Asteroid Thicket - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): The Asteroid Thicket

Threepio: Sir, the density of asteroids in a belt is actually extremely low, and quite easy to navigate. If you're hoping to evade pursuit, you're sorely mistaken.

Han Solo: Never tell me the facts!

—Irregular Webcomic

In science fiction movies and TV, asteroids are never anywhere near as thinly spread as they are in reality.

Unmanned space probes routinely go through the real asteroid belt. If the scientists can squeeze some extra money out of the budget, they'll nudge the probe a bit so they can take some pictures of an asteroid—because a random trajectory that isn't specifically planned to see an asteroid won't. (This actually happened with the Cassini mission, which didn't have the budget to nudge the probe. During its trip through the whole belt, it saw one asteroid as a point of light at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers.) The asteroid belt could actually be reasonably accurately described as an "asteroid vacuum".

Sci-fi asteroids, on the other hand, form a vast, hyperkinetic obstacle course. Small nimble spacecraft can slalom through, if skilfully piloted, but capital ships must plough straight through the dense-packed rocks, if they can't shoot them out of the way.

In real life, large solid asteroids don't even rotate more than once every few hours; otherwise centripetal force pulls them apart. In sci-fi, enormous rocks spin like tops and whiz around all over the place, and frequently even run into each other.

This process ought to leave the sci-fi asteroid field as uniform gravel after a few years, but has apparently been going on for millions of years without a pause.

Aspiring SF writers might consider the use of a planetary ring system (a la Saturn — well, Saturn's ring matter is mostly gravel, so maybe a planet not quite Saturn) as an alternate route to the same imagery. But hey, it's easier to just say "asteroids!"

For that matter, if ships are going through a nebula, it will not be like a thick fog - the density of the gases is about 1000 particles per square centimetre. The air you breathe just walking around on Earth is around 2.5x10^19 particles per square centimetre, or about 250-million-billion times denser.

A subtrope of Space Does Not Work That Way. See also You Fail Astronomy Forever.

Examples:

Anime

In the second season of Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers, the Argo attempts to elude the Earth Defense flagship Andromeda by flying at high speed through our solar system's asteroid belt. (To his credit, Captain Gideon of the Andromeda simply flies around the asteroid belt and is waiting for our heroes on the other side.)
The "Cemetery Belt" in episode 6 of Heroic Age.
Mobile Suit Gundam does this with the Corregidor Shoal Zone, a collection of debris from decades of asteroid processing for space colony construction that have aggregated around a Le Grange point. It's a bit more plausible than most examples, as it's relatively young by astronomical standards & it's in a much tighter orbit around its centre of mass than a conventional asteroid belt. Still, while the rocks don't come whizzing out at passing spaceships, there are chunks big enough for Humongous Mecha to hide behind, when collisions due to mutual attraction should have reduced them to gravel years ago and they're dense enough to make navigation somewhat difficult, though not to the point of Wronski Feint-ing.
Transformers Headmasters abused this in the episode "My Friend Sixshot"
Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko episode 5.
Episode 6 of Super Dimension Fortress Macross used the "rings of Saturn" variation.

Film

In The Empire Strikes Back, Han, deprived of his hyperdrive, has to slalom through densely packed asteroids to evade an Imperial fleet. And then echoed in Attack of the Clones when Obi-Wan is trying to evade Jango Fett in a planetary ring.
- Note that the asteroid density from Empire is apparently nothing unusual in the galaxy far, far away. Rather, C 3 P 0's cited statistics indicate they're all insanely-difficult to navigate.
- The unreality of the Empire Strikes Back sequence is lampooned in this Irregular Webcomic. See also the page quote.
- Asteroid thickets come up once in the X Wing Series, as the X-wings try to get through asteroids to an enemy ship. The enemy actually had a strategy for this situation, which was to shoot the bigger asteroids, which would destroy the fighters which are hiding behind them on their way to the big ship. Even though a pilot realized this before it happened and called them off, two were taken out on the retreat by, yes, unavoidable giant space rocks.
  - The second Rogue Squadron game had the Rogues guiding transports through an all-concealing nebula, and later going on a mission through an asteroid thicket that was very dense.
Titan AE had the characters flying through a giant ice field. We see a lot of the giant ice balls smash into each other, which at the rate they were going, they should have reduced the entire ice field to ice cubes within a few years.
Averted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. While passing through the asteroid belt Discovery passes within visual range of one asteroid. They deliberately chose their route to bring them close enough to make observations of that asteroid.
Variation: Instead of an asteroid field, Galaxy Quest has ships traveling through a space minefield. Justified in this instance because, as a minefield, it's supposed to kill whoever enters it, and the mines were more or less stationary until a ship got close enough to set off magnetic sensors.
Meteor shows our solar system's own asteroid belt being like this, with two large asteroids close enough that when one gets hit by a comet, a spacecraft orbiting the other gets destroyed by the debris.

Literature

Averted and explained in The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov, who says that perhaps the spaceships didn't have to waste propellant to go around the asteroid belt, since, while on map it looks like a swarm of insects, it would take real stroke of bad luck in order to hit a rock.
- Robert Heinlein said the same thing in Farmer in the Sky when the narrator observes that the 'old pile drive' ships used to 'plow right through the asteroid field and none of them was ever hit enough to matter'.
Justified in Tobias S. Buckell's Halo novel The Cole Protocol. The Rubble is explicitly said to be very unusual, the asteroids having been tethered together, and is kept stable by constant adjustments controlled by an AI.
Subverted in Allen Steele's A King Of Infinite Space, where the protagonist claims to expect the asteroid field to mirror his recollections of Empire Strikes Back, only to discover the scientific reality of the asteroid field.
Justified and lampshaded in Crusade by David Weber. It first comes up in the context of a closed warp point (a warp point without a significant/detectable gravity field) that happens to exist in the middle of an asteroid belt, which led to the immediate destruction of small ships transiting due to collisions - a situation immediately stated as freakish and unique. One chapter later, an enemy uses an asteroid cluster in a different star system to hide a fleet, while musing that only in a handful of clusters do "conditions even approach those... in popular entertainment."
In Timothy Zahn's Vision of the Future, when the Wild Karde goes through an asteroid field, Karde notes that it's more dense than most his crew has encountered.
Seems to be averted in Halo expanded universe. We only ever see one asteroid, but it's not portrayed as an obstacle course, and a band of pirates have safely set up a colony on one.

Live Action TV

Battlestar Galactica. Guilty as charged. Rather surprising given that it's usually relatively accurate when it comes to astrophysics.
- Might have been justified when they were in the debris disk around the black hole. Every other instance, however...
- Actually, the 'asteroid field' in Scar was argued to be a protoplanetary disc, because the science advisors or whatnot knew that asteroids weren't packed together but still wanted a dangerous dogfight situation.
The Blake's 7 episode "Mission To Destiny" features a space storm that appears as an asteroid thicket. An interstellar one.
The pilot (episode, not the character Pilot) of Farscape had an asteroid thicket.
The Lost In Space episode "The Reluctant Stowaway" (the premiere) featured the Jupiter 2 being pummeled by asteroids as it drifted off course into the belt.
The 2007 4th season premiere of Stargate: Atlantis has Atlantis, shot into space in the previous season, having to make its way through an asteroid field. Sheppard, McKay, and a team have to shoot the asteroids into pieces to clear a path. Sheppard, trying to reassure McKay, compares it to the video game Asteroids. McKay responds, "But I was terrible at Asteroids! I think I actually scored zero once!".
In the 7th season episode Genesis of Star Trek The Next Generation, the Enterprise sends a shuttle craft into an asteroid field because it was too dense for the Enterprise to go in safely. It was mentioned that the asteroid field was unusually dense though.

Video Games

One must mention the classic arcade game Asteroids, where the asteroids just go through each other: either they cheat, or their dodging skills make them smarter than the player.
- Clearly the player's ship is actually a huge arrow-shaped tower.
The starship battles in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando take place in such a region.
The Meteo area in the Star Fox games. "Use the boost to get through!"
The classic Space Sims Wing Commander and Freespace both used this trope, the former as a Death Course for fighters. The latter creates a very distinct mix of infuriating and awesome by making the asteroids too slow and clumsy to be a threat to fighters, then having missions where a desperate capital ship plows through them and has its small craft play point defense against the Malevolent Asteroids that continually appear out of nowhere to converge on the target ship.
- You think that's bad? Try a game breaking bug that prevented the capital ship from jumping to safety at the end of that very mission...
Freelancer carefully examines this trope. First, due to their thickness, most asteroid fields in the game are hiding places for criminals. Second, also due to their thickness, several asteroid fields are also suitable for mining operations. Third, some of these asteroid fields are actually made of junk (one of them is even a minefield!). And finally, the spacecraft manufacturers must be very aware of the difficulty of navigating these places by hand, because in order to get across an asteroid field, you just have to set a waypoint to your target, press the Go To button, and the computer will do the slaloming for you.
The Escape Velocity series (plays like Privateer, looks like Asteroids) has immensely thick asteroid belts, but ships can not collide with them, their purpose is simply to interfere with weapons fire (though they can also be mined in the third game).
- It should be noted that these asteroids are identical in appearance to those in Maelstrom, a clone of Asteroids which was Ambrosia Software's first published game.
In Homeworld, one mission puts you right in the center of a swarm of malicious asteroids, your objective being to get your smaller ships out of harm's way while blasting apart asteroids that are about to collide with the Mothership. There's a margin for error in that the Mothership can handle a few hits, but it's still not quite as easy as it sounds.
- The asteroids were deliberatly flown into the path of the mothership, as the mothership cannot change direction when in hyperspace, and will automatically leave hyperspace when it detects a potential collision, with the "boss" asteroid having a huge engine in it's rear.
The various Star Wars-based space sim/shooter games tend to have at least one mission with a whack o' asteroids, probably in deference to Episode V, though in this case the asteroids tend to be much less harmful in and of themselves (though they might prove to be excellent platforms for a starfighter hangar, well-defended space-base, or weapons turrets).
The PS3 downloadable title Super Stardust HD has asteroids that swoop down (and this troper swears they're aiming for you!), and then start orbiting around the planet you're guarding. This appears to be because of an incredibly powerful planetary shield whose existence is for some reason entirely dependant on the existence of your ship.
- They are aiming for you. It's how the game works.
- The backstory explains that the asteroids are being thrown at those planets by the attacking aliens to distract you when they attack.
The MMORPG Eve Online suffers from this trope in that of the 5000+ solar systems, a large majority of them have at least one "Asteroid Belt", and some have upwards of 20 or 30. This alone isn't enough... the asteroid belts themselves are composed of a belt maybe 100km from end to end with asteroids of various mineral types densely packed together.
Subverted in the classic 1984 space simulator Elite and its sequels. Whereas the first game had several classic examples of Did Not Do The Research such as no star system containing more than one planet and one sun, it did, more or less, bang asteroids on the head. As the game was randomly generated, it was not unusual for players to never come across an asteroid ever when playing the game!
- In the sequel Elite: Frontier star systems were more realistic, usually having several planets of various sizes.
Averted in Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion: the Ceres Research Lab is stationed in the middle of an asteroid field (possibly the Asteroid Belt, given the name of the station) and the asteroids therein are completely static in relation to one another, if densely packed. In the sequel, Samus only crashes into an asteroid because the X Parasite infection had knocked her out.
Averted in Darkstar One, where navigating an asteroid field is pretty easy, with the asteroids being large, slow and very dodgeable. The only marginally difficult part is entering into special asteroids to collect pieces of the Darkstar.
Justified in Dead Space, as the thicket is actually the debris kicked up by the mining ship the game takes place on pulling a continent-sized chunk out of the planet it's orbiting.
Sonic & Knuckles teaches us that there's a dense asteroid field in Earth's orbit. Who knew? Barely room to fit a hedgehog between the rocks, even.
In the classic TI-99/4A game, Parsec, asteroid belts are unusual indeed. The game is a side-scrolling shooter, where you fly a ship around the planet. Despite this fact, you encounter asteroid belts regularly! And each "belt" contains an identical pattern of asteroids, starting with a huge column of rocks coming at you. Each subsequent belt comes ever faster, which suggests they should have crashed into each other ages ago.

Western Animation

Futurama's episode "A Flight To Remember" lampshades this. Zapp Brannigan deliberately makes a "course correction" to the safe flight of the pleasure cruise to take the spaceship through an asteroid field. After several near misses with asteroids, he then pilots the ship directly into a black hole.
- Comets. They were comets, "The icebergs of the galaxy". Y'know, 'cause it was the Titanic.
- Not to mention that in "Love and Rocket", Leela is having to sweve about like she's driving on ice whilst piloting through a field of asteroids.
Invader Zim interestingly averted this in one episode. Yes, Zim piloted a ship into the asteroid belt during a dogfight with Dib, and yes, it was destroyed by the asteroids. They were, respectively, piloting Mars and Mercury.
- How's that an aversion? Even the densest bits of the asteroid belt would easily accomodate the passage of a Mars-sized object without any direct collisions, and if one were to happen, it may, depending on the size of the asteroid, be very bad news for anyone on the surface of the planet, but it couldn't even begin to "destroy" it in any meaningful sense.
  - Well to be fair. The planet was never destroyed. Only the control platform required to pilot the giant planet engine was. Mars kept on cruising along the universe, eventually taking out a good portion of the Irken fleet and our solar system became short of one red planet.

Web Original

Invoked in the AH Dot Com The Series episode The Machine, in which Captain Dr. What (whose knowledge of how the universe works is mainly based on old movies) tries to hide from the Vendetta in an asteroid belt, and the most knowledgeable GBW keeps trying to point out that the asteroids are too dispersed for this to work.

Real Life

Until the Pioneer 10 space probe passed through the asteroid belt, nobody really knew how dense the belt was. Only several thousand big lumps had been spotted up to that time, but there was a well-founded worry that the craft would be peppered with impacts from many small or tiny rocks. Luckily Pioneer (and all later missions that went beyond Mars) met with nothing whatsoever.

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