach it, and pass it on their way down) is their terminal velocity at 1 atmosphere, the velocity at which they'd strike the ground.
    • Regardless, having a power pole dropped on you from LEO isn't gonna feel good.
      • Which is the whole point.

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