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In war, one should seek to take and hold the high ground. From there, the enemy's movements are clearly visible, and he will struggle just to reach you, let alone fight you. High orbit is the highest ground there is. — The Codex Astartes, Warhammer 40000
When it absolutely, positively, has to be destroyed on time, nothing beats your own remote-controlled, satellite-mounted laser cannon.
A variation of the " Wave Motion Gun", Kill Sats have the added advantage that you don't need to be anywhere near either the weapon or the target. Instead, you can fire it from the safety of your headquarters: your satellite will move into position and unleash a shiny descending Pillar Of Light on your unsuspecting target. Power/accuracy on Kill Sats vary, ranging from "lone vehicle" to "entire building" to (rarely) "town or small city." Planet busters are another category entirely, as firing them remotely from anywhere on the surface is inadvisable.
Since it's considered poor form to snipe your opponent from such a risk-free distance, Kill Sats are generally the realm of villains. So-called good guys who resort to these will, at best, fail miserably. If Everything Is Online in their world (and you know it is), there is always the risk of control falling into the wrong hands. In video games, Kill Sats are frequently used by the good guys (ie the player) but usually requiring some sort of targeting system on the ground in the vicinity of the target (distance varies from a few meters to a few miles). If the good guys do have one, its precision and accuracy are emphasized, often by providing the bad guys with a less precise weapon of equivalent power (such as a nuclear missile).
Of course, in the hands of either side, it would end the story in a hurry if these could be used repeatedly — none of the opposing side could poke their nose into the open without risking vaporization. Therefore:
- It's prohibitively expensive, time-intensive, and/or just plain difficult to get it moved over the target and charged, making it something that can't be used regularly or that can be avoided.
- Or It Only Works Once, because there was only enough power/ammo to fire it the one time, or because the heroes sabotage it or its control system before the villains can shoot again.
- Or, most often, some combination of the two, the former giving the opportunity for the heroes to do the latter.
Alternatively, it's not active at all yet, in which case the story centers around making sure it never gets off its first shot. In these cases it generally leans toward the powerful end of the scale.
Kill Sats sometimes display the orbital properties of their more benign counterparts, the Spy Satellites, able to move themselves over any target in record time and then park themselves there to get off as many shots as they please. More often, thankfully, the writers actually pay attention to how satellites work and incorporate that into the plot ("we've got two hours to destroy the control center before the satellite is in position over our headquarters!")
Any villain seeking to get their private space program off the ground (pun most definitely intended) is probably doing so to put one of these bad boys in orbit ( never mind what it actually gets used for ). Spy villains love these things. The Ancient Conspiracy may already have a full network of Death Ray Sats secretly in orbit, but they're careful about using it regularly, lest someone catch on.
The Standard Sci Fi Fleet can and will take this Up To Eleven, with the heavier ships turning their guns on a helpless planet below.
An early test fire of these may create the Doomed Hometown.
The trope name is a parody of "TelSat", the TV satellite system.
A popular way to rain Death From Above.
The Kill Sat is fundamentally a tool of modern societies:
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Anime & Manga
- SOL in Akira. Impressively, it got off several blasts in a short period (albeit poorly aimed) and probably could have kept it up all day if it hadn't been blown out of the sky by Tetsuo after he'd lost his right arm to the satellite.
- Technically, when Tetsuo flew up to it, he screwed with the controls and forced it to fire several times before bringing it down, which is why the two shots aimed at him had pinpoint accuracy, while the others fired when he was standing on it seemed to hit random locations in Neo-Tokyo.
- Battle Programmer Shirase has a technique called "Three Sisters Deathblow", where three scrapped Cosmos satellites are programmed for re-entry. The first two serve to shield the third from atmospheric heat, so that it can enter the atmosphere intact and precisely hit a target on the ground (or sea).
- One of the major subplots in the original Bubblegum Crisis revolved around a MacGuffin which would allow a Boomer to gain control of the military's network of Kill Sats.
- The first anime Kill Sat was in Cat's Eye, but they got the idea from Diamonds Are Forever.
- The Damocles from Code Geass. Technically not a satellite but a floating fortress armed with a cannon that shoots FLEIA warheads, but since it was supposed to be flown out of the atmosphere and placed on a geosynchronous orbit, it fulfills all the criteria for a Kill Sat (it's in space, it rains doom on people).
- The Cowboy Bebop episode "Jamming With Edward" featured a network of satellite-mounted lasers. They were built in an attempt to reduce the severity of meteor showers after the moon was destroyed by the hyperspace gate explosion. During the story, an A.I. which evolved in the network used them to carve graffiti on unoccupied areas of the planet surface. And then automated defense programs activated when Spike came to collect a bounty on it and tried to blast his fighter...
- Mikawa Kai uses a NASA Kill Sat in an effort to destroy the "Terminator" in Seto No Hanayome.
- Used in Nadia the Secret of Blue Water. Especially impressive considering the series takes place in the 19th century (the satellite was Atlantean technology).
- The original Sol Bianca OAV cheats a little, when Feb hides herself on an orbiting Space Ring with a very long-ranged laser sniper rifle to help her friends escape from their own execution.
- Gall Force ups the scale considerably with a planet-sized energy cannon orbiting the sun.
- Artemis, the trump card for the Searrs Foundation in Mai-HiME, is actually a meaningfully-named gigantic Mon in orbit.
- A pin-point precise version of this goes haywire in the All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku OAV.
- The Saint's Cradle of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, capable of directed planetary bombardment and inter-dimensional attacks once it positions itself in the orbits of the two moons. The final mission of the third season was to prevent it from reaching space before the TSAB fleet could arrive and destroy it.
- The Radam-occupied Orbital Ring around Earth in Tekkaman Blade is used for orbital bombardment in several episodes.
- Gintama, naturally, featured a comedic variation: Otae actually uses one of these in an episode as protection against Kondou stalking outside her dojo, along with spiked fences and pratfalls.
- One Piece's Enel does this as his strongest attack.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion included a Kill Sat angel. Eva being Eva, it fired a Mind Rape beam at you to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. Asuka was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of said beam, and needless to say, the results were not pretty.
- There was another Kill Sat angel earlier in the series, one that dropped bits of itself down on the earth before trying to kill Tokyo-3 by crashing down on the city. Living kamikaze killer satellite, anyone?
- The AMP in Silent Mobius has access to a Kill Sat, which seems to be privately owned by member Lebia Maverick. It also acts as her second brain, providing a ridiculous amount of extra data storage. Its name is Donald.
- In the final episode of Mnemosyne, Techno Wizard Mimi hijacks a Kill Sat belonging to her friend's company and uses it in an attempt to stop the Big Bad's plan. She fails.
- Subverted in the final episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig when the Tachikomas take control of the satellite containing the hardcopies of their collective AIs and move it into the path of a nuclear missile fired by an American Empire submarine in a noble act of cheerful self-sacrifice. This troper confesses to having a lump in his otherwise manly throat as this happened. This could be argued as an example of the Save Sat, perhaps the only one.
- Fairy Tail features the Aetherion, a magical version of this. It takes about an hour for the Council, an organization of the strongest wizards in the land, to charge up, and then it blasts down with the power of more than two billion, seven hundred million ideas of magical energy, which is about equivalent to the combined magical energies of all the wizards on the continent. According to one member of the Council, its destructive power is sufficient to wipe an entire country off the face of the planet. Naturally, the arc's villain absorbs the magical energy so he can use it as a power battery for his spell to resurrect history's most infamous black mage.
- Later we learn that the true purpose of the Xanatos Gambit behind the events of this Story Arc was to provoke the Council into such extreme action as firing the Aetherion, then reveal that they were fooled by the villain, thus undermining their authority.
- The Death-Para Machine from Transformers Super God Masterforce, which had the power to destroy Earth's ozone layer.
- Kill Sats show up in many Gundam series, although they aren't quite as common as the Colony Drop.
- Getter Robo features two of these, in Humongous Mecha form. The first, from the Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo OVA dispenses countless meteorites over North America, some of which are so large that they function as drop pods for other Humongous Mecha. The second is in the Getter Robo Go manga, and is of the laser variety. Though it can apparently fire multiple times in succession.
- Macross Plus reveals that, decades after Space War I, Earth has upgraded its defenses with a network of hundreds of thousands of densely-packed, automated Kill Sats that serve a dual purpose: vaporize orbital debris before it falls into the atmosphere, and discouraging invasion from external forces. When Isamu has to navigate this network and force his way into Earth, his only hope is to shoot down a couple of communication sats, hide among the falling debris, and pray. His companion has so little faith in their chances he just shuts himself off into hibernation.
- Dancougar handles this differently; the Kill Sat hits the sword of the titular machine, creating a gigantic laser sword for it to use.
- Securing the two keys of one of these was plot for the last third of the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX; coincidentally, its owner duels with a deck built around his veritable love for Kill Sats.
- In the Yu-Gi-Oh! Cyber World filler arc, the guy who takes the form of Jinzo summons a monster which is a satellite cannon, which is quite a a pain to Kaiba until he finally summons BEWD and destroys it..
- In the sexy spy anime NajicaBlitzTactics, one of the android girls actually is the remote control for a killsat. Likely the most beautiful remote control ever.
- In Eureka seveN, Dewey Novak fires one called "Oratorio #8" once at the Scab Coral to make a hole for The END to fly through, and again to target the beacon The END placed on the Control Cluster. After the second shot, the thing self-destructed and STILL rained death down on the poor planet with its highly explosive debris.
- Shaman King has one of these which is used against the main villain Hao Asakura, but he is unhurt by it.
Comics
- The penultimate issue of the Global Frequency comic is based around a preset plan by the US government to cause a population reduction by blasting a few major cities with Kill Sats. These are kinetic harpoons, a single shot weapon mostly by virtue of being a fancy orbiting crossbow that fires an artificial diamond at enough speed that the kinetic energy goes off like a nuke when it strikes the ground.
- The last Story Arc of the original Grendel series features the Sun-Disk, a superweapon used only once (to level Japan and and a future cold war), before its creator disables it and dies.
- Zodon's 'modifications' to the lunar lander in PS 238.
- An orbital particle beam cannon shows up in Planetary.
- Watchmen doesn't have kill sats, but one draft of the script for the movie did.
Films
- The Death Star
- Dr. Evil's "Alan Parsons Project" in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. He cheated a little by putting it on the Moon, but that's still in orbit.
- The Zeus space cannon in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Remember, never try to fire it twice in rapid succession.
- A recurring theme in James Bond films:
- In Real Genius, the lead characters are duped by their college professor into building a laser which is intended as the main weapon for a Kill Sat. They end up sabotaging the test to have it destroy the duplicitous professor's home.
- The plot of the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege 2 revolves around a Diabolical Mastermind seizing control of a military Kill Sat and threatening to use it to blow up Washington, D.C. Bonus points are awarded since the Diabolical Mastermind was the one who had built the satellite for the government in the first place before faking his own death.
- More bonus points are awarded for being a Kill Sat that shoots earthquakes.
- Extreme bonus points are awarded for being a Kill Sat that shoots earthquakes but still manages to destroy ostensibly high-flying bomber planes.
- In Godzilla vs. Megaguirus a satellite is used to attack Godzilla and barely manages to get off a shot on target before it burns up. The fact that it fired a solid projectile which took almost a minute to get to the ground against a notably fast-moving target makes one wonder why they bothered to put it orbit.
- Congo (1995) has a laser-powered satellite that is integral to the plot; the trope may actually be somewhat subverted here. (The book had them looking for diamonds to be used in next-generation semiconductors; at no point did lasers come into it.)
- The protagonists in Space Cowboys go into space to fix what they're told is a communications satellite, only to find out it's an old Soviet Kill Sat armed with nuclear missiles and in danger of activating.
- In Antz, a kid with a magnifying glass functions as the insect-sized version of this. He vaporizes one soldier ant before chasing the protagonists down with a beam of sunlight. They get away, but end up hopelessly lost in the process.
- The Narada's drill from Star Trek. It seems to blast some kind of epic fire rather than an actual laser, but it can punch straight to the core of a planet. This turns out to be problematic for Vulcan, as it allows the Romulans to drop a ball of black-hole-creating matter to the core and literally make it implode. Something like that in the hands of an angry and "particularly troubled" Romulans = NOT GOOD. Then again, Nero is possibly the best example of a Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds in any film to come out in the last decade.
- In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Soundwave's alt mode is that of a satellite. Instead of normal projectiles, however, he fires other Decepticons, notably his minion Ravage.
- The stolen Mac Guffin in Escape From L.A. is a control for a Kill Sat
Literature
- Silver Tower by Dale Brown. The title space station has a high energy laser weapon called Skybolt that's used to wipe out a swarm of Soviet cruise missiles and save an American naval fleet from destruction.
- Also worth mentioning his other original book (written around the same time as Silver Tower) Flight of the Old Dog, which involved the Russians with a nuclear powered laser in Siberia. Later, they deploy a mirror sat, and the American's deploy their own Kill Sat with X-Ray warheads in response.
- A very literal Kill Sat (and a rare occurrence of a Kill Sat being used by a good guy) is found in Jim Butcher's Death Masks. Harry's mentor Ebenezar McCoy brings down an old Soviet satellite on the home of villainous vampire Paolo Ortega, killing him and his dozens of vampire subjects... as well as the humans they fed from.
- The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy had as a major plot point the simultaneous development of anti-satellite weapons by the US and the USSR. As the lasers were ground-located, they weren't technically Kill Sats, but the US system included the ability to bounce the laser beam off of multiple orbiting mirrors, thus hitting any target on the planet. It worked, too, except that the laser was too weak to do much more than give the target a mild sunburn.
- The Nights Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton has planets surrounded by swarms of these, known as "Strategic Defense satellites". They usually are pointed outward to defend against attacks from space, but can be used against surface targets with devastating effects.
- Larry Niven's Ringworld is defended by a magnetically controlled X-Ray laser made by fluorescing sunspots, with a beam the width of Earth's moon.
- In Quicksilver by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the titular satellite was intended to be a relatively harmless (to biological material) EMP blast, but instead caused some sort of chain reaction which charged the air around the target to such a degree that hugely powerful bolts of lightning would strike the target instead.
- A Kill Sat named ODIN (Orbital Defence Initiative) appears in Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet, particularly the fourth (and last) book.
- In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, Fedmahn Kassad uses these to resolve a planet-wide hostage situation — by simultaneously attacking all of the terrorist ringleaders at once. The leader of the terrorists is even killed on live television mid-Sedgwick Speech, for bonus points.
- Powersat by Ben Bova: a microwave power satellite is turned into a kill sat by a bunch of terrorists.
- This Troper once wrote a short story: Celestial Beings Where the leader of the normal humans has an ace up his sleeve just in case his opponent pulled some applied phlebonium out of his arse, a low orbit ion cannon piloted by a friend who went crazy and obsesses over the red button. It works, multiple times.
- David Weber's Safehold series: the planet Safehold's prohibition on advanced technology is enforced by orbital platforms that, if they detect power sources, will unleash a kinetic bombardment capable of devastating a small continent. So far, no solution has been found.
- In a Star Wars Expanded Universe novel, Shatterpoint, a variation is used. Instead of the massive satellite firing a laser, it is thrown into the ground like a huge missile. Needless to say, a five ton chunk of metal hitting the ground at supersonic speeds causes quite a bit of damage.
Live Action TV
- Babylon 5, "Endgame"; When Sheridan's forces arrive at Earth and easily overwhelm most of the remnants of Earth Force fleet, President Clarke kills himself, after programming the planet's orbital defense system to take all of Earth with him. This means Sheridan's fleet must destroy the satellites before they fire.
- The X-Files episode "Kill Switch" centered around a network of Kill Sats, complete with a computer control system that developed its own ideas about how to use it.
- In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Ethon", the Ori supply one of these to the Rand Protectorate, one of two feuding governments on the world of Tegalus. It ends up destroying Earth's first starship, the Prometheus.
- Also, before the Ori, a network of Kill Sats is deployed ostensibly as a defense against external threats, but gets turned on terrestrial targets anyway as a scheme to Take Over The World. By a main character. But it was All Just A Dream, intended to show him that You Are Not Ready.
- The Asuran use a Kill Sat against Atlantis on Stargate Atlantis. The Kill Sat itself is a big ship with a stargate embedded in it. The beam is fired on the asuran homeworld through a stargate, and out the other onto Atlantis.
- The 1978 Quatermass series (aka Quatermass IV or The Quatermass Conclusion) featured an alien device that lured people into small areas and then engulfed them in a column of light. True Believers assumed that the light was transporting them to a better planet. No such luck. It was actually a kind of nasty and insidious form of Kill Sat, only just to make things worse there wasn't an actual satellite that could be shot down.
- The heroes of Angel are surprised and disturbed to find they have such a thing at their command (in the form of microwave laser satellites) after taking over Wolfram and Hart. Angel considers using them to wipe out all the bad guys rather than continue to live as a corporate drone.
Tabletop Games
- In Conspiracy X, the remains of the former Soviet Russian secret organization "Project Rasputin" (merged with AEGIS and NASA after the fall of the Soviet Republic) grants its members access to the top-secret satellite "Alexis". Since Project Rasputin's mission was the study of psionic powers and to discover and train psychics, satellite Alexis was build around the world's largest psychotron. It could be moved into a geosynchronous position over any spot on Earth, although this took time and wasn't done on a whim, so you better needed a good reason and even better standing in your organization to request it. A crew of psychics (originally stationed on MIR, but Aegis later stationed them on Earth) trained in Greater Telepathy or Greater Bio-PK could charge the psychotron and use it to affect a designated spot on the Earth's surface or below it, with an area of effect ranging from one building to several square kilometers. Telepathy allowed mind probes or mind wipes, Bio-PK could be used to put all people in that area (except for Voids and Psinks) into a trance state. So technically speaking, Alexis was no killer satellite. But this editor thinks that, since the rules of the RPG allowed psychics with Bio-PK to learn how to kill with a thought by giving people aneurisms or heart attacks, it would have been possible to use Alexis as a weapon of mass destruction.
- For the more direct, NASA also had "Gun Stars" that would fire hockey-puck sized chunks of metal really fast at ground targets.
- In the old World Of Darkness, the Technocracy had secret orbital satellites for spying, defense against alien incursions, you name it (as well as various research stations on Luna and some moons of Jupiter and at Lagrange points throughout the solar system, a defense parameter around Earth and Moon, a Dyson Sphere in Deep Space...). As revealed in the supplement Time of Thin Blood, when an ancient vampire arose from slumber in India during the End Times and laid waste to Bangladesh the Technocracy executed "Code Ragnarök"; they finally managed to destroy the vampire by first stunning him with fusion bombs and then incinerating him with the help of a network of mirror satellites and a concentrated ray of sunlight from heaven.
- In Warhammer 40000, Exterminatus is the command used by the Inquisition when demons or heresy spread too far across the planet to be contained by covert or even overt military action. All possible (or at least important) Imperial forces pull out, and the orbiting fleet blows the hell out of the planet in any of a wide variety of ways, ranging from glassing the surface with hundreds of multi-gigaton warheads and ship-based beam weapons, to bombs filled with viruses that turn all organic matter into sludge, and "cyclonic torpedoes" that light the atmosphere on fire in a rather Homeworldesque way. All of these methods aim for one thing: rendering life on the planet impossible.
- Even when you don't need to destroy the entire planet, the various factions aren't above shelling the battlefield from orbit.
- There is a giant defense system in Terra's solar system meant to defend it against enemy fleets thousands strong. It includes Kill Sats, moons that were hollowed out and made into bases, and a whole space fleet to name a few items.
- You're forgetting that — this being Warhammer 40k, that sometimes — setting the atmosphere on fire, rendering organic matter into its constituent molecules or just plain old turning everything into molten slag JUST ISN'T ENOUGH... for this, there are two stage torpedoes which will actually blow a planet up.
- ... no there aren't. Warhammer is limited to "melt world to molten slag" firepower, not "blow planet into smithereens" firepower.
- That is massively incorrect. Ever heard of the Planet Killer? Or the Blackstone Fortresses? The latter can take out stars as well as planets.
- Those are special weapons which are not standard issue for your average Segmentum fleets.
- The former is an impossible engine of war that exists in a few dimensions we don't know of and the latter were built by a god. They are most certainly the exception to the rule rather than the citation. That said, enough ships can reduce a planet to rubble (Caliban), it just takes a lot more than a single weapon.
- This troper is quite confident that cyclonic torpedoes are the ones that bore deep down the surface and detonate to disrupt the tectonic plates of a planet, causing massive volcanic eruptions and continent-shattering earthquakes etc. The above mentioned planet-wide firestorms are the result of extensive virus bombing (with the aptly-named "Life Eater" virus): When a planet worth of organic matter rapidly decays, it releases a lot of volatile gases, which can then be ignited from orbit by any type of weapon.
- That is correct. The cyclonic torpedoes cracks the surface and mantle of the planet and the virus bombs incinerates all organic life by first melting them into slag and then igniting all the gasses they release into planet-wide firestorms. While you will rarely see a Earth Shattering Kaboom in 40k, there are stil plenty of ways to wipe out all of civilization from orbit. It should also be noted that Exterminatus is extremely rare since it makes any future use of the planet close to impossible. Since the Imperium thinks in decades ahead, they find it far better to just abandon a planet in most cases and come back for it later when they have amassed a new army.
- In Shadowrun, "Thor shots" are Kill Sats that fire space junk at the target. It has similar power to a nuclear device and is treated as such. Orbital lasers also exist, and one was used on the dragon Alamais. He survived.
- The Fist of Shiva from the Feng Shui supplement "Seed of the New Flesh" is a Buro weather control satellite that doubles as a Kill Sat. In the adventure that features it, the players have to forge an alliance between all the other factions in order to commandeer a space shuttle, take over the Fist of Shiva, and use it to destroy the Buro-controlled 2056-era Vatican in order to wipe out not only a powerful Buro feng shui site, but also to stop the Buro from using their new Transworld Maglev Network to make the site the most powerful in the world and warping the world's chi to an unimaginable degree.
- Dungeons & Dragons has a spell called "Apocalypse from the Sky". Guess what it does...
Video Games
Web Animation
- The graphic novel-esque flash series Broken Saints features a fanatical Corrupt Corporate Executive who sets up a Kill Sat network in order to broadcast a signal triggering his vision of Judgment Day. It also has the ability to lock on to anywhere on the planet and emit highly-focused EM pulses.
Web Comics
- In Megatokyo, the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division used "a high-intensity satellite-based laser" to "neutralize" Ed and his plasma cannon, in this strip.
- A military Kill Sat was fired with great precision at just one person in this strip of Antihero for Hire.
- Exterminatus Now, being a combination of Sonic the Hedgehog and Warhammer 40,000, is NAMED after the command that field agents of the Mobian Inquisition can use in times of imminent defeat or upon discovering a massive demon incursion to request a direct strike from an orbital weapons platform on their current position — which means if they don't manage to get far away quickly enough, they too will go out with a bang. Note that this is a toned down version of the W40K Exterminatus...
- 1 (what is the Exterminatus?), 2, 3 (the command is given), 4, 5, 6, 7 (The Exterminatus), 8 (big explosions make guys happy)
- In Exploitation Now, the Bad Guy is incinerated by his own "defense" satellite after the heroine reprogrammed it to target the building he was in. (Actually they were both on the roof of said building.) 1, 2, 3
- The RPG-spoof Adventurers has a laser-obsessed Big Bad who loves nothing more than using his orbital-based Death Ray to toast bread and make sammiches.
- The "Eyes in the Sky" from Sluggy Freelance. In the ghoul-infested world, these "Eyes" were used to rain destruction down upon attacking ghouls.
- Used in This strip about Sound of Music robots from Truck Bearing Kibble.
- Userfriendly is also fond of this trope, in the form of "Crowbar Satellites", which... well, drop crowbars from orbit. When the User Friendly crew were visiting Antarctica, one of the techs living there used a satellite to drop a crowbar on the unfortunate Predator wandering around outside with a soldering iron stuck in his eye (it's a long story), exploding him quite satisfactorily. Pitr (resident evil-genius wannabe) eventually got his own Crowbar Satellite... at least until one of the other techs found the remote and mistook it for a handheld game, wasting all the ammo.
- In The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja, Dracula is far too elegant to bother with something as blunt as an orbital satellite. He uses Moon Lasers instead.
- NSTA revolves around the operations of the titular National Satellite Tracking Agency, which manages orbital satellites used for both techno-telepathic brain-borrowing computation and orbital laser strikes. The first strip to introduce the latter functionality involved precision brain surgery by thought-controlled orbital laser.
- The Tower of Babel in SSDD is an odd variation in that the satellite is only a mirror designed to redirect the lasers fired from a very large, very phallic looking tower. Apparently previous attempts at orbital weapons were either really large and easy to shoot down, or underpowered.
Western Animation
- The second Watchtower in Justice League Unlimited had one of these, which caused the heroes no end of grief when it got hijacked for villainous purposes.
- One episode named it the "Binary Fusion Generator", which (while never spoken as such in the show) has a convenient acronym.
- In the Batman Beyond OVA movie, Return of the Joker, the Joker manages to gain control of a Kill Sat. Terry is forced into a chase scene with the beam through downtown Gotham at one point. (The commentary notes that this is a Shout Out to the Akira example from above.)
- In the Justice League episode Maid of Honor, villain Vandal Savage takes control of a mass driver equipped Kill Sat owned by the country kingdom of his intended bride...and is promptly crushed (but not killed, thanks to his regenerative powers) by a shot from the weapon after his plans are foiled.
- Code Lyoko: XANA once hacked into a laser satellite, apparently to try to vaporize Yumi... again.
- Rockos Modern Life episode "Teed Off" featured a satellite that launched grand pianos.
- In an episode of Galactic Guardians, Darkseid tries to turn the peaceful Star City into a Kill Sat. When the heroes foil his plan, he is forced to settle for a Colony Drop.
- In the 1981 Spider-Man cartoon, Doctor Doom introduced us to a satellite-mounted laser — the laser part of which was actually a holdover from an earlier episode — and used it to play with the Pacific Ring of Fire. As far as the "kill" part, the satellite turns out to have a surprisingly localized effect when it gets knocked off course, burns a path to his castle and bodily vaporizes him.
- Johnny Bravo was once fried by one when he started hitting on a random nerd girl.
- Invader Zim parodies this. When Dib discovers that Zim is weak against water, naturally a water fight ensues. This escalates until Zim builds a giant, orbital water balloon launcher.
- In GI Joe: Resolute Cobra uses a kill sat to blow up Moscow. Successfully, in the first ten minutes of the first episode.
- In the Dilbert series, Dogbert causes some havoc with one of these.
- Ronald Reagan in Celebrity Deathmatch tried to kill Ayatollah Khomeini with the Star Wars satellite defense system. The first attempt failed and killed a random audience member instead, but the second attempt succeeded.
- The Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers episode "Queen's Lair" revolved around the Rangers' efforts to take out one of these before The Queen of the Crowns took out Earth with it. This actually made for one of the darker episodes of the series.
- In Beast Wars, an alien race known as the Vok had built a gigantic death ray within a second artificial moon orbiting Earth with the purpose of wiping out all life on Earth and starting anew (Or So I Heard). Said ray was blown up when Optimus Primal attempted a Heroic Sacrifice. He got better.
Real Life
- The actual deployment of nukes in space is prohibited by the 1969 Outer Space Treaty.
- Which had the unfortunate side-effect of indefinately postponing all research into nuclear detonation driven spaceflight, such as Project Orion.
- Actually the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited atmospheric tests of atomic weapons because of the fallout they caused. Since Project Orion was to be a spacecraft propelled by atomic explosions, atmospheric tests using atomic bombs would probably have been necessary at some stage in its development. Orion was awesome, but fallout is uncool.
- One of the best-known real life examples (although it never passed the experimental stages) was the US "strategic defense initiative" or "Star Wars" program which was shelved in the closing years of the Cold War. Principally a system to intercept intercontinental missiles from space, it also included "Rods from God" and "Brilliant Pebbles", anti-fortification weapons which (in laymen's terms) were meant to drop big rods or lumps of metal from orbit at underground bunkers, using the kinetic energy of the weapon rather than explosives or nukes to do the damage.
- This troper's favorite SDI idea was the pop-up one-shot X-Ray laser satellite powered by a nuke and theoretically toasting an area as wide as a football field. The single test towards this design proved inconclusive, though serendipitously fueled the development of plenty of other (often civil) technologies. Still, it may have been the inspiration for Goldeneye, above.
- Rods from God is supposedly back on the drawing board now, as a possible way of discreetly dealing with hardened targets belonging to terrorists or rogue states.
- In a rather odd form of life imitating art, noted sci-fi author Larry Niven was an advisor to the SDI program.
- During the early Cold War era there was a think tank assembled made out of prominent sci-fi writers (including (IIRC) Asimov and Hubbard (He WAS a prominent sci-fi writer before he turned nutjob cult leader))
- In the decades since it was abandoned, many of the engineers and scientists who were involved in SDI have openly admitted that they'd never expected their projects to work: to them, it was just a handy way to get funding for pure physics research under the guise of applied military R&D.
- The Russian military space station OPS-2/Salyut 3 sported a self-defense gun that was tested successfully on a target-satellite (one has to wonder if they put a target up there or simply shot an American one). The intent here was probably taking out potential US killer satellites.
- They probably shot down one of their own obsolete birds, as taking out a functioning US satellite would be considered an act of war.
- The Russians also had the Polyus project, an advanced weapons satellite that would have sported particle weaponry, orbital mines, and an anti-observance shroud (read: cloaking device, or rather very dark cover). Would have — it was launched upside down, executed a 360-degree spin instead of a 180, and crashed into the ocean.
- During the late 1990s, the Russian government announced plans for building a network of mirror satellites to capture and collect sunlight and direct it onto subpolar regions (i.e. Siberia) during winter, to improve agriculture or cut down on electrical lighting during the polar winter. The project seems to have been dropped quietly, due to costs. (Speaking as an ecologist, this editor can only say, thank God they didn't build it. It's sometimes hard to get engineers to understand that their "brilliant" ideas are not so great when seen from another viewpoint.)
- Older Than They Think: Sputnik 1, the first satellite EVER, freaked a lot of people out when it went up, although they were afraid of the possibility of the launch vehicles the Russians now had being used to launch nuclear warheads rather than the satellite itself.
- Even Older Than They Think: The Nazi's called theirs the Sonnengewehr or "Sun Gun", which in turn was based on a 1929 design. A giant space-borne parabolic mirror, it would have been used to burn down cities from space. Let me repeat: The Nazis were building a giant space-borne sun laser. More info here.
- The ultimate proposed kill-sat is the Nicoll-Dyson Laser. Using a shell of satellites in orbit around the sun (the original proposal for a Dyson Sphere, not a solid shell) which collect solar energy and convert it into a laser beam, James Nicoll calculated that one could use the satellites to create a phased array laser which would have an initial beam width equal to the size of the satellites' orbits and an effective range of millions of light years.
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