History Main / AsteroidThicket

* The episode "Little Girl Lost Part 1" of SupermanTheAnimatedSeries very neatly and subtly averts this one. While scanning the shattered remnants of Krypton, which have slowly begun forming into an asteroid belt, he receives a distress call from just outside the system. Rather than play "Asteroids" in his protective ship, he simply drops down and ducks under the field to get there as quickly as possible.

* Averted/lampshaded in the {{Family Guy}} apatation of Empire when Threepio (played by Quagmire) says in the adaptation of the asteroid scene "Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 2-1!". To which Han (portrayed by Peter) replies "Never tell me the o-oh... well that's not bad. Never mind, let's keep going. "

* Doomsday Zone from ''[[SonicAndKnuckles Sonic & Knuckles]]'' teaches us that there's a dense asteroid field in Earth's orbit. Who knew? Barely room to fit a hedgehog between the rocks, even. (Or, Mobius' orbit, depending on which version you're playing.)

* In the classic TI-99/4A game, ''Parsec'', asteroid belts are unusual indeed. The game is a side-scrolling shooter, where you fly a ship ''around the planet''. Despite this fact, you encounter asteroid belts regularly! And each "belt" contains an identical pattern of asteroids, starting with a huge column of rocks coming at you. Each subsequent belt comes ever faster, which suggests they should have crashed into each other ages ago.

Not to mention that, as we understand the process so far, an asteroid belt will quickly (in astronomical terms) be pulled into the same orbital plane as the rest of the planetary system. And thats assuming it didn't form from a broken-up planet that was already in the plane. If you needed to get from one side to the other, and by some chance it actually was an AsteroidThicket, your best plan would be to simply leave the orbital plane and bypass it entirely.

[[AC:{{Anime}}]]

* In ''CowboyBebop'', Earth is surrounded by an incredibly thick asteroid field. It was born when an experimental jumpgate was opened accidentally inside the Moon, and a good third of it blasted into pieces, raining down into Earth's gravity field. Now Earth has its own ring like Saturn, and daily meteor showers because of it.

[[AC:{{Film}}]]

[[AC:{{Literature}}]]

[[AC:LiveActionTV]]

* In the ''Voyager'' episode "Year of Hell," the beat-up ship hides in a nebula... and suffers from gas leaking ''in,'' implying that it's denser than the ship's atmosphere.
* The Star Trek (original) episode "Mudd's Women" shows the U.S.S Enterprise chasing Harry Mudd's stolen ship through an asteroid belt (at relativistic speeds) where the asteroids are seen to zip past the Enterprise (as seen by the bridge screen that Kirk is looking at). The asteroids appeared to be spaced apart from each other at considerable distance rather than the traditional Star Wars type asteroid thicket.

[[AC:VideoGames]]

[[AC:WesternAnimation]]

[[AC:TabletopGames]]
* The StarWars-Risk boardgame used an impenetrable asteroid field to represent planets destroyed by the death star, rendering travel in the region.

[[AC:WebOriginal]]
* [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] in the AHDotComTheSeries episode ''The Machine'', in which Captain Dr. What (whose knowledge of how the universe works is mainly based on old movies) tries to hide from [[LawyerFriendlyCameo the]] ''[[Warhammer40K Vendetta]]'' in an asteroid belt, and the most knowledgeable GBW keeps trying to point out that the asteroids are too dispersed for this to work.

[[AC:Comics]]
* In the [[MarvelComics Marvel]] ''TransformersGeneration1'' comic, our solar system's asteroid field is portrayed in precisely this manner; in fact, the ''Ark'''s mission was to destroy a bunch of asteroids so that Cybertron could pass safely through.
** To be fair, although the asteroid belt is portrayed incorrectly, at this time in the comic Cybertron was said to be "Saturn-sized". This size would make the chances of a cataclysmic impact more likely (though still very low).

[[AC:RealLife]]

* At least one extrasolar asteroid belt has been discovered, with measurements indicating that it's much more densly packed than our own.

To be fair, the kind in TV shows are a [[YourMileageMayVary lot]] [[RuleOfCool cooler]].

* MassEffect averts the dense nebula version; the Horse Head Nebula is home to various chunks of the story and sidequests, and its perfectly livable. Note that the Serpent Nebula the Citadel sits in appears to follow this straight, but the Codex entry [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] the improbability of such a dense nebula, notes that it makes navigation (and therefore, external attack) extremely difficult outside the perimiter of the Citadel's mass relays, and cites an in-universe theory that the Citadel itself creates and maintains the nebula artificially with its waste disposal systems.

* Justified in ''CowboyBebop'', where Earth is surrounded by an incredibly thick asteroid field. It was born when an experimental jumpgate was opened accidentally inside the Moon, and a good third of it blasted into pieces, raining down into Earth's gravity field. Now Earth has its own ring like Saturn, and daily meteor showers because of it.

* ''{{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 [[spoiler:Mercury]].''
** How's that an aversion? Even the densest bits of the asteroid belt would easily accomodate the passage of a Mars-sized object without any direct collisions, and if one were to happen, it may, depending on the size of the asteroid, be very bad news for anyone on the surface of the planet, but it couldn't even begin to "destroy" it in any meaningful sense.
*** Well to be fair. The planet was never destroyed. Only the control platform required to pilot the giant planet engine was. Mars kept on cruising along the universe, eventually taking out a good portion of the Irken fleet and our solar system became short of one red planet.

For that matter, if ships are going through a nebula, it ''will not'' be like a thick fog - the density of the gases is about 1000 particles per cubic centimeter. The air you breathe just walking around on Earth is around 2.5x10^19 particles per cubic centimeter, or about 250-million-billion times denser. The nebula's density may be 1000 times the density of the interstellar medium, but it's still a near perfect vacuum.

**** Interrestingly, while dense, the asteroids barely move and as such, the fields are very easy to navigate. Even the bonus level based off of the Millenium Falcon chase scene has nowhere near the amount of danger implied in the film.

* MobileSuitGundam 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 LeGrange point. It's a bit more plausible than most examples, as it's relatively young by astronomical standards and 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 HumongousMecha to hide behind, when collisions due to mutual attraction should have reduced them to gravel years ago and they're dense enough to make navigation somewhat difficult, though not to the point of WronskiFeint-ing.

* Subverted in AllenSteele's ''AKingOfInfiniteSpace,'' where the protagonist claims to expect the asteroid field to mirror his recollections of ''[[StarWars Empire Strikes Back]]'', only to discover the scientific reality of the asteroid field.

* The classic [[SpaceSim Space Sims]] ''WingCommander'' and ''{{Freespace}}'' both used this trope, the former as a DeathCourse 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 [[EscortMission play point defense]] against the [[MalevolentArchitecture Malevolent Asteroids]] that continually appear out of nowhere to converge on the target ship.

** On the other hand, ''Ratchet: Deadlocked'' has a planet whose orbit takes it through an asteroid field so dense, the residents put up a planetary shield so they didn't get {{Colony Drop}}ped to death.

To be fair, the kind in TV shows are a lot [[RuleOfCool cooler]].

*** The thicket is described as an asteroid ''field'', which is presumably different from a belt in some way-- in interstellar space, maybe, and so gravitationally bound only to each other? Or the result of a recent collision having not had time to disperse? ...Okay, I got nothing.

* ''GalaxyExpress999'' episode 3 depicts our solar system's asteroid belt this way. Granted, the series runs on RuleOfCool, but the asteroid field isn't some futuristic device designed to look like an old-fashioned inaccurate sci-fi asteroid field... it just ''is'' an inaccurate sci-fi asteroid field.

There is another way for asteroids to form into fields or clumps - they can collect at the Lagrange points (regions of null gravity) created by large planets and the sun. The Trojan asteroids out in Jupiter's orbit are a real example. The density of these fields can be much higher than an orbital belt, and the gravitational forces on the rocks will keep them tightly packed.

This process ought to leave the sci-fi asteroid field as uniform gravel after a few years--or a planet after many thousands more when gravity finally wins--but has apparently been going on for millions of years without a pause.

** In the original movie, though, it's [[JustifiedTrope justified]]: the "asteroids" are really fragments of Alderaan, which has literally ''just been destroyed''. So obviously they're everywhere.

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

* Then there's also ''Zanac'' and ''Zanac Neo''. Thick asteroid field can be seen in arer 5 in the original and even thicker one is in the second stage of Zanac Neo.