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In science fiction movies and TV, asteroids are never anywhere near as thinly spread as they are in the real world.
Unmanned space probes routinely go through the real asteroid belt. If the scientists can squeeze some extra money out of the budget, they'll nudge the probe a bit so they can take some pictures of an asteroid--because a random trajectory that isn't specifically planned to see an asteroid won't. (This actually happened with the Cassini mission, which didn't have the budget to nudge the probe. During its trip through the whole belt, it saw one asteroid as a point of light at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers.) The asteroid belt could actually be reasonably accurately described as an "asteroid vacuum".
Sci-fi asteroids, on the other hand, form a vast, hyperkinetic obstacle course. Small nimble spacecraft can slalom through, if skilfully piloted, but capital ships must plough straight through the dense-packed rocks, if they can't shoot them out of the way.
In real life, large solid asteroids don't even rotate more than once every few hours; otherwise centrifugal force pulls them apart. In sci-fi, enormous rocks spin like tops and whiz around all over the place, and frequently even run into each other.
This process ought to leave the sci-fi asteroid field as uniform gravel after a few years, but has apparently been going on for millions.
Aspiring SF writers might consider the use of a planetary ring system (a la Saturn-- well, Saturn's ring matter is mostly gravel, so maybe a planet not quite Saturn) as an alternate route to the same imagery. But hey, it's easier to just say "asteroids!"
A subtrope of Space Does Not Work That Way.
Examples:
Film
- Of course, The Empire Strikes Back where Han, deprived of his hyperdrive, has to slalom through densely packed asteroids to evade an Imperial fleet. And then echoed in Attack of the Clones when Obi-Wan is trying to evade Jango Fett.
- The unreality of the Empire Strikes Back sequence is lampooned in this
 Irregular Webcomic.
- It may be worth noting that the Thicket here is referred to as an "asteroid field" rather than a "belt" - not that any such thing is known (or likely) to exist, as discussed above, but it doesn't try to pretend they're the same thing.
- Technically, it could exist... for a relatively short period, and on a much smaller scale. But a recent collision or breakup of a large asteroid could leave a fairly dense gravitationally bound debris field, for a few months at most.
- Nah, still doesn't work. Han went through precisely such a debris field in A New Hope -- the remains of Alderaan shortly after it was destroyed by the Empire. And he did so without any more inconvenience or fancy maneuvers than the Millennium Falcon's cockpit looking like it was on a caffiene jag for a few seconds.
- Uuuh, the Millenium Falcon had smaller asteroids bounce off its shields in both scenes.
Western Animation
- Futurama's episode "A Flight To Remember" lampshades this. Zapp Brannigan deliberately makes a "course correction" to the safe flight of the pleasure cruise to take the spaceship through an asteroid field. After several near misses with asteroids, he then pilots the ship directly into a black hole.
- Invader Zim interestingly averted this in one episode. Yes, Zim piloted a ship into the asteroid belt during a dogfight with Dib, and yes, it was destroyed by the asteroids. They were, respectively, piloting Mars and Mercury.
- You're still not getting it. Mars is less than 7 thousand kilometers across. Asteroids are millions of kilometers apart. You could drive Jupiter through gaps that big (disregarding gravity, of course).
- And even if the asteroids were that dense, there's still no way to destroy by asteroid impact; even if the asteroids were only one inch apart, all they'd do is make it bigger, considering that's how planets form in the first place.
Video Games
- One must mention the classic arcade game Asteroids, where the asteroids just go through each other: either they cheat, or their dodging skills make them smarter than the player.
- The starship battles in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando take place in such a region.
- The Meteo area in the Star Fox games. "Use the boost to get through!"
- The classic Space Sims Wing Commander and Freespace both used this trope, the former as a Death Course for fighters. The latter creates a very distinct mix of infuriating and awesome by making the asteroids too slow and clumsy to be a threat to fighters, then having missions where a desperate capital ship plows through them and has its small craft play point defense.
- Freelancer carefully examines this trope. First, due to their thickness, most asteroid fields in the game are hiding places for criminals. Second, also due to their thickness, several asteroid fields are also suitable for mining operations. Third, some of these asteroid fields are actually made of junk (one of them is even a minefield!). And finally, the spacecraft manufacturers must be very aware of the difficulty of navigating these places by hand, because in order to get across an asteroid field, you just have to set a waypoint to your target, press the Go To button, and the computer will do the slaloming for you.
- The Escape Velocity series (plays like Privateer, looks like Asteroids) has immensely thick asteroid belts, but ships can not collide with them, their purpose is simply to interfere with weapons fire (though they can also be mined in the third game).
- In Homeworld, one mission puts you right in the center of a swarm of malicious asteroids, your objective being to get your smaller ships out of harm's way while blasting apart asteroids that are about to collide with the Mothership. There's a margin for error in that the Mothership can handle a few hits, but it's still not quite as easy as it sounds.
- The various Star Wars-based space sim/shooter games tend to have at least one mission with a whack o' asteroids, probably in deference to Episode V, though in this case the asteroids tend to be much less harmful in and of themselves (though they might prove to be excellent platforms for a starfighter hangar, well-defended space-base, or weapons turrets).
- The PS3 downloadable title Super Stardust HD has asteroids that swoop down (and this troper swears they're aiming for you!), and then start orbiting around the planet you're guarding. This appears to be because of an incredibly powerful planetary shield who's existance is for some reason entirely dependant on the existance of your ship.
- They are aiming for you. It's how the game works.
- The MMORPG Eve Online suffers from this trope in that of the 5000+ solar systems, a large majority of them have at least one "Asteroid Belt", and some have upwards of 20 or 30. This alone isn't enough... the asteroid belts themselves are composed of a belt maybe 100km from end to end with asteroids of various mineral types densely packed together.
- Subverted in the classic 1984 space simulator Elite and it's sequels. Whereas the first game had several classic examples of [[Did not do the research]] such as no star system containing more than one planet and one sun, it did, more or less, bang asteroids on the head. As the game was randomly generated, it was not unusual for players to never come across an asteroid ever when playing the game!
Newspaper Comics
- One Spaceman Spiff fantasy sequence in Calvin And Hobbes had Spiff using the planetary rings variant while Calvin was playing dodgeball.
Live Action TV
- The 2007 4th season premiere of Stargate: Atlantis has Atlantis, shot into space in the previous season, having to make its way through an asteroid field. Sheppard, McKay, and a team have to shoot the asteroids into pieces to clear a path. Sheppard, trying to reassure McKay, compares it to the video game Asteroids. McKay responds, "But I was terrible at Asteroids! I think I actually scored zero once!".
- The Blake's 7 episode "Mission To Destiny" features a space storm that appears as an asteroid thicket.
- The pilot (episode, not the character Pilot) of Farscape had an asteroid thicket.
- Battlestar Galactica. Guilty as charged.
Anime
- In the second season of Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers, the Argo attempts to elude the Earth Defense flagship Andromeda by flying at high speed through our solar system's asteroid belt. (To his credit, Captain Gideon of the Andromeda simply flies around the asteroid belt and is waiting for our heroes on the other side.)
- The "Cemetery Belt" in episode 6 of Heroic Age.
- Mobile Suit Gundam does this with the Corregidor Shoal Zone, a collection of debris from decades of asteroid processing for space colony construction that have aggregated around a Le Grange point. It's a bit more plausible than most examples, as its relatively young by astronomical standards & it's in a much tighter orbit around its centre of mass than a conventional asteroid belt. Still, while the rocks don't come whizzing out at passing spaceships, there are chunks big enough for Humongous Mecha to hide behind, when collisions due top mutual attraction should have reduced them to gravel years ago & they're dense enough to make navigation somewhat difficult, though not to the point of Wronski Feint-ing.
Literature
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