Orbital Piano Strike

[Neomi Bensch]

In some science fiction, it's impractical to transport enough ground troops to invade a planet or natural satellite, or The Empire simply wants to make a statement. So they bombard it with a bunch of nukes or large kinetics, or Energy Weapons of some sort. This bombardment may be limited to a small geographical area but more often it is a general assault that wipes out most civilization if not all life on the planet.

A term frequently used in relation to this trope is "glassing," which originally referred to the bombardment being intense enough to cause the soil to vitrify, or melt into volcanic glass. Such as what happened at the Trinity nuclear test site.

Subtrope of Death from Above, supertrope to Colony Drop, usually less powerful than an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Kill Sat is a specific example where the bombardment is carried out by a satellite instead of a ship (the primary distinction is that the Kill Sat can't leave orbit under its own power). This can overlap with a Meteor-Summoning Attack. May involve Nuking 'em, and could be required because It's the Only Way to Be Sure. Has no relation to an Orbital Shot. See also Gunship Rescue.

Anime & Manga

• Gundam:
• The original Mobile Suit Gundam's backstory includes an attempted colony drop on Brazil that was derailed to Australia. Gundam 0083 gives us a decent peek of the ensuing crater bay carved from the 50-mile radius around what used to be Sydney.
• Char's Counterattack more or less revolves around Char doing this and even begins with a preliminary meteor drop on Tibet.
• Operation Meteor of Gundam Wing infamy was drafted as a plan to drop an asteroid on Earth, then seize control with the Gundams as the populace runs around in terror. Of course, we wind up seeing what happens when the Gundams jump the gun and their pilots' humanity interferes, but Dekim Barton decides to double back and do it right in Endless Waltz. Late in the TV series, the space fortress Libra fires a shot from its Wave-Motion Gun down on Earth, destroying a small uninhabited island.
• After War Gundam X starts with the Space Revolutionary Army devastating the Earth with mass colony drops. The series proper takes place After the End with everyone who's left scrambling to control the titular Gundam, whose Satellite Cannon was designed to shoot the things down.
• The second season of Gundam 00 has an orbital elevator collapse and a massive scramble from Celestial Being and A-LAWS to clear the ensuing debris before it lands on someone's head. The collapse was caused by the Memento Mori orbital cannons which were also used previously to level entire CITIES from above.
• Gundam SEED Destiny features an attempt to drop a destroyed colony on Earth. Despite the efforts of both the Federation and ZAFT, who together actually manage to take out the majority of the thing, enough damage is caused to re-ignite a second Bloody Valentine War.
• Even SD Gundam Force gets in on the action towards the end of its first half, when Chief Haro conducts the largest-scale Bright Slap homage ever by dropping the hand-shaped Blanc Base on the Dark Axis's Big Zam.
• In The 08th MS Team, the entire point of the Apsalus Project is to produce a weapon that can destroy the Federation's headquarters at Jaburo even through the layers of rock and earth protecting it. This is done by strapping a superhigh-powered beam cannon to a mobile armor designed to "bounce" high into the atmosphere and bombard Jaburo like a Kill Sat.
• Gundam Evolve featured a Titans Mobile Armor, the Geminus, that was capable of striking ground targets from orbit with a Beam Cannon. It manages to take out a Karaba base before getting destroyed by a team of Zeta Gundams.
• Iron-Blooded Orphans has a non-Colony Drop version of this: in the final episode, Gjallarhorn launches a Dainsleif bombardment on Tekkadan's remaining mobile suits during their last stand. This ends up doing incredible damage to the Barbatos, but Mikazuki keeps fighting for a few more minutes out of sheer determination. A briefly seen map at the end of Season 1 shows that in the past (presumably during the Calamity Wars) something, presumably large and dropped from orbit, wiped out Sydney, Australia. Again
• Space Carrier Blue Noah: Hostile aliens destroy Earth's bases through showers of meteors.
• Robotech's Macross:
• Midway into the saga, Admiral Dolza amasses the Zentradi armada above Earth's orbit. The crew of SDF-1 join forces with Breetai and Azonia to smash through Dolza's defenses and succeed in killing him, but not before the order is given to annihilate the Earth. The Zentradi open fire, devastating close to 90 percent of the planet's surface, killing two thirds of its populace.
• In the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the Zentraedi fold into orbit and immediately open fire without giving humanity any time to do more than gawk at the enormous fleet they've amassed. When the Macross and the allied Breetai and Lap Lamiz fleets go after Bodolza, they do so under the assumption that all human life on the planet is dead. Fortunately, it turns out this isn't quite the case: a few million survivors here and there across the surface are located in the following years.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The movie confirms that this is how the Anti-Spirals destroyed the previous iteration of human civilization, and the Earth's surface along with it.
• In Space Battleship Yamato 2199, the Gamilas Empire used planet bombs to irradiate the earth's surface. The Gamilas Empire bombarded Alteria with ultra-menace missiles, fighters, and fighter carriers that act as a Kill Sat in an attempt to scare any civilizations that want to revolt from the empire.
• Yakitori: Soldiers of Misfortune: When Unit K-321 request this trope, their commander insists that another member of the unit confirm the request before allowing it. They discover why on seeing the sheer destruction that ensues. After it's all over, Unit K-321 then find themselves being court-martialed for genocide after there's a public outcry.

Comic Books

• Dawn of the Jedi: The comic reveals that the desert world Tattooine was once a jungle world with large oceans. The Rakata conquered it and the people they enslaved rebelled. They bombarded the world from orbit and turned it into the desert we see in the films.
• Global Frequency: The comic features the threat of kinetic spears, weapons designed to be dropped from satellites, heat up on re-entry, and strike the ground with the force of a tactical nuke, and as hot as the edge of the sun. Part of a 'die-back' protocol.
• Mary Marvel (1945): In issue #23, an alien race demands that Earth submits to their rule, reinforcing their threats by blowing up huge chunks of Moon rock which plunge towards Earth like a lethal meteor shower.
• Star Trek: Early Voyages:
• In the two-part story "The Fallen", the Chakuun ghostships launch devastating attacks from space on Federation colonies such as Jubal and Theta Kalyb. Approximately 100,000 Federation citizens are killed in the attack on Jubal. New Milan suffered the same fate eight years earlier.
• In "Nemesis", the Klingon commander Kharg threatens to destroy the major population centers of the Temazi homeworld from space.
• Supergirl: In The Death of Luthor, Supergirl visits an alien world which was destroyed by hostile spaceships shooting freezing beams which literally glassed the atmosphere.
• Superman:
• "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali": In order to force Superman and Muhammad Ali to comply with his demands, the Scrubb Emperor Rat'Lar warns that his armada has surrounded Earth before ordering the obliteration of one whole city. One of his hundreds of ships fires two giant intangible plasma missiles, and although Superman is able to divert them into the sea, he still must deal with the ensuing tsunami. While he is busy, another ship shoots another couple of missiles and blows one island up before Superman can stop them.
• "Brainiac: Rebirth": Brainiac's Skull ship shoots barrages of missiles and beams to destroy the cities of Systus 2. When its inhabitants try to mount a counterattack, Brainiac fires a massive beam which turns their world into an uninhabitable ball of scorched, cracked earth.
• Superboy (1980): In issue #53, a Drulokian warship attempts to destroy a planet's civilization by causing a meteor shower to fall upon their cities.
• Wonder Woman: In Wonder Woman (1942), the Green Geni get a kick out of finding planets that support life, and then bombarding them with nuclear weapons from orbit. They then have the temerity to act like the victims when the Golden Women Space Police force turns their own vessel into a prison ship for them.

Fan Works

• The Celestia Code: After some run-ins with changelings, Twilight finally settles on diplomacy. Namely, a politely worded letter ... and borrowing an asteroid when Luna's not looking.I think I used too much velocity.
• Day of Darkness II features Gallente Sentry Drones performing an orbital bombardment. Also, Admiral Tovil-Toba performs a Colony Drop with his multi-kilometer spaceship.
• The Elements of Harmony and the Savior of Worlds: This is the Earth Defense Command's General Plan 24 and equivalent nuclear option - bombardment of a ground target with the Energon cannons of as many Enterprise-class space battleships of the EDC as can be made available.
• Fractured: Anyone with a sufficiently large Battlestar seems to like employing this trope. From the small-scale by comparison nuclear firepower unleashed by an anti-Jakobs alliance to full-scale anti-Reaper blasts from Trans-Galactic Republic fleets or even the last sweep against the Flood using huge numbers of Star Dreadnaughts, many planets have been glassed over the course of the series.
• From Bajor to the Black states that after the survivors of the fleet rescued the 9,000 survivors of the Borg attack on the Vega IX colony, they demolished the site with an orbital torpedo attack.
• Let the Galaxy Burn, A Song of Ice and Fire as a Space Opera, has a character mention a maxim: "Maxim One: who controls the orbital, controls the planet". It's stated that the inability to do this is part of what makes taking Moat Cailin almost impossible, as even if you get past the minefields, asteroid fields, and asteroid fortresses, it has machines on it that generate gravity distortions that drag any ship in bombardment range to their doom, forcing enemies to land troops if they want to take the massive swamp-covered planet that one character states could be used in a dictionary to define the term Death World.
• Red Fire, Red Planet: This is done inadvertently. Norigom's "strike package" (really just ten tons of uranium dropped from a Bird-of-Prey at 25,000 km/s) is actually aimed at part of Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, but a chunk of it keeps going after hitting its target and impacts the planet. A Martian city reportedly suffered a direct hit.
• The Unabridged Memoirs of Darth Plagueis the Wise: This is the main tactic of Ackbar's Perlemian Blitz campaign. He jumps his fleet into a system, and proceeds to deliver Death from Above on every visible military site on the planet, allowing his forces to then land and steal and/or sabotage all the infrastructure they can, before then fleeing the system to rinse and repeat somewhere else.
• Uplifted: Arrival: Following the Nazi commando raid on the Kareon and the successful liberation of Adolf Hitler, Admiral Alaan'Jarva tracks Hitler's movements into Italy, where a fortress inside Mt. Ortler was constructed during his absence. When his location is confirmed, Jarva orders twenty-four ships into orbit over Earth and together they fire about 800 megatons of firepower on him, vaporizing the dictator, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and the entire mountain.
• Used and discussed in Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion:
• The technical definition of a Star Destroyer is based around their orbital bombardment capabilities; "any ship smaller than 2,000 meters capable of making a planet uninhabitable in less than a day with only the standard weapons". Most Star Destroyers achieve this through sheer turbolaser firepower, while the Victory I, relatively undergunned in the turbolaser department, simply fires all its missiles to blast away a planet's magnetic field and let solar radiation finish the job.
• Base Delta Zero, an orbital bombardment that obliterates all life on a planet, is ordered by Tarkin against the planet D'vouran. As D'vouran eats people and is being weaponized by a rogue Imperial scientist, this is considered entirely appropriate.
• Base Delta Zero has existed as a protocol for a long time for situations where killing an entire planet quickly becomes necessary, but every time it was ordered an alternative solution was found before it was carried out... Up until Grievous ordered it against Humbarine during the Clone Wars for terror purposes, with "rogue" Imperial officers carrying one out against Caamas. Tarkin's implementation is the first appropriate use of the bombardment.
• Shadows of the Empire's Bombardment of Falleen is featured, with two variations: Vader was extraneous to the creation of the flesh-eating bacteria that made it necessary (in fact the release was the result of the lab screwing up by trying to destroy it before Vader arrived and discovered they hadn't done it yet), and it was demanded by a medic in the affected area knowing he'd be killed. Vader being Vader he arrived ready to carry it out, he just waited for the medic to order it - and Falleen's garrison fleet being prevented from carrying it out by the local governor that didn't want to lose the "donations" from a native of the targeted city.

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