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"FIRE EVERYTHING!"
Nero, Star Trek (2009)

A tactic wherein a military vehicle or craft — often a Humongous Mecha — launches a massive salvo of missiles at a target (sometimes more missiles than you'd think the craft would be able to hold). The missiles often follow artistic curving trajectories for no apparent reason, though strategically it may simply make them more difficult to dodge (or intercept, if there's any usable point defence). Occasionally, this is explained in Space Opera as the effect a ship's energy/force/gravity field has on the missiles. In some cases, this is justified by having the missile silos oriented up (or down) to allow for more surface area-and, in turn, more missiles. If More Dakka is about spamming bullets, then Macross Missile Massacre is the missile equivalent of it.

A High-Speed Missile Dodge is usually an effective counter. A slightly more proactive solution is to launch your own missiles or, if you have the option of More Dakka, shooting them down. Trying to lead them away and crashing into an enemy is usually reserved for Ace Pilots. Can often be rendered into a Worf Barrage. Missiles may engage in Roboteching (which should not be confused with Macross Missile Massacre, even though Macross is part of Robotech).

Named after the Humongous Mecha in the Macross metaseries who fire swarms of missiles (specifically, 'micromissiles') that behave in precisely this way. It has also been called "Itano Circus," after animation director Ichiro Itano, who pioneered the most common aesthetic look of the MMM.

There are several actual weapons that fire a Macross Missile Massacre. In fact a whole lot of real-life weapon systems are either designed or can be adapted to use this tactic, and if nothing else you can just gather a whole bunch of one-shot launchers together Hamas or Hezbollah-style; see Real Life examples below.

In fiction (other than Video Games), it will often overlap with a Worf Barrage, especially if it's used against a single target.

A form of Death In All Directions, There Is No Kill Like Overkill, and Impossibly Cool Weapon. May overlap with Fatal Fireworks. If this is fired from another missile in the form of a cluster or multi missile, then it's Recursive Ammo. See also Beam Spam, the laser variant, and Magic Missile Storm, the magical projectile variant. See also the related video game genre, Bullet Hell.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Kaoruko from Akahori Gedou Hour Lovege often does this with her Powered Armor, which has four missile launchers (two on her legs, two on her arms) that fire like this.
  • Not surprisingly, The Big O also carries a stupidly large number of missiles in its chest cavity. Unfortunately, while they are deployed nearly every episode, their total destructive power barely rivals that of a road flare.
    • In addition Big O only has enough missiles for a single salvo per battle. When Roger has to bring it out twice in one episode, his Butler/Mechanic Norman informs him that he hasn't had time to reload it's ammunition yet leaving him at a disadvantage in the second fight.
  • In the final episode of Blue Submarine No. 6, the title Blue Sub 6 launches a Macross Torpedo Massacre at the Ghost Ship.
  • The Parabellum lets off one of these in Episode 23 of Bodacious Space Pirates against the Grand Cross. It shows that its shields are less effective against physical bombardment and several pirate ships use these to destroy a Grand Cross during the final battle.
  • Two-thirds into Code Geass R2, Jeremiah Gottwald new mecha, Sutherland Sieg, fires a huge missile barrage he refers to as... THE STORM OF HIS LOYALTY!!!
  • Crest of the Stars and its sequels made their battleships purely missile platforms that take Macross Missile Massacre to the absolutely ridiculous extent (the majority of the mass of ships multiple kilometers long consists solely of thousand and thousands of missiles). The sheer weight of fire ONE battleship could deliver would put Honor Harrington to shame.
  • Cowboy Bebop:
    • In "Honky Tonk Woman", the criminal boss's ship fires one of these at Faye's fleeing ship.
    • In "Gateway Shuffle", a baddie fires a giant missile full of a biological payload which the goodies attempt to intercept, which then splits into three missiles. They destroy all but one and are about to blow up the last when it splits into thousands more missiles.
  • Daicon III & IV:
    • In III, the protagonist unleashes a number of missiles from her backpack that destroy several ships (and Godzilla).
    • One scene in IV shows the SDF-1 Macross (combined with the Yamato and the Arcadia) evading several missiles before launches its own array at the VF-1 Valkyrie, destroying it in a series of explosions.
  • Something of a Digimon tradition: the highest digivolved form of The Lancer's partner tends to be (but isn't always) an insanely weapon-laden cyborg.
    • Digimon Adventure's MetalGarurumon used Grace Cross Freezer/Ice Wolf Claw, an attack spamming freezing missiles, and cool (no pun intended) enough to be featured in his transformation sequence.
    • Digimon Tamers: the Humongous Mecha-sized MegaGargomon had hundreds of missiles of all sizes that come from various hidden compartments all over his body. (However, this attack, while cool-looking, seldom finishes a fight. They just soften the bad guy up for the two hugely oversized (and oddly happy) shoulder missiles which are the finisher.)
    • Many of the hostile artificial Digimon in the Battle of Adventurers movie such as Baromon could fire missiles from within their bodies even if the natural versions of those Digimon had no such ability.
    • MetalGarurumon and his Grace Cross Freezer return in Digimon Adventure: (2020), now combined with a Freeze Ray Beam Spam. Omegamon can also fire missiles from the Garuru Cannon, in keeping with his Reference Book profile, though he only does so while fighting Abaddomon Core. He fires them from hidden ports on the shoulder and snout of the Garuru Cannon. On the villains' side is DarkKnightmon, who summons several rocket-propelled copies of their lance to home in on WarGreymon during their final confrontation. Given that WarGreymon is a level higher, they're pretty ineffective.
  • Eureka Seven features the Macross Missile Massacre prominently, in both missile and "homing laser" form. Unsurprisingly, it shares a mechanical designer with the Macross franchise.
    • Its sequel, Eureka Seven AO starts using the Macross Missile Massacre in episode 13, just as the connections between the two shows start tightening up.
  • Genesis Climber MOSPEADA: With Macross, another part of Robotech. This is Stig (aka Scott Bernard)'s preferred method of disposing of enemies. In fact, before TV Tropes even existed, Robotech fans were referring to the Macross Missile Massacre by their own term: "Scott Bernarding".
  • Gundam:
    • Gundam Wing: Trowa Barton's Gundam Heavyarms. Despite an armament of 52 missiles + 36 homing missiles, instead of using them against multiple targets, he invariably launches all of them in a single barrage against a few targets.
      • Wing also has a non-Gundam example like the strike cruiser the Preventers use in Endless Waltz. It has dozens of detachable modules, each of which fires out quite a few guided missiles.
    • Roybea Roy's Gundam Leopard also uses this kind of attack.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 :Ptolemaios II, the Celestial Being mothership from the second season uses this trope heavily. Gundam Arios (and to a much, much smaller extent, Gundam Cherudim) use this too. But its support unit, GN Archer, really takes the cake, especially considering its relatively smaller dimensions.
      • In the first season, the Assault Containers are actually equipped with two Gatling Guns... that fire fricking GN Missiles!. In the second season, these are moved to the main ship, as they don't need Assault Containers anymore. Yes, they have a battleship with Gatling Guns that fire missiles. Regular Missile Launchers are overrated.
      • The Arios's first season predecessor, Gundam Kyrios, sort of does this, but has to carry a large missile launcher on it's fighter jet mode.
      • Episode 22 of the second season the bad guys spread a cloud across the entire battlefield which prevents the use of beam weapons. Cue nearly two minute long battle royale of everyone firing and dodging MMMs.
      • The Federation space forces do this a lot in the movie, but to little effect against the aliens.
      • In the movie, practically everything that has weapons is capable of this, as it is needed to destroyed the ELS fast enough. Even Sniper-types aren't excluded. Gundam Zabanya, the newest Sniper-Type Gundam, is coveres in small armor-plates, that turn out to be GN Missile Containers... And it is armed with 76 missiles, aside from its 10 (14 in the final mission) GN Rifle Bits and Holster Bits (that can also fire, by the way). What exactly happened to the Dynames-line being Snipers?
      • Gadelaza, a huge Mobile Armor the size of a freaking battleship, carries 256 GN Missiles, each bigger than Zabanya's Rifle Bits. It also carries 10 Gundam-sized GN Bits that each carry 14 smaller GN Fangs.
    • Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory: Taken to another level by the Gundam GP03 Dendrobium. Its basic "Stamen" form is a conventional RX-78 clone with no missiles at all. But when it docks with the "Orchis" mobile armor, it can launch a salvo of almost TWO THOUSAND missiles.
    • Gundam SEED and its sequel Gundam SEED Destiny. A notable example is the METEOR support craft. A Spiritual Successor-slash-Homage to the Orchis, it carries a grand total of 77 missiles spread all over its body. Combined with its beam cannons and the weapons of the mobile suit that pilots it, it can pull off the MMM and Beam Spam all at the same time.
      • SEED and SEED Destiny also feature the Eternal, the ship that Lacus Clyne captains and houses the METEORs when not in use, which has missile launchers for most of its weaponry. Though the exact number of launchers isn't given, going by what is seen on screen it has at least 74. As a result, almost every shot of the ship firing its weapons is an MMM.
    • The Zssa from Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ is a mobile suit built around carrying a crapton of missile launchers in its...everywhere, really. Shoulders, arms, legs, back, chest, and so on. It was also a mass-produced suit, so imagine waves of these things launching an entire armory's worth of missiles each.
    • In Gundam: Reconguista in G has the G-self with the assault pack which is similar to the meteor from seed with a load of missiles.
  • In the Haruhi Suzumiya anime, Kyon does this with a bunch of fireworks from his bike, proving that even he is willing to do something stupidly dangerous for the sake of a Shout-Out. It is also a reference of how Itano created this trope in the first place; see the first example filed under Real Life.
  • Cure Sunshine's Gold Forte Burst in HeartCatch Pretty Cure!.
  • London. An armored airship, turning out hundreds of V2 missiles, like they're paper planes. And that's discounting the artificial Nazi undead the airship keeps belching. Little gems like that make Hellsing awesome in all its gory glory.
  • In the backstory of Infinite Stratos, the nuclear weapons of the world's superpowers were hacked and launched at Japan. White Knight, the first IS, destroyed all of them single-handidly. It is all but stated outright that the inventor of the IS set up both the missiles and the White Knight to make the IS look good.
  • In Kirameki Project a giant fighting mecha called "The Perfect" fires a ridiculously large salvo of missiles at a magical girl, Nene.
  • Quite a few monsters and other enemies in Kirby: Right Back at Ya! love this tactic, each using different kinds of ammo as missiles, such as Sasuke while he's controlling a mechanical King Dedede float (which fires fireworks), as well as Togeira (which fires exploding spikes), Escar-droid in its third form, and the Destrayas (which fire fireballs).
  • Alliance warships in Legend of the Galactic Heroes are capable to doing this, although they tend to save this for desperation attacks.
  • Parodied in Love Hina Again, where Kaolla Su uses missile launchers attached to her arms and legs to generate the effect. Subverted somewhat in the Love Hina Spring Movie, when the latest incarnation of Mecha Tama does not, in fact, have unlimited missiles. It runs out.
  • Macross:
    • Trope Namer. Crafts such as the YF-21 use this attack. Taken to the extreme with the VF-25 Messiah Armored pack, which carries 210 Missiles.
    • In episode 47 of Macross 7 the fleet launches an MMM composed entirely of NUKES.
    • The trope is so integral to the series that the Insectoid Alien Vajra from Macross Frontier actually produce missile like growths within their bodies to invoke the trope.
    • The Zentraedi are approaching Earth, and how do the Earth-built ARMD platforms contribute the first space battle in human history? Launch fighters, and then a crap ton of giant missiles. It even nets them a couple Zentraedi vessels.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion:
    • Sachiel, the third Angel, faces a massive missile attack throughout the entire first episode.
    • There's a huge N-2 missile attack on the angel Sahaquiel,.
    • In the movie End of Evangelion, after realizing the true meaning of AT-Field, Asuka dodges a MMM from the UN army with an apparently several miles high jump.
  • In Panzer World Galient, Artillery Panzers used that tactic. In episode 7, a large squad surrounded a cave where Jordy and his allies were hiding and shot a salvo of explosive projectiles over and over again.
  • Pokémon: The Original Series: In Johto's "The Big Balloon Blow-Up", the Team Rocket trio fires miniature missiles at a chasing Noctowl and Pikachu. At least six rounds of at least six missiles in two small rocket launchers were fired in the episode, and the launchers couldn't possibly hold more than one round.
  • Project A-Ko: B-Ko's "Akagiyama Missiles".
  • In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Homura uses her time-stopping power to do this manually with thousands of bazookas.
  • Gokudera's Rocket Bombs in Reborn! (2004) tend to be used like this.
  • Rebuild World:
    • The relic thief Kain tries to kill Akira with one of these launched from his Mini-Mecha, but Alpha makes Akira sacrifice his Cool Bike as a shield to survive it. Kain also levels the front of the building Akira subsequently takes cover in due to getting sick of being sniped at.
    • The Battle Butler Lattice uses his flying set of Powered Armor to launch one of these at Akira, who is pursuing his master's truck via bike. The barrage of missiles has Recursive Ammo splitting into multiple warheads. Alpha uses the Abnormal Ammo of Akira's sword that functions by holding in place liquid metal with force fields, to make a shield dome around Akira and his bike.
    • In another Recursive Ammo barrage, thirty mobile artillery platforms launch one of these at the slums around Akira's Home Base at the start of the main phase of The Siege, but with Trick Bomb warheads that spread Ominous Fog that jams sensors but also has the Gravity Screw effect of slowing bullets to help prevent Collateral Damage that might make Kugamayama City Neutral No Longer.
  • In Samurai Pizza Cats, Lucille has this occur when she's upset, and the projectiles are stored within her hair.
  • A sequence in School Rumble had Harima racing to deliver his finished manga manuscript to the publisher while riding a giant curry dish as a sled. A truck carrying frozen tuna crashed — and fired its cargo at him, Macross Missile Massacre style. No really.
  • Sengoku Youko gives us one made of trees.
  • While not technically a complete Macross Missile Massacre, the ending battle in OVA 5 of the air combat series Sentou Yousei Yukikaze resembles a pseudo 3M, as every surviving aircraft is remotely taken over by the Yukikaze AI and salvo fires all of their remaining missiles simultaneously. The result is several hundred to several thousand full-sized Air to Air missiles blanketing the horizon. Called a pseudo 3M because all those missiles really were needed to break through the swarms of JAM and allow Yukikaze to escort the Flip Knights & their nukes to the heart of the JAM central consciousness and because all of the aircraft carried a finite and generally realistic number of missiles individually.
  • Kouji Kabuto pulls this off in the final episode of Shin Mazinger, with Rocket Punches, no less.
    • And in the original Mazinger Z series, several Mechanical Beasts (such like Brighton J2, Jinray S1 and Daima U5) used that strategy to attack Mazinger Z with sundry results. The mobile fortresses of Baron Ashura and Count Brocken also deployed an unholy amount of missiles — or torpedoes — when they engaged in combat against Mazinger Z.
    • And in the sequel, Great Mazinger, one of the most used tactis of Jun Hono was showering her enemy with Venus A's OppaiMissiles.
    • The Vegan warships and mini-saucers of UFO Robo Grendizer also blasted their targets with barrage of missiles.
    • And in the short story New Mazinger Mazinger-Z itself used that tactic against an army of monsters.
  • Shugo Chara!: The variation within the form of an attack from Rima Mashiro's "Clown Drop" Character Transformation, the "Juggling Party", which does this with juggling pins. While it only(?) creates six of them, whereas most times this trope appears, the target is larger/around about the same size as the offender, the X-Characters are far physically smaller than her, therefore, it indeed evens in.
  • In early episodes of Space Runaway Ideon this appears to be the Ideon's only method of attack. In later episodes, when said missiles have (literal?) god-like power, this will easily devastate fleets.
  • In Submarine 707 R, the U-X uses these to sink two ships above it during the introduction.
  • Symphogear: This is one of Chris Yukine's favorite tactics, in conjunction with lots and lots of bullets. The basic version, Megadeth Party, shoots about two dozen foot-long rockets. Later upgrades include Megadeth Quartet (good for armies of mooks) and Megadeth Symphony (good for inconvenient mountains).
  • In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann the Missile Massacre is a favored "tactic" of Attenborough, who is prone to pushing the Fire button of the warships without warning.
    • It does become useful later on when the Missile Massacre simultaneously hits every point at every time in the universe, annihilating the entire enemy force throughout all times, until that point it never really does much.
    • Simon did something similar to this a couple of times with projectile drills.
      • Not to mention Rossiu had a small Moment of Awesome for himself as he takes over while Simon rests after that projectile drill attack — he weaves and dodges the Gurren-Lagann through a veritable three-ring Itano Circus worth of missiles.
    • In the second movie, Yoko pulls off one of these by herself right after Kittan's death. The camera has to pull back a few times to show the sheer number of Anti-Spiral mechs she destroyed in one salvo.
  • The Nirvana from Vandread shoots missiles this way, with the bonus that they can circumvent friendly troops while streaking toward their target.
    • Not only Nirvana, Rabat's pet Orangutan is also intelligent enough to pilot a robot. "Intelligent" meaning, getting strapped in and firing 3M's at anything that moves 'til it runs out of ammo. When she used it the last time, she got lucky since Nirvana's crews are actually more than ready to resupply her.
    • Even the small fighter craft are fully capable and willing to spew out several times their vehicular mass in missiles at the drop of a hat.
  • The Zoids anime have various individuals who enjoyed this trope.
    • Most notably Leena Toros in the Zoids: New Century series. Her only attack in an entire episode typically consisted of one giant Macross Missile Massacre, usually launched while shouting "Wild Weasel Unit Total Assault!!" For bonus points, her Humongous Mecha was a sniper unit before she had it modified.
    • This was also the main attack method of the Panzer armour of the Liger Zero — which overheated the Zoid so much that the armour had to be ejected after using it. Fortunately, it's re-usable. The attack was first used to destroy an entire armada of flying enemies. Then later, it was used to destroy the chunks of a satellite so large its impact was going to devastate most of a continent. When locking onto its targets, it achieved so many missile locks that the cockpit sprouted new monitors in order to keep the targets on screen. He even fires missiles from his tail.
    • Zoids: Genesis had Ron and his Bamburian, who carried a limited number of cartridges with him anywhere he went, but they were usually key to destroying enemy bases, escaping, or otherwise taking down enemies that no one else could realistically fight.

    Asian Animation 
  • Mechamato: When Mechamato enables all his weapons, several missile launchers and laser blasters protrude off of his arms and back to release a barrage of attacks at an enemy.

    Comic Books 
  • In the Apocalypse War plotline of Judge Dredd, East-Meg One destroys half of Mega-City One with nuclear missiles that split into smaller missiles, filling the entire skyline. They retaliate, with no success.
  • Norby: When Jeff tells Norby, "Bombs Away!", Norby drops fist-sized missiles from a bomb bay in his barrel. The missiles explode on the ground around the henchmen, as well as in the air above Norby and Jeff.
  • In War World alien overlord Mongul tries this tactic to destroy both Superman and Supergirl.
    The merest thought crosses Mongul's jaundiced brow, and a savage swarm of missiles streaks skyward at his command — even as floating macro-laser cannons cross the star-swept heavens with devastating beams of fire...

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): When Godzilla, Mothra and other Titans fight against Ghidorah, Monarch's and Russia's military forces pull this off more than once to significant effect against Ghidorah, acting as the benevolent Titans' assist.
  • A Crown of Stars: Jinnai tries to this tactic to destroy Asuka, Shinji and their troops, bombarding them with waves of missiles fitted with N2 warheads.
  • Shun Hayami, an original character in Slightly Damned: Wind of Redemption and Rebirth, has this as one of his strongest attacks.
  • Anansi, the Spider Tank boss in The Legend of Zelda fan fic Exoria, can launch multiple top-attack missiles at once.
  • In An Entry with a Bang!, Clancy-Earth aircraft throw a lot of missiles around. Then again, given how tough Battletech armour is, this is rather necessary.
  • Fan Vids based on Touhou Project often use this to portray how danmaku would look in three dimensions.
  • Bait and Switch: The USS Bajor, a Galaxy-class starship, carries a complement of 180 quantum torpedoes, and the crew commonly launches them in spreads.
  • "From Bajor to the Black, Part II": After the fleet brings down the shields of a Borg cube with massed phaser fire the killshot comes in the form of "half a hundred torpedoes".
  • A Hollow in Equestria: Princess Luna demonstrates she has her own organic/magical variant of this move, channeling her magic through the feathers on her wings instead of her horn to take advantage of multiple simultaneous conductors, providing her with the ability to deliver a wide, continuous, Gatling Good delivery of concussive blasts.
  • Let the Galaxy Burn: The standard tactics for human space fleets. Special note should be given to the "Longbow" defense network of which a single platform is capable of launching a volley of over six hundred missiles.
    • The Northerners have their own version which, while only launching four hundred a piece, has four warheads per missile and can be linked en-masse to northern warships. And the missiles they fire are the updated versions of weapons that were designed to hurt and KILL dragons. Did we mention they also doubled the range range of those Roose used to spank the Lannisters at the Twins? They prove their worth beyond a shadow of a doubt when a Night's Watch force of eight heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and sixteen scout cruisers ambushes an Other fleet of 130 cruisers, thirty-six battleships, twenty dragon-carriers, and Star Killer. While the Night's Watch is massacred, they destroy more than a hundred and fifty Other vessels and inflict severe damage to Star Killer. The missiles also prove their boasts by killing four ice dragons.
    • Taken even further in the battle of the Wall, where the Northern and Night's Watch forces launch two million missiles at the Others. The Others actually hesitate for a few seconds at seeing this, indicating even they were stunned by the amount of missiles coming at them.
  • Of Sheep and Battle Chicken: Volus warships utilize this tactic exclusively, to the point where they have massive missile batteries facing backwards so that they can also shower you with missiles as they run away.
  • In Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover, there are at least two.
    • Cerberus mounts an attack against a shipyard using aptly-named Tormenting Swarm ships—each one mounts twenty-four box launchers capable of spewing up to sixty missiles each. Six of them participate in the attack, overwhelming otherwise-competent GARDIAN defensive systems with sheer fire volume.
    • Later, two destroyers sent to attack a dreadnaught end up on the receiving end—"over two thousand missile launchers" that have each fired "at least one" projectile.
  • Peace Forged in Fire: From the Tal'Shiar flagship Sienov, a Khnial-class battlecruiser based on the same technology as the Narada, using the weapons that blew away a fleet in Star Trek (2009). They target Morgan's screening ships and destroy at least three.
  • Strange Times Are Upon Us: From a squadron of Ferengi D'Kora-class ships that pitch in fighting the Breen at Free Haven. In-game the Ferengi sell a rapid-fire missile launcher that does this.

    Films — Animation 
  • Despicable Me does this... a lot. The most notable — and probably the only real example that truly fits this trope — is when Gru, in his plane is pursuing Vector in his own plane to reclaim the Shrink Ray the latter just stole from the former. He attempts to attack Vector by firing a lot of missiles that are released from platfroms on the plane's sides that take up way more space than the plane itself. Vector, however, responds by releasing flares to avoid being hit by any of the missiles, and then used the aforementioned shrink ray to reduce Gru's plane into the size of a children's ride-in car.
  • The final battle of Voices of a Distant Star ends with a Macross Missile Massacre launched by Mikako, wiping out a good chunk of Tarsian Fleet.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Avatar, an entire fleet of human gunships each launch all their missiles in rapid succession to destroy the Na'vi Hometree.
    • The Dragon also has lots of miniguns mounted on it. It gets to use them fully, suffice to say, and could clearly Take on the entire Na'vi population singlehandedly with its dozens of miniguns and missile launchers. And was, until Jake Sully used that brain of his.
  • Iron Man launches a salvo of mini-missiles himself in The Avengers.
  • The Humongous Mecha (very Real Robot, interestingly) sequence in District 9 has an awesome example.
    • The director, Neill Blomkamp, referenced the 3M almost by name in the DVD commentary.
  • The title of Korean film The Divine Weapon refers to the hwacha (described in the Real Life section below). The film's culmination revels in this trope, and is probably the best example you could get out of a non-Speculative Fiction story in pre-Modern setting.
  • Expend4bles has Barney Ross destroy Rahmat's ship with helicopter missiles so that his nuke would detonate underwater.
  • One of the vehicles in the final battle in The Fate of the Furious is armed with missiles. It locks onto the team, but when Dom redeems himself, he rams into the vehicles and it takes out the other surrounding enemies instead.
  • Godzilla:
    • Any one of the mechas Godzilla fights or fights alongside can count as this.
      • The Showa MechaGodzilla(1 and 2) is capable of firing missiles and beams from all over his body. He can fire beams from his eyes and mouth, fire an incredibly powerful beam from within his chest, his fingers detach and turn into missiles that he seemingly has an endless supply of, and even his knees and toes can fire missiles.
      • The Heisei MechaGodzilla can fire wave after wave of missiles from ports on his back, and is capable of firing various beams. Connect him to the Garuda, and he becomes Super MechaGodzilla, capable of firing yet more waves of missiles and beams.
      • Kiryu has similar attacks to both, but lacks the ability to shoot missiles in his base form. Attach a battlepack and missile gauntlets to Kiryu, and it's a completely different story.
      • The MonsterVerse Mechagodzilla opens its fight against Godzilla with a Salvo that even Godzilla can't just shrug off.
  • Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Henry V and its famous scene when all of the longbow archers fire simultaneously.
  • Happens in Independence Day during the humans' first (and horribly unsuccessful) attack on one of the alien craft; every missile fired by the numerous fighter jets hits the ship's shields, doing absolutely nothing.
  • The Jericho Missile of the Iron Man movie, which starts off as a single missile that splits up in mid-air. As Tony himself describes it...
    Tony Stark: Is it better to be feared, or respected? I say: "Is it too much to ask for both?" With that in mind, I humbly present the crown jewel of Stark Industries' Freedom Line. It's the first missile system to incorporate our proprietary Repulsor Technology. They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree; I prefer... the weapon you only need to fire once. That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it... and it's worked out pretty well so far. Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain, and I personally guarantee you the bad guys won't even wanna come out of their caves.
    [gestures to the operator to launch one of the missiles. As the missile begins to dive to Earth, it fragments into many smaller rockets]
    Tony Stark: For your consideration... the Jericho. [the mountainside behind him explodes, Tony spreads his arms and grins as the shockwave washes over him and the soldiers]
  • In The Last Starfighter, the GunStar 1's attack of last resort, "Death Blossom", combines triple-M with Beam Spam, opening the loading access panels to the missile magazines and firing them all. In this case, though, none of the rockets actually hit anything.
  • In The Matrix: Reloaded, the Sentinels do this with themselves as the missiles. And it works! Even with the defenders of Zion using overwhelming firepower, the Sentinels achieve exactly the point of MMM: have at least one more missile than they have bullets.
  • In No Time to Die, the Royal Navy destroyer fires fragmentation missiles with its Sea Viper system to destroy Safin's base in the climax. Bond dies when they reach their target.
  • Pacific Rim: Striker Eureka is armed with multiple missile launchers in its chest which can result in this.
  • One of Robotnik‘s go-to methods in trying to snuff out Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
  • Star Trek (2009): A Romulan Cool Ship called the Narada that seems to have missile tubes coming out the yin-yang, and those missiles themselves are fragmenting. It gets more interesting when you learn that the Narada is a mining vessel that has been hastily converted into a warship and that the missiles it fires are developed by the Romulans from reverse-engineered Borg technology. Repeat after me, There Is No Kill Like Overkill. Yet in the end, the Narada's Macross Missile Massacre is no match for the Enterprise's Beam Spam.
  • This is kind of the point of the Hailfire Droid's existence. Read this if you haven't got what the Hailfire is.
  • In Top Gun: Maverick, Dagger Squadron is forced to evade a swarm launched from unmanned SAM's during the strike mission. Maverick and Rooster are shot down.
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon has humankind unleashing a torrent of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Decepticon forces occupying Chicago. Given it was 9 Autobots, 2 miniature drones, Sam, a militia banded together from old NEST operatives, and a large squad of human soldiers airdropped in versus at least 200 Decepticons including Megatron, fighters and dropships, not to mention Sentinel Prime and his Pillars, it's exactly what was needed to turn the tide.
  • During the climactic scene at the Cuban waters in X-Men: First Class, the American and Soviet Navy decide to bombard the shore with the mutants with their rockets and missiles AND complimentary shelling thrown in. Of course, at that point Magneto has just recently developed his control over his own power, so one can imagine what a spiteful Magneto was going to do right after.

    Literature 
  • In the Antares novels, an attack carrier is a converted freighter carrying about ten thousand nuclear missiles each. In the first novel, the Ryall send three of these against Sandar. The purpose is to overwhelm planetary defense computers — oh, and to cause destruction on an untold scale.
  • The Battle at Martian Orbit in Mikhail Akhmanov's Invasion has Admiral Timokhin's battlegroup (6 in-system cruisers and their escorts) engage the enormous Faata starship and its "combat modules". Timokhin's ships manage to launch a 500 nuclear missile barrage at the starship with the combined firepower of about 140 gigaton. The Faata starship's Deflector Shields take the hit with barely a Star Trek Shake. In later novels, this practice pretty much ceases to exist, as shields make missiles (even nukes) largely useless in space battles.
  • In Fyodor Berezin's Ash, Earth is at war with its off-world colony in another star system. By the time of the novel, the colony has been turned into a radioactive wasteland by constant nuclear bombardment. However, it is revealed that at least two habitats exist: one is deep under a mountain range, while the other is at the bottom of the ocean. The leader of the first knows their society won't last long. His only goal is to strike back. Since he can't attack Earth, he plans to destroy the Earthlings' base on the planet's moon. To this end, they construct thousands of MIRV missiles and launch them. When the missiles split, they also release duds, which are basically inflated objects with radar-reflecting paint. Altogether, the enemy sees hundreds of thousands of targets coming at them, only about 10-15% of which are real nuclear warheads. Despite this, the automated defenses built years before do a good job at reducing that number substantially. In the end, only a few impact the vicinity of the base, killing dozens of pilots. Several missiles are also shown to have cluster warheads with "mini-nukes" using californium, which has a much smaller critical mass than plutonium. Also, the attack on the base turns out to be a diversion, as several missiles break off and proceed to knock an asteroid off its orbit to fall on the base.
  • The Bolo tanks often carry a VLS battery or two capable of unleashing the MMM. Their excellent point defenses and armour allow them to survive multiple MMMs.
  • Ciaphas Cain:
    • For the Emperor briefly shows a pair of Tau battlesuits helping out an Imperial Guard infantry attack by unloading a huge barrage of missiles at traitor PDF positions.
    • Played with in The Emperor's Finest. Some Ork warships attack the Reclaimers Strike Cruiser Revenant with an enormous salvo of torpedoes too big for the Space Marines' Thunderhawks to stop. Then they impact without detonating and turn out to be Boarding Pods instead.
  • During the attack by the aliens in the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall, one of the main characters explicitly comments that the barrage of incoming alien missiles reminded him of a Japanese science fiction cartoon.
  • Halo:
    • UNSC warships are capable of firing very large numbers of Archer missiles. The typical Archer pod contains 30 missiles, and even small ships like a frigate have over two-dozen pods, resulting in total payload of hundreds of missiles (perhaps thousands for larger ships). Unfortunately for the UNSC, all those missiles are useless against a Covenant warship if its shields are up, and even if its shields are down, its point defense lasers can shoot down a large portion of even a large volley of Archer missiles. This is why typical anti-Covenant tactics only use missiles to weaken the shields before switching to stronger weapons. It is also mentioned a single Archer missile is capable of disabling or outright destroying smaller human ships, so either warships were severely overpowered in pre-2525 engagements or the Human-Covenant war prompted the upgrade.
    • The UNSC's various mounted rocket/missile platforms, like those on Rocket Warthogs, are quite capable of this. In particular, the Halo 3 Missile Pod can be continuously fired without needing to reload.
    • In Halo Wars, both the UNSC Vulture heavy gunship and the UNSC Wolverine anti-air tank can fire a ton of missiles, with Halo Wars 2 adding the Blisterback and Reaver.
    • The Mantis, introduced in Halo 4, can fire off its missiles in rapid succession.
    • Halo 5: Guardians introduces the rifle-sized Hydra launcher, which can fire up to six homing micro-missiles in rapid succession.
  • In the History of the Galaxy books, dedicated missile frigates are equipped with a 100 missile tubes, able to launch them simultaneously at 50 separate targets. The novel where they are described shows one ambushing two frigates and blowing them to smithereens, although they are able to shoot a number of the missiles down. Then a heavy cruiser shows up. The missile frigate launches another 100 missiles, but the cruiser only sustains light damage thanks to its superior point-defense systems and EM screens. For reference, a heavy (or flagship) cruiser is ten times the size of the missile frigate and roughly 7 kilometers (about 4.3 miles) long.
  • This is standard military operating procedure in the Honor Harrington Space Opera series by David Weber. The in-story justification is to overwhelm the computerized defensive systems of enemy vessels. (A.K.A. the Manticore Missile Massacre.)
    • To add to the awe-inspiring slaughter, given that the missiles are for delivering bomb-pumped lasers, with the tens of thousands (or much more) missiles launched, even accounting for countermeasures to defend against that, it also makes your average fleet engagement in the Honorverse an exercise in Beam Spam as well. Add the tribarrel for More Dakka goodness, and you have the Hat Trick of spam attacks.
    • Also the trope is played straight in the later part of the series with medium combatants (cruisers, destroyers, battlecruisers) that get the opportunity, through off bore targeting missiles, to fire all their on board launchers at a single target. Considering that the launchers are fixed in position, for all the missiles to hit some of them will have to robotech to hit their targets. Also it's standard practice to have the missiles spreading so as not to kill one another with their drives, which begets, you guessed it, more roboteching.
    • The First Battle of Manticore, which was at the time the largest battle in the history of the series, features a combined opening salvo of seven hundred thousand missiles (and the emphasis is Weber's). Repeat after me: SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND. So many that they fry most of the sensors being pointed at them. For reference, humanity has thus far built MAYBE 80,000 nuclear weapons total, each of which is of minute power compared to these. That right there is nine times the number and God knows how many times the firepower of the most destructive weapons available to mankind at the moment, and it's. The. Opening. Salvo.
      • Bonus point for 540.000 missiles (i. e. 77% of the salvo) were launched by RHN ships. Should we rename this Havenite Missile Massacre?
    • And their ships are no longer limited by how many missile tubes they have! In A Short Victorious War, Manticore reintroduces the missile pod, which is a battery of one-shot missile launchers that can be carried outside the ship. This allows a warship to fire far more missiles in its opening salvo than it could with just its ship-based tubes. Then Honor Among Enemies introduces naval vessels which are built around storage bays full of missile pods, which they can deploy rapidly, ultimately resulting in pod-laying superdreadnoughts, or "podnoughts", which, alongside the CLAC (Carrier, Light Attack Craft, essentially a space-age aircraft carrier) dominated the Second Manticoran-Havenite War. One sign of how utterly screwed the Solarians are is that their navy has no podnoughts. Currently, just five star nations — the Manticorans, the Havenites, the Graysons, the Andermani, and the Erewhonese — possess podnoughts (or are currently building them in the case of the Erewhonese). The first three are at war with the Solarian League. The Andermani, while officially neutral, are effectively in Manticore's camp. And Erewhon will likely turn on the League when Governor Barregos pulls the Sepoy Option.
    • The reason for these insane salvos? To invoke Point Defenseless through sheer math. If a countermeasure system can stop X missiles a second and a salvo has Y seconds of flight time before it hits, then logically it can only stop X*Y missiles a salvo. Fire more than X*Y missiles, and something will get through.
  • In Manifold: Space, a fleet of Planet Looters in orbit around Mercury is completely obliterated when liberally-seeded, re-engineered lunar flowers, which fire rocket-propelled seed pods, simultaneously fire from all over the planet in a single massive bombardment.
  • While individual Nameless ships in The Nameless War have fairly modest amounts of ammunition, when an entire fleet fires combined with their range advantage, the humans on the receiving end can only hunker down a pray point defence stops enough of them. The Nameless are later on the receiving end when the bombard the Sherlock unleashes a barrage of kinetic strike projectiles and enhanced fallout nuclear weapons against one of their worlds, far more than the orbiting defences can hope to intercept.
  • On a slightly smaller scale, this is what happens in space battles in The Night's Dawn Trilogy. Combat is performed by means of "combat wasps", independent, highly-manoeuvrable drones which are launched from ships. Each ship tends to carry maybe a maximum of twenty or thirty on average (some more, some significantly less), but each wasp subdivides on its way to its target into dozens of submunitions, ranging from one-shot lasers to simple kinetic projectiles, and including many, many guided missiles with their own reaction engines. A large battle between several ships can result in thousands of pieces of powered death duking it out in the space between the fleets.
  • In the Dale Brown novel Plan of Attack, the Air Battle Force takes severe casualties after Russians lob many, many missiles at them. Including nuclear ones.
  • Done to an American convoy in Red Storm Rising. although that's with many aircraft flying two or three missiles each..
    • Actually done so much in the novels by both the Soviets and allies that an alternate title for the page could be 'Soviet Missile Massacre' or 'Cruise Missile Massacre' or simply 'Red Storm Rising', but that doesn't sound so good with out the third "M". As revealed in the Real Life section bellow this is actually truth in fiction. Let's count them:
      • The NATO airfield in Iceland
      • The Nimitz battle group, with disastrous results: Nimitz heavily damaged, the French carrier Foch sunk, the amphibious assault ship Saipan (which was carrying 2000 marines) blown up with no survivors and several more damaged or sunk.
      • Not one, but practically every Allied Convoy in the beginning of the war.
      • The Russian airfields near Murmansk also get this treatment at the hands of sub launched American Tomahawk missiles.
      • The the Russian battlecruiser Kirov gets the torpedo equivalent by four torpedoes fired from a Norwegian diesel sub.
      • Kirov's escorts get mauled by a sub launched Harpoon MMM.
      • USS Ticonderoga fires all her 96 missiles in less then 3 minutes while trying to defend the Nimitz Battle Group
      • Also the F-14 Tomcats in the naval air battles described fire these at the squadron level
    • This is actually a well-known tactic in naval anti-ship warfare — you launch missiles with the expectation that your target will launch countermissiles that will take out some of your missiles; the remainder will get closer while your target reloads its countermissile launchers to fire a second wave; the survivors of that launch will get closer while the target reloads again, repeated until the target can't reload and fire before the survivors reach the target. The VLS system on the Aegis cruisers and destroyers eliminate the reload time, but if you fire more missiles than the air-defense ships have countermissiles, your target is SOL even if all the countermissiles work.
  • In the Star Carrier series this is the main defensive measure used by Turusch warships against Confederation fighter attacks. They just spam so many kiloton-yield nuclear missiles at them that they can't evade them all. The defense of last resort for the fighters is AMSO canisters, missile countermeasures filled with granules of degenerate matter that destroy the missiles (and pose a serious hazard to anything else) by kinetic force. Also, in the second book a Confederation capital ship disables part of a H'rulka warship this way moments before the H'rulka return fire one-shots it.
  • Commonplace in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and Legends.
    • One method for bringing down a planetary deflector shield is the torpedo sphere, a dedicated siege weapon that fires the things in veritable streams.
    • This is the standard method for fighter attacks against capital ships, seen multiple times in the X-Wing Series. Hitting a warship with a dozen or more proton torpedoes almost simultaneously usually causes that area of the ship's Deflector Shields to fail (possibly due to computer overload).
    • In The Bacta War, Booster Terrik's station mounts three hundred torpedo and missile launchers. It's all a ruse, with only the targeting sensors in place; the weapons themselves are loaded onto freighters and put to use against Lusankya later. The actual first salvo clocks in at eighty missiles (still enough to disable a small Star Destroyer, per shot).
    • Wraith Squadron uses an improvised technique coined the "Loran Spitball" in a couple battles. It involves firing a bunch of proton torpedoes from the X-wings in the open hangar bay at the front of their modified Corellian Corvette, both times at targets who believe the Corvette to be friendly. The first such barrage severely cripples a frigate (which is destroyed with another torpedo barrage later in the same battle). The second, used against a Star Destroyer and coordinated with an attack by their TIE fighters, is less devastating but still causes significant damage to the ship (the TIE assault takes out the Star Destroyer's shields, and the torpedoes allow for the destruction of the ship's power cells later by creating a large enough hull breach for one of the TIEs to fly inside the Star Destroyer).
    • In Shatterpoint, Mace Windu steals a pair of enemy gunships and launches every missile they have at a swarm of droid starfighters harassing his clone troops' landers. Because of High Speed Missile Dodges and Beam Spam, only nine out of fifty-nine missiles hit, but that's not the point: by droid logic, a coordinated attack from two "friendly" gunships is evidence of treachery from all sixty-nine gunships, and suddenly the fighters and gunships are too busy attacking each other to worry much about his clones.
  • Troy Rising: Humans and others, particularly in The Hot Gate, throw around up to hundreds of thousands of missiles, depending on the specific engagement under discussion, at one point outdoing the entire missile expenditure of both sides at the Battle of Manticore.

    Live Action TV 
  • Used in the Season 6 finale of 24 to destroy the oil platform where Phillip Bauer had taken refuge.
  • The favored tactic of Andromeda in the early seasons. At one point a FLEET of ships did so, which one captain described as 'Carpet Bombing Space'. It was pretty impressive. The primary purpose of the Siege Perilous-class assault ships built during the Commonwealth's final days. With their 180 missile tubes, they can launch more missiles than an entire fleet, making them perfect ship-killers. Of the four built, three were shown on screen and played important roles: the Balance of Judgment survived the Nietzscheans rebellion, but its AI went insane; the Wrath of Achilles was captured in battle and kept in the "starship prison" system; the Resolution of Hector was built by the New Commonwealth but hijacked by the Judgments's AI. The unnamed fourth ship was destroyed in port by the Nietzscheans.
  • Babylon 5:
  • Happened in the 2018 season of BattleBots in a rare real-life nonmilitary use, in which Ultimo Destructo opened its match against Axe Backwards by firing all 24 of its missiles at once. Like the trope, the missiles followed curved and spiraling trajectories in a variety of directions. All of them missed.
  • Happens routinely on Battlestar Galactica.
    • Cylon basestars are especially prone to firing gigantic salvos of missiles (with cool vapor trails) that home in on the Galactica. If Galactica is on top of its game, the missiles get shot down by Vipers and the battlestar's anti-aircraft guns. If not, expect some breakage. They also really like to jump away right before the missiles hit.
    • Racetrack's Raptor in the Grand Finale
    • In the Pilot, two Cylon Raiders engage a full squadron of Vipers; after disabling the squadron, the two Raiders pulled an MMM, firing enough missiles to wipe out the 20 (24?) Viper squadron.
    • A group of Cylon Raiders use one of these to kill the non-FTL capable civillain fleet in the miniseries. Granted, there were enough targets to justify the manoeuvre.
  • Happens routinely in The Expanse where missiles and torpedos are the preferred method of engaging targets at range, followed by railguns. Close-in battles with ships directly firing at one another are rare due to the more realistic ranges and physics involved (although point defence weapons are used to try to shoot down incoming missiles, and very occasionally in close-range combat).
    • The Earth-Mars cold war is maintained by the fear of MAD, on Mars's side via their stealth missile platforms, each capable of firing a MMM volley of nuclear missiles (each in turn packed with dozens of submunitions and warheads) at Earth. In the episode "Assured Destruction", Earth successfully locates and destroys all five platforms in a coordinated railgun strike, but Mars is able to get off one missile and only one warhead which causes immense devastation in South America; a full barrage could have sterilised Earth.
  • Kamen Rider has more than one example:
    • Kamen Rider Ryuki: All Riders have a "Final Vent". Most of them are melee attacks that create perhaps a man-sized explosion at best. The Final Vent of Kamen Rider Zolda (And by extension, Torque), on the other hand, is a barrage of dozens upon dozens of missiles resulting in a humongous explosion and frequently beating the shit out of several other Riders. It is appropriately named "End of World".
    • Kamen Rider 555: The super-charged bike of Kamen Rider Kaixa has a mecha mode that can fire one of these.
    • Kamen Rider Den-O: Boistous Shot, Climax Form's Gun Form-based 'Charge And Up' finisher is this.
  • GrandLiner, the Mid-Season Upgrade Humongous Mecha in Kyūkyū Sentai GoGoV, essentially a giant walking fortress formed by train cars, combines a Macross Missile Massacre with a hail of bullets from a giant Gatling engine, both shoulder-mounted; the technique is called "Grand Fire".
  • Done several times on Mythbusters to test various rocket myths. Notable one being the alcohol myths episode where the build team tested a Korean arrow launcher (the hwacha mentioned below IRL).
  • Space: Above and Beyond has a very memorable use of it in the duel between Lt. Col. T.C. McQueen and Chiggy von Richthofen, ended when McQueen sends all six of his missiles into Chiggy at once.
  • Stargate-verse:
    • Happens during a major battle in Stargate SG-1. Jack uses an Ancient command chair to destroy Anubis' mothership with a veritable legion of Drone missiles, which compensates for being grossly unnecessary in volume with its sheer awesome. Though, Anubis survives. Also, during the preceding aerial battle over Antarctica, the F-302s assigned to the Prometheus lead the way with a salvo of Sidewinder missiles aimed at Anubis' fighters.
    • The Ancient drone weapons were apparently designed specifically for this tactic, but in Stargate Atlantis the team never had enough to spare because of limited supplies. It seems that, in the war against the Wraith, the Ancients themselves couldn't produce enough drones to deal with the superior numbers the Wraith had.
    • A more straight up example is when the Daedalus ambushes a pair of hive ships in the episode "No Man's Land" and the ship rapidly deploys it's entire battery of VLS launched nuclear missiles and has them fan out into a wave while trying to overwhelm the fighter screen of a Wraith hive ship. It partially works.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In a more mild example than usual, the Enterprise-D is capable of launching up to five torpedoes in rapid succession before reloading, and the tech books state that the Galaxy-class carries a complement of 250.
    • In the episode "Code of Honor" the Enterprise fires a massive barrage of torpedoes into the atmosphere of a planet to try to intimidate the locals into releasing a captured officer. The gambit fails.
    • In the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", the Enterprise does the cool trick of firing half a dozen photon torpedoes simultaneously, appearing to be a single torpedo that splits into multiple ones to inflict damage on an attacking Klingon ship.
    • Pretty much any time the Enteprise faces the Borg (most notably "Q Who?" and "The Best of Both Worlds"), the ship cuts loose with a massive volley of phaser fire and continuous torpedo bombardments that is extremely impressive, though of course completely ineffective against this enemy (oddly against other, lesser but still dangerous foes, the ship never displays such a capability).
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • The eponymous station launches 5000 photon torpedoes from a Gatling torpedo launcher and other munitions at an invading Klingon force, in the episode "The Way of the Warrior".
      • The station does the same again against the attacking Dominion fleet in the episode "Call to Arms" (in fact using some of the same effects shots, with Dominion ships replacing Klingon ones).
    • A Jem'Hadar battleship does this to a lesser extent in "Valiant" against a single ship.
    • The Borg threat convinced the Federation it had to get back into practice building warships. The Defiant-class gunboat was based on this principle, but at the time proved too overpowered to be controllable; between its guns and its engines, the prototype nearly shook itself to pieces on its trial run.
  • In the Season 1 finale of Terra Nova the bad guys spot Col. Taylor and his soldiers trying to get away in a vehicle. The vehicle is hidden by a dense tree canopy so they cannot target it directly. Instead Lucas fires off a missile that splits into multiple smaller missiles that then rain down on the forest in a wide spread.
  • This is the signature ability of Velokron, Ultraman Ace's first and most famous opponent. Every part of the Choju's coral-like body is loaded with an endless supply of organic missiles that it fires en masse at opponents in rapid succession, overwhelming defense team fighter jets and Ultra heroes alike with a multitude of powerful explosions upon impact.
  • Zone Fighter has a very similarly named Special Attack that fires out of the titular hero's wristbands at least once an episode — the Meteor Missile Might!

    Pinball 

    Podcasts 
  • During the crossover between The Fallen Gods and Jemjammer, Tuatha's wild magic is able to launch a volley of magic missiles. The trope name is referenced as the attack is unleashed.
    Kit: You know in Mechwarrior where you fire all your weapons at once?
    Jake: Yeah!
    Annie: Yeah it Robotechs! It Macrosses!
    Kit: You Macross this fucking dragon.

    Roleplay 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Battlefleet Gothic, almost all fleet can setup impressive torpedo volleys, but the Tau Fleet fits this trope to a 'T'. Instead of launching torpedoes, the Tau launch volleys of guided missiles that can both turn and change their speed midflight. What really cements it for the Tau is that each missile on the table is actually a cluster of ten missiles, which means whenever a Tau Battleship launches a Firepower 8 volley, it is really launching a deluge 80 missiles.
  • In Battlemachines the dakka infused biggy gun can be upgraded to have explosive rounds. Of course its just one of the many weapons you can make.
  • Battletech, for a long time only used their missiles this way. The individual missiles themselves were rather weak though, and could only do damage in numbers or through a lucky hit. With the exception of artillery and warship-mounted missiles (which soon became extinct in the main setting), it was centuries before somebody revisited the concept of a powerful missile. Some mechs that are practically made of this trope. Gaze upon the Yeoman, ye mighty, and despair!
    • The Yeoman's nothing. Check out the mighty Kraken 3. No other mech epitomizes the Macross Missile Massacre to the same extent — this mech mounts 8 LRM 15 pods. That means it has 8 different launchers that each fire 15 missiles, giving it the capacity to launch a staggering 120 missiles simultaneously.
    • The vehicular 'SRM Carrier' has 10 6-packs of short range missiles (that's 60 missiles per shot, thank you). One * will* scrub most of the armor off the biggest mechs in the game. The tricky part is living to take the * second* shot.
    • Also worth noting: standard BattleTech missiles are individually actually very small. One metric ton of long-range missile ammo for example consists of 120 individual missiles (launchable in salvos of 5, 10, 15, or 20), which works out to each of them weighing 8 1/3 kg or about 18.4 lbs. This puts them firmly in the 'man-portable' weight class, and indeed missile-equipped infantry exists in the game, but well below 'real' real life rocket artillery or guided missiles. (The WW2 Katyusha mentioned in the Real Life section below fired salvos of individual missiles weighing five times this much.)
    • This was explained in later flufftext in that Age of War-era missile systems (the ubiquitous long- and short-range missiles of the game) didn't have warheads so much as explosive structure, which also justifies the ammunition explosion rules. The evolution of BattleTech flufftext also described that the MMM-only launchers came about because electronic countermeasures were just too good for individual missiles to penetrate: for the same mass, a single hard-hitting missile would almost inevitably be jammed, spoofed, blinded, or otherwise overcome but a salvo had a pretty good chance of enough making it through to have an impact. Though with the new Thunderbolt-series missiles making a comeback in BT as big, nasty, single-hit missiles, the pendulum may be swinging more back towards the middle as well. However, Thunderbolt missiles are horrifically vulnerable to anti-missile systems compared to salvo-firing missile types.
  • CthulhuTech, homage-storm that it is, features rocket-pods that use exactly this method as heavy weapons for their Humongous Mecha. The big winner is the Cherub-class Engel, a middling-sized support mech that can hit a target with up to a dozen rockets at once.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has one Prestige Class, the Force Missile Mage, dedicated to turning the Magic Missile spell into this.
    • Not quite, the Force Missile Mage just adds an additional two missiles, making a total of seven for a high level caster. However, if you combine this with creative use of Metamagic (namely Quicken Spell and Twin Spell) one can easily fire off as many as 28 in a single turn, if you use Delay Spell you can end up with over fifty Magic Missiles going off at once.
    • The "Magic Missile Shotgun": a Rod of Wands (holds up to three wands and allows you to use those wands simultaneously) and three Wands of Magic Missile (high level crafter = five Missiles per use each). Pull the trigger and it fires fifteen unerring bolts of magical force. Upgrade those wands to Maximized Magic Missile (automatically does greatest possible damage) and that's 75 points of damage per turn that cannot miss.
      • Better still, 21st-level casters can use Intensify Spell instead of Maximize Spell. Intensified spells do double maximum damage.
    • And like everything in DnD tactics like this can be optimized to insane extremes, as can be seen in this set up which launches well over a hundred orbs of force and does just a hair under 4000 damage on average.
  • In GURPS, firing a sufficient number of projectiles at an enemy gives a free increase in accuracy because it's harder to get out of the way. Unfortunately the rules don't allow for a successful MMM (more than a fraction hitting) except on a critical success. Though there are rules for firing 20 round salvos for weapons with very high rates of fire which produce a dozen or so hits even with an unsuccessful attack.
    • Unless the projectiles are guided or homing, then they kinda just hit stuff, pretty much regardless.
  • In the "Interstellar Wars" setting for Traveller, this is standard Vilani naval doctrine.
  • Lancer has the SSC Monarch frame. Its Core Power allows the player to attack every enemy within a huge range (effectively the entire map, in most cases). The rest of its traits and license perks mostly provide various missile weaponry and give it bonuses.
  • In Mekton, missiles are virtually worthless unless fired en masse, necessitating the use of large numbers to hurt your enemy. (The Mekton Tactical Display explained how to build a MIRV: cram as many missiles as possible onto a flying Remote, then point it at the enemy and watch.)
  • Rifts has several mecha who can do this, being mounted with Mini Missile launchers that carry obscene loads of small missiles almost designed to be used in this way. Not unsurprising as Palladium Books also published an RPG based on the Robotech franchise that used the same system.
    • The Robotech RPG was released prior to Rifts, and was the first instance of the name "Mini Missile" actually being used.
  • Missiles are becoming a more common weapon in Rocket Age. The Ancient Martians experimented with the technology before moving onto RAY weapons and many space ships carry large missile pods. The Russians have even manufactured a Missile Artillery Tank. In 1938.
  • Standard capital ship stand-off tactics in Starfire. Necessary due to the presence of Point Defense systems on most targets.
  • The Kzinti in Star Fleet Battles usually try to overwhelm their opponents' defenses by saturating the battlefield with drones (which is what missiles are called in that universe).
  • The Missile Bot in Star Realms. Its card art shows it firing off a large number of missiles at once.
  • Both Eldar Dark Reaper Reaper Launchers and Space Marine Heavy Bolters are described in the Warhammer 40,000 fluff as firing many miniature missiles and firing rocket-propelled rounds respectively, although scale-wise those are closely to More Dakka. The Tau get a Missile (Im)Barrage on their Skyray Missile Gunships, not to mention multi-launch missile systems on their battlesuits (and the ability for infantry squads to call up a missile strike from a Skyray). The Sisters of Battle have Exorcist artillery organs that do this. Space Marines also have multiple missile tubes on their Whirlwinds and they even have a portable version for their Terminator armor, but not to as over-the-top extents as with Skyrays or Exorcists.
    • By the way, those Exorcists? They're fired by Sisters who play the keys of the pipe organ that serves as the launcher for the rockets.
    • Ork Tankbustas have a fixation of anything rocket-y, if they're not wielding a rocket-hammer they carry a Rokkit Launcha which is basically a wild assortment of various rockets attached to a stick.
    • The newest incarnation of the Tau Broadside Battlesuit can choose to exchange it's Rail Cannon for a second set of smart missiles, giving it the appearance of a walking missile rack. It can then upgrade itself with a Seeker missile, the same kind mentioned on the Skyrays, giving it the highest volume of missile fire outside of superheavy tanks.
    • And then there's the Stormsurge, a Humongous Mecha with a stupidly huge Shoulder Cannon whose arms are replaced with suitably huge missile pods (and has a few seeker missiles for good measure). It looks perfectly ridiculous, but puts out a terrifying amount of exploding dakka.

    Video Games 
  • At least one type of weapon/plane/bombs in almost every Shoot 'Em Up game, though sometimes only if you level it up.
    • In Zero Wing, the green shot type is homing at all levels, and both Attack Drones fire it simultaneously with the main ship.
    • Gundhara has a four-way homing missile shot.
    • Event Horizon has the Heavy Missile Launcher M2, which fires powerful long-range homing missiles that are almost impossible to dodge by slow ships. Normally it has a long cooldown, but becomes extremely effective when buffed and equipped on a ship with many missile slots, such as Megalodon.
  • In Ace Combat 6 there's the special weapon of the CFA-44 Nosferatu called the ADMM which includes 3 body-mounted dispenser units (one on top of each wing and one on the bottom-middle section) that fire off the rounds in a manner akin to countermeasure flares; these are retracted into the body and covered by doors when the special weapon is not selected. Unlike all the other "Multi-Tgt" missiles, each Macross Missile Massacre equals one expended missile (out of up to eighteen) and not however many targets you locked onto, usually up to four, or six with the new XMA6 air-to-air missile... it's even enough to (usually) negate the "inefficiency" flaw of air-to-ground missiles.
  • In After Burner Climax, Climax Mode allows the player's fighter to lock onto all visible targets and launch missiles at all of them. That number does go over ten often. Of course, the player ends up on the receiving end of this often too, not just from the numerous enemy planes launching at once, but in late-game also from lone planes as well..
  • Air Force Delta Strike, Players can fire up to four regular missiles in rapid succession, then quickly switch to special weapons and shoot off four more. It is a good way to waste ammo.
  • In Air Rivals, most missiles are usually fired two or four at a time. However, if using certain skills in conjunction with a certain weapon, it is possible to fire 42 missiles per salvo (which can be fired every few seconds or so). Using specialized weapons with increased rate-of-fire might achieve an even greater amount of missiles over time.
  • Alien Swarm has the "Hornet Barrage" and "Smartbomb" weapons, which fill the screen with guided missiles. Hornets come with three salvos while the smartbomb has only one, but more missiles total. Some clever folks have been using the console commands to modify them, it's possible to spew out twenty missiles a second for the whole level this way.
  • The giant mecha in Armored Core can be designed with massive missile supplies, in some cases firing dozens of light missiles at a time. Given the agility of some opposing mecha, and the cost of replacing missile stores, this isn't a popular option, but it certainly has a place.
    • Armored Core 2 had shoulder weapons that took up both shoulders, but in reply gave 3 launchers with MMM. Two which fired in total 16 rockets (and overheated the enemy core) or one which fired one big slow missile, that fires a CLOUD of homing missiles.
    • Kisaragi in Armored Core Last Raven developed Micromissiles, missile launchers that fired up to 9 missiles in one salvo (13 if you have the extension part), this was perhaps the best weapon a non OP-I Core can have on his back. Unless he faces off against mechs with good anti missile weapons. The Nymph series compensates instant missile salvos with more stopping power and better firing trajectory, the Taurus also provides a spectacular display of an insane barrage of missiles. The best way to stop the Nymph and Taurus is to equip a lock canceller which resets the lock.
    • In the fourth installment, combining Macross Missile Massacres with hit-and-run tactics is arguably the safest, and cheapest, way of disposing of enemy mecha—at least, if you're not up against a skilled human opponent.
      • To elaborate, earlier games has missile barrages about 12, or maximum 16 missiles at a time. In for Answer, a dedicated missileboat can launch a whopping 128 missiles continously (WHEELING01/03 back launcher(s) launches 32 missiles per shot, the MUSKINGUM02 shoulder weapon fires 64), at a single target, with fire-and-forget capability (meaning that once a lock-on is ensured and the trigger is pulled, each missiles launched will track the locked on target even when it's no longer on the lock-on arc). This makes missile dodging paramount to survival itself. Hope you're packing flares, buddy.
      • Of course, you could just shoot the missiles, causing them to blow up in their face.
      • Or use a fast enough mech to run the missiles right into the missile-boating core. (Shooting down missiles does less damage than making them hit their launcher, and with a bit of Overedboost and a light... horrifyingly easy).
    • Armored Core 6 has both "Cinder" Carla and "Chatty" Stick, whose ACs are both build to fire one off using the WR-0999 DELIVERY BOY and the BC-5001 SOUP. The player can obtain these later in the game as well. Chatty's AC name, CIRCUS in particular appears to be a Shout-Out towards the Trope Namer.
  • One of the earlier trailers for Asura's Wrath had an entire spear unit throw spears this way at the Title character. He just Runs right through it. It's also seen in many other moments in the game. It helps the original creator of Macross was a key animation director for this game's cutscenes.
    • Later, Chakravartin does a Macross Planet Massacre during the first phase of the fight with him in the final fight.
  • "Aurora4x" enjoys this trope in full. Since ship/missile bases design is not limited by pretty much anything, its not uncommon to find 20-40 launchers on a ship, capable of firing MIRV's or two stage missiles in rapid succession. And MMM is pretty much required to get the Invader/Precursors ships...
  • Bangai-O:
    • The first game follows this trope to the letter. Your tiny Mecha can release up to 400 missiles at once, which all have the ability to home in on your target.
    • In Bangai-O Spirits, Missile Massacres halve in number and double in size when they go over a hundred, so while the Bangai-O can't actually release 400 missiles, it can reach up to 100 quadruple size missiles. And it's still enough to lag the DS's graphical renderer (The game knows this, and will warn you about it in the tutorial). And it's still a bucket of fun.
    • But if you have the reflect EX attack on, you reflect more than 800 missiles at your enemies, in addition to the 100 you can already launch.
    • Note: this is a main feature of the game and some parts of the game REQUIRE you to do this to have a fighting chance. And THEN there's the bosses that will do this to YOU as well, which results in a 3M being used to COUNTER another 3M (each launching 400 missiles). This is as awesome as it sounds.
      • How it works is the EX attack is charged by danger. The more enemies and bullets the are near you, the more awesome the Macross Missile Massacre is. It's effectively a smart bomb, and you use it to get you out of trouble. The game encourages you to get in trouble and then use it. If you destroy an insane amount of enemies, and then collect the fruit from them, you can actually gain temporary invincibility. This is also as awesome as it sounds.
      • Also, doing this can cause the number at the top-center of the screen (a counter for the number of simultaneous on-screen explosions) to max out at 999. At that point, even the Dreamcast — a system designed to be able to handle absurd amounts 2-D graphical objects — will get slowdown. Note that, because you have to risk getting creamed in order to do this (by being close to the incoming 3M swarm and/or enemy), hitting the 3M trigger just a hair too late means instant death. Success, on the other hand, means several nail-biting seconds of 3M's countering one another in rapid succession until one of you either runs out of 3M ammo or doesn't counter in time. It's a sight to see if you can pull it off.
  • The BattleTech (and its MechWarrior spinoff) series has two main missile types: Short Range Missiles and Long Range Missiles. SRMs are shot, according to the launcher type, in salvos of two, four and six. LRMs, in contrast, are shot in salvos of five, ten, and rather more ridiculously fifteen and twenty. Super-heavy Mechs can be armed with as many launchers as their weight allows, one can mount, say, six LRM20s on a single mech. Shooting them all at once causes a barrage of 120 guided missiles that will overpower any anti-missile system and very probably destroy any Mech in one shot.
    • That's assuming the missiles hit, of course, depending on how lucky you are with the dice. However, two more missile types do exist: Medium Range Missiles and Clan-only Advanced Tactical Missiles. ATMs come in launcher sizes of three, six, nine and twelve missiles and have on-the-fly inversely variable yield and range loads, but MRMs are loaded in salvos of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty. Good luck hitting something with it, though—MRMs are naturally inaccurate.
      • Then there's XRMs, which are practically cruise missiles. Sidenote: always turn off your night vision mode (even during night missions!) in MechWarrior 4 before launching a missile volley, or you'll get blinded.
      • Such tactics are the origin of the term Missile Boat, whose modus operandi is nothing but missiles, missiles, missiles.
      • While not nearly as numerous as the above mentioned examples, the SRM launchers of MechWarrior 3 deserve some mention for making their missiles the only ones to spiral wildly about instead of firing in nice, tight clusters like the Streak SRMs and LRMs of the same game. The Vulture A OmniMech in particular deserves note for managing to fit the aesthetic of the trope, as it carries six SRM-6 launchers, resulting in 36 twisting, swirling contrails with every pull of the trigger.
    • Perhaps in a nod to this trope (or at least the frequency of Missile Boats and such), the concept art for the Catapult in the upcoming Mechwarrior Online has "Missile Massacre" written on the inside of one of its missile rack covers.
    • The MechWarrior Living Legends mod for Crysis Wars has LRMs that rocket into the sky before arching over and bombarding the target. A variant of the Vulture carries 4 LRM launchers which fire 20 missile salvos a piece. There's also the "Agent Orange" Shiva aerospace fighter, which carries a pair of MRM-40 launchers and a pair of MRM-30 launchers, for maximum missile spam.
    • MechWarrior: Online toned it down somewhat by differentiating launcher types. If you put a LRM 20 in a launcher that only has six missile tubes they'll come out in four salvos, making the attack longer-lasting but definitely less massacring. The trope gets subverted if you put one in a Mech with a two-tube launcher meant for beacons, as you'll pee them out in a protracted attack that's surprisingly good at annoying your target but of questionable usefulness as an actual weapon.
      • A comical glitch in Online caused the Quickdraw (otherwise more of a brawler or cavalry 'Mech) to turn into a missile-slinging monstrosity until they gave it a hotfix. Yes, it is indeed vomiting out an entire ton of missile ammo in one salvo, from a single launcher. It's every bit as broken and funny as it sounds.
    • The 2018 BattleTech game keeps the tradition alive, as LRM and SRM-equipped tanks get turned into Goddamned Bats because of how quickly they can topple mechs with a full complement of missiles.
  • Several enemies from Bayonetta and its sequel can launch salvos of missiles at Bayonetta, including the angels Kinship, Worship, Temperantia and Sapientia, and the demon Insidious.
  • In Blazing Lazers, the player can acquire homing missiles which fire in many different directions. One type of enemy can also do this with its own missiles.
  • In Bloons Tower Defense, the Dartling Gun tower initially shoots darts, but these can upgraded to missiles later on, which can pop the otherwise explosion-immune Black Bloons. The final upgrade shoots three at once and comes with an ability to shoot 100 missiles at once at the nearest bloon. As the game puts it: ouch.
  • In Borderlands, any grenade mod that's labeled "Rain" will, after being thrown, shoot up into the air and explode, sending multiple grenades raining down on the enemies.
    • The Monster's turret fires a battery of homing missiles.
  • Borderlands 2 will give you the Vladof Mongol as a lucky drop from Dukino's Mom, which fires 1 rocket, that splits in to 2, and again, and again, and again until you have a pretty formidable barrage of rockets.
    • Most Torgue-made legendaries have the gimmick of "MORE EXPLOSIONS!!!1!" running in their special weapon effects, ranging from flak cannon shotguns to gyrojet barrage pistols and MIRV grenades whose child grenades are smaller MIRV grenades ("Yo Dawg I heard you like MIRV grenades" much?).
    • Several of the legendary rocket weapons can do this, as well as any rocket launcher with the burst, spread, or helix modifiers. Combine this with a mod that provides Bottomless Magazines and your day is officially made.
  • In Celestus, missile launchers are the first –- and thus cheapest –- ground-to-space weapon. This means that even a moderatly-well defended planet will have millions of them.
  • Champions Online: The Power Armor Framework includes "Micromunitions". Several salvos of missiles are fired from the shoulders: Both, left, then right. It's a ranged Area Attack ability.
  • In City of Heroes, the Macross Missile Massacre is often the first attack used by the Malta Group's Zeus Class Titan. After their second upgrade, a Robotics Mastermind's Assault Bot gains this ability.
    • In the Dual Pistols set, the Bullet Rain power is a miniature version of the trope, with the character waving their guns around in a cone firing rapidly, after which the bullets robotech to their target (and the enemies in an area around the target).
    • Rain of Arrows in the Archery powerset is another miniature version of the trope; the character appears to draw four arrows at once for a high, arching shot... and twenty or thirty arrows fall out of the sky in a wide area around the target point.
  • Command & Conquer:
    • The Rocket Buggy in Command & Conquer: Generals has this as its motto: launching half a dozen (a full dozen with an upgrade) unguided rockets at an area. They're not very effective (an infantry unit will survive more than six rockets) if not in groups, however.
    • The American Comanche helicopters have a much more powerful version in the Rocket Pods upgrade, which can utterly saturate a small area with a storm of payload, making it extremely potent at stopping tank rushes. Five Comanches using this ability will overload the graphics engine and make most of the missile trails disappear, and a wing of seven equals a superweapon in sheer output, and with a faster recharge to boot.
      How 'bout those rocket pods?
    • The GLA's superweapon, the SCUD Storm, fires off a dozen Soviet-era missiles over a very wide area, and for extra fun each missile unleashes a big dose of anthrax that lingers for a while.
    • One of the American base defenses is the Patriot missile launcher, which fires a salvo of four missiles at its target. Admittedly not very impressive, except that it transmits the target's location to nearby turrets, causing them to launch their own missiles at it, resulting in this trope.
    • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the Allied Aegis Missile Cruiser starts off as a powerful anti-air unit that fires damaging missiles at targets. However, as it begins to rack up kills and gain promotions (which isn't too hard as it's pretty good at its job) it gets becomes even more powerful and fires missiles nonstop. An elite (fully promoted) Aegis Cruiser can destroy a Kirov Airship in three seconds.
    • Red Alert 2's Allied Rocket IFV is quite capable of triple-M'ing when it's fully promoted. Rack up as many elite Rocket IFVs and you can guarantee that you'll have a real triple-M show.
    • And in Red Alert 3, we have the Rocket Angels, who do this whenever they're not using their paralyzing whip.
      • This is one of the Empire of the Rising Sun's specialties. One of their special upgrades makes any units with rocket weapons fire even more rockets when attacking.
      • The Imperial Giga-fortress from Uprising is a floating battleship that mounts four photon rocket launchers, each equivalent to a Rocket Angel in firepower, plus four beam-cannon batteries.
    • And also in Red Alert 3, we have Soviet Dreadnoughts that can utterly spam targets with missiles—really, really huge missiles (these are full battleships after all), but at the expense of the unit's health. Allied IFVs and missile turrets can spam nearly as bad as a Rocket Angel, however, if you put a Javelin soldier in there, and the Soviet Twinblade attacks targets simply by unloading a ton of rockets onto it.
    • The GDI MLRS is this in Renegade, Tiberian Dawn's spinoff. Six rockets per salvo, compared to the original's two.
    • The Nod Multi-Missile superweapon from Tiberian Sun is, put simply, Macross Missile Massacre plus Recursive Ammo. It's the only weapon that can let off more than two missiles in a go, until Firestorm added the Cyborg Reaper, which lets off four missile a salvo.
    • The mode of attack of the Nod Stealth Tank from Tiberium Wars is — you guessed it — a triple-M, a feat that its older versions could never pull off in the previous installments. To make it clear: older Stealth Tank models let two missiles off per salvo; these new toys let off at least three to four times as much.
      • Also in the same game, but at a lesser extent is the Orca Gunship, firing 6 air-to-ground missiles each. but since you usually have 4 of them, it ends up barraging 24 missiles on your enemies. The Kane's Wrath expansion even has a +2 missiles upgrade to these aircrafts, bringing up to 32 missiles in one quick run! Stack it up with a cheap Orca Strike Craft, and you get a full-fledged missile massacre.
  • In Company of Heroes, choosing the tank specialisation on the allied side allows you to call in the Sherman Calliope, an M4 Sherman with sixty missiles strapped on top of it. It can be fired as often as you want, if you have the resources. Gets better if you have several of them, as you can fire them all simultaneously, resulting in huge missile strikes. Again, if you have the resources.
  • Contra:
    • In Contra III: The Alien Wars, a monumental number of missiles (and not small ones, either) is shot at one of Red Falcon's flying fortresses. The player has to destroy the forcefield protecting the fortress' core, leaping from missile to missile as they impact and detonate. And not jumping from foothold to foothold, either, but handhold to handhold, with a single hand (the other wields a weapon, of course.) Once the field is down, the player can allow the missiles to hit, although most of them will be destroyed by flares coming out of the core unless the player dissipates them first.
    • The Homing missile weapon in Contra III allows for a smaller scale version of this trope, with rapid-fire missiles arcing and bobbing drunkenly towards the nearest available target. Pick up two and activate both at the same time to go into a spinning jump while spraying a veritable stream of homing missiles at anything in range.
    • In the third stage of Contra Re Birth, there are numerous missiles fired (which you can also shoot down with missiles of your own). There are many enemies hanging from the missiles and finally the first form of the boss of the stage is a missile that can shoots missiles.
  • In Crying Suns, General Vivar’s boss ability launches dozens of missiles at your squadrons’ current positions. The missiles take a few seconds to reach the targeted cells, so you can move your squadrons out of harm’s way if Vivar’s own squadrons (which are Friendly Fireproof) aren’t bogging them down.
  • Dawn of War
    • The Skyray Missile Gunship of the Tau in Dawn of War pretty much does the same as its counterpart in the ''tabletop game: Burning the Enemies of the Greater Good with a wave of missiles to the ground. Same for the Sisters of Battle Exorcist.
    • This is how Ork Tank Bustaz work in Dawn of War II, they even come with a the ability "barrage" which lets them fire their roketz all at once in da air to rain death upon their foes.
    • Once you unlock the Fragmentation Missile Pod for the Tau Commander in Dawn of War II: Retribution's Last Stand mode, equipping it allows you to fire off a triple-M at a target area, damaging everything in it. The Anti-Armor Missile Pod, while less trope-obedient, still fires a cluster of missiles at a single target.
  • Descent 3 follows this closely with its Cyclone missiles. Shortly after being launched, a Cyclone separates into five smaller missiles, which lazily swoop and spiral out toward the target. You can easily get several of these things in the air at once, leading to a rain of warheads down range.
    • And several of the bosses like to missile-spam you, in combination with Teleport Spam.
    • And pretty much any normal robot packing missiles will unleash these upon you at the higher difficulty settings.
  • The Flash tower-defense game Desktop Defender has the Dart Tower, which can be upgraded to the Advanced Dart Tower. Level 6 Dart Towers have massive range and do a lot of damage; however, level 6 Advanced Dart Towers gain the special ability "SHOCK AND AWE". Need I say more?
  • In Destiny, both Cabal Centurion and Colossus troops will gladly pump out a constant supply of missiles from backpack launchers. Valus Ta'aurc, a Cabal boss and leader of their Siege Dancers army, takes this to a whole new level, constantly spamming an endless supply of missiles while rampaging around the area, and only a few hits from said missiles are enough to kill even the toughest Guardians.
  • In the Devil May Cry series, Pandora's "PF594: Argument" move in Devil May Cry 4 and Kalina Ann's "Hysteric" move in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition and Devil May Cry 5 all spray a cluster of missiles. Since Dante can find another Kalina Ann and dual-wield them in the fifth game, there's also a "Hysteric Twins" move that lets him fire a larger barrage.
  • The Cluster Launcher gun skill in Disgaea 4 unleashes one.
  • Dolphin Blue have the Valkyrie Missiles, which allows you to let loose six missiles with a single shot. You can find plenty of ammo for this weapon, too, allowing you to spam the screen with missiles.
  • Duke Nukem 3D has the aptly-named Devastator weapon. It fires small missiles very fast. In fact, it's so effective that you can easily beat the third boss in the game in a few seconds with it.
  • On a much smaller scale, we have EarthBound (1994). Rocket-type weapons have a distinct sound effect for when they're fired. Bottle Rockets do it once, Big Bottle rockets do it several times (presumably for igniting a bigger engine). When Jeff uses a Multi-Bottle Rocket, it layers enough repetitions of this "engine ignition" sound that the attack sounds more like a machine gun going off than a rocket. One can only imagine what this attack would look like if it were animated. It's as powerful as it sounds, too.
  • Earth Defense Force: Throughout the various titles in the series players have gotten access to personal missile launching weapons, missile armed vehicles, and even mechs armed with missile launchers that shoot out a spray of multiple homing projectiles all in one go.
  • Elite: Dangerous features this as a faction specific reward in the form of Li Yong-Rui's Pack Hound missile rack.
  • Empire at War gives the Rebellion a corvette-sized ship, the Corellian Gunboat. Like other Corvette's, it only takes up 2 population, and its primary weapons are concussion missile launchers. Even without using the no-pop-in-battle mod, massed Gunboats can easily overwhelm and destroy an IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER with few (if any) losses. As well, there are also the Anti-fighter/space station Marauder-class Cruiser and Broadside-class Cruiser, who's special ability is to saturate an area with missiles for a (short but sweet) period of time.
  • Even Empire: Total War has this at times with the Rocket Troop artillery unit (the "rockets' red glare" type of rocket).
  • Design-wise, this is the Hat of Federation warships in Escape Velocity Nova. One of their most feared ships is the Fed Destroyer's Heavy Missile Version, which loves to fill its vicinity with Hellhound missiles and EMP torpedoes. This is a byproduct of the Escape Velocity AI being somewhat, shall we say, tactically challenged: basically, it shoots every weapon in its arsenal (except those coded as point-defense) at a target if it's in range.
  • This is one of the game mechanics you can find in the Japanese indy shmup, Ether Vapor. The Attack Drones accompanying the protagonist uses lasers, while his enemies uses missiles. It story's first Bonus Stage is about the game showing off its Triple M abilities. You, as the protagonist, get to use roboteching lasers to shoot missiles down while doing some very impressive High Speed Missile Dodges.
  • While ships in EVE Online can have up to eight missile racks, all missiles launched from a ship originate from the same spot, causing simultaneously launched missiles to travel in a neat, glowing ball'o'death instead of a swarm.
    • The upcoming Dominion expansion introduces the fighter bombers, which pelt the enemy capital ship from all angles with torpedoes.
    • While the fighter bombers have been delayed the Titan Superweapons of the Caldari and Minmatar are a shining example of this trope. The Caldari Titan in particular, known as the Leviathan, launches a literal barrage of anti-ship missiles that deal a whopping 3,000,000 damage before resistances. Anything smaller than a supercarrier or another Titan is going to die in one shot unless purpose-tanked against the attack.
    • For a more traditional example, some players are fond of "line torping" which is basically creating an uninterrupted stream of missiles between you and your target. Originally done with torpedoes because they were relatively slow; patches have turned them into fast, short-range weapons but some still attempt this with other long-range missile types.
    • Caldari being the missile favouring race of the bunch has plenty of ships that deal carnage via different sized missiles. Whilst in-game the Drake Battlecruiser can fit "only" 7 launchers (although State Issue Raven, a very rare battleship is the only ship that can fit 8 launchers), it's in-game model has no less than 16 launchers (eight on each side) with three missile tubes each. Canonically, it looks very capable of performing MMM, even if it's game version can't.
    • As of the latest expansion (Inferno), missile graphics have been updated to add both trails and missile separation, so it appears much closer to MMM than before.
    • Retribution added the Caldari Corax, a destroyer with seven missile hardpoints. When fitted with Rocket Launchers, the result is a rapid-fire swarm of death.
  • In EVERSPACE, all ships, except with the weapon override, which boost your weapon damage, and you'll turn space fields in scrapyards in no time.
  • In Fable, the spell "Multi Shot" lets you do this with a bow and arrow. Keep in mind that the arrows will Robotech en-route to their target, so using this in an enclosed space will result in only one or two arrows hitting the target, while the walls around you will resemble a feathery pincushion.
  • The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road gives the Red Glare: A scoped, fully-automatic missile launcher that can fire up to 13 rockets in less than 5 seconds.
    • Fallout 3 has the Experimental MIRV, which qualifies despite only firing 8 missiles. Why, you ask? Each missile contains a nuclear warhead. Certain areas such as Takoma Park have switches that launch missile barrages, and the Kill Sat in Broken Steel also fires these.
    • Gun Runner's Arsenal also adds the Tiny Tots Mini-Nuke, which deploys a volley of nine bomblets similar to the Experimental MIRV from Fallout 3.
    • Old World Blues has a unique boss-type Securitron that fires missiles like this.
    • Fallout 4 has the Big Boy MIRV, the Big Boy launcher doubles the amount of Mini Nuke, the MIRV mod is no exception. The Big Boy MIRV launcher fires 12 Mini Nukes at once.
  • Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII can call a minor massacre from his airship as a Limit Break.
    • The Al-Bhed leader Cid in Final Fantasy X takes his airship and releases a considerable amount of missiles upon the Al-Bhed Home, once it has been overrun by Fiends and enemy forces.
      • He also uses it in the Evrae boss battle if you use the trigger command and wait for his turn.
    • The enemy skill Matra Magic also takes this form in Final Fantasy VII.
    • While Matra Magic is also usable in Final Fantasy IX, a better example is the Ark summon: a large warship that descends from space, transforms into a Humongous Mecha, and releases a laser-targeted M3 before finishing off the whole mess with a Kill Sat.
    • Quistis' Blue Magic 'Micro Missiles' in Final Fantasy VIII is a M3, complete with the missiles Roboteching their way from her back to the enemy.
  • The most obvious example of this is Kuja — he uses an attack which launches hundreds of magic missiles, similar to Matra Magic, TWICE in two separate cutscenes.
  • In F.E.A.R., you encounter the Power Armors, which can dual-wield the triple-shot rocket launcher available in the game. Do the maths, that makes a total of six rockets every time the Power Armor attacks. It's its only attack, but damn, it's not like they need another one.
  • The flight-based FPS Flying Heroes has two Macross Missile Massacre weapons: the Magion clan gets the Freezer, which releases a swarm of icy magic orbs, while the Lizard Riders get the Bombardion, which fires a single large rocket that releases a swarm of smaller Roboteching missiles on impact.
  • The main advantage of rocket artillery in Foxhole over standard artillery shells (besides the ability to set structures, vehicles, and infantry ablaze) is the ability to launch the entire battery at once, spreading destruction over a wide area. Of course, the rockets still have to be loaded individually, so these salvos have a long interval between them.
  • Fraxy gives you the missile part, which fires 5 missiles before reloading at rank 100. What if someone added an event to loop the missile launching?
  • In FreeSpace 2, you can arm your fighter with 2 types of missile that fire off four (or 8 if you double fire) mini missiles. They also home in. Sadly, you can't load up completely on these and fire all of your ordnance racks at once, although you could (if you were good and fast) fire all of them in very quick succession.
    • You can also equip the other fighters in your squad and up to three additional squads with swarm missiles and then order them to get into formation with you. When you then command all of them to attack the capital ship in front of you, they will all fire their missiles at the same distance from the target, for a possible total of 128 missiles. Unless they send a second wave three seconds after that.
    • One of the very first missiles you have access to not only takes up a lot of space in your fighter, but also has poor tracking capability (tail-chase only) and mediocre damage to boot. However, it is a staple of multiplayer partly because it requires no lock-on to track targets but also because the firing intervals for the weapon are lower than just about any other missile weapon. This allows you to "ripple-fire" them in salvos in order to make them harder to shake off and in order to ensure a kill.
    • Freespace mods also cop to this on occasion. Wings of Dawn contains a frigate that fires several dozen missiles per salvo, and Blue Planet has this as one of the UEF's main tactics: since they lack the Wave Motion Guns the GTVA uses, their strongest attack is a massive, continuous swarm of nukes.
  • Build-your-own-battlefleet sandbox From the Depths has spawned plenty of designs that fire an ungodly amount of missiles even if they don't make any sense. Especially if they don't make any sense...
  • It is possible to do this in FTL: Faster Than Light by loading up on three or four missile weapons and unleashing them all at once. Since they penetrate shields, you can potentially cause significant damage without having to lower even the toughest shields first. However, this is genereally a bad idea, because missile weapons consume ammo, and if your shots miss (and it's very likely they will), you'll have wasted scrap at best and reduced your ship to harmlessness at worst.
  • In Galactic Civilizations II, the Missile weapon type turns into this rather fast. Culminating in Black Hole Eruptors.
  • Galaxy Angel: The Happy Trigger's special weapon, Strike Burst, unleashes the vessel's entire payload on a single victim. In the following games, if the target is destroyed, any remaining phalanx/missile shots will seek out and hit nearby enemies, resulting in obscene damage to enemy ships in large radius around it.
  • Ghost in the Shell allows you to fire a barrage of missiles as your Limit Break. Several of the bosses tends to spam missiles as well, notably the last one who keeps spamming missiles all over the place.
  • In Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, the Commando class (Duke in the story mode) can have a shoulder-mounted missile launcher which shoots multiple missiles at the chosen target.
  • Golden Sun: The Lost Age has the Daedalus summon, which has the immediate effect of summoning a Macross Missile Massacre and then the delayed effect of launching a single, much more devastating missile at the end of the turn after the summon is used.
    • The Fire/Fireball/Inferno psynergy applies this trope to, well, fireballs, sending a huge amount of burning projectiles Robo Teching from the caster's hand into the enemy.
  • G-Police has the Star missile. In a game in which every other missile works much like you'd expect, the Star is special because it launches eight missiles that lazily configure themselves in a circle around your cockpit, then launch themselves at your target one after the other at blinding speed. They're unguided, but it doesn't matter — they're so fast they're almost impossible to dodge.
  • Most types of missile in Gratuitous Space Battles carry onboard decoys which surround each missile in graceful curves. A ship (or better — a fleet of ships) with many missile launchers often exemplifies this trope.
    • Let's just say that each medium or larger battle turns into a missile massacre whether you want to avoid it or not. But why would you want to avoid a MMM in the first place anyway?
  • The military chopper fought in Half-Life 2 that can spew out a gigantic swarm of antipersonnel mines, and will do so repeatedly just to show you it can. Interestingly, the most memorable version of this attack actually spawned from a glitch. When you nearly have the chopper taken down, it will start spamming mines in a gigantic three-line stream, covering wherever you are with explosives. This used to be a glitch, but when Valve discovered how effective it was and the lasting memories it impressed upon players, they turned it into a tactic, and came up with an in-universe explanation: the mines are inflatable, so that they can float on water, and they just poof up when they're released. It justifies how meager of a blast the mines have relative to their size.
  • The Vulture gunship from Halo Wars has the Barrage ability wherein it launches a salvo of missiles at a ground target. It's also equipped with two air-to-air missile launchers.
    • Pelican dropships can also be equipped for a missile massacre. This is most visible at the end of the Halo 3 campaign level "Sierra 117" in which a single Pelican blows two Covenant Phantoms to hell with a relentless bombardment of missiles. It will also shoot at any surviving Covenant infantry, often to comedic effect.
    • The last cutscene of the Halo 3 level "The Storm" has many dozens of Longsword fighters, not to mention several frigates, firing a huge volley at the Forerunner Dreadnought, the fighters using missiles and the ships using MAC rounds. The explosions that result from the attack cover almost the entire target, which is (read it) a little over 7 miles long. Unfortunately, they don't do much against whatever was shielding the ship.
    • On a smaller scale, the Missile Pod in Halo 3, and the Fuel Rod Turrets and Missile Warthog in Halo: Reach.
  • Heavy Weapon has the homing missiles and the rocket Power Ups for your tank. The former targets airborne mooks and deals a quite good amount of damage, while the latter is like the former but without a targeting system and deals slightly less damage. You can upgrade both weapons to 3 levels to unleash a missile rampage!
    • The enemy also tries this on you. You have two annoying helicopter mooks that fires missiles often, a shield-protected jet fighter that also fires missiles at a decent rate, and an RPG-firing pickup truck. As for bosses, 13 out of 19 bosses also does this, such as Kommie Kong's exploding rockets, and the Secret Weapon's combination of regular missiles and armored missiles in the final phase.
  • Homeworld features the Missile Destroyer, which has 4 missile launchers and has a special feature that allows it fire 32 missiles in about 5 seconds. It could single-handedly wipe out entire fleets of strike craft.
    • An even better display of fireworks is from the surprisingly smaller and weaker Missile Corvette. If a player can get a hold of one of these, he essentially has the ability to rain sixty missiles on his enemies.
    • In Homeworld 2, many of the Vaygr capital ships are armed with anti-ship missiles as their primary weapon. When a large group of these ships open fire at once, an instant missile massacre ensues. Hiigaran Torpedoes have a similar effect through Recursive Ammo.
    • Cataclysm does it best: while Somtaaw destroyers are equipped with two forward-fixed ion cannons, the engineers saw it fit to increase weapon coverage with a top-mounted missile turret that fires in salvoes of four. The inverse happened to the dreadnought: its main weapon fires even more missiles, but to prevent the enemy from attacking the slow ship from outside missile coverage, they put an ion cannon turret each onto the top and bottom.
  • Two of the Tor's attacks in Iji, "Megamissile" and "Fractal Rocket".
  • Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier features the Judgment missile, which splits in to three independently targeting missiles. Which then split into another three. Each. Then you can buy an Unlimited Ammo cheat. Yeah. While not as effective at completely clearing the airspace around you as the Judgement missile, the Swarmer Missile aircraft weapon also sends a barrage of missiles towards whatever happens to be in your way.
  • This is entirely doable in Kerbal Space Program. Just stick a few liquid tanks and engines to your rocket onto some decouplers, and watch your DIY MIRV rain down hell. Now we just need to wait until an update adds cities...
  • Maxima in The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match plays this trope nice and straight with his newly altered MAX2/HSDM, wherein he blasts the opponent senseless with a barrage of missiles from his own body (He's a cyborg). You would think that would be enough to put the opponent away permanently, but oh no, Maxima wants to be sure of his opponent's demise and proceeds to fry them with a fricking huge laser beam from his own chest cavity.
  • The Final Boss of Lethal Enforcers will launch even more missiles at you on the hardest difficulty.
  • In Lunar: Eternal Blue, Lemina's Flame Shot does this with a bunch of fireballs.
  • Machines has the gorilla, which fires lots of small missiles at long distance, which kind of compensates for it's slow speed and it's other attack being very short range.
  • The ranged special attack of Ruru in Magical Battle Arena has her launching a barrage of homing drill missiles.
  • War Machine's War Destroyer super move in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a barrage of missiles (the main difference between him and Iron Man is that the former's weapons are mostly ballistic while the latter's are energy-based).
  • You are can really be sure that at least one of Morrigan's Specials in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is this.
  • In the web based online game Marvel: Avengers Alliance, there are some Hydra mooks with a bazooka, they have an attack conveniently called "Missile Massacre". Such attack consist in them shooting a bunch of missiles to you and your allied heroes.
    • Also in the same game we find Iron Man's "Missile Barrage" and Tatctical Force's "Rocket Barrage".
  • A honorable mention to Mass Effect 3's M-560 Hydra missile launcher. It shoots a "mere" 8 warheads at a time, but unlike the vast majority of weapons on this list, it's man-portable. It's designed so that its missiles will converge if aimed at a large, hardened target but split off and track multiple enemies if aimed at a mook, making the best use of the available firepower.
    • Mass Effect: Andromeda has a downplayed version in the Hydra, a Mini-Mecha Mini-Boss which will fire a half dozen missiles at once. The battles for Meridian and the Asari ark feature straight versions of this trope with Kett and later Remnant starships.
  • Master of Orion series allow to pack lots and lots of missiles on a ship, especially if you don't care about having many shots. In the second, two strategies are to have the last missile you can outfit with MIRV (4x damage, needs 2 more TechLevels) and other improvements that make them hard to kill or jam at the cost of bulk and thus total number of missiles or hurling unholy amounts of spam with plain (at best one minor mod weakening some antimissile measure) missiles in an attempt to overwhelm point defences and have enough left after other anti-missile measures to inflict great damage. Dauntless Guidance allows the remains of the swarm killing a target to lock on the next one. In the first game, "Scatter Packs" are a separate tech, and may be a better early investment than the relatively weak guns available at lower tech levels.
  • Artix Entertainment's game MechQuest has MULTIPLE weapons that can pull off the Macross Missile Massacre. No Roboteching, mostly because the weapons are forward-locked. But launching about twelve missiles for several turns in a row does have its charm.
  • Medal of Honor: Allied Assault has a mission where you take out a battery of Nebelwerfer 41 multi-rocket launchers. And yes, you must run through their line of fire. In Frontline's Rough Landing level, you use one to destroy an out-of-reach tank.
  • The Finishing Move of Craft in Mega Man Zero 4, the second time Zero fights him.
  • Mercenaries 2 has the Venezuelan Cortez RA. A military truck with a rocket launcher on top, which fires 11 rockets in rapid succession.
    If you ever need to fire eleven missiles in just over a second, the Cortez Rocket Artillery Vehicles is the easiest way to do it.
  • In Metal Fatigue, Rimtech has access to this from the get-go. Build a Combot with dual heavy missile arms, a drunk missile torso, and drunk missile legs, and you have a recipe for bombardment. Salvage homing missile arms from Neuropa and the resultant missile-spam Combot will have no shortage of explosives to dole out. For bonus points, the 'drunk' missiles will bob back and forth in the spirit of this trope and Roboteching.
  • At the beginning of Act 5 of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Liquid's futuristic floating fortress Outer Haven launches one of these against the approaching USS Missouri. This results in a Moment of Awesome for the Missouri when she manages to shoot down nearly the entire swarm and destroy the launchers with WW2-era flak cannons and naval guns... and the couple of modern Phalanx CIWS she has, but it's still an MoA.
    • During the final moments of the act immediately preceding this, you can pull off your own with the weapon systems provided by Metal Gear REX. Action Commands accessible during your incredibly awesome boss battle with RAY will even let you grind Liquid Ocelot into the dirt with a missile barrage if you catch him while he's downed.
  • From Metal Wolf Chaos, firing a ludicrous amount of missiles:
  • Samus Aran of Metroid fame generally ends up with a veritable Hyperspace Arsenal of missiles. In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes she gains the ability to lock on and fire five of them simultaneously.
    • Meta Ridley in Metroid Prime has a multi-missile attack, in which he launches several missiles, complete with the curving trajectory.
    • Missiles end up being your primary anti-boss weapon in Metroid Fusion, so triple-M is unavoidable.
    • Metroid Dread: The new Storm Missiles upgrade lets Samus lock onto up to five targets and fire three micromissiles at each one. With a full five locks on one target you can unload a whopping 15 Missiles into it for massive damage.
  • In the last act of Modern Warfare, Zakhaev launches a salvo of MIRV ICBM's towards the US.
  • The Level 3 Rocket Power-Up in ModNation Racers, rest assured, just have excellent timing with that shield button and you'll be fine.
  • The WWII MMO naval-simulation game Navyfield contains an interesting case, in that instead of missiles there are torpedoes. Quite a few Japanese ships in the game could be outfitted with a stupidly large number of torpedo launchers, which allows for massive 3M-type volleys of torpedoes (a practice the Navyfield community calls "torp-whoring"). Add to that the fact that the Japanese side uses the Long Lance torpedoes (which, historically, were the longest-range unguided torpedoes ever built, with a 20-mile range), plus the fact that said torps seem to explode with the force of a small atomic bomb, even when they self-destruct (and thereby sinking or severely damaging any ship that's too close by), and it's no wonder that torp-whoring is quite controversial among the Navyfield community.
    • As the Metagame of Navyfield progresses, however, torpedo whores are seeing less and less use, as players wise up and protect their ships from torpedoes through armor. Additionally, as players play, they get access to better and better ships, some of whom can shrug off insane quantities of torpedoes before suffering any noticeable damage. "Torpedo whores" are also usually the first target in any battle, as they are generally the first in line so as to not damage friendly ships inadvertently.
    • Interestingly, this is actually somewhat realistic, tactics-wise. Japanese battle plans called for hundreds of torpedoes to be launched in the general direction of the enemy fleet from stupidly long ranges in the hopes that this would disable at least some of the enemy ships before the main fleet engagement; this is why they developed the "Long Lance" in the first place. Of course, this large surface fleet engagement never materialized, and so the ships outfitted to fulfill this role were never used as anything more then AA support.
      • Made even more interesting by the fact that nearly nothing else of the game is realistic.
  • The Isaac's Greater Missile Storm spell is animated this way in Neverwinter Nights 2.
    • The spell also exists in the expansions to Neverwinter Nights, where it's almost a Game-Breaker for its absurd damage potential when the Maximize Spell feat is applied to it.
      • And if that wasn't bad enough; imagine a spellcaster throwing two Maximised IGMSs out while Time Stop is in effect. Imagine what that would look like to the poor bastard/s on the other end!
      • Baldur's Gate 2 topped this though. With Time Stop, Improved Aclarity, the Robe of Vecna, and Amulet of Power, it was possible to cast Magic Missile without pausing between spells, and very quickly. Quickly enough to cause even the most powerful computers to stutter as they calculated graphics and damage of the various spells, which all occurred as soon as the time stop ended.
  • No More Heroes: Holly Summers in is fond of launching salvo upon salvo of missiles from her prosthetic leg. This is also the only attack Helter Skelter shows in the game's teaser trailer/prologue.
  • ''No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: The player is capable of charging a large-scale sequence of misile shots in the mecha fight against Charlie MacDonald.
  • No More Heroes III: During the outer space fights against the enormous sidereal alien monsters (Ice Shaver, Space Sheath and Space Peacock), Travis and his cat Jeane pilot a huge mecha that can load and the unleash a multi-missile shot, and during the load their targets are being locked one by one; this proves useful when aiming every missile at the monsters' weak points or destroying the incoming projectiles from the monsters. However, Travis must avoid taking damage, or else the load will be interruped and will have to be restarted.
  • Nova Drift: Salvo deploys a swarm of wild, heat-seeking missiles that explode in a small blast radius. While not firing, missiles are stockpiled every 0.5 seconds, and are all released at once when you fire.
  • The MMO Ogame has the missile silo building, that you can load with interception and/or interplanetary missiles. The latter can travel between planets and even star systems to destroy planetary defenses — that unlike what happens on fleet attacks cannot be repaired — while the former destroy interplanetary missiles before hitting you. In addition to them, the most basic planetary defense is a rocket launcher that beyond the early game is just cheap to build Cannon Fodder, that gets destroyed en masse instead of more powerful and expensive defenses.
  • In Operation Flashpoint, EVERY helicopter is armed with tons of unguided air-to-ground missiles. These suckers are meant to be fired in salvos while strafing the target. You can launch them as fast as you can click the mouse. A.I.s even use them in copter-vs-copter duels (which makes sense since only the combat copters have a 30mm machine gun and it's not that powerful). Need any more explanation?
  • In Overwatch Pharah's ultimate ability "Barrage" has her hover in place while firing a massive number of rockets at her enemies. "Justice rains from above!"
  • In Paladins, Drogoz's "Salvo" ability sets his rocket launcher to fire all of his loaded rockets at once. The rockets deal around a third of their normal damage to players, but get a damage bonus against the Front Line heroes shield abilities.
  • The Colored Pencils boss in Paper Mario: The Origami King uses its numerous pencils as homing missiles both during its boss fight and when Mario climbs the Overlook Tower to reach him. Even if during combat he only uses twelve pencils at a time, he can use a much larger amount of them as seen during the last climb to reach him, where he releases a barrage of pencil missiles trying to stop Mario's ascension.
  • A rather early example can be found in the intro of the 1997 game, Pax Imperia. "You didn't have to use those Swarm Missiles, did you?"
  • The Terran Republic soldiers in both PlanetSide games get the Striker, a lock-on bullpup missile launcher which fires a salvo of 5 rockets. Individually, it's not particularly powerful, but it's versatile as it can attack both ground and air vehicles. Typically, every Terran heavy soldier carries either a Striker or a dumbfire launcher. Woe betide any New Conglomerate or Vanu Sovereignty aircraft that try to strafe a Terran firing line without flares, because in about three seconds they'll have a hundred very persistent missiles zooming in towards their squishy VTOL.
  • P.N.03 has the Swan Energy Drive, the special attack the player starts with, and its more massacrey cousin, the Swan Pro.
  • The Project: Snowblind rocket launcher has two firing modes. The primary one fires an unguided rocket, but the alternate firing mode splits this rocket into four independently targeting, homing minimissiles.
  • Most missile systems available to the player in Project Sylpheed work this way. The heaviest is capable of launching six missiles at once... then each missile shoots ten missiles for a grand total of 60.
  • In Quake IV, you get to pilot a Mini-Mecha. It has a multi-rocket launcher that can launch a full volley of six, which can lock-on to parts of a bigger Strogg like a Harvester, startlingly fast. It has a relatively long reload time, but you can just switch to the integrated machinegun as it does to keep the dakka rolling and then switch back to another round of missile saturation.
  • Rage 2: The rocket launcher can be upgraded to lock onto every enemy on the screen before firing rockets at each of them.
  • In the Raiden series, you can pick up missile power-ups that cause your ship to fire missiles alongside its primary weapon. The M-type missiles (non-homing-type) are the most potent and dense type of missiles, becoming a veritable swarm at maximum power level.
  • The RYNO (or "Rip You a New One") in Ratchet & Clank functions by spamming a hail of missiles at everything in shooting range.
    • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando features its upgraded version RYNO II which is basically a chain rocket launcher that holds 100 shots and shoots them blindingly fast. Deploying a few Mega-Turret Launchers, that automatically shoot rockets at enemies, also results in this trope.
    • Later versions, such as the upgraded forms of the third game's RY3NO, hybridise this with Beam Spam into a spray of light/missile/whatever darts that disintegrate their opponents. Overkill? What's that?
  • This is the basic principle of RAY Series. Players can accomplish this by firing multiple rays at the enemy crafts once they finish aiming. Many bosses and some minibosses do it as well.
  • Krakens in Razing Storm love to use this on you. The third boss of the game, a Spider Tank, does this when defeated in a Taking You with Me move. If you don't destroy enough of his missiles in time, it will destroy the walkway connecting two skyscrapers, of which your squad is on, leading to a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Hijack a artillery tank in Red Faction: Guerilla, turn on cool turrets, and go to a large EDF base. Hold down the left trigger the entire time.
  • Arsenal-archetype ships in Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages are heavy bricks that fire lots of missiles all at once. There are several Arsenal-specific abilities that boost missiles, such as making enemies hit with missiles slow down (so you can aim at them with more missiles), firing a missile when you hit something with a missile, or giving you health whenever you land a hit with a missile.
  • The Vinci faction of Rise of Legends make use of crude missiles. And they shoot them out in large quantities with their Air Destroyer units and the Land Leviathan super-unit. Additionally, cities and bunkers for Vinci will sometimes be protected by a unique infantry model that carries a rocket launcher. Because of their primitive nature, most of these missiles have a winding flight pattern.
  • The First-Person Shooter Rise of the Triad had the Drunk Missile, which fired five missiles which flew in a wild pattern and tracked enemies. Firing "drunks" into a crowd of enemies resulted in a huge, gibletty mess.
  • Risk of Rain: On the foe's side, one of the many modifiers elite foes can have is to fire missiles every now and then, causing swarms to be dangerous as hell, and the Scavenger fires whole volleys by himself. On the hero's side, there's two items that have a chance of firing one/three missiles with every hit landed, with the chance growing higher with every stack of each item, and the engineer has one ability that lets him fire four missiles into the air for good damage; every missile counts as one hit, and other classes have even more hits for some abilities, so with luck, and/or many stacks of the aforementioned items, you can have veritable clouds of rockets.
  • Shadow Hearts: From The New World gives us Ricardo's "Fated Day's End". He plays a few notes, throws his hat, swings his guitar onto his shoulder and releases about twenty missiles, which rain down on the enemy.
  • Xeros Beat and Javelin Rain in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne are lighter versions of the MMM, the latter is a more typical example which homes in more on a specific area, while the former only travels in a straight line, both inflict a specific status ailment as well.
  • Shogo: Mobile Armor Division has the Bullgut: a Humongous Mecha-carried weapon that launches four explosive missiles at a time in the general vicinity of the crosshairs. Jumping up and firing allows you to fire only one at time, though why on Earth you'd try to enact a Macross Monomissile Massacre is anyone's guess.
    • A smaller, truck-mounted version is seen on the mecha levels.
  • The Marza Dreadnought's Missile Barrage in Sins of a Solar Empire release absolutely massive amount of missiles. Just think of a large spaceship sitting duck, release missiles to hit every enemy ships in large radius for 60 seconds. It's as deadly as it sounds, if you don't get disabled, that is.
    • The Javelis LRM Frigate is another example. Each frigate is practically built with this trope in mind, with launching volleys of missiles being their sole purpose. It gets even better when you consider that those missiles can be upgraded with cluster warheads and that the relatively cheap cost of the frigates allow insanely large fleets of them to be built. Such a fleet can decimate low-to-mid-level capital ships in seconds.
    • The Vasari are no slouch in this department either, with the Kanrak Assailant and Vulkoras Desolator being their equivalents to the Javelis and Marza respectively. The volume of missiles they shoot is lower than that of the TEC fleet, but then, they shoot phase missiles, which can fly through enemy shields and hit their hull directly for deadly effect.
  • Soldiers: Heroes of World War II featured the Katyusha, the T34, and a German equivalent (see the real-life examples), who could shower any area on the map with missiles. Almost every multiplayer PvP game had No Rockets (or even No Artillery) as the game name, since they could kill just about anything by sending a single scout forward to find the enemy tanks, and shower it with nearly pinpoint accuracy.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, the Tails/Eggman mechs can produce one of these in the second boss battle and in 2P battle mode. Eggman also has one of these on his "Egg Dealer" robot in Shadow the Hedgehog.
    • A better example is in the beginning of Sonic Unleashed, where Sonic crashes onto Eggman's flagship. The doctor targets every turret and robot, in the dozens and hundreds respectively, onto him and fires. The target being Sonic and all...
    • And before all this, there was the Sonic 3 & Knuckles Doomsday Zone. Assuming you have all the Chaos Emeralds and Super Emeralds, after the Death Egg explodes, Sonic is sent into space, who then turns Super/Hyper, and flies headfirst into a Macross Missile Massacre fired by Robotnik's mech.
  • The Final Boss of Splatoon is more than happy to make your little tennis match more interesting by mixing in a disconcerting number of homing missiles (in addition to his various other attacks). Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3 actually lets you do this to your opponents with the Tenta Missiles special weapon.
  • Star Control:
    • The Earthling Cruiser, whose main weapon are refurbished nuclear missiles. While it cannot be seen during battles, as you fight just with one ship at a time and a Cruiser can launch at best two missiles with a full battery, Starbase Commander Hayes mentions how during the war against the Ur-Quan Hierarchy said vessels were churned out in hundreds together with smaller support vessels (Macross MX Missile Massacre).
    • The Mmrnmhrm's X-Form ship transformed on the Y-Wing form attacks with twin long-range, tracking missiles. While weak individually, they're cheap to launch and an enemy ship can be overwhelmed by a slow but constant barrage of such missiles. Just keep your distance if you don't want to suffer a lot of pain, given also the turn rate of that form is anything but fast.
  • The Terran Valkyrie of Starcraft: Brood War can fire up to 12 missiles simultaneously at different targets, with a fairly high firing rate. These are cheap air units that are intended to be used in large groups, so seeing a dozen valkyries throwing out over a thousand missiles in about ten seconds is not uncommon.
  • StarCraft II has the terran Banshee, Battlecruiser and Missile Turret. The banshee fires barrages of about 4 missiles once every second, the Battlecruiser fires small lasers at a constant rate of around 2-3 a second, and in the campaign can also have an anti-air Barrage ability that fits this trope better, the missile turret is similar to the banshee, but like the battlecruiser, has a campaign upgrade to fire an an additional barrage after each normal volley.
    • One of Alexei Stukov's calldown abilities in Co-op Missions is the ability to summon the Apocalisk, an Ultralisk that is several times larger than the regular unit, and is fused with Terran armor. This comes complete with a 40 missiles launcher that simply hails rockets in every direction at airborne foes, and has a very short cooldown before it does it again.
    • From the same mode, Arcturus Mengsk's ultimate calldown has him carpet-bombing an area with nuclear missiles. Needless to say, very few things are capable of surviving such an onslaught.
      Mengsk: Fire missiles! Fire again! Fire them all!
  • With enough research in Star Ruler, your missile launchers can spew out a ridiculous amount of firepower. Galactic Armory removes this scaling with level but gives Barrage and Cluster launchers in return.
  • Star Trek Online:
    • The bridge officer power "Torpedo: Spread" causes your launcher to fire four torpedoes each at any targets in a 90 degree cone, while "Torpedo: High Yield" causes photon and quantum torpedo launchers to fire multiple torpedoes at a single target.
    • The Romulan Hyper-Plasma Torpedo fires large plasma torpedoes three-at-a-time.
  • The Mirak race in Star Trek: Starfleet Command have this trope as their hat. Out of all the races, their ships are the only one that can put out such an ungodly amount of missiles.
    • The game only has 2 ways to defend against missiles: phasers and tractor beams. Larger ships have more of both but may not be able to turn around fast enough to bring more firing arcs to bear. Tractor beams hold missiles in place (relative to the ship) until one of three things takes place: the tractor beam runs out of power and shuts off, a recharged phaser takes care of the missile, the missile runs out of fuel.
  • The player's backup weapon in Space Debris is a missile battery that spams projectiles capable of destroying dozens and dozens of alien enemies onscreen.
  • Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter has this as one of Nym's later attacks.
  • This is the standard attack of Interceptors in Star Wars: Battlefront II; they do carry blasters as secondary attacks, but their homing missiles are their primary weapons. The Imperial and Trade Federation shuttles can also do this, making for a Game-Breaker when you consider that they not only pump out more missiles faster than the Interceptor vessels can but they're exceedingly difficult to kill.
  • The two expansion sets for Star Wars: Tie Fighter featured a new Imperial prototype fighter known as the Missile Boat, which somehow managed to cram some 80 missiles into a craft the size of an X-wing (the X-wing only carries 6 proton torpedoes). Looking at a picture of the Missile Boat, you'd be rather hard-pressed to figure out just where all that ordnance is kept. In any case, the Missile Boat was designed to counter the threat of a rogue imperial admiral who also had a very advanced starfighter in his arsenal. When flying this ship, you could fire two missiles at a time with a very short reload, again and again until you ran out of missiles. Not only did this allow the Missile Boat to smash any other starfighter with ease, it could also singlehandedly take down large warships with little difficulty. It makes you wonder why the Empire didn't cut back all other ships and make nothing but Missile Boats.
    • For extra fun, half of the craft's missile loadout could be substituted for a smaller number of slower and less agile but harder hitting warheads, giving the player 40 missiles and either 30 proton torpedoes, 20 heavy rockets, or 10 inertial bombs — enough firepower to wipe out whole enemy fleets singlehandedly.
    • Unsurprisingly, the multiplayer-oriented sequel X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter excluded the Missile Boat for being too much of a Game-Breaker, though the later X-Wing Alliance included a nerfed version in its multiplayer mode. The missile spam aspect remained intact, though; it was the ludicrous speed and agility that were toned down.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Bounty Hunter's Death From Above ability has them use their jets to gain height then rain missiles on where the attack was aimed.
  • Stellaris has missile-specific ship sections; however, launcher hardpoints don't get as many weapon mounts than normal turrets so a single ship can only fire so many missiles. To compensate for the lower volume of shots, missiles have long range, nearly perfect accuracy, ignore shields, and start with much higher damage than other weapons. There are also mid-game swarmer versions designed to overwhelm point defenses. Unfortunately, missiles don't work very well with very small fleets (as they can be shot down by point defense) or in the late game (as other weapons start to exceed their range and damage); however in the early to mid game, a wall of inexpensive corvettes with missiles can simply drown opponents in a storm of unerring, hull-wrecking fireworks.
  • Strike Suit Zero is essentially Macross Missile Massacre: The Game — and those massacres are glorious to behold." Game Spy's review
    • The game even calls the missiles you use in Strike (robot) mode "circus" missiles.
  • In Sunrider, many enemy ships and several types of enemy Ryders are armed with a limited supply of missiles and more powerful rockets. Battles will often begin with the entire enemy force firing all their missiles at once in an effort to overwhelm your team’s flak guns. This can be countered by bunching up your units to create overlapping fields of flak, but it becomes less effective late in the game when the enemy starts deploying Support Ryders that can shut off a unit’s flak guns for one turn. Your team can also invoke this trope, but in a more limited fashion as only three of your seven units are armed with missiles (and only one of them, the Sunrider, gets access to rockets).
    • The second game makes it more dangerous to bunch up by introducing the PACT Destroyer, an enemy unit whose missiles do splash damage upon reaching their target.
  • Any game based on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, of course. There's a whole bunch of 'em.
    • The best one has to be Macross Frontier Trilogy. Not in the sheer number fired, but there's a title that's awarded when you've killed one million enemies with missiles. The use of missiles is so ubiquitous in the series that the developers anticipated that a lot of enemies would be killed using missiles. There's even a counter for how many missiles you've fired, which goes up to the hundreds of millions.
    • Even better? These games have SP attacks, that allow your battroids to unleash a barrage that would do any ork proud, be it melee or, obviously, missile based. And then you equip the Mecha Expansion Pack for ANY robot, or better yet, use any of the Macross-class ships.
  • Supreme Commander featured not only the Cybran T2 gunship, but also the Cybran Hoplite, which launched a volley of rockets. Not a massacre on its own, it's very effective in groups.
  • In Sword of the Stars, missiles are one of the three weapons you are guaranteed to get at the start. They can be placed in medium or large turret mounts, and most combat-oriented cruiser or dreadnought designs can hold at least four. Add in the fact that point-defense weapons are murder on missiles, and the 3M is about the only way to use missiles in this game.
    • And for those who prefer quantity over quality in their 3Ms, Expansion Pack Born of Blood added the Dumbfire Missile Rack: the individual missiles are smaller, weaker, have less range and no guidance, but the rack fires them in volleys of ten (or twenty for the large mount version) and can launch volleys twice as often as regular missiles.
    • A Murder of Crows. Multi-Warhead Missiles. "Yo dawg, we heard you like missiles, so we put missiles inside your missiles so you can shoot missiles while you shoot missiles."
    • Kinetic kill missiles don't do much damage but have tons of momentum that they pass on to the impacted ship. This can be devastating to enemy ships protecting a planet, as they will likely end up getting pushed into said planet.
  • Syndicate (2012) has the Swarm missile launcher that fires a missile splitting up into many lesser missiles. Agent Ramon uses this weapon. Agent Merit in the final fight has mini-missile pods that fire flashbangs and explosive missiles.
  • Tachyon: The Fringe has the Swarm Missile launcher, a small missile pack holding four shots. With each pull of the trigger, however, the Swarm launcher fires a missile that instantly splits into four smaller missiles the moment it leaves the tubes. Just one salvo is usually enough to wipe out an opposing ship, though some ships can carry multiple racks of Swarms just to keep things interesting.
  • Team Fortress 2: A level 3 Sentry fires missiles at a target in a spiraling-inward fashion.
    • Teams with multiple Soldiers can end up looking like a MMM. This was so prevalent in the Soldier versus Demoman update that some servers crashed because they couldn't handle the number of explosive objects being lobbed.
    • Oh, that's just the start. Mann Vs. Machine introduces hordes of robot soldiers who will unleash massive barrages of rockets. The giant Rapid Fire Soldier is described as wielding the "machine gun of rocket launchers". And lastly, a Soldier in this game mode using the Beggar's Bazooka and enough upgrades can unleash up to 11 rockets in rapid succession before needing to start loading it again, effectively turning the Beggar's Bazooka into a weapon of mass destruction.
    • A lesser example, the Air Strike, another rocket launcher for the Soldier, fires much faster while the user is rocket-jumping, and also has its clip grow in size as the user's kills grow. When this is maxed out, the thing can unleash 8 rockets on some poor unsuspecting merc in less than two seconds.
      • With the appropriate upgrades in Mann Vs. Machine and the maximum number of kills (which is not hard to achieve at all in this mode), the Air Strike can unload up to 16 rockets in quick succession, putting even the Beggar's Bazooka and Giant Soldiers to shame.
  • Terraria:
    • Spamming the Scourge of the Corruptor all around you will result in a screen full of tiny homing corruptors homing in onto any unfortunate enemy in the area.
    • Spamming the Razorblade Typhoon tends to have a similar effect as the projectiles last for a good bit of time.
    • The Snowman Cannon is for all purposes a full-auto, homing rocket launcher that sprays missiles like a machine gun.
    • The Martian Saucer boss can do this, with actual missiles.
  • Player-designed vehicles in TerraTech can have as many missile launchers as will fit on their hulls. Some weapons, such as the Avalanche missile launcher, fire multiple missiles each second.
  • In Time Crisis 5, Robert Baxter uses a robot that fires tons of missiles at you in the final battle.
  • In TimeSplitters Future Perfect, the rocket launcher can be set to fire six rockets in rapid succession, in accordance with rule #37.
  • In Titanfall, if you equip your Titan with the Quad Rocket and the Rapid Fire mod as its main weapon and the Rocket Salvo ordnance, the next Mecha you find will quickly understand the meaning of this trope.
    • Its sequel Titanfall 2 has multiple loadouts and titans with missile spaming abilities.
      • Tone's Tracking Rockets fire between 8 to 10 in a single salvo after a lock on with the 40mm Tracker Cannon is achieved. Additionally, Tone's Salvo Core fires 48 missiles that track where the center crosshair is pointed.
      • Northstar's (and by loadout association, Brute's) Titan Core is the Flight Core, which starts the mecha airborne and allowing continuous firing of missiles at enemies.
      • BT-7274's standard Expedition loadout includes a Rocket Salvo which can fire up to 8 missiles at separately locked on enemies.
  • Torchlight II's Engineer has the Fusillade skill that fires rapid bursts of two homing missiles from their cannon. Tier I adds a third missile, the missiles release a larger explosion at Tier II then fires four per burst at Tier III.
  • Almost every unit that uses rockets in Total Annihilation eventually qualifies. "Eventually" because only a very few of them are capable of launching a Massacre on their own; most just fire a couple of rockets at a time. However, TA is not the kind of RTS that you play with a handful of units; most matches end up as vast slugfests between armies of hundreds — and when you have a group of several dozen rocket planes, each firing its two rockets at a time, the result is gloriously MMM-worthy.
  • Turbo Overkill: The Cyborg protagonist Johnny Turbo gets a cybernetic left arm that fires out barrages of these combined with Flipping the Bird to add insult to injury.
  • The Twisted Metal series has many weapons like this, including the MIRV, Rain Missile 2, Satellite, Reticle, Zoomy, etc. Warthog gets it as a special, shooting a red, white, and blue missile that home in like this to Heroic Fanfare. Minion has an even nastier version, minus the music and colors and with a freeze missile to make up for it.
  • A lot of weapons in Tyrian.
    • Frequently, this lot of weapons would be fired in tandem to increase an already respectable Massacre.
  • The Unreal series has always featured a rocket launcher that can send off several rockets at once, whether focused at one point or scattered in a horizontal line for maximum area-of-effect. In Unreal and Unreal Tournament, said launcher could store up to six; later games pulled it down to three. Invariably, keep the crosshairs on your target for more than one second and you'll have a Missile Lock-On.
  • In Unreal Tournament 2004 onward, there is the Cicada. It is an airborne vehicle that fires missiles in quick succession. The alt-fire lets you target a spot and load up to 24 missiles. Boom.
  • Vanquish has the first boss, which when you defeat its first form, will fill the sky with missiles in order to kill anything and everything not currently cowering behind a large piece of concrete.
  • Vector Thrust: There's a secret weapon that players can manually mod onto an aircraft named the Micro-Munition Cluster Launcher. It fires 10 units per salvo and has an ammunition pool of hundreds more. The weird flight pattern of the missiles are justified by the fact that they're so small their rocket boosters make them flip end over end in flight, leading to the stylised flight paths they take compared to other missiles. It's even featured in the Itano Circus mutator.
  • Vega Strike treats rocket pods as power-saving autocannons that need a special mount, so due to limited reactor size lighter fighters tend to pack rockets. One of them is called Hail (see Real Life section). Proper missiles are used by almost everyone and many heavy fighters have 4 launchers or so, but with default parameters AI doesn't launch much.
  • Warcraft III has two abilities that come close to this: Barrage and Cluster Rockets. Barrage gives Steam Tanks a missile launcher that can attack up to three air units at a time, while Cluster Rockets fires a swarm of weaving missiles into an area, stunning units caught inside (and the number of missiles increases with the level).
  • Warframe: While the Odonata Archwing has Seeking Fire launch up to 5 missiles at base, the prime example comes from the Railjack's Seeker Volley, which launches a staggering 25 missiles at once. Both examples' missiles will home in targets, but the Seeker Volley's will redirect towards new targets should their prior targets be destroyed, or if new targets spawn in.
  • In Warhawk, there is a weapon for the titular aircraft to use known as the Swarm Missile, which can lock on as many times as you want before firing, with the only limit being how many you have. Naturally, this can get extreme.
  • In War Robots, equipping your robot with multiple missile weapons will result in this, in particular the Pinata/Orkan family of weapons.
  • Warship Gunner 2 can have this depending on what missile systems you've installed on your warship, especially if you've mounted a Vertical Launch System (VLS) and the Aegis (allowing multiple simultaneous targets, up to nine at Level 3). Since anti-aircraft missiles (and their VLS version) are autofire-capable, you'll get this when you hold L2 for manual countermeasures — the AI will aim and fire all autofire-capable weapons — or use a certain system that applies that to all weapons.
    • Unfortunately unless you have the two special "systems" that give infinite ammo and the other which has all of your weapons firing pretty much constantly and aimed by the AI, missiles and lasers are worthless at higher settings because of all the counter measures. The solution? Rock Beats Laser aka a large battleship load with large turrets(not to large or you wont fire fast enough) and maybe a Wave-Motion Gun for bosses. Ironically a large battleship with turrets for most ships, LOTS of anti air measures, thick armor and maybe that one so-so anti submarine counter you can equip on your battleship is a Gamebreaker.
  • Warzone 2100 has this for most of the higher-tier artillery units, such as Ripple Rockets, which fire about 20 missiles in an arc to a target up to half a map (even further for some others) away, and take about 10-20 seconds to reload.
  • In Wing Commander Prophecy and it's sequel, Wing Commander Secret Ops, the player on occasion has access to the Wasp interceptor. One of its weapons is the Swarmer, a launcher that with each shot fires eight missiles that track your locked target — as long as you keep your target within your front view, otherwise the Swarmers will lose lock and fly off aimlessly. If you possess the piloting skills to keep your target in your view (often not possible without jettisoning the Wasp's booster), it's a one-shot kill. See also the Tracker, which is 4 Friend-or-Foe missiles connected to one common launch body that eventually splits off into its separate missiles.
    • To a lesser degree than a full MMM, using the salvo function, one can dump all of one's missiles in a short time. This is a cheap way to kill "Flash" in the sim contest in Wing Commander III, if you don't want to take forever to kick the little twerp's ass. This method also works on potting Thrakhath after the Behemoth is destroyed in the Loki system, but in the Kilrathi Saga version of WC3, unlike the initial DOS release, the instant Thrakhath dies your carrier jumps out, even if there's still time left on the countdown. Of course, being The Dragon, Thrakhath returns at the end anyway, even if you do kill him and get to land.)
  • In Wonder Boy in Monster World, Fire Storm does this with homing fireballs.
  • In World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack, Mages who spec deeply into Arcane can get a Talent called Missile Barrage, which, on proc, turns their next casting of Arcane Missiles into this.
    • A mission in Northrend has your character riding a gnomish helicopter defending a dig site from incoming gargoyles. There is a missile attack that is exactly this, including the randomly spiraling missile paths, smoke trails and More Dakka. Given the number of other Shout Outs in WoW it would be no surprise if this were a direct Shout-Out to the original MMM.
  • X3: Terran Conflict introduced the dedicated M7M missile frigates which replaced the gun turrets of a regular M7 with missile bays. Load up, hold the launch button, and watch gleefully as an almost uninterrupted stream of missiles pour into your chosen target. For an added bonus: load some of the multiple warhead missiles.
    • This goes even more into Macross Missile Massacre territory when you locate the Barrage command in the command console (sadly, this is only exclusive to M7M and M8 ships). 1 Barrage is 8 missiles. One multi-warhead missile fires as 8 missiles. One Barrage of Multi-warhead missiles generates 64 missiles in the air. It's possible to launch more than just one barrage at a time. And every M7M missile can re-acquire new targets if their original one is destroyed.
    • Any M7M is fully capable of singlehandedly leveling sectors, but the ATF's entry, the Skirnir, takes it up a notch and crosses it with There Is No Kill Like Overkill. Its anticapital weapon is the Shadow missile, which does 755 megajoules of damage per warhead on an eight-warhead missile — about 10x that of the Commonwealth Hammer torpedo. The toughest ships in the game as of X3: Albion Prelude have 14 gigajoules of shielding. Do the math. The typo in the Shadow's missile data was corrected in Albion Prelude to being single-warheaded only, as well as having its stats slightly nerfed. It was fun while it lasted.
    • Also included is the fighter/corvette sized M8 Bomber class, launching extremely powerful Tomahawk missiles. Used to provide fighter squadrons with Anti-capital punch, some versions are able to launch up to 792 missiles at once. Missiles which reach the target late will lock on to any enemy target around.
    • In Albion Prelude missile frigates now automatically use small countermissiles for point defense. Given that some of these ships have up to 16 launch tubes, they launch huge waves of missiles in second intervals to intercept incoming missiles, resulting in a Macross Missile Defense.
    • While Albion Prelude made point defense (through lasers and missiles) far more viable, AI ships — especially missile frigates — spawn with a LOT more missiles, making sure that these improvements are going to be needed.
    • Even outside of M7Ms, triple-M is a really effective tactic since missiles are standardized, and the only limitation on how many you can carry is the size of your cargo bay. Teladi ships often tend to be the best choices for triple-M thanks to their absurdly large cargo bays, in spite of their terribly low speed. A few number of their fighters (the Falcon Hauler, Falcon Sentinel, Kea and its Enhanced variant) have enormous cargo bays. Another shining example of a fighter with an abnormally large hold is the Prototype version of the Blastclaw used by the Space Pirates. Some players arm them with Tornado missiles, making them pretty effective as missile boats against capital ships.
    • Special mention has to go to the Typhoon missile, another eight-warhead missile with a tracking ability and with rather well-rounded stats. This is a favorite among players who pilot M7s, M1s, and M2s, since it can be carried at bulk and can be spammed by the hundreds by simply pressing the launch button repeatedly to decimate capital ships, and preferably from about 18 kilometers away. The Typhoon seems to be a bit of overkill to use against fighters (thanks to the missile dealing 240 MJ worth of damage total, with each warhead dealing 30 MJ worth of damage to stack up), so it's mainly used as a poor man's anti-capital ship version of the Flail Barrage missile, albeit without the ability to re-acquire new hostile targets. Because of its versatility, the Typhoon is considered the best general-purpose swarm missile in the game, made better by the fact that working factories are available for purchase.
  • Jehuty, the Humongous Mecha piloted by the protagonist in both Zone of the Enders games, has a "Homing Laser", which targets as many as 40 on-screen targets and launches beams Macross Missile Massacre style. It is more of a mix of MMM and Beam Spam, and it offers some serious eyecandy too boot.
    • Jehuty gains the Homing Missile program in the sequel, Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner which enables Jehuty to generate up to 16 homing missiles (each one of them half as tall as Jehuty itself) from its Vector Trap as long as the sub-weapon energy gauge is still available (which can also be replenished by obtaining Metatron crates either scattered in various locations or dropped by destroyed enemies.) The entire game is essentially a grand and glorious exercise of beam spamming overkill.

    Webcomics 
  • Bob and George: while Protoman doesn't normally have this, a common tactic of his is to merge with Nate, producing a rocket-heavy combined form known as Protean. While normally fitted with eight missiles, Nate being a shapeshifting goo monster, they can easily go up to this. And Nate can regenerate them when he's not building up a large coating of goo on his target to produce a massive crushing fist around them.
  • In Dragon Ball Multiverse, the first opponent Uub face use this... on a one on one combat in a tournament. It's about as effective as you think.
  • The Gamer: one of Jee-Han's first spells is Mana Arrow, which he eventually manages to upgrade to shoot multiple arrows at the same time that spin on its axis for greater penetration. Eventually, he upgrades it to Infinite Spinning Mana Arrows, which continuously creates and shoots arrows until it is dispelled or its user runs out of MP. And Jee-Han's MP regeneration heavily outdoes the spell's cost.
  • Outsider:
    • This page provides a beautiful example... the ships committing the Missile Massacre look designed precisely for such a purpose, and we even see empty launch tubes being left behind by missiles that have already been expended.
    • In the same battle, we see cluster missiles that break up into MMMs en route.
  • The Whiteboard: In the 2010 Zombie Apocalypse story arc, the APC from Aliens included, as part of its armament, an ungodly amount of guided missiles, which it spent liberally. In fact, the arming switches are labeled "Missles", "More Missiles" and "All the Missiles!". Considering Doc and Roger are worshipers at the Church of Spam Attack, this is probably not surprising.

    Web Original 
  • The Dead Skunk: In the Battle of Roxbury, the Duke of Wellington pulls off one of these with Congreve rockets.
  • In DEATH BATTLE!: Starscream vs. Rainbow Dash, Starscream eventually launches all his remaining missiles at Rainbow Dash at once. She then uses the Sonic Rainboom to enter Super-Speed, outrun them, and lead them to hit him instead.
  • DSBT InsaniT: Seth can summon toy stealth jets to fire a swarm of missiles.
  • In Season 10 of Red vs. Blue, after Tex breaks in the Freelancer ship with the help of York, South attacks her with a huge barrage of missiles. Tex, unarmed, manages to dodge a few of them before South unleashes a massive wave which she can't evade ...at which point North shows up and shoots down every single rocket with dual wielded sniper rifles .
  • RWBY: The Colossus contains a cannon on its right arm. Linked to it is a missile launcher that loads sixteen missiles at a time. It therefore has the option of firing a single missile or an entire barrage at its target.
  • Void of the Stars has this whenever railguns or beam weapons are out of effective range in a battle, though missiles have become exceedingly rare in favor of more close-up Wave Motion Guns and Beam Spam.
  • Generator's arm bracers in the Whateley Universe. Her friends said she'd been watching too much Project A-Ko.

    Western Animation 
  • Meatwad does this to Shake in one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Frylock has just built a humongous mecha as a body replacement for Carl, who had been reduced to a disembodied head. Meatwad takes control of the robot, grabs Shake, throws him up into the air and blows him up with a barrage of missiles.
  • The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot intro shows the Big Guy being able to do this with dozens of spiraling missiles. Sadly he prefers using the machine guns in his armpits rather than falling for the rule of cool and spamming missiles.
  • Briefly used by Duck Dodgers, to blow a hole in world made entirely of a giant aquarium, housing warring shark and dolphin people, believing that would somehow lead to peace. Really. Fortunately this fails miserably, unfortunately, Dodgers then opts just to ram his ship though the tank... Well, it did get the two civilizations of fish people to set their differences aside.
  • Deliberately homaged in Justice League Unlimited, with Rocket Red in his Powered Armor using this against the near-unstoppable android Amazo. It didn't work. Didn't even slow him down.
  • Parodied in Megas XLR episode "TV Dinner", where Coop pushes three buttons on his control panel that are labelled "Missiles", "More Missiles" and "All The Missiles." The missile swarm turns out to be ineffective, as the Monster of the Week it was used against was the size of a small planet.
    • Also in "S-Force SOS", with Coop's "Super Destructor Mode" modification. Coop screwed up the targeting system, hitting the S-Force by accident, but failed to kill them.
  • In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Robostus", the titular villain takes over the security system in Hawk Moth's lair and bombards him with missiles while he tries to steal the heroes' Miraculouses for himself.
  • Powerpuff Dynamo (Dynamic Nanotechnic Monobot) in its debut episode, "Uh Oh, Dynamo", is anywhere between subversion and deconstruction of Triple M. The heatseekers massacre everything in the city... except the giant puffer fish. Maybe its cold-bloodedness has something to do with it.
  • Used in an episode of ReBoot. Matrix's flying motorcycle surprisingly produced several rows of missile racks behind it to launch one of these at the enemy, and does a pretty good job with it.
  • The Skysurfer Strike Force member Air Enforcer had four missile launchers, two on his shoulders and two on his legs. His signature attack was firing all his missiles at once in a borg blasting barrage. The villainous shapeshifter Replicon, who can turn his arms and head into missile launchers also does this frequently.
  • In Star Wars: Clone Wars, one of these was fired at the Republic starfighters by the droid starfighters. Anakin Skywalker got them all following him, then used the Misguided Missile technique and flew straight through the nearest enemy capital ship's starfighter launch bay. He still had a swarm of missiles after him, though, so he got his fighter squadrons to line up a shot at where he was going to be and fire off another Macross Missile Massacre. The two Massacres collided in midair (-space?) and wiped each other out.
  • The Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! Super Robot has this one. As well as about every other Super Robot trope... In fact it can deploy this attack from the fingertips, the arms, or the feet.
  • In SWAT Kats, the TurboKat performs this attack twice. The first time with buzzsaw missiles while under the control of Hard Drive in "Night of Dark Kat", the second time in "When Strikes Mutilor", to destroy the fighter Mutilor was intending to use to destroy the drive and crash the mothership into the planet's surface.
  • Any number of Transformers can do this, though Demolishor's rebuilt form in Energon is the one that comes to mind first.

    Real Life 
  • Not as impressive as below, but in a TV interview (and later repeated at convention appearances), Itano revealed that his inspiration for the Macross Missile Massacre was, while in college, attaching about 100 bottle rockets (small firecrackers) to the sides of his motorcycle, and at about 40mph, lighting them all off at once with a Zippo lighter. Then getting out of the area before anyone called the cops.
  • The concept of Multiple Launch Rocket System / Free Rocket Over Ground: see a concentration of enemy troops, quickly unload a lot of cheap unguided rockets to scour the whole area.
  • Surprisingly, this is Older Than Steam: The historical Korean hwacha — which can be best described as a Schizo Tech Katyusha — also functioned in much the same way, a 15-16th century saturation artillery piece capable of firing up to 100 steel-tipped rockets or 200 singijeon (effectively fire arrows). This was most-likely based on a previous Chinese variant, the huoche (火車), which roughly translates to 'fire cart', and written exactly the same way as hwacha (火車).
  • Soviet "Katyusha" MLRS, starting from BM-13-16 and BM-8-48 (132mm / 82mm respectively, the second number is rails) note , also known as "Stalin's Organ" due to their distinctive sound. They had variant ammo (like anti-armor, or spreading thermite elements for even more Impressive Pyrotechnics); most fighter-bombers and ground assault planes also carried launchers: 132-mm x10 on Su-2 x4-8 on Il-2 (save late anti-tank variants) and Il-10. Add a few ships and launch frames used as less mobile artillery, though these mainly used less rails of higher calibers. Dud ones could also be used to deliver mail.
    • Its descendants the 9K51 (or BM-21) "Grad" ("Hail") note  and the BM-30 "Smerch" ("Tornado") note  — the first can fire 720 missiles at once when packed in a battalion of 18 launchers, while the second can fire a missile every 3 seconds or so. Ammunition varies from regular HE and HEAT rounds to mines. Of course, during the Cold War many USSR allies got these as well. There's also a close-range (up to 6km) TOS-1 "Buratino" note  (russian "Pinocchio") is a 30-round MLRS mounted on the T-72 tank chassis. It's not just a regular house-sized rocket launcher, but a flamethrower system with incendiary or thermobaric warheads with a devastating area of effect. Also, unlike similar vehicles, it can launch rockets in pairs.
  • 82-mm x6 on some I-16 (first used on Khalkin-Gol) and LaGG-3, sometimes used as pocket flak guns — even if an unguided rocket isn't fit to snipe a fighter, launching a wave of these can both soften and scatter formations.
  • The American T34 Calliope, basically a Sherman tank with sixty rocket tubes strapped onto it. Some had a detachable 12-shot launcher as well for quick reload, bringing the total to a whopping 72 rockets. Developed a year after the 48-rail Katyusha variant, one wonders if the designers were thinking "those Russians are onto something, but it needs More Dakka". USSR had a few experimental rocket tanks, but chose to stick with more mobile truck "artillery".
  • The LCT-R (Landing Craft Tank - Rocket) was a conversion of landing craft for Operation Overlord (the D-Day landings) which installed 1044 rocket launchers on the upper deck — with storage space below for another 5000 reloads — for bombardment of shore defences.
  • The American M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System. Each MLRS vehicle can launch 12 277mm rockets within sixty seconds. Each rocket can contain up to 644 submunitions. Total throw is therefore 7,728 bombs launched in under a minute per vehicle. MLRS batteries are colloquially known as 'grid square erasers.' It can also shoot guided missiles for extra precision.
  • The MMM was very much a planned tactic of Soviet Maritime Aviation in a World War III scenario using a lot of Tu-16 and Tu-22M bombers along with missile subs like the "Echo". Since the Tu-16's reporting name is "Badger" and it carried Mnogo Nukes, the joke is obvious.... Sergey Gorshkov, commander-in-chief of the Soviet Navy from 1968 to 1985 called this "the battle of the first salvo".
    • The "naval missile massacre" came about with the advent of the cruise missile after World War II. These were basically jet-powered kamikazes that were controlled by inertial guidance systems and radar seekers rather than human pilots. The Soviets didn't have aircraft carriers nor could they have matched the U.S. even if they tried, so they turned to the cruise missile as their naval weapon of choice. The U.S. Navy noticed this and started arming their ships with anti-air missiles that could shoot down incoming cruise missiles. The Soviets responded by building better missiles and lots more of them; they put cruise missiles on ships down to the smallest corvette, on planes, and on submarines, with the intent of firing a massive salvo at a U.S. carrier group to overwhelm its defenses. The U.S. responded with Aegis, a ship-based system meant to track and engage lots and lots of incoming missiles. The U.S. also deployed the F-14, a long range interceptor whose main mission was to shoot down incoming bombers before they could fire their cruise missiles, or failing that, shoot down the missiles themselves. At that point it really came down to tactics, as the Soviets would try to detect an incoming carrier group and then try to organize their killer salvo, while the Americans tried to stay hidden by keeping their radars turned off while using fighter aircraft to shoot down any incoming scout planes and disrupt bomber formations. Then of course the Cold War ended, and we never got the chance to see how this fight would turn out.
    • It should be noted that with the evolution of air wings, the US Navy can perform a creditable imitation of the above Soviet strategy with their carrier air wings. A Super Hornet can carry two antiship missiles alongside drop tanks and targeting/ECM pods, while the upcoming F-35C can also carry two such missiles in its weapons bays. Considering that carriers carry forty-eight such fighters as standard, also carry a few jammer aircraft, and add in upcoming antiship Tomahawks and VLS-launched antiship missiles, and any enemy surface forces are in for a very bad time.
  • At the current state of the art, the US Navy's 'Aegis' missile defense technology is essentially undefeatable except by a wave (or waves) of inbound threats larger than what the system is capable of handling (which it does by launching counter-missiles rapidly enough to simultaneously engage them all).
    • Russian Orlan/"Kirov" class can do the same. The nuclear-powered cruiser has a greater SAM capacity than most other vessels on the planet, with four different types carried. Its main SAM battery consists basically of navalized version of the venerable S-300 system, with eight vertical revolver-type launchers, each holding eight missiles. This gives us 64 large long-range missiles, but each cell in those launcher could accept from four to eight smaller, shorter range missiles, driving the number up to 512 missiles. These could be fired in salvos limited only by the fire control ability, which is, admittedly, somewhat lacking, but given that Aegis-analogue is already coming online note  and it would be installed on them during a scheduled refit — all bets are off.
  • In many western Navies the always crowd pleasing close in gun systems like the Vulcan Phalanx are being replaced/augmented by the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe (anti-missile) Missile. These are fitted in 21-cell launchers with full 360° rotation and 90° elevation. Unlike gun-based close in weapons systems the missile system can engage many target simultaneously via a Macross Missile Massacre style launch. Of course at $500,000 per missile such a Massacre is going to cost upwards of $10 million dollars. Which is still a good deal, if it saves a $1 billion dollar ship and its crew, and keeps it viable as a tactical asset in the battle.
  • The U.S Navy also uses a Macross Missile Massacre as the main offensive weapon for its cruisers and destroyers: the Vertical Launching System (VLS). This badass launcher can pump out Tomahawks or SAMs at a ridiculous rate (about one every two seconds) to attack ground targets, aircraft, or even space targets like satellites and ballistic missiles. The VLS-SM3 combo has been demonstrated as easily capable of killing an orbiting satellite. However, the plan for future ships like the Zumwalt-Class stealth destroyer see the VLS-Tomahawk land-attack combo being replaced by the 155mm howitzer-based Advanced Gun System, and later, by electromagnetic railguns. BFGs are more cost-effective than MMMs.
    • It is worth noting that the majority of missiles carried in VLS systems on US ships are actually Anti-Air missiles meant to defend the fleet from air or missile attack. That said, the Navy has been able to use SAMs as antiship missiles since the Talos in the 1950s, and in fact used Standard missiles in such a role during the Tanker Wars in the Persian Gulf. Effectively, this means that any enemies within 50 miles or so would face a barrage of dozens of supersonic missiles. While such missiles have relatively small warheads, modern warships tend to be relatively unarmored.
    • New Russian UKSK VLS is built around the same idea, but, as it uses a cold-launch approach, it's much cheaper and lighter on a per cell basis, so even a 2000-ton corvette is able to carry a couple of 8-cell modules.
  • The Ohio-class SSGN submarine, which can carry up to 154 cruise missiles in its VLS tubes.
  • A very large number of real-life weapon systems or tactics can be considered real-life versions of this, from multiple rocket launchers which can fire a large number of either "dumb" or "smart" munitions, to simply clustering a bunch of weapon launchers together or coordinating a large number of missile launches (works doubly best when paired with previous described weapon) or large bombers like the B-52 whose primary mission is to saturate a target area with missiles (back in the Cold War days, nuclear-tipped multiple-warhead missiles), let alone ballistic-missile launching submarines like the Soviet "Typhoon"-class (if you've ever seen The Hunt for Red October this is the real-life submarine the titular vessel is based on) which can carry 20 missiles with ten warheads each, or an American Ohio-class submarine converted to launch 156 land attack cruise missiles, also cluster-munition capable. A reason why the Macross Missile Massacre is such a popular trope, after all, is because it happens to be a very useful and devastating real-life tactic, especially when target destruction must be guaranteed, probability of missile evasion or interception is high, and when collateral damage isn't given an afterthought or when the missiles have sufficiently "smart" enough guidance to prevent such.
    • When engaged in air-to-air combat, opposing aircraft will "ripple-fire" missiles at each other to increase the probability of a kill. This especially occurred in The Vietnam War, early missiles being unreliable, frequently missing when they worked at all. In effect, the Macross Missile Massacre is really just an exaggerated, Rule of Cool-conforming version of this real life tactic.
    • As for the distinctive spiraling flght paths which often show at least a few missiles moving in arcs towards the target? Also Truth in Television, at least for some weapon systems. The reasoning is simple — a projectile moving horizontally can be dodged or blocked by conventional obstacles. One flying straight down at the target, on the other hand, is much more difficult to avoid.
      • Actually this phenomenon is a result of a technical limitation of the missile itself (the most famous example is the 9K121 Vikhr, aka AT-16 Scallion). Whereas most missiles have control surfaces that work in two axes (pitch, yaw) the Vikhr and its derivatives only have one control surface axis. This was initially to save money on development and manufacturing. The way it works is that the missile spins about its long axis so that the single control axis has the opportunity to work in as many directions as possible. This results in the spiral flight pattern. It's a horribly inefficient way to fly, but it's not that big a deal for two main reasons. A: The cost savings were worth it, given that this weapon was meant to be very widely deployed through Soviet and later Russian forces. B: It was meant for ground targets, which are either immobile or won't move very far during the missile's flight time. For anti-air or anti-ship missiles, going as fast (and in the case of anti-ship missiles, as low) as possible is a much better approach because it minimizes the available response time, and in the case of anti-air missiles, it increases amount of energy available to the missile for maneuvering.
    • It might be accurate to say that militaries were forced to use this tactic before the invention of guided weapons. Without the ability to target a single location, the only way to hit the enemy most of the time was to blanket the area they're in with shells, rockets, or bombs. Although an artillery barrage isn't as visually spectacular as a true 3M due to the lack of flames or smoke trails, it was just as effective. Also, the image of a massive bomber emptying her bays over a target has become a symbol of air raids since WW2, despite the fact that stand-off weaponry is increasingly now becoming the norm.
    • Pre-WW2 British subs were designed with this tactic in mind. The Royal Navy believed that advances in ASW meant that British submarines attacking enemy warships would be unable to get close to their targets without being detected by the enemy's sonar. Therefore the attacks would have to be made at long range, and to compensate for the vagueness of torpedo aiming at this range this meant that a large torpedo salvo would be needed in order to guarantee hits. How large? The T-class boats had ten forward facing torpedo tubes (by comparison, the larger US boats had six forward tubes and the German type VII and type IX U-boats, only four).
    • Also in WW2, this tactic was the backbone of the Imperial Japanese Navy's strategy to defeat the US Navy in a single, climactic battle, where after destroying American screening formations the former would use large numbers of cruisers and destroyers equipped with powerful, long-range torpedoesnote  against the US battleships before letting theirs in, including the famous "Yamato", in to fight them, or whatever remained after said attack.
  • Officially, Gary Power's U-2 and accidentally a pursuing MiG-19 (piloted by Sergei Safronov) were shot down with a salvo of fourteen S-75 Dvina/SA-2 "Guideline" missiles. Other versions of the event are:
    • A Su-9 caught the U-2 in her slipstream, breaking off the wings. The missiles hit the aforementioned MiG-19.
    • A first three-missile salvo destroyed the U-2. Other batteries were unsure about the success and thirteen more missiles were fired, hitting the MiG-19.
  • The term MIRV stands for "Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicle" and is used to describe short-range to ICBM class nuclear-tipped missiles that contain a single first stage with multiple warheads that will detach after launch, shortly before impact. (Reportedly the Trident II is capable of carrying at least 12 warheads per missile.) The contrails in Missile Command that would split up to hit multiple targets? This is the real life weapon on which they were based.
  • The British Starstreak Close Air Defense Missile is designed to kill low flying aircraft by launching three smaller guided sub-munitions that then home into its target mid flight. Think about it, it's a missile that launches a small Macross Missile Massacre, in real life!
  • Though not exactly missiles, multiple-launched aerial rockets were the primary armament of US Air Force interceptors in the 1950's. See article on other Wiki and this vid.
    • The German R4M rocket was intended as a way to destroy a B-17/B-24-sized target in one salvo. One 55-millimeter rocket may not have been much, but shotgun 24 of them at once and you've got something going.
    • The Nebelwerfer 41 and 42.
    • The LARS (Leichtes Artillerieraketensystem/Light Artillery Rocket System): Two bundles with 18 launch tubes each per vehicle, planned to be used in groups of four.
  • This trope is not quite as unrealistic as one might think since actual guided missiles often follow slightly erratic paths until they get up to speed and any course to intercept a moving target has to be curved by definition. Naturally the flight paths of real-world missiles aren't nearly as exaggerated.
  • Historically, it's taken an average of 20 surface-to-air missiles to bring down one aircraft.
  • The AGM-124 Wasp was a small "mini-missile" that could be launched in multiples on one pass against massed tank formations. Carried in launch pods, an A-10 loaded with them could launch a total of 40 of these things. Each missile acted autonomously and talked to each other so that only one missile went after a separate tank. It was, unfortunately too expensive to enter mass production and was canceled in 1983.
  • The tradition of Rouketopolemos (literally translated as Rocket War) in the town of Vrontados qualifies. The objective is for two churches to launch as many rockets at each other as possible, hoping to ring the other churches' bell with a rocket. The result is this trope. Here's another video.
  • The Type 45 "Daring-class" Destroyer, the UK's latest Cool Boat, has been designed with averting this in mind — its anti-missile radar is so good that the US Navy ask them to turn it off for exercises because it "constrains the training."
  • Operation Behemoth was a test of this. The idea was to launch all SLBMs of a Delta-IV in a single salvo: 16 missiles were fired within 244 seconds or one each 14 seconds.
  • This trope is Older Than Steam — one proposed British tactic in the Age Of Sail was to hollow out an old ship, fill it with vertically launching rockets, tip it on its side at low tide, then light the fuse.
  • This could be the fate that befalls North Korea. If they fire a shell at South Korea, then both South Korea and the US will fire back. With more missiles that North Korea could possibly handle.
    • North Korea has shelled South Korea in recent times. Specifically on November 23, 2010, Korean Peoples' Army posts in Muto and Kaemori fired 170 shells and rockets at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, prompting the South Koreans to return fire at either target. Fortunately the North didn't press their offensive (which would have undoubtedly ended the armistice and renewed the shooting war), likely due to the fear of the South (and the US) invoking this trope if pushed too far.
  • Metal Storm Limited is the manufacturer of stacked-projectile weapons — weapons whose barrels contain several sets of propellant and projectile stacked on top of each other, with separate ignition for each propellant charge, so that you can fire one projectile or ripple through each one in turn with no wait for an action to cycle. While their current products are of more modest design, they have demonstrated a 36-barrel machine gun, a miltrailleuse design utilizing their stacked-round technology to achieve a rate of fire in excess of a million rounds per minute for a 180-round burst.
  • 70mm Rocket Pods are already this. And then we have the CRV7 MPSM. That's right, Every single one of those rockets flying at you carries 9 explosive sub munitions. Accept no substitutes.
  • Following use of chemical weapons on civilians by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017, the US Navy hit a Syrian air base with a salvo of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
  • There was a 1990s-era US Navy proposal called the "arsenal ship" that would have held as many as 500 vertical launch tubes for missiles. It was eventually cancelled, but in the 2010s there are rumours of China trying its own take on the idea.
  • While not an offensive system, Iron Dome is capable of launching large salvos on missiles in short spans of time, sending them on curving trajectories similar to missiles in anime.

Alternative Title(s): Itano Circus, Multi Missile Massacre

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Pharah's Barrage

Pharah's ultimate ability unleashes a salvo of miniature rockets to destroy her enemies.

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