Colony Drop

Here comes the neighborhood.

Shepard: I'm surprised you'd mention vandalism in that bunch.
Jack: That's what the hanar call it when you drop that space station I mentioned onto one of their moons and make a new crater. Heh. They really liked that moon.

— Mass Effect 2

One of the most dramatic ways to try and bring about The End of the World as We Know It. Put simply, just set any sufficiently large object on a course toward the Earth, or whatever world is important to the plot, and make sure you're off-world when it hits. Or not, if you don't care about surviving it or you're already going to be dead when it happens.

The sky literally falling has a way of pushing the story quickly past the Godzilla Threshold. It most likely will require Applied Phlebotinum to stop or a large amount of firepower, thus it's also one of the few cases where the Nuclear Option is acceptable. In fact, it would probably be insufficient: even a small asteroid about the size of a house can cause more damage than the atomic bomb, and this trope is all about objects much bigger and more threatening.

Most often done with asteroids or comets, but very large space colonies often show up too, and provide the added drama of allowing both populations to witness their imminent doom.

If this is done deliberately by a villain, he may warn the world in advance (through their TV sets), so as to give the good guys time to avert it.

When someone is doing this on purpose, this trope often overlaps with Meteor-Summoning Attack and Orbital Bombardment. This often results in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Those who happen to be at ground zero are especially screwed. Even a successfully halted colony drop can be the source of an Inferred Holocaust. If you have a weapon capable of causing these, then it is very likely also a subtrope of Superweapon. Contrast Save Sat, when it's a satellite crashing down.

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Examples:

Space Colonies, Space Stations, various assorted artificial space stuff

Anime & Manga

• Battle Programmer Shirase's main character Akira has a 'special attack' where he drops three decommissioned Russian satellites in a row, insuring that the last makes it intact through the atmosphere on the target of his choice.
• Date A Live: Some treacherous members of DEM attempt to assassinate Sir Isaac Ray Peram Westcott by causing three satellites to fall on Tengu City, not caring about the collateral damage. Kotori blows up the first one in time, then Shido and his harem blows up the second one, and Origami blows up the third one.
• Parodied in Excel♡Saga: at the end of the Space Opera spoof, the evil puchuu faction tries to ram the Earth with their giant mothership. The good puchuus manage to destroy most of it, then when they learn a remaining piece will still devastate the City of Adventure on impact, declare it acceptable losses and leave as the Puchuu-shaped mushroom cloud rises over Fukuo-excuse me, "F City." (The next episode is a parody of Fist of the North Star that turns quite unexpectedly, and quite effectively, serious in the last third).
• The Andromeda Flow Country from Getter Robo attempt this with their enormous space battleship, in a last-ditch attempt to stop humanity's use of Getter Rays. The favor gets returned later on by the Getter Emperor, a Humongous Mecha so large that it crushes the AFC's planets by flying into them.
• Leopard, the Master Computer running a space colony in The Girl Who Leapt Through Space, spirals downward into despair after he can't fire his Wave-Motion Gun and almost colony drops himself into the Earth. He's pulled out of it just in time.
  • Later parodied when Nerval's battle body wraps around Leopard's colony, yells out "COLONY DROP!!", and suplexes him into the lunar surface.
• The Trope Namer is Gundam: dropping large objects ranging from space colonies to asteroids to battlestations is a favorite tactic of the series, though usually unsuccessful. The only way they avoid an Inferred Holocaust is by making it explicit, though rarely past class 0 on the scale.
  • In the original series, Zeon dropped one of Earth's space colonies during the Back Story "Operation British" in an attempt to destroy the Earth Federation's nuke-proof headquarters in Brazil. The colony breaks up before impact and misses its intended target, instead completely annihilating Sydney, Australia and generally making a mess of things. Gundam 0083 actually shows the crater left by the drop, making clear that the explosion was equal to about 60,000 MT, and the Sega Dreamcast game Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise From The Ashes drives the point home by featuring the continent of Australia (where the game takes place) on the title screen◊ with what looks like a bite taken out of it where Sydney, Canberra and a quarter of New South Wales used to be. The impact itself and its devastation on Sydney is also shown in gratuitous detail in the opening of Narrative, with the shattered city and surrounding area featuring at the beginning of Thunderbolt Season 2. The Origins manga went on to explain that between the impacts proper and the environmental aftermath, the population of Earth on Impact + 1 month was half of what it was before the drop. If the colony hadn't broken into three pieces before impact (with one-piece breaking up further during reentry), it probably would have been worse.
  • Zeta Gundam had a bit of a variation, in that the villains tried to colony-drop a city on the Moon rather than on Earth. Fortunately, the colony was diverted, and, this being the Moon, the environmental aftereffects were nonexistent (by virtue of there not being an environment to ruin).
  • Other series in the UC timeline continue the tradition; there are colony drops in Gundam 0083, Gundam ZZ, and Char's Counterattack. Effects differ from the destruction of a city to making the entire planet uninhabitable — happily, that last one is prevented.
    • The final stretch of 0083's story revolves around the heroes trying to prevent a colony from being dropped on North America. They fail.
  • Parodied in the third Mobile Suit SD Gundam short where both Gundam and Zaku accidentally cause one while competing in a survival marathon for the Olympics. The credits seem to indicate only the Colosseum was ruined.
  • Gundam X is an Alternate Universe, set on a near-Class 3a ruined Earth that's been the victim of a whole bunch of colony drops.
  • Gundam Wing ends with Heero preventing a colony drop.
    • In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, it is revealed that the actual plan for the Gundam pilots was to conquer Earth after they sent a colony drop first. Thankfully, their supervisors and the pilots themselves (except one, who was killed by a technician that had family on Earth and was quickly replaced by another unnamed technician — the man whom we know as Trowa Barton) didn't feel like going along with this and deserted.
  • Gundam SEED Destiny, as well as the prologue of Mobile Suit Gundam Seed CE 73 Stargazer features the remains of the destroyed space colony, Junius Seven, being sent towards the Earth by a group of rogue ZAFT Soldiers loyal to Patrick Zala. It is mostly destroyed in orbit, but fragments of the wreckage still make their way through the atmosphere and cause massive casualties.
  • A variation occurs in Season 2 of Gundam 00 when the A-LAWS shoot down the African space elevator because it had been taken over by an anti-A-LAWS military faction, in the process killing most of the 60,000 civilians inside and causing it to crash down to Earth in pieces.
  • Not a colony, but the Downes battle station in Gundam AGE almost causes a similar effect before being destroyed.
  • In ∀ Gundam this happens due to collateral damage knocking an abandoned asteroid colony out of lunar orbit, and Loran has to prevent it from smashing into the moon's capital city. Loran stops it with the nuclear warheads he'd been safeguarding.
  • In the OVA Gundam Build Fighters Try: Island Wars, the Scramble Gundam, utilizing the power of the Plavsky Particles Mk. II, summons the original Colony Drop to destroy our heroes. Team Try Fighters pull off an All Your Powers Combined to make short work of the attempt.
  • Although not outright shown, it's implied that this happened during the Calamity War in the backstory of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, since much like in the original, a large chunk of Australia is missing from the map of the Earth.
  • Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE features Captain Zeon, who uses the Axis colony drop above as a Limit Break. Played for Laughs because GBN is a video game, and he is actually a good-natured paragon of fair play. He dropped the Axis on a bunch of griefers to get them to change their ways. Since Death Is a Slap on the Wrist in GBN, they respawn and agree to behave themselves, suitably cowed after they realize that The Cape really doesn't have any qualms about smashing the three of them with an entire asteroid colony — if they get out of line, he might do it again.
• In Moonlight Mile, there is a somewhat smaller-scale version — a pilot has to be rescued from a malfunctioning cylindrical German spacecraft called the Doner Kebab and the ship's trajectory redirected before it is expected to fall on Sydney, Australia like in the original Mobile Suit Gundam.
• In Planetes, terrorists plot to sabotage the interplanetary spaceship in lunar orbit and crash it into Luna City. They call it off after the government gives concessions, but just barely.
• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Attempted by Desslar against his own people in an effort to destroy the titular space battleship. Capt. Okita uses the Wave-Motion Gun to vaporize it before it can impact.
• In Transformers Victory, in a final, desperate effort to get revenge on Victory Saber, Deathsaurus attempts to ram his space fortress into Earth, killing everybody. He fails.
• In the third Eureka Seven Hi-Evolution film, Dewey Novak initiates a Colony Drop by destroying a space elevator, intending for the ship connected to it to wreak havoc across Earth as it proceeds toward colliding with the planet. While the impact is averted, Dewey, many of his henchmen and a significant number of his enemies die in the course of it being stopped.

Comic Books

• In one of the earliest Aliens vs. Predator crossover comics (later adapted into a novel), a small backwater colony gets completely infested with aliens. After the few surviving colonists evacuate to a safe distance, administrator Machiko Noguchi heads into the heart of the alien hive with a Predator ally and programs the orbiting cargo ship to crash into the colony.
• In one of the Doctor Who (Titan) Twelfth Doctor stories, the villains are planning to commit a huge blood sacrifice to empower a Life Energy-powered alien, by deliberately crashing an orbiting space colony into the city of Mumbai.
• Italian Comic Book series Nathan Never has a story arc about the war between Each and its Space Colonies. Urania, one of these colonies abandoned after being wrecked by a terrorist attack, is used to perform a Colony Drop attack against the largest city of Earth.
• Star Wars Infinities: In this What If? version of A New Hope, Luke fails to destroy the Death Star, years later Yoda ends up taking control of it and sets it to crash into Palpatine's palace on Coruscant, putting an end to the Empire and leaving Coruscant... broken.
• In Superman storyline Reign of Doomsday, Doomslayer's world-ending plan involves crashing a spaceship into Earth at terminal speed.
• In The Transformers: Sins of the Wreckers, the Wreckers have an asteroid space station called Debris which serves as their home base. At the climax of the arc, Impactor has to contrive a way to drop Debris onto a whale in another dimension in order to save the day.
• Ultimatum: After killing Magneto, the heroes blew up his floating fortress, which fell to the ocean below.

Fan Works

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has Galaxoid accidentally sending a satellite down to Earth. It's Played for Laughs.
• Happens in the Babylon 5 fanfic The Dilgar War twice, first when the Dilgar use the wreckage of enemy ships as munitions for their mass drivers (that usually fire small asteroids and other rocks) to bomb the planet they were destroying trying to defend (it's implied to be a standard procedure, partly because, as long as you don't want some specific after-effects, it's as effective as rocks, faster and doesn't use the fuel needed to actually gather the rocks, and partly because the Dilgar appreciate the Irony and love to Kick the Dog), and then, when Jha'dur decides to destroy Mitoc and, after having it nuked and hit with mass driver fire and the weapons of the orbital defences, has the orbits of the defensive satellites and starbase degraded so they'll fall on the planet in a few days.
• In the Child of the Storm universe, the Scarlet Witch has apparently mastered this trope as an offensive technique, combining her massive magical power and skills with her probability-altering mutant abilities in order to drop space junk on her enemies with pinpoint accuracy. There's an offhand mention of her doing this to Nicodemus Archleone, and at the climax of the Chaos Reigns spinoff, we finally get to see her pull this move off, in order to severely injure the Mabdhara. Dresden is left in awe at the display.
• Sudden Contact: The Overmind resorted to pulling down an Orbital Platform on the combined terran/turian/batarian/protoss ground forces in retaliation to the deaths of two Cerebrates.
• In the Freedom Planet fic Freedom Dies With Me, this is eventually revealed to be Clone Master's motivation to continue Lord Brevon's work after killing him. Gathering the armies of both Shang Tu AND Shang Mu to the Battle Glacier, he uses the Kingdom Stone to rise the broken Dreadnought as high as it can go and rigs the engines to blow, causing the ship to crash into the Battle Glacier, smashing the Kingdom Stone in the process and nuking the planet to the point of near-armageddon.
• A Nerubian's Journey: When plan A to destroy the zombified giant turtle Shen-Zin Su falls through, Krivax racks his brain and suggests that they crush it with the Nerubians' giant flying fortress — after appropriately reinforcing it.

Films — Live-Action

• In Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the planet Mül is destroyed by a gigantic ship falling from orbit and detonating. Later on, it's revealed that Commander Filitt ordered the deployment of a superweapon that caused the enemy ship to crash, knowingly sacrificing an entire sentient race to win the battle.
• In Wet Hot American Summer, the climactic talent show is threatened by a falling piece of the space station headed straight for the auditorium!

Literature

• Alex Rider: The villain of Ark Angel plans to set off a bomb on the titular space station, which has gone massively over-budget while still in construction, so he can wash his hands of it and collect the insurance money. Not content with space-age insurance fraud, he wants to time the explosion so the station will land in Washington, destroying all the government's evidence of his other criminal activities.
• Evolution: Earth is hit by two major cosmic bodies, both causing a mass extinction — the comet that killed the dinosaurs and Eros in the future. Numerous other impacts of this scale occur during the Solar System's dying days, but by that point there's nothing left on Earth for them to kill.
• Isaac Asimov may have originated a cheap way to terraform nearly waterless Mars: adjust cometary trajectories slightly and bombard the planet with big balls of dirty ice. The Caliban series, derived from Asimov's Robot Series, takes terraforming by colony drop to a new level. The normal process is to have a few robot teams cut the comets apart and fire them at the planet with mass drivers, ensuring that all the micro-comets that hit the planet are small enough to burn up on impact without damaging the real estate. But the final novel of the trilogy sends an entire comet at the planet, breaking it apart into large pieces, so that the overlapping craters will dig a channel between the equatorial seas and the north pole, allowing the planet of Inferno to have greater temperature regulation.
• Chanur Novels: A ship coming into a system out of hyperspace is travelling at a very high fraction of the speed of light. In theory, it's possible for a ship to hop out of hyperspace, drop off an asteroid so that it's on a collision course for an inhabited world, and then hop back into hyperspace. Since the asteroid will itself being travelling at a very high fraction of light-speed, not only is it impossible to stop, it doesn't even need to be very big to cause massive amounts of destruction. This form of Colony Drop was never used in the series, but one of the antagonists did threaten its use.
• During the climax of Chrysalis (Beaver Fur), as the Terran's last act, they crash their entire mothership into one of the Xunvir Republic's major manufacturing planets, destroying it. Since that spaceship is also their entire body, it's also a Suicide Attack.
• In the Chung Kuo series, Earth has seven continent-spanning cities and a combined population of 38 billion people. This necessitates large orbiting stations to grow food. One of these falls from orbit and impacts North America causing a hole in the city the size of the Great Lakes, the death of the Emperor of North America as he tries to flee a rioting populace, and a civil war for the next 20 years. It's possible 2 billion people died.
• Cities in Flight: The rogue spacefaring city known as Interstellar Master Traders uses this to rape and pillage planets in Earthman Come Home.
• In Bruno Schulz's story, "The Comet", global disaster is averted because the comet becomes a sensation which subsequently goes out of fashion.
• Allen Steele's 'Coyote Rising' has the colonists employing a Colony Drop in the form of the deliberate de-orbiting of the starship Alabama onto the main base of the bad guys, destroying most of their forces in the process.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In order to kill Duke Paolo Ortega, both in retaliation for an offscreen attack in the previous book and because he cheated in his duel against Harry before running his cowardly ass away, Harry's old mentor and grandfather Ebenezar "Blackstaff" McCoy makes sure the vampire gets what's coming to him. By dropping a decommissioned Soviet satellite out of orbit straight onto Ortega's hometown, right where he was healing. Needless to say, there were no survivors, though the village itself was mostly untouched.
  • It's not the first time, either. The Tunguska Event? Yeah, that was him.
  • A little context. The Duke's home had all sorts of magical protection. No one could get in or out, and trying to use magic to hurt him or storm the castle would not work. Unfortunately for the Duke, gravity is not magic.
• Downtiming The Night Side: The setting in future has Earth fighting an increasingly desperate war against "The Others", genetically modified humans living on the moon. The Others battle plan consists of hurling asteroids at the Earth, the defense of which is rapidly draining resources and leads to desperate measures.
• Dune:
  • Starships called 'crushers', which are meant to be deliberately crashed onto a planetary surface to destroy a city/installation/military formation, are employed.
  • Used as a tactic by Titan Agamemnon in Legends of Dune during the invasion of Geidi Prime. He sends a cruiser on a collision course for a scrambler field emitter that is keeping the Thinking Machines from invading. The sheet kinetic force of the fall destroys a large part of the capital city.
• The Eschaton Series: In Iron Sunrise, the second strike ship (accelerates to sublight speed and rains Death from Above upon target) is set on a course to smash into an enemy planet after its home system is destroyed by a superweapon.
• Honor Harrington:
  • A three hundred-thousand-ton chunk of an orbital shipyard wipes out a fair-sized city by landing almost directly on top of it, to the tune of several million casualties. Though the object of the attack was to destroy the station, and the damage to the planet was just collateral damage/a bonus.
  • Also an oft-Discussed Trope. Orbital bombardment of a populated planet is referred to as The Heinlein Maneuver, and the deliberate and unprovoked performing of such is considered one of the few easy ways to provoke The Solarian League into open war.
• In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the rebelling Moon colonists use their electromagnetic catapult to throw rocks down the gravity well at Earth.
• In The Night's Dawn Trilogy, villain Quinn Dexter forces the orbiting dozen or so asteroid habitats circling the planet Nyvan to crash into the planet, wiping out the half-billion or so inhabitants. He later plans to do this to Earth with its much bigger orbital network of asteroid settlements and its population of 39 billion, but is distracted by another plan and pursues that instead.
• Otherland: At the climax of the series, the AI running the Otherland network tricks the heroes into letting it escape its virtual imprisonment. Its first and final action is to attempt to destroy its tormentors by activating its self-destruct sequence, which in this case means sending the satellite that houses its "brain" plummeting to Earth, aimed directly at the headquarters of J Corp. The resulting impact turns a mile high corporate tower into a smoking crater in the Louisiana swamp.
• In the finale of Rama II, the spacecraft realigns is orbit so that it is in a collision course with Earth. The response on the ground is to nuke it. Then the spacecraft realigns its orbit again to do an observational slingshot pass of the planet at the last minute.
• In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, Mars is being colonized and populated even BEFORE the cometary bombardment ceases, requiring some very important Travel Advisories. Also in Robinson's trilogy, when the Space Elevator is destroyed, it falls and wraps around the planet several times.
• Release That Witch: Roland eventually manages to beat Zero in her Mental World by imagining a theoretical kinetic orbital strike weapon that drops thousands of pieces of metal slag from orbit, which under the effects of gravity and atmospheric entry turns it into flaming molten metal moving at high speed.
• Safehold has the Rakurai, a kinetic bombardment weapons platform orbiting the planet programmed to destroy any place which reaches a certain technology level in order to keep the planet in Medieval Stasis. The Lost Colony's founders used it to destroy the enclave of the people who disagreed with their God Guise. One of the protagonists' main issues is finding a way to somehow get rid of the platform.
• An averted attempt at one is what sets up the events of the Stephanie Plum novel Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight. The Big Bad of the novel, hacker Oswald Wednesday, was seeking revenge for being fired from NASA, with him being able to hack into the International Space Station and plotting to send it on a collision course to Earth whether or not the world governments paid his ransom of a hundred-million dollars. However, before he can execute the plan, a group of hackers that admired him managed to hack into his computer, and when one of the hackers stayed on longer and learned of his plan to drop the ISS on Earth, she proceeded to infect his computer with ransomware to stop the plan, leading to him killing the members of the hacker group one-by-one as a means of retribution.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Chains of Command featured the Enterprise finding a number of planets that had been destroyed by a powerful alien race firing smaller (moon-sized) celestial bodies at high speed.
• Star Wars Legends
  • In various reference books it's mentioned that during the Clone Wars The Republic did this by accident; during a battle over the Separatist planet of Pammant, a battlecruiser's hyperdrive was damaged by torpedo droids and triggered a jump which nearly shattered the planet, ending all life and crippling CIS ship production.
  • X-Wing Series: Played with twice, using the Executor-class star dreadnaught Lusankya.
    • Inverted in The Krytos Trap, where the Lusankya buried under the surface of Coruscant blasts its way out from under the city, causing massive destruction and killing millions of people in the process.
    • Defied in The Bacta War when the captain of the Lusankya threatens to crash it into the planet Thyferra rather than surrender his vessel. Instead, his first officer shoots him and surrenders to the Rogues.
  • It's then played straight during the fall of Coruscant in Star by Star when the Yuuzhan Vong bombard Coruscant with its own orbital defense stations.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In The Bleeding Chalice, an Imperial Battleship possessed by a Chaos Plague Lord (or something like that...) is dropped on a planet. Said ship exploded on entering the atmosphere, resulting in not only a rain of debris but the first-ever Airdrop Zombie Apocalypse.
  • In the first novel of Black Legion, the eponymous, yet-unnamed warband begins their attack on Canticle City by dropping at it Khayon's late ship, Tlaloc, from the orbit, annihilating it completely.
  • In Talon of Horus, Iskandar Khayon telekinetically tows the Tlaloc behind Vengeful Spirit to throw it at the Canticle City on Harmony, destroying the Emperor's Children's fortress and its cloning facilities.
• The Zachary Nixon Johnson series has a race of aliens called the Gladians. Most people believe them to be a peaceful race, as they possess no weapons. The main character's secretary, however, points out that they do possess extremely massive ships, which they are capable of flying into planets at extremely fast speeds. They apparently wiped out the dinosaurs this way, and threaten to do it to humanity, too.

Live-Action TV

• Dead Like Me: In a small-scale variant, Georgia Lass was killed by a plummeting toilet seat that fell from the decommissioned Mir space station.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Revenge of the Cybermen": The Cybermen (obviously) make a second attempt to destroy Voga by crashing the Nerva beacon, laden with Cyberbombs, into the planet. The Doctor and Sarah, who they've left on board, prevent this from happening.
  • The Cybermen do the same thing again in "Earthshock" when they try to crash a massive transport ship into future Earth to stop an anti-Cybermen conference. They succeed... sort of. Adric inadvertently saves the planet by fiddling with the controls so the thing goes back in time, to become the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
  • "Voyage of the Damned": Max Capricorn attempts to make the space Titanic crash into Earth. His motivation? To drive his former company that he was forced out of bankrupt and get its current owners arrested for exterminating humanity. It narrowly misses Buckingham Palace.
  • In the following season, in the alternate universe where Donna didn't "Turn Left", the Doctor died before he could stop the space Titanic. The fallout from the explosion obliterates London, turning the UK into a third world country overnight, forcing martial law, forced housing, and the eventual Nazi-ish removal of foreigners to concentration camps.
  • In "The Return of Doctor Mysterio", the Harmony Shoal attempt to drop a spaceship onto New York in order to trick world leaders into hiding out in their reinforced buildings, thus allowing them to perform a Grand Theft Me on all of them. The Doctor accelerates their plan and aims the ship towards Lucy Fletcher's apartment building, broadcasting a message that only one person on the whole planet can hear — Grant Gordon, a.k.a. the Ghost (Superman Expy). Grant catches the ship with one hand and then flies off to Hurl It into the Sun.
• Eureka:
  • An episode of has the accumulated space junk accidentally forming into this level of a threat. Not so much a colony drop, but space junk drop to make it implicit to only the title town.
  • In Season 3, an unidentified ship is on course for Earth and compelling various residents of the town to assemble towers of unknown purpose. The towers are first assumed to be a weapon, but it's eventually discovered that they're in fact a high-tech safety net meant to stop the ship from hitting Eureka hard enough to turn the town into a crater.
• Very narrowly averted during the Eros incident in The Expanse. Though on a much smaller scale, it is ultimately played straight during the attack on Ganymede.
• The Flash (2014): After being defeated in the Season 4 finale, Clifford DeVoe/The Thinker's last act of spite is to engineer things so that the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite will drop on Central City. Team Flash counters this by using their powers to protect people from most of the smaller debris, with Barry and Nora/XS using a supersonic punch to obliterate the main body of the satellite.
• Foundation: At the climax of the pilot, a terrorist attack severs the tether of Trantor's space elevator from the orbiting space station, causing the cable to fall and, in Brother Day's words, "wrap itself around the planet like a garrote". It leaves a scar 50 levels deep on the city-planet and kills 100 million people.
• The Mandalorian: In the season three finale, the Mandalorians finally defeat Moff Gideon by landing a crashing Imperial Cruiser right on top of his base with him still in it (the base, not the ship).
• Ending of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy. The Big Bad has wrecked the colony, so what will she do now? Drop the dome on the survivors. Oddly, the impact was considered not that dangerous if it didn't directly hit the camp, so having the Megazord redirecting it was enough to avoid carnage (the Megazord is tiny when compared to the colony, but hey, they already did it in Power Rangers in Space with an asteroid).
• Ultra Series:
  • Ultraman Dyna: In the two-part story "The Krakov Won't Surface", a jellyfish-like alien being named Spume sets up base in Antarctica to attempt this with an artificial sun recently launched out by Super GUTS, with the plan being that the sun's heat will melt the Antarctic ice and flood Earth so that Spume can have the planet all to itself. Of course, Dyna and Super GUTS were going to have none of that.
  • Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle featured a similar-looking artificial sun set up around the planet Bolis that gets damaged during a scuffle with King Joe Black, causing the sun to hurtle towards the kaiju-infested planet during the finale. The problem is ZAP SPACY and a number of space colonists are still trying to get off Bolis as this is going on.

Roleplay

• Destroy the Godmodder: The UOSS was a gigantic spaceship summoned in the second thread. When it was destroyed, its chassis fell onto the Battlefield, killing almost everyone on it.

Tabletop Games

• The Azrael from GURPS: Spaceships uses a ramscoop to reach half the speed of light on its trip to the target. On impact, it has the effect of 40 million megatons of TNT.
• The fate of Cadia in Warhammer 40,000, cracked by a falling Blackstone Fortress.

Video Games

• Ace Combat:
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies ends with you having to stop a recently-reactivated weapon called Megalith, a giant facility that launches missiles to hit remaining fragments of the Ulysses asteroid and redirect them into the planet.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has the enemy attempt to kamikaze an enormous military satellite (about 500 meters long, and large enough your planes can fly through the hollow space in the center) named the SOLG (Strategic Orbital Linear Gun) into your country's capital city whilst armed with a nuclear warhead. Your final mission in the game is to destroy it in the atmosphere before it hits.
• Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits: Invoked in one of Maru's attacks. He's got an attack called Hunting Arrow where he shoots an arrow up in the sky and then some kind of pteranodon-like creature drops on the enemies. A second more powerful version of the attack is called Great Hunter and it's pretty much the same, except that is some kind of spacecraft to drop on the enemies. Improbable Aiming Skills indeed!
• Assault Suits Valken: Level 3 takes place aboard a space colony in control by the enemy. When you get inside, the enemies start to shift the colony's course by letting it fall towards Earth. If you don't destroy the engines in time, the next level lets you see the results in the background where a massive explosion is seen and many lives being lost. This also puts you on the route for the bad ending where your crewmates die.
• It turns out that this is what happened to the planet Leeir in Asteroid 5251 — it got blown apart by a meteor shower, turning it into the very asteroid you've crash-landed on.
• Asura's Wrath has the Karma Fortress's head fall to earth, with Chakravartin taking the rest of the fortress to build his own giant form. The scene is a shot for shot redux of the original colony drop.
• Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2: After the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity is disabled by Imperial forces in the prologue/tutorial, a Chaos fleet pushes the wreckage into Cadia, destroying it.
• Bayonetta: During the fight with Balder, after he blasts at Bayonetta with a Kill Sat, he decides to drop the satellite itself onto her. And at the very end of the game, Jeanne and Bayonetta team up to destroy Jubileus's body before it crashes into the Earth and destroys it.
• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: Colonel Zarpedon's plan is to destroy Pandora by using Elpis, its moon, as the candidate in order to decimate the Artifact of Doom hidden within the planet. The said plan involves using Helios' Wave-Motion Gun in order for the moon to crumble, as its remains are hurled towards the planet. The plan failed, of course, but it leaves two terrible scars on the man who happened to save both the planet and its moon. One literal, one metaphorical. This plot is revisited in Borderlands 3, except the true nature of Elpis and Pandora are revealed; Pandora is the Great Vault with some kind of multi-planetary apocalyptic horror sealed inside of it, and Elpis is its Vault Key. While the Great Vault remains sealed at game's end, Lilith had to give her own life to stop Elpis' descent.
• Burning Rangers had this plan as their final chapter, in an accidental example. Some scientist's daughter had an initially incurable disease and was placed in a special cryogenic stasis aboard a custom-built space station, with scientist scanning his brain in as the station's AI, complete with orders to send her home when a cure is found. Unfortunately, a combination of years of neglect, the scientist's overprotective tendencies, and an unreliable AI, caused the station to accumulate satellites and other flotsam and jetsam as a shield, ballooning the station's size. When a cure was found, the AI gave the order to send her home, but that order was interpreted to mean "bring her home," i.e. bring the station down to earth. If the orders were followed, it would have destroyed the Earth utterly. Either way, it failed.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
  • The Soviets get a special power (Krasna-45 Orbital Drop Protocol) that dumps increasingly larger orbital satellites at an enemy location. The highest level drops the Mir space station. It's surprisingly impotent for an object that size, though.
  • An ability also allows the same Soviet satellite to magnetically pick up vehicles and add them to the satellite barrage the next time one chooses to use it. Hilariously fun if you picked up aircraft carriers and battleships beforehand and chucked them at something. Even more hilarious once you find out the magnetic beam works on Tesla Troopers. Supplementing the space station with powered armored soldiers is a funny moment.
  • One of the Challenge missions (and a skirmish map) is under constant bombardment from the orbital drop power, since it's where the Soviets decommission their space assets. To quote the opposing commander when defeated:
  I should have known that being showered by trash wouldn't bother you.
  • Early in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars the Philadelphia is destroyed, resulting in massive chaos across the globe as communications are offline (the Philadelphia was the primary GDI command hub) and causing massive collateral damage as the station's remains fell to earth.
• Creepy Castle: The final menace that Dopterra face is Possessor possessing a living mountain from another planet to crash it into Dopterra, effectively ending civilization as it currently exists.
• Cybattler: What appears to be the remains of some of the Moon have been used to create an Orbital Ring System of connecting chunks. At the end of the first level, one of the largest chunks seems to make planetfall.
• Cyberbots: In Jin Saotome's story, the final battle takes place on a satellite weapon as it is sent falling into Earth's atmosphere. Jin's mentor sacrifices himself to keep the satellite from hitting the planet.
• In Dead Space, on the last level the marker activates, disabling gravity tethers holding a chunk of the planet in space with the Ishimura. This causes the chunk to crash down to the planet's surface, wiping out the Hive Mind.
• In Final Fantasy XIII, the game world features a large, magically-floating hollow moonlet named "Cocoon" floating above a world called "Pulse". Eventually, the heroes learn that the Big Bad's plot involves disabling the moonlet's power supply via a needlessly complex plot involving a Load-Bearing Boss (apparently though they run Cocoon they can't just choose to hit the off switch on the antigrav for some reason), causing it to crash into Pulse for the specific purpose of orchestrating mass murder. This is a bit of a reversal of the usual Colony Drop threat because whereas usually it's the people on the ground in danger from the falling colony, in this case all the people are living inside Cocoon and would die if it fell; Pulse is uninhabited except by monsters and zombies. Though naturally the Big Bad's plot is foiled, much of the plot of the sequel revolves around the peril of the exact same thing potentially happening.
• At the end of the original version of Final Fantasy XIV, the Garlean Empire tries to drop the moon of Dalamud on Eorzea. In a twist, it didn't actually impact the surface, but instead exploded and released the Elder Primal Bahamut imprisoned within, whereupon it tore Eorzea a new one.
  • So why isn't this part of the "Moons" category? Because Dalamud was never actually a natural moon — it was a colossal satellite constructed by the Allagan Empire (who else?) to harness Bahamut's aether as a power source for Syrcus Tower. Once it was brought down, it no longer supplied energy to the tower, and after several years, the tower's stasis field wore down, reawakening the last Allagan Emperor, Xande, and causing a big, brand new problem for Eorzea.
• Gundam Breaker 3 deserves some credit for both inverting this trope and playing it straight while having absolutely no reason to do so. It is inverted at end of the main campaign, where Will and your team are invited to a geosynchronous space station for the grand final Gunpla battle of the tournament. However, one of Will's corporate enemies, a Dirty Coward Corrupt Corporate Executive named Viras, unleashes a computer virus that severs the Space Elevator tether, intending to fling Will into deep space as revenge for buying out his anti-virus company and outing him as a black-market virus-writer.
  • The DLC also deserves credit for finding a way to include a colony drop in a setting without war or deep space travel. Well-Intentioned Extremist Nazir writes a backdoor worm that gives him access to the space station, intending to crash it onto Earth to destroy the super-efficient solar energy generating technology that would've rendered his oil-industry-dependent home country obsolete overnight. How he expected his country to survive crippling international sanctions amid the backlash of a terrorist action that would've killed hundreds of thousands of people is anyone's guess. Fortunately, he is stopped via Heroic Sacrifice from Robota.
• Naturally possible in Kerbal Space Program, though a spacecraft or space station not designed for re-entry will probably just burn up. Also, good luck aiming; unless you steer the craft down you'll probably miss the target by a few miles.
• This is how Igniz planned to end The King of Fighters 2001, by driving the NESTS space station into Southtown. K' dealt with him before that was to happen, though.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: The Hulk has his "Gamma Crush" super move where he grabs a meteor from space and sends it crashing down into the Earth, while still riding said meteor.
• Mass Effect:
  • The codex notes that launching towed-in asteroids at planets is perfectly doable for pretty much anybody able to afford a decent-sized spaceship and a few relatively small (read: two-story building-sized) fusion torches. However, due to the fact that such an impact can easily not only kill all life on a planet, but render the biosphere irreparably damaged thus closing off the planet to all future habitation, dropping asteroids is banned under the Fictional Geneva Conventions. Not that this has stopped some people:
  • The codex notes that due to their destructiveness and cheapness, asteroids are popular weapons during total wars between "third galaxy" nations in the Terminus systems.
  • During the Krogan Rebellions the krogan began dropping asteroids onto turian worlds when the turians intervened on the Citadel's behalf. They rendered several planets completely uninhabitable this way. This just pissed the turians off even more.
  • Additionally, during the invasion of Shanxi the Turians dropped orbital debris from the space battle in order to break pockets of resistance on the colony's surface. A far lesser version than is common in the setting, as the debris were small enough to "only" take out city blocks instead of killing the entire planet.
  • A DLC for the first game involved stopping a group of batarian terrorists from dropping an asteroid on a heavily-populated human colony. This is also the first time players laid eyes on a batarian. Not a very good first impression (story-wise, they've been in a state of Cold War with the Systems Alliance for a few decades). One character notes that this particular batarian must be acting on his own initiative rather than on orders from high up, because if the batarians actually did kill the planet, then Mutually Assured Destruction would ensure that the Council races would have to respond with force and would probably extinguish every batarian planet the same way. The Dragon (an unrepentant murderer and slaver) is horrified when he figures out what his boss is planning and even offers to help you stop him, presumably for the same reason. One scientist you discover on the asteroid even gives you a detailed description of what would happen if the impact was not stopped:
  "X-57 is twice the size of the asteroid that wiped out the Earth's dinosaurs.^note That asteroid impacted the Earth with the equivalent of 120 teratons of TNT. If X-57 was accelerated to at least that speed (and by all indications, it was faster), it would impact the colony with 240 teratons of TNT equivalent. Considering his description and the asteroid's acceleration, the most likely result would actually be an impact in the petaton range. For context, a single petaton of TNT is about 20 million times more energy than the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever built. It would be like millions of fusion bombs striking at once. With the heat of the blast, a thousand kilometers away, clothes would ignite. There'd be global wildfires. Air shock will flatten everything for hundreds of kilometers. Terra Nova will die, Shepard — not just our colony, the planet. There'll be a climate shift, mass extinctions, the ecosystem won't recover for thousands of years. Millions maybe."
  • In Mass Effect 2, Jack recounts her Backstory, including a time where she crashed a space station upon the hanar's favorite moon. The hanar, having politeness as their racial hat, refer to this as "Vandalism".
  • In The Arrival DLC, Shepard is forced to invoke this trope by crashing an asteroid research facility to slow down the Reaper invasion, not into a planet, but a mass relay which goes supernova, destroying a solar system and killing over 300,000 batarians. S/he's told afterwards that s/he will have to face trial and a war with the batarians is almost certainly guaranteed, although the arrival of the Reapers en masse at the beginning of the third game mostly pre-empts the larger consequences.
  • In Mass Effect 3, whilst on the quarian homeworld, Rannoch, Garrus suggests towing in a few asteroids and launching them at the planet to take out the enemy geth. Tali balks at the idea, pointing out that his tactic would render the planet they're trying to take uninhabitable. Garrus just shrugs, saying that the dust would clear eventually... besides, they're already wearing environmental suits.
  • Some characters in the third game suggest using this tactic against the Nigh-Invulnerable Reapers. Unfortunately, the Reapers, lacking any apparent supply lines, don't have planets or space stations to throw meteors at, and the Reapers themselves (as spaceships) are far too maneuverable to fall victim to it themselves.
  • At the end-game of Mass Effect: Andromeda, you can hear one of Ryder's teammates having a similar conversation to Tali and Garrus', telling some turians not to try this tactic against the kett, since that'd wreck the planets everyone wants to live on.
• Massive Assault: The Backstory mentions terrorists hijacking long-range shuttles and using them to crash into Earth cities.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man X4 begins with the player trying (and failing) to stop Mavericks from dropping a flying city, the Sky Lagoon, as a terrorist attack. Repliforce became The Scapegoat and is asked to disarm and come in for questioning, with them opting to start a coup and fight back due to the accusation, and the rest of the game is either fighting off the Repliforce's attacks or rogue Mavericks who are popping up in the wake of the attack.
  • Mega Man X5 has Space Station Eurasia hurtling towards Earth. While allowing the space colony to crash into the Earth does not end the game outright, doing so locks you into the Bad Ending; you will no longer be able to play as Zero as well, due to him going "Maverick" from the resulting impact. Even though the Maverick Hunters canonically destroyed it, the leftover debris still has an adverse effect on the planet.
  • Mega Man Zero 4 historically referenced the X5 disaster with Area Zero; ironically, it has become the last bastion of nature on the planet, since Eurasia's life support systems have survived and nourished life in the Death World the Elf Wars caused. Later in the game the Big Bad's superweapon is revealed to be another orbital space station, Ragnarok, which predictably was sent on a collision course with Area Zero once its Kill Sat function was forcibly disabled.
• Metroid:
  • At the end of Metroid Fusion, Samus originally wants to blow up the BSL space station to get rid of the X Parasites onboard, but Adam counters that this doesn't account for the X Parasites on the surface of SR388 and suggests ramming the station into the planet while simultaneously detonating it. Cue Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus needs to disable a shield around a Leviathan on Elysia. Since she can't destroy the shield generator, she loads a thermonuclear bomb onto part of Skytown and drops it on the shield, destroying it instead.
• Millenium 2.2 had a lunar colony try to rebuild Earth after it was hit by a 2.2 trillion ton asteroid.
• No Straight Roads: Near the end Kliff causes the satellite to drop to Vinyl City. Fortunately, the combined efforts of Bunk Bed Junction and the NSR artists, including Tatiana, managed to prevent any serious damage.
• Phantasy Star II: This is a major plot point, where the impact of the Gaira prison satellite results in the total disintegration of Palm (a.k.a. Palma or Parma, depending on who you ask), one of the solar system's three planets. This event is retold in Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, when at the end of Episode 2, the Guardians Colony is knocked from its orbit and crashes into the planet Parum below, causing quite a bit of local devastation but certainly nowhere near PSII's level.
• Power Stone 2 has meteors rain down from the sky and reduces all players' health so low that just tapping someone kills them. This happens when time runs out and initiates sudden death. In sudden death, if the players take too long to kill each other, more meteors rain down and kill everyone, resulting in a draw.
• Space Empires: You can stick lots of explosives on a Baseship and send it on a collision course with a planet. It sadly doesn't do quite as much damage as you'd expect.
• SimCity 2000 inverts this trope. While the game has no real "win" condition, the closest thing to it is the Exodus, which happens when the player builds enough Launch Arcologies (basically super-structures that combine massive amounts of Residential, Commercial, and Industrial production in the same space), where they are all converted to Colony Ships and take off for new worlds. "Enough" in this case is about 450, meaning the arcologies have to take up about 90% of your city's landmass. Mechanically, the Exodus is represented by the Arcologies all being demolished at once, leaving empty space for the player to develop all over again.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Rather frequent across the franchise.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Sonic knocking the Death Egg out of orbit in Sonic 2 serves as the catalyst for Sonic 3. Fighting Big Arm in the Launch Base (as Sonic, anyway) botches the Death Egg's launch, causing it to fall back to Angel Island. At the end of Sonic and Knuckles, you're tasked with averting this trope with Angel Island itself by getting the Master Emeralds as well as the Chaos Emeralds. Failure to do so results in an ending where the island falls out of the sky and into the sea. Unlike most colony drops, though, this one seems harmless for everyone involved.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 had the Space Colony ARK dropped. Dr. Eggman's grandfather, Professor Gerald Robotnik, brought to despair over the death of his granddaughter Maria, exacts revenge in spirit by programming the colony to crash into Earth while overcharged with energy from the Chaos Emeralds. The presence of the gargantuan Biolizard makes matter far worse, as it fuses with the colony and tries to forcibly drag it down into the planet when the heroes manage to neutralize the energy overload with the Master Emerald. After both Sonic and Shadow power up to their super forms, the duo ultimately slay Biolizard, but with the colony swiftly entering Earth's atmosphere, they have only seconds to stop an imminent doomsday. Sonic's solution to stopping this is to use Chaos Control to send it back into orbit. Shadow, on the other hand... does the unthinkable.
  • Sonic Advance 2: The regular ending has the player character falling out of the sky while Eggman's space colony does the same in the background, exploding violently on impact.
• Space Tyrant: The card "One for the Team" sacrifices one Bzzzerk ship to deal two damage to a sieged planet.
• In Spore, new colonies are installed by dropping them out of space to begin with, so it is technically possible to use this as a weapon. However, since colonies can only be placed on uninhabited planets, said weapon can only be wielded against poor defenseless animals who are no threat to you and you reap no benefit from killing.
• Spriggan Mark 2: Played with like Gundam in this rare (but very fun) PC Engine shooter.
• Starsector: Mairaath used to be a beautiful terran world, considered the jewel of its star system, and orbited by three astropoli. Then the Luddic Path decided to ram one of them into the planet, ruining it to such an extent it's now a desert world wracked by storms.
• Starhawk: In this third-person shooter/strategy PS3 game, players call self-assembling structures down from orbiting ships. It's a common strategy to use both these structures and your own respawn pod to OHKO the enemy upon impact, even before the drop constructs itself into a turret or beam cannon (or whatever you happened to call down).
• Star Trek Judgment Rites: The penultimate mission has Kirk and crew trying to stop a massive alien ship from landing on top of a Federation colony in the Klingon Neutral Zone. Transporting aboard, Kirk discovers that the ship's computer believes it is simply returning home, and refuses to acknowledge the presence of the colony.
• Stellaris:
  • One of the possible Precursor civilisations are the Voltaum, who had a tendency to destroy their own colonies as mass suicides attempting to "disconnect" themselves from reality, which they believed to be a simulation. One such colony had the cables of its Space Elevator severed, destroying several urban centres around the equator and killing millions in its collapse.
  • Your science ships may chance upon an anomaly concerning a giant impact crater on a lifeless world. Looking into it reveals that it was caused by a small space ship hitting the world at FTL speeds, but it happened so long ago that the crew can no longer ascertain whether it was an intentional maneuver or just an unlucky accident.
• In Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return, the extremist Hawk Faction seizes control of the Solar Congress space station in an attempt to overthrow the Solar Alliance government. Should this coup go south (which it does), they plan to deorbit the station and drop it on the capital city below, killing millions.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Stern Regusseur was the colony (Merged with Neviim) and Super Robot Wars Judgment Gu-Landon was to use the Moon which was a spaceship covered in debris. The green Earth in Third Super Robot Wars Z: Tengoku-hen is turned into Douzemille (everyone on it is evacuated to the blue Earth) and used by Dix Neuf in an event battle sequence and stopped by Nono like in the show, but one of the reasons is because she was trying to protect the message for Noriko and Kazumi, and she activates it there.
• System Shock: In the first game, SHODAN tries to do this with Citadel Station after the Hacker stopped all of her plans (and backup plans).
• World of Warcraft did this in the first Expansion Pack, with a magitek dimensional fortress screwing up a small archipelago.
• The games in the X-Universe let players build space stations wherever in a sector they wish. The game mechanic consists of teleporting the station, fully built, out of the cargo hold of your TL-class transport and into its intended position. At some point, somebody decided to see what would happen if they built a cheap station directly on top of an enemy capital ship. The tactic proved quite successful and has become fairly widespread among X fans, under the moniker "station-bombing".
  • The destruction of the Earth Torus in X3: Albion Prelude caused millions of tons of debris to rain down on Earth.
• Xenogears gives us the fall of Solaris. People, when the counterweight/city on the other end of an orbital elevator snaps like a twig, don't be under it when it hits, tends to leave holes in continents.
• Xenosaga: Albedo attempts to drop the Proto Merkabah on Second Miltia, apparently primarily for his own entertainment. Not even a hint of an Inferred Holocaust here.
• Zone of the Enders: Dolores i: The finale had the Big Bad of the series, a bitter and psychotic Radam Lavans, try to topple the Earth's orbital elevator, which would cause it to smack the earth like a gigantic slap bracelet. It takes a herculean effort to stop it, requiring the near-sacrifice of Dolores and the actual sacrifice of Radam, his Orbital Frame, Hathor, and several mass-produced Orbital Frames, but things turn out alright.

Web Animation

• This is how Sonic's world was destroyed in Super Mario Bros. Z: Mecha Sonic's escape sent Eggman's Death Egg crashing into the planet.

Webcomics

• The Cyantian Chronicles: Part of the backstory is a war that was started with cargo shuttles being dropped on a city as a shock tactic. Specifically, Centralis, which happens to be the biggest city and home to the heroes.

Web Original

• Warhammer 40,000: The Angry Marines, a 4chan chapter of Space Marines, will send their battle barges (with colorful names such as Litany of Litany's Litany and Maximum Fuck) crashing into each other in their mad scramble to strike the earth.

Western Animation

• In the Codename: Kids Next Door movie Operation: Z.E.R.O., it looked like Numbuh 1 was going to do a heroic version of this with the moon on the captured-by-evil Earth, but it instead just fired the sizable treehouse-ish moonbase, the KND's headquarters. Grandfather shrugs it off too, but the real plan was to bring the KND's Laser-Guided Amnesia device down to Earth to use on him.
• In Courage the Cowardly Dog, the episode "Courage The Fly" features Di Lung attempting to "make a satellite fall" onto Courage's house using a giant magnet; shockingly enough, he actually kind of succeeds.
• After his Villainous Breakdown, General Lunaris from DuckTales (2017) intends to crash his spaceship into Earth to destroy it, himself included. He thankfully gets prevented from doing so and instead, his ship gets stuck permanently in the planet's orbit as "Earth's second moon".
• Parodied in the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage", in which the guys from Planet Express must stop a big ball of garbage from splattering against New New York.
• In the final episode of Justice League (pre-Unlimited), "Starcrossed", Batman destroys the hypergate generator by piloting the Watchtower into it.
• In Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel, Candace, while trying to figure out how to release the Marvel Heroes' powers from a containment unit in Phineas and Ferb's spaceship, presses a Big Red Button that sends the satellite hurtling back to Earth. Fortunately for everyone, it crash-lands right on top of the villains' superweapon, foiling their plans to destroy the Tri-State Area.
• Kenny from South Park is squashed by the crashing MIR space station in the first-season Halloween special, "Pinkeye".
• In Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "I Have No Bones And I Must Flee", Mariner, Ransom and Gary unwittingly trap the moopsy inside the main control room of the intergalactic zoo they're in and it randomly hits buttons to make deorbit. They have to lure it out so they can save it, themselves and the various creatures inside.
• Superfriends: The fate of Star City in the Galactic Guardians episode "Escape from Space City", after Darkseid's failed attempt to turn it into a Kill Sat.

Real Life

• In 1978 the Soviet satellite Kosmos 954 broke up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the Northwest Territories of Canada, spreading radioactive material all over the wilderness around Yellowknife because there was a nuclear reactor on board. The Soviets eventually paid $3 million Canadian dollars to help with the cleanup.
• Some bits of Skylab actually made it through the Earth's atmosphere in July 1979 when the failed space station succumbed to Earth's gravitational pull, although none of the pieces was large enough to cause significant damage. Nowadays, most expiring satellites are given remote-control commands to come apart in small pieces that won't survive reentry, and/or to land in the oceans, so as to avert this trope. Even more hilarious: some of it fell on Australia, and NASA had to pay a $400 USD fine for littering. Life Imitates Art in this case, as this happened just a couple of months after the Mobile Suit Gundam episode depicting a Colony Drop on Sydney, Australia.
• Same for the Russian space station Mir, that fell in March 2001 on the Pacific Ocean (not on Paris during the 1999 solar eclipse, as fashion designer-turned-astrologer Paco Rabbane predicted).
• China's space station, Tian Gong 1, reentered the Earth's atmosphere on April Fool's Day 2018 having lost control in 2016. By sheer coincidence, it landed in the South Pacific, somewhat north of the established spacecraft graveyard near Point Nemo.
• Typically rocket's first stage ^note which is the largest and usually the most powerful part of the rocket detaches before the whole vehicle reaches orbit and falls back to earth relatively close to the launch site. Since the Chinese Long March 5B rocket consists of just the first stage, side boosters and the payload, after launch the whole first stage ends up on decaying low Earth orbit. This tends to cause some problems when it inevitably reenters the atmosphere few days or weeks later.
  • After the rocket's maiden launch in May 2020 its first stage crashed into the Gulf of Guinea, but some pieces reportedly fell on the Ivory Coast.
  • Following its flight with the Tianhe space station the spent rocket fell into the Indian Ocean not far from the Maldives.
• While most space agencies tend to launch their rockets on paths that take them over the sea, so any spent stages land harmlessly in the water to either be left there or recovered, China has a nasty habit of taking their rockets on paths that lead them over remote areas of their own countryside. The reason for this isn’t exactly clear, but it’s speculated that this is to avoid particularly ugly disputes with the Koreas, Japan and other nations along the East Asian coastline. In any case, this has led to a ‘fire and forget’ attitude which causes rocket stages, sometimes still loaded with fuel, to fall on rural villages and towns, regularly causing death and destruction.
• There is a kind of hypothetical orbital superweapon commonly termed "Rods from God" which is literally a rod made from some quite dense metal — such as tungsten - suspended in high orbit, ready to be dropped at any time. The kinetic energy accumulated and subsequently released by such an object is roughly the same as a nuclear weapon without needing to worry about all that nasty fallout and may technically be able to not violate agreements such as the Outer Space Treaty. The US military has even considered making one for real, called Project Thor. The catch is that Tungsten is an extremely dense metal, and getting enough of it into space would require a lot of effort and money.
• One of the retaliations threatened for interference in the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 is that they could purposefully de-orbit the ISS on a city in Europe or the USA, although this ability doesn't actually exist.
• NASA's Deep Impact and DART missions against the comet Tempel 1 and Dimorphos, a moon of the asteroid Dydimos, respectively. The former used an impactor to study the properties of such comet by excavating a crater, and in the latter the entire spacecraft was crashed in kamikaze fashion with Earth-based telescopes and a microsatellite accompanying it^note Plus ESA's Hera mission scheduled for further study studying the impact's aftermath as a test for the deflection in similar ways of asteroids that could be a hazard for Earth.

Asteroids and Comets

Anime and Manga

• In the Black Clover movie: Sword of the Wizard King, after Asta defeats Conrad's One-Winged Angel form, the former Wizard King decides to use a Dangerous Forbidden Technique in the form of Doom's Gate where he sacrifices his remaining life force to summon a giant meteorite in a last ditch effort to destroy the Clover Kingdom. It took a combination of his grimoire's Anti-Magic and the Imperial Sword for Asta to destroy the meteorite and finally defeat Conrad.
• Bleach: Gremmy Thoumeaux imagines a meteor into existence to kill Kenpachi and wipe out Seireitei. Kenpachi is thrilled by this challenge.
• Although technically not an Asteroid, a major part of the eighth Dragon Ball Z movie dealt with this: Paragus intends to lure Prince Vegeta and the rest of the protagonists to the New Planet Vegeta, which is doomed to be destroyed by an immense comet known as Comet Camori with the intention of killing Vegeta out of revenge for his father attempting to execute him and his son. The plan ended up backfiring after his son lost control.
• In Dr. STONE reboot: Byakuya, a giant meteor hits Italy, effectively eradicating it off the map, and turning the entirety of Europe gray. Another meteor is set to strike Japan 500 years after that but Rei manages to set it off course thus averting a planetary apocalypse.
• Fairy Tail
  • Jellal has two such spells that invoke this. The first, Grand Chariot, creates seven powerful blasts of light that crash down on a target with the force of a meteor. His True Heavenly Body Magic: Sema, however, is the one that drops an actual meteor on a target.
  • One of Irene Belserion's most powerful spells, Deus Sema, involves enchanting and attracting an even larger meteor than Jellal's to strike the planet with continent-devastating force. She can only perform this version when she assumes her dragon form, and to her shock her daughter Erza proves strong enough to destroy it by herself even with only one good arm and a trusty sword.
• Gall Force: Earth Chapter has the MARS civ using a device that hurls rocks on the baddies. Funny in that the baddies comment that the previous plan our heroes wanted to use, nukes would not have hurt them as bad but now that they figured rocks from space can do almost more destruction w/o the danger of radiation.
• In GaoGaiGar, the Brain Primeval tries to hit the Earth with a shower of asteroids. When Gai Gai Gar finally defeats it, it makes one last effort by launching an asteroid 10km long at them. ChoRyuJin pushes the asteroid back through the portal, and ends up getting sent back to Earth sixty-five million years ago, rock and all, where the rock kills the dinosaurs and ChoRyuJin gets dug up in the present day.
• In Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo, the Dinosaur Empire uses a satellite that fires asteroids to attack America; Texas Mack saves the day by using its BFG to shoot the satellite out of orbit.
• When Gundam isn't dropping space colonies on Earth, it's usually an asteroid of some sort, culminating in the attempted drop of the Asteroid fortress Axis in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack.
  • The Shadow-Mirror went with this plan in Super Robot Wars Advance. In Super Robot Wars Compact, Don Zauser and Koros plan on doing this so mankind is forced into outer space. In Super Robot Wars 64, Neo Zeon do this after the group purges it from its Devil Gundam infection.
  • Parodied in Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE where in a reference to Char's Counterattack, Captain Zeon uses an "Axis Drop" as a finisher on a trio of Card Carrying Villains, right after reminding the enemies he's fighting of the main Gundam universe version of the Antarctic Treaty, which among other things specifically outlawed the invocation of this trope with both colonies and asteroids... At the very least though, the Axis he dropped wasn't real and had no cognitively capable AIs inside it, with the only casualties being the avatars and virtualized gunplay of his enemies.
• If the Gundam examples listed above were not enough to prove that Yoshiyuki Tomino loves the trope, another series of his features a colony drop: Heavy Metal L-Gaim features Operation Stardust, where La Résistance decided launching hundreds of asteroids around planet Gastogal towards Sveto, The Empire's capital city.
• Jewelpet:
  • Jewelpet (2009): The Jewelpet Alex is brainwashed by the Big Bad into summoning an asteroid to destroy Earth. The heroes avert the crisis by playing "kick the can" against the villains.
  • Jewelpet Kira☆Deco!'s plot is caused by an asteroid shattering the sacred Mirror Ball. Also, the characters frequently have to deal with asteroids threatening Jewel Town, but this is Played for Laughs and not relevant to the story for the most part.
• In Naruto, zombie Madara Uchiha drops/summons an asteroid on the Shinobi Alliance army. With the combined efforts of Gaara and O'onoki (who has a jutsu that can make anything he touches weightless, allowing Gaara's sand to hold up the meteor). Madara then praises their effort and asks "Now, how will you deal with the second one, O'onoki?" A second meteor then drops directly on top of the first, and since O'onoki isn't in a position to touch the second meteor they're now powerless to stop both meteors. Of course, Madara admits that the reason he never really used this technique when he was alive was because he had no way to avoid getting hit and killed by it as a consequence. Later still, once he's brought back to life and becomes the Ten-Tails Jinchurriki, he can drop multiple meteors at once with no delay and since he can now fly out of the way of the meteors, it's much more practical.
• In One Piece, Admiral Fujitora is capable of bringing down meteorites using his Devil Fruit ability.
• One-Punch Man
  • One arc focuses on an incoming meteor threatening to completely destroy City Z. While there's a mass evacuation, the only S-Class Heroes who are available to answer to call to deal with the meteor are Bang (who as a martial artist can't actually do much against it), Genos (whose new prototype Wave-Motion Gun is only able to damage the meteor, not stop it), and Metal Knight (who doesn't actually care about the damage the meteor will cause and sees this as a good chance to test his newest weapon, which fails to destroy it either). Luckily, Saitama shows up to punch it into chunks with one punch, as usual. However, the rubble from the destroyed meteor still causing a decent amount of damage to the city, even if total destruction was averted.
  • The anime adaptation has the tiny but incredibly powerful Esper Tatsumaki dealing with a giant Rent-a-Zilla who gloats that he ruled as a king during the age of the dinosaurs and that the only thing that can defeat him is an asteroid from space. Tatsumaki promptly finds one and drops it on him. The last we see of the Dinosaur King is a charred skeleton in the bottom of a several-mile-wide crater. And no, she wasn't too worried about the collateral damage, either.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Madoka's soul gem. It's so big, it's basically a comet. Subverted because despite being headed towards Earth, it never hits. Instead, a witch hatches, which is much worse. However, it is defeated, the universe is rewritten, nobody ends up dead from the incident, and the rest is history.
• At the end of the first Sailor Moon movie, Promise of the Rose, after the evil Xenian Flower is destroyed Fiore makes an attempt to crash the asteroid he and the Senshi were fighting on into the Earth. The Senshi are able to stop it with the power of the Silver Crystal, though Sailor Moon dies and has to be brought back to life by the power of Mamoru's kiss combined with Fiore's life force.
• In the Grand Finale of Samurai Pizza Cats, "The Big Comet Caper", The Big Cheese is caught embezzling funds for his latest evil scheme and threatened with banishment by Princess Vi. So, he builds a tractor beam that attracts the Love Comet (Harahoro Comet) and pulls it towards Earth, threatening to drop it on the city if he is not made Emperor of Little Tokyo.
• Space Battleship Yamato and Space Battleship Yamato 2199 both see the Gamilus ravaging the Earth by dropping irradiated meteors referrred to as "Planet Bombs" on it, destroying most major cities, drying up the oceans and seas, and leaving the world an irradiated wasteland.
• In Transformers Victory, Deathsaurus uses his space fortress to fire a large number of 'meteorite bombs' at Earth.
• In Your Name, the comet mentioned throughout the story fragments and destroys Mitsuha's town, killing everyone there; Taki finds this out at the same time he learns it happened three years ago. He manages to force one more mind-swap and works with Mitsuha and her friends to evacuate the town, saving all its inhabitants, which is subsequently treated as a miracle.

Comic Books

• In All Fall Down, a giant asteroid, Penumbra, threatens to collide with Earth. It turns out to be an elaborate hoax.
• Aquaman (1994) establishes that Atlantis was originally sunk by a massive asteroid. Shalako and his followers believed it to be this, sent by the Goddess of the Sky to punish the Atlanteans for forsaking her. But most assume it was just a natural event. It turns out it was neither; it was a literal Colony Drop by the alien Annunake, who later attempted to destroy another city the same way; fortunately the second attempt was stopped.
• Issue #4 of The Bad Eggs reveals that Ript's Lucky Star is actually a giant asteroid. It crashes into earth in the final issue, presumably killing all the dinosaurs except Ript and Claude, who escaped through a time portal.
• Green Lantern:
  • In Green Lantern Corps v2 #13, the living planet Mogo intentionally moves into the path of an asteroid to get rid of a sentient space-fungus that's infected its forests.
  • In the conclusion of the Sinestro Corps War, John Stewart and Guy Gardner get the idea to take the newly recreated Warworld and throw it on top of the goddamn Anti-Monitor.
• In The Rebels (of the ElfQuest universe), a rogue human military executes a very stealthy colony drop on the aliens' home planet at the outer rim of the solar system. How stealthy? They've spent twenty years making slow course corrections on the asteroid, just to make sure it won't get detected by spaceship warning systems.
• In Sigil (of CrossGen), there is a plot by the Big Bad (who by that time had been superseded by a Bigger Bad, however) to ram an asteroid into the humans' capital planet, by equipping said asteroid with a gigantic FTL drive. The hero manages to deflect the asteroid (and save his love, who was on it) by sheer force, but the casualties are still great and we learn that the planet is going to become uninhabitable anyway.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: A chunk of what's claimed to be Neptune falls into the Atlantic ocean, causing earthquakes, tidal waves, and massive property damage and resulting in a temporary island called "Neptunia".
• X-Men:
  • Averted at least three times now with Magneto's Asteroid M. Even the mutants who end up riding these things into the ocean tend to survive more often than not.
  • During the early days of Jean's Phoenix phase in Uncanny X-Men, she casually grabs a passing asteroid and drops it on Jahf, Guardian of the M'kraan Crystal's head. Once the dust clears (and amazingly, no-one is killed from being right next to an asteroid slamming into the planet at speed), Jahf doesn't have a scratch on him anyway. But the characters still note with alarm that Jean was able to do something like that anyway.

Comic Strips

• The Wacky Adventures of Pedro has one storyline in which Pedro diverts an asteroid away from crushing the Earth.

Fan Works

• Red Fire, Red Planet has an offhand mention that the Optimum (from Star Trek: Federation) dropped an asteroid on Mecca in 2060.
• The Bridge (MLP): The Xilian's ace in the hole, Monster X, is housed inside asteroid Gorath most of the time. When deployed into battle, he's often dropped from orbit. In Tales of the Amalgam'verse: Monster X vs. Ultraman Belial - End of Days, X makes his entrance by Gorath slamming into Belial and X jumping out the back before impact.
• During her battle with Ira in Natural Selection, Maiko used her Empress Regalia to manifest a meteor construct that was about half the size of Honnouji's main tower and launches it at her opponent.
• Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters: During the climactic fight in Chapter 32, Phobos (now made a Physical God by the Heart of Meridian) drags a meteor out of space to drop on the capital; while the Guardians are distracted trying to break it up, he takes advantage to attack them. This leaves the remaining meteor pieces big enough to still devastate the city.
• The Last Son: In the climax of Book 1, Magneto uses his powers, amplified by Asteroid M, to drag a shower of iron-rich meteors towards Earth. Superman is forced to blast them with his heat vision, barely preventing them from causing any damage.

Films — Animation

• In The Bad Guys (2022), a large crater can be seen in a wide shot of Los Angeles during the introductory car chase. We later learn that the city was hit by a meteorite a year before the beginning of the series.
• Dinosaur: The main plot is kicked off when a giant asteroid impacts the Earth, destroying the homeland of Aladar and the lemurs, and reducing most of the surrounding region into a dusty wasteland, forcing all the survivors to migrate to the hopefully still fertile nesting grounds. Despite the setting, the ending shows the dinosaurs repopulating, implying that this asteroid wasn't the asteroid.

Films — Live-Action

• Two movies released in 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact involve this trope, with a meteor and a comet, respectively.
• Parodied in Don't Look Up, whereby a giant comet smashes into earth, killing everyone and everything on it all because people were too stupid, greedy and ignorant to stop it in time.
• The Fifth Element, in which a living (and evil) asteroid threatens to impact Earth.
• Gorath involves a super-dense wandering planet with 4,000 times the mass of Earth; the only way to solve the problem, in the end, is to attach giant engines to Earth and move it out of the way.
  • The threat of Gorath reappears in Godzilla: Final Wars (faked by the alien invaders), as well as a smaller "weaponized" asteroid (meant mostly as a means to transport Monster X/Ghidorah to Earth).
• Greenland, a film starring Gerard butler and Morena Baccarin, shows a family tring to get to Greenland while the film shows pieces of a comet (similar to Armageddon (1998) striking down on Earth throughout the film before the 'big one' hits it, creating another major-extinction event.
• The Moon Nazis in Iron Sky use space-zeppelins that are dragging asteroids with engines attached. On command, they detach the cables and engage the engines, causing the asteroids to break orbit and fall down at the start of their invasion.
• The Last Starfighter has the Ko-Dan Armada severely damage Starfighter Command by firing small asteroids at it with a mass driver of some sort.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie Ivan Ooze's One-Winged Angel form is able to completely overpower the Rangers' Megazord. They decide to flee into space (aware he'll chase them) and lure into the path of an incoming comet, mentioned earlier in the movie. Getting him into the path of the comet is easy, getting out his grasp and away from it proves to be a problem.
• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World takes place in the two weeks leading up to an asteroid impact that will end all life on Earth.
• Starship Troopers: Precisely-aimed meteors were the Weapon of Mass Destruction of the "bugs" in the movie. Although it's ridiculously implausible that the bugs could hurl rocks over light-years of distance on a sane timescale and with any sort of accuracy, an apparently disposable bit of background chatter suggests the rocks were coming from much closer to home. It may have been a natural disaster that the space Nazis used to justify a war against the bugs (or they could have been dropping the rocks themselves).
  • In the original novel it's made clear that not only did the bugs definitely do it, but they've attempted it again multiple times only to be foiled by Earth's improved defenses since then.
• The speculative documentary Super Comet: After the Impact is all about this trope.
• This is what has happened in These Final Hours, a sole radio DJ keeping the protagonist and audience up to date with how long is left until the end by mentioning the cities that they've lost contact with.
• In the classic sci-fi movie This Island Earth, the planet Metaluna is bombarded by thousands of meteorites, gradually turning it into a radioactive sun.
• Without Warning (1994) begins with three space rocks launched at uninhabited areas of Earth, as an attempt at first contact, by an unseen extraterrestrial presence. Later, three much bigger meteors are launched at Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. and are narrowly intercepted, only to be followed shortly by an unstoppable third wave of hundreds of meteors.

Literature

• Age Of Unreason: The eponymous Newton's Cannon in the first book is actually a comet that King Louis XIV's royal alchemists have drawn down from the heavens, without quite realizing the holocaust they are about to unleash.
• Fyodor Berezin's novel Ash involves Earth waging a nuclear war against its only extrasolar colony (the colony wanted economic independence). By this point, the planet is a radioactive wasteland, but the Earth military (based on the far side of the colony's moon) keeps dropping nukes on it. It turns out that two cities have survived: one underground and one underwater. The underground city has worked for a long time, building thousands of nukes in order to obliterate the lunar base. They finally launch them, but the orbital and lunar defenses manage to eliminate most of them, with the lunar base experiencing relatively minor damage. The Earth forces then realize that the nuclear barrage wasn't the main attack. Some of the missiles were programmed to strike an asteroid in order to cause it to fall on the lunar base. They manage to attach some engines to it and aim it at the planet. Due to a freak coincidence, the asteroid somehow ends up destroying a large chunk of the planet (not just the surface).
• Dragonlance: The novels have this as a background event known as the Cataclysm. While it's vague otherwise, multiple references to a "fiery mountain" falling from the sky really does point to Krynn getting hit by a massive meteor, which in turn caused panic and chaos for centuries afterward.
• Dragonriders of Pern: Pern is subject to persistent attacks by quantities of a fungoid that comes from the Oort cloud at the edge of the Pernese system, dragged in by the Red Star, a small planetary body. These threadfalls last for several hours at a time and come in a pattern of 50 years of this bombardment, followed by 200 years of no attacks. There are two periods where the interval is longer, one of which sets up the original book...
• The Makers of Endgame Trilogy can command meteors and toss them at earth at will, completely disregarding any natural laws that determine when they will impact and where. this is how they intiate the Calling, when they send 12 meteors at the players' current location and how they plan to eventually destroy mankind. with a massive asteroid named "Abaddon"
• Empire from the Ashes: This is one of the Absolute Xenophobe Achuultani's favourite battle tactics. Dahak speculates they were responsible for the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. In the second book, during the Siege of Earth, after they find that the planet's defenders are capable of quickly destroying asteroids, they decide to go all the way to the top and steal Iapetus from Saturn, cover it with Deflector Shields and throw it at Earth.
• The Enchantment Emporium: The Future Falls has an asteroid discovered that will just graze by... and then another asteroid is discovered 'behind' it that will impact within two years. Most of the book had a magical family arguing about if they have enough power to move it, and if they should even bother, if enough of the family would survive the impact anyway.
• The Expanse: The villain of Nemesis Games drops a cluster of radar-stealthed asteroids on Earth, killing billions.
• Footfall: The Fithp drop an asteroid the size of the dinosaur killer in the Indian Ocean — this being the titular Footfall — wiping out most of India and causing global rain showers.
• In the Galactic Marines novel Luna Marine:
  • The UN attempts to do this with an asteroid in an attempt to cripple the US and end the war quickly. The plan is to use nukes to nudge the rock on a collision course that would result in it striking somewhere in the vicinity of Cheyenne, WY, as that would destroy NORAD. As a bonus, the resulting dust cloud would also slightly lower the global temperature, staving off climate change for a few years. The author goes into great detail to describe the sheer destruction such an act would cause. Fortunately, the US learns of the attempt and manages to use nuclear missiles to divert the asteroid. Some of the fragments still hit Earth, resulting in the death of thousands and the destruction of a number of US and UN ships in the Atlantic. The French ship that was protecting the asteroid, though, ends up hitting Lake Michigan and wiping out Chicago, its nuclear power plant raining radioactive fallout all over the place.
  • In addition, David Alexander finds video records of the Ahn colonies on Earth being wiped out by a tidal wave, caused by an asteroid dropped into the Red Sea by the so-called "Hunters of the Dawn".
• Halo: The Cole Protocol: The main setting is a collection of asteroids — modified to serve as a makeshift colony in the wake of a nearby planet's glassing — known as the Rubble. Late in the novel, the protagonists discover a Covenant attack force on another nearby planet and must figure out a way to prevent said force from wiping out the Rubble's inhabitants. The solution? Evacuate the population and then drop the asteroid-habitats from orbit.
• Honor Harrington:
  • The hegemonic Solarian League has written the "Eridani Edict" into their constitution, forbidding any variety of mass destruction of civilian targets on pain of them wiping out your empire. Turns out they didn't much like having one of their planets get massacred by RKVs a few centuries back...
  • David Weber has hinted that in the event the Solarian League comes unglued, someone else will have to step up to the plate to enforce the Edict or something like it since it's just too important for the survival of civilization. He very carefully (and gleefully) did not mention who this might be.
  • As mentioned a few examples below, indiscriminate planetary bombardment with asteroids or WMDs is called "The Heinlein Maneuver" in-universe. It is also worth mentioning that while it may specify orbital bombardment, many characters on both sides are shown as being understandably antsy about even accidentally hitting an inhabited planet with an unlucky shot during a space battle (the same concern, in inverse, has at times forced defensive forces to fight at a disadvantage, unwilling to use defensive platforms in orbit over their own planets first lest they force the enemy to return fire). A sizable part of this is due to the Eridani Edict, in addition to many of the officers on both sides of the conflict being good.
• The 2012 novel The Last Policeman is a police procedural set against an impending asteroid impact. Interestingly, the story (and its sequel) are about the breakdown of civilization before the asteroid hits.
• In Lux, the titular city (and the bedrock it sits on) is held two miles in the air by the telekinetic Epic Wingflare. One of the main problems the Reckoners face in trying to take out Lux is that if they simply kill Wingflare (even assuming they could do that), Lux would fall from the sky, hitting with a force comparable to a dinosaur-killer asteroid and probably finishing off the already fragile remnants of civilization on the North American continent. For this reason, a key part of their plan is trying to get a motivator fabrial that can mimic Wingflare's powers in place, allowing them to soft-land Lux if they can take out Wingflare.
• In Robert L. Forward's Martian Rainbow, a series of asteroids, connected via extruded diamond, is dropped on Mars for purposes of terraforming, thus creating a hole deep enough to maintain Earth-like atmosphere pressure. Furthermore, the megalomanic emperor of Earth utilizes a magnetically coupling/decoupling asteroid to threaten Earth.
• The moon-based rebels in the Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress blackmail Earth for independence with moon rocks catapulted from the moon to Earth, resulting in an impact equivalent to a 2 kiloton nuclear bomb. (These are actually the good guys, waging war against an oppressive government.) This sequence is referenced or repeated in many, many space operas. This is also given a Shout-Out in an Honor Harrington novel, as the "Heinlein Maneuver".
  • A minor subversion, in that they don't actually target people — rather, they mostly target uninhabited areas near large population centers, for intimidation value, and a few military bases. The de facto leader of the Lunar rebels even admits that the whole thing is a bluff: if they used one of their rocks to destroy a major city, the people of Earth would never accept their independence, instead demanding that the lunar colony be exterminated. Nevertheless, a large number of people die in the initial round of bombardment, after going to scheduled impact sites to observe what the government insists will be harmless events.
• Several occurred in the backstory of the Mortal Engines series; a few times in the original quartet, reference is made to 'Slow Bombs' being among the weapons used in the Sixty Minute War that ended the civilisation of the Ancients, but it isn't until the prequel trilogy that it's explained that these were near-Earth asteroids deliberately boosted onto a collision course.
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote The Mote in God's Eye with this trope in mind. The newly-discovered planet has been bombarded by asteroids in an uncountable number of wars over the entire history of the aliens. The solar system has reached the point where all the remaining asteroids and comets have been moved to stable orbits where the cost of rocket thrust is too expensive to use them for planet smashing.
• Out of the Dark has the Shongairi launching several kinetic strikes before, during, and after their invasion of earth. In fact, it seems to be their sole advantage over the human race.
• At one point in the Paul Sinclair series, it is mentioned that the populations of asteroid colonies are closely monitored specifically to make sure that they don't get taken over by lunatics who might want to do this.
• The point of departure in S. M. Stirling's Alternate History The Peshawar Lancers is an asteroid hitting earth in the 19th century, destroying civilization and killing millions.
• The Priest, the Scientist, and the Meteor has the title meteor being ridden and directed by dinosaur ghosts, with the intent of crashing it into Earth. Because they wanted revenge on humanity for not having shared their ice cream.
• A rebel faction in the Red Mars Trilogy drops a space elevator on Mars which was long enough to circle the planet's equator. Twice. The impact only became more powerful because the higher parts of the elevator picked up speed thanks to gravity and the planet's spin. The rebels also destroyed the Martian moon Phobos to prevent it being used as a weapons platform by Earth's multinationals, which led to humongous fragments of the moon bombarding the planet's equatorial regions, just to add icing to the cake of the space elevator's fall. And they even strapped a bunch of rockets to an asteroid that they'd christened Nemesis and pointed it at Earth just to make a point (although it was easily intercepted and diverted). There's a reason they liked Paul Bunyan folklore on Mars: it's because they did everything big.
  • They do this a lot during the Red Mars Trilogy, and not just for war. They drop several icy comets onto Mars in a controlled fashion throughout the books to help bring more volatiles necessary for terraforming.
• In the backstory to the Star Carrier series, the Chinese Hegemony, losing World War Whatever, set three asteroids on a collision course with Earth. Two were diverted at great cost, but the third, dubbed Wormwood, came down in the Atlantic and killed half a billion people. Since then, the Terran Confederation has maintained a subfleet of its Space Navy called the High Guard that keeps an eye out for Colony Drops and naturally occurring asteroid dangers alike.
• In The Thrawn Trilogy, one of Thrawn's most brilliant plans involves launching lots of invisible asteroids at the capital world of the Republic. To protect the public and vital installations, the planetary shields were raised, which effectively kept the entire planet under siege long after Thrawn's fleet had left the system. Also, Thrawn didn't actually have that many cloaking devices, so he just had the Star Destroyers fire their gravity catapults without any invisible asteroids loaded, so the Republic had no idea how many asteroids were really out there. So even after the last asteroid had smashed into the shields or detected and destroyed, they would have no way of telling when it would be safe to lower the shields.
• In Titan by Stephen Baxter, China ends up causing a minimum Class 3a Apocalypse How by accident when they try to capture an asteroid into Earth's orbit, but only succeed in crashing it into Earth and killing everybody...except the crew of the American craft heading to Titan.
• Troy Rising: Part of the Horvath's initial appearance was dropping kinetic warheads on several major Earth cities, in Live Free or Die.
• Done benevolently in Utopia. Deliberately dropping cometary fragments small enough to burn up in the atmosphere onto the poorly terraformed world of Inferno was used to add water to the ecosystem. Then a researcher gets the idea of dropping a whole comet onto the planet in such a way that the fragments gouge out a channel across an entire continent, making it possible for a polar sea to form as a way of stabilizing the climate.
• Villains by Necessity: It's mentioned that Cwellyn, the patron saint of bards, asked the goddess Rhinka, his lover, to take his side with the druids. She was so infuriated Rhinka killed him with a meteorite.
• The Warhammer 40,000 novel Chapter War, by Ben Counter, sees an army of invading Orks use small asteroids (with rockets attached) as conveyance through space. Once they've arrived, they use the same Roks as a crude yet surprisingly effective orbital bombardment, devastating the Planetary Defense Force.
  • In the 40K novel Shadow of Ullanor, the third and final Imperial assault on Ullanor begins with the Adeptus Mechanicus using their reverse-engineered Ork gravitic weapon to throw a few asteroids at the planet. One is converted to hold the rebuilt Imperial Fists Chapter and deliver them (mostly) safely to the surface.

Live-Action TV

• Alien Worlds (2020): At the end of the Atlas segment, a large meteor compared to the Chicxulub bolide impacts the planet, and is implied to cause a mass extinction.
• Babylon 5:
  • The Centauri use illegal mass driver weapons to drop asteroids on the Narn homeworld in one episode. This is considered so heinous that even the Vorlons issue a formal statement decrying the act. The Vorlons whose foreign policy consists of "We take no interest in the affairs of others."
  • The Vorlons themselves get over it later, by introducing planet-killing ships of their own at the climax of the last Shadow War.
• Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: One episode involves the Earth government deliberately dropping a large asteroid made of frozen oxygen onto an uninhabited area in an attempt to help replenish the planet's post-apocalyptic atmosphere.
• Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future: One half of Lord Dread's Project New Order involved capturing the human population with an orbital Digitizer, the space station Icarus. Power and his team infiltrate the Big Bad's base and hack into Icarus' ground control, forcing it down from orbit and on a collision course with Dread's capital city, Volcania.
• Doctor Who: "Frontios" features the Tractators, who create meteor showers to try to rid the eponymous planet of its human inhabitants, although this is more of a "Colony Pull", as the Tractators are already on the planet underground and are using their gravity-controlling abilities to pull the asteroids down.
• Power Rangers falls back on this every so often. The first time, four Humongous Mecha pushed the asteroid far enough off-course to miss Earth. The other three times, it was blown up. And then, there was a literal colony drop: at the end of Lost Galaxy, the Big Bad reactivates the largest dome of the massive space colony and aims it at the settlement on the planet.
• In Salvation, it's revealed that the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor crash was a secret US government-developed weapon called Project Atlas, designed to divert asteroids using gravity tractors and drop them on Russia with no one being the wiser. The show's main theme is about a natural asteroid threatening to destroy humanity, while someone in the government seeks to turn it into a shotgun blast to obliterate Russia and China. At the end of Season 2, it's revealed that "Samson" was never going to hit in the first place because it's not an asteroid at all. Asteroids don't change course to avoid an incoming railgun shot. The final shot of the season is "Samson" slowing down to enter orbit.
• Also done in Stargate SG-1 where an asteroid is found to be hurtling towards the Earth. Cue the Armageddon reference from Colonel O'Neill. In a twist, it was revealed that the asteroid was not a natural phenomenon, but a way for Anubis to get around the Protected Planets Treaty. Shockingly, blowing the asteroid up was not the answer, as the asteroid in question was specifically chosen by Anubis so that blowing it up would just make things worse. Unfortunately, SG-1 was stuck with a very poorly-designed bomb.
• Star Trek:
  • A Star Trek: Voyager episode had an evil alien race slowly bombarding another race's colony worlds with giant asteroids, in hopes they'd abandon the colony as unsafe and the evil aliens could simply move right in without a war. Not sure why they wanted a planet covered in craters, though.
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky". The ancient, long-lost Fibrini civilization build a generation-ship, Yonada, designed as a traveling planet which would eventually find a new world for their descendants to settle. However, the guidance computer aboard Yonada went off-course, and Yonada itself was doomed to collide with a planet with millions of inhabitants. The Enterprise averted this disaster AND McCoy's premature death by incurable disease.
• Asteroid-like creatures rather than true asteroids, but in Ultraman Gaia, the Radical Destruction Bringer and its forces try this twice. The first time, they redirected a Living Gasbag from Jupiter called Diglobe to crash into Earth in hopes of causing a mass extinction event. Later on in the events leading up to the finale, the Radical Destruction Bringer's herald Shinigami tries a similar tactic with his colossal Living Ship Mokian.

Music

• "Greg! The Stop Sign!" by TISM:
  Sometime in the next ten thousand years
  A comet's gonna wipe out all trace of man
  I'm banking on it coming before
  My end-of-year exam.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: The Jihad had a few Asteroid Drops caused by Word of Blake, in one case framing the Federated Suns in the eyes of Taurian Concordat, sparking another front the Suns didn't need.
• Coyote And Crow begins with the idea that the great comet seen passing Earth in 1402 was instead on a collision course, and the Great Spirit sacrificed themselves to keep it from becoming an Extinction-Level Event. It's presumed that the comet still hit somewhere in Eurasia and caused a nuclear winter, with the subsequent consequence that Europeans never colonized the Americas.
• The backstory for Cyberpunk 2020 includes a short orbital war between the US and the EU, ending when the EU-controlled lunar massdriver was used to lob a substantial lump of rock at Washington DC. The rock was deflected by orbital defences, and instead hit Colorado Springs (or, as it became known afterwards, "Colorado Sprung")
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In older editions the druid/cleric only spell Cometfall conjures a huge ball of ice and rock to fall down on top of an opponent.
  • 5th edition has the 9th level spell Meteor Swarm which conjures FOUR enormous fiery meteors to devastate battlefields, towns, anything that annoyed the wizard...
  • Elder Evils, a sourcebook on world-ending cosmic horrors, has two examples.
    • Atropus is an Undead Abomination in the form of a small moonlet that, if not stopped, eventually impacts the planet he's targeting. And he's done this to countless worlds...
    • Ragnorra takes the form of a fiery red comet blazing through the cosmos, and likes arrive on new world by violently impacting them, shattering most of her bulk and sending her corrupting flesh raining down on the world. She regrows her form afterward and, after corrupting all life on that planet, detaches from it and heads back off for another planet to smash into.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer had the Lore of the Heavens magic spell Comet of Cassandora, which aimed a meteorite at a part of the tabletop, dealing high amounts of damage to all units within a certain distance of the impact site. It was a bit imprecise though — it didn't hit the turn the spell was cast, but instead remained in play, and each turn you'd roll to see if the comet arrived. This comet also grew more powerful the more turns it spent in flight. This could lead to situations where, depending on how the battle progressed and where units moved, both sides' spellcasters could be frantically trying to dispel the comet before it pulverized their dueling generals, or wiped out everyone contesting an objective.
  • Mordheim, Warhammer's skirmish-scale spin-off game, takes place in the setting's past, in the ruins of a city destroyed by a wyrdstone meteorite, the shards of which are fought over by rival bands of treasure hunters. Incidentally, a prophetess named Cassandora tried to warn the city's inhabitants about the comet, making her the likely namesake of the spell mentioned above.
  • In Warhammer 40,000
    • Orks (naturally) take this trope to an utter screaming extreme. Their "Roks" are asteroids converted into crude spacecraft, which are sometimes outfitted with troop compartments, retrorockets, and cantankerous force fields, then hurled at a planet as an enormous Drop Pod. If the landing systems work and a horde of Orks boil out of their space-dropped fortress, that's great — and if everything goes wrong and there's a massive explosion, that's just as good! Warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka took this one step further and outfitted the Roks he used in the Third War for Armageddon with "Tellyportas", allowing endless waves of reinforcements, including Gargants, to swarm out of the Roks without further need for troop landings. In a more traditional sense, Ghazghkull wiped Hades Hive off the map by hurling asteroids at it until the whole megacity was a smoking crater. His archenemy Commissar Yarrick theorized that the Ork Warlord was still smarting from his failure to take the hive in the previous war, and decided to simply annihilate it rather than waste time and resources on a siege.
    • And it's been even worse than that before, as The Beast had entire moons customized in such a manner and was more than ready to drop one on Terra.
    • An issue of White Dwarf contains a very funny debunking of the idea that doing this to a planet would be cheaper and easier than the usual Exterminatus methods. It was originally found online and can be found quoted here. "Rocks are NOT 'free', citizen..." The offending officer is sentenced to a week of accountancy class.
    • The Tyranid Hive Fleet Jormungandr employ a unique method of planetary invasion, seeding asteroids with tunnelling and vanguard bioforms and then launching them at a prey world. Those asteroids that make it through the world's orbital defence network spread Tyranid creatures across the planet that, which then go into hiding until the majority of the Hive Fleet makes its assault, striking the prey from an unexpected quarter.
• Magic: The Gathering has the spells Meteor Shower, Meteor Storm, Shivan Meteor, and Comet Storm. All of these are very effective at killing stuff.
• Pathfinder: The aboleths responded to their puppet state of Azlant getting too uppity by grabbing a meteor and dropping it on Azlant. This proved way more potent than they'd intended, and ended up cracking a continent in half, sinking Azlant entirely, destroying every civilization in existence — including the aboleths' own empire — and started a centuries-long age of darkness, cold and mysery. Ironically enough, given that aboleths despise gods, it turned out that the stone in question was capable of empowering mortals to godhood, which played a role in the origin of several deities, most notably Cayden Caillean (who took the Test of the Starstone while drunk and still has no memory of it).
• The apocalypse in the Backstory of Traveller: The New Era is implied to have included (among every other way a homicidal malfunctioning computer can seriously ruin your day) many examples of literal Colony Drops.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has the card Meteor of Destruction, which knocks off 1000 of your opponents Life Points, provided they have at least 3000.
  • It also has Jurrac Meteor, which clears the field (including itself) when it's first brought out. It's based off the Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs), and is a dinosaur itself.

Video Games

• Ace Combat plays this straight with the Ulysses asteroid, then plays with it in that all of the technology created to stop the impact (including a set of eight railguns, a single much bigger railgun, and two separate missile-launching bunkers) sparks off wars and causes more damage than the chunks of the asteroid that made it through.
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies has a variant with one of those aforementioned bits of technology created to stop Ulysses, which is turned into a superweapon by... firing it at bits of the asteroid still in orbit around the planet, which causes them to fall to earth and destroy whatever they hit.
• Advance Wars has Sturm's CO/Super Power, Meteor Strike, which drops a 3x3 meteor on the most expensive cluster of enemy units for 8 damage. In the comedy sketches on Youtube, it gets changed to dropping a Sturm clone on someone.
• Advent Rising: The Seekers (bad guys) destroy the hero's homeworld by dropping asteroids on it.
  "They are coming to destroy the planet."
  "What? How?"
  "They throw rocks."
  "Rocks? They throw rocks?"
  "Asteroids."
• Allegiance (2000): The backstory is that, by 2140, asteroid mining has become a profitable business. It's done by launching asteroids in the Belt towards the Lunar catching station and mining it on location. Unfortunately, a rather large asteroid ends up missing the station and hits Earth. The game takes place After the End.
• Angry Birds Space is largely made of this. It is rather satisfying to drop a massive asteroid onto those bloody pigs.
• The Babylon Project: In one level of The Earth-Brakiri War, just after getting to an abandoned Space Station, you discover an asteroid on a collision course with the station (in a region of space devoid of asteroids and full of mines), and have to go destroy it.
• Baten Kaitos Origins: Aphelion Dustwake, Guillo's strongest spell, causes a comet to crash into the planet and deal severe ice damage to all enemies.
• Canterlot Siege: This Tower Defense game has Twilight Sparkle rain comets on enemies as her superpower.
• Celestus: The backstory of the Melrehn Faction indicates that they liberated one of their colonies from Amaranth domination by dropping a sizable asteroid on it.
• Command & Conquer: Kane's Wrath features an example of this: the Scrin can throw a Tiberium meteor with the Special Power named "Overlord's Wrath"
• Curse Crackers: For Whom The Belle Toils: It's revealed late into the main story that Tedra and Leer have directed a meteor towards the moon (where Blindgaze and many of her people live), and they believe that when destroyed, the moon's pieces will fall towards Ledamra and destroy everything there as well. Thankfully, Chime eats the meteor before that can happen.
• Deep Rock Galactic's third season, "Plaguefall," gets its name from the development that a rogue comet is passing close to Hoxxes IV, shedding fragments that are raining down on the planet and infecting it with a virulent lithophage known as "Rockpox." Not only are areas of the planet infected, forcing mining teams to decontaminate their work environment before it becomes too hostile even for dwarves, there's a chance during missions for additional meteorites to hit the caves, which the dwarves can crack open to recover the "Plague Hearts" inside before they start spreading the Rockpox. What's troubling is that Mission Control reports that the meteors seem to be deliberately aiming for uninfected areas, in order to spread the lithophage more quickly.
• Defender (The Remake, not the original) had a mission like this at the end. The Earth is found to have been offensively terraformed by the aliens, all the way through. Your mission is to defend the power plants on the moon that are running the gigantic engines pushing it towards the Earth.
• The Dig uses the threat of this as the Call to Adventure, when a large asteroid shows up out of nowhere in Earth orbit and threatens to crash into the planet. It's actually a disguised spaceship sent by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to see if we've developed sufficient spacefaring capabilities to go up there and stop it; having done so, the astronauts in question are subsequently whisked away to the aliens' long-deserted planet.
• Disgaea: Laharl's ultimate attack combines this with Riding the Bomb (and his Evil Laugh). It is aptly named Meteor Impact.
  • Disgaea 4: The Meteor Lancer spear skill has the user leap into outer space, gather some meteors into the shape of a gigantic lance, then throw it at the targets.
• Earth 2150 has the Lunar Corporation's Weather-Control Machine being outfitted with an asteroid targeting system as the planet's decaying orbit evaporates surface water to the point the machine can no longer influence weather. In gameplay terms, that means the LC can call in meteor showers instead of lightning storms in volcanic and lunar tilesets. And unlike lightning, meteors can NOT be stopped by Deflector Shields and no longer ignore buildings in favor of high hills. Each meteor does a fuckton of damage (enough to insta-kill most units and severely damage buildings) but scatter randomly over a very large area. Still, a minute-long carpet-bombing of asteroids is much more awesome to watch than a nuke. Even better: the WCM is the cheapest superweapon in the game and only needs base power to operate so given enough money, you can build dozens of the sucker fire them all simultaneously.
  • It gets even better in The Moon Project where one mission has the Fang being outfitted with the targeting system's prototype. Every two minutes or so, the game calls in a triple barrage of asteroids on the Fang's location. You have one objective: complete destruction of all four UCS bases on the map and since the whole LC campaign plays out on the Moon, collateral damage is not an issue. Apocalypse does not even BEGIN to describe it.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Ishtar's Noble Phantasm, An Gal Tā Kigal Shē, has her drop planet Venus on her enemies.
  • One of James Moriarty's Noble Phantasms summons an asteroid that can potentially destroy the planet. In life, Moriarty was an ordinary human who had no ability to do this, but this ability was born from his dreams of creating a "Perfect Crime" and one-upping every criminal in history by destroying the world combined with fusing with the Freeshooter Phantom, who can turn any object into a "bullet" to perfectly strike a target (in this case, the asteroid aimed into a certain spot to destroy the planet). Because of this, the heroes can't destroy the asteroid in Shinjuku until they take down Moriarty, which causes it to lose its conceptual nature as a bullet that can't miss, allowing EMIYA Alter and Saber Alter to blow it up with their Noble Phantasms.
  • In the Agartha Singularity, Scheherazade's ultimate plan is to summon the Floating Continent Laputa and drop it onto a city in order to prove that the supernatural exists. Fergus uses his Noble Phantasm to severely damage Laputa, and it ends up crashing on an uninhabited Tibetan plateau.
  • In the third Lostbelt story, the bad guys summon a meteor to crush the village giving shelter to the heroes. Spartacus sacrifices himself by leaping up to shatter the meteor, which fatally wounds him.
  • Quetzalcoatl (Samba Santa)'s Noble Phantasm, Yucatán Regalo de Navidad^note Yucatan Christmas Present, summons forth the infamous Chicxulub Impactor asteroid that crash-landed in the Yucatan peninsula and is thought to have triggered the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. It's wrapped up as a giant present 50 miles in diameter. Jaguar Warrior even refers to it as such as part of her commentary.
  Jaguar Warrior: Is it a bird? Is it a COLONY?! NO! It's a Christmas present!
  • Koyanskaya of Darkness and Koyanskaya's Beast form have the Noble Phantasm, Tunguska Nine Drive, which summons the 100 thousand ton meteor that caused The Tunguska Event to drop on their enemies.
  • With his Noble Phantasm, Grand Order / Anima Animusphere, Kirschtaria Wodime drops a storm of meteors on the battlefield. In his Hopeless Boss Fight in Atlantis, this ends the battle instantly.
• The Final Fantasy series have the spells Comet and Meteor appear in several games.
  • Final Fantasy VII has Meteor as an important plot point. Sephiroth plans to summon Meteor to destroy the planet, enabling him to worm his way into The Lifestream and attain godhood. This is a distinctly odd example in that Meteor actually falls quite slowly; in fact, slower than the planet's gravity should have made possible. The implication seems to be that, as Meteor is magical in nature, it won't merely collide with the planet and create a crater, but bore through it and come out the other side. In addition, in the distant past, the alien Jenova crash landed on the planet through a (natural) meteor, causing a huge crater on the Northern Continent. In fact, Sephiroth, who coopted Jenova, is partly inspired by this piece of history when he conceives the plan to destroy the world.
  • The Dissidia Final Fantasy series has a few examples, too; notable, considering it's a real-time fighting game. Sephiroth can use the Black Materia to summon the aforementioned meteor to attack his opponent, and the Emperor has a much more visually impressive (though heavily telegraphed) version in Starfall.
  • Final Fantasy Record Keeper loves this trope, especially since it's a retelling of numerous Final Fantasy titles. At first, it was just Sephiroth with his iconic Black Materia Soul Break, but it's since become a bit of a Running Gag to have numerous Powercreeped Soul Breaks increasingly devastate the world in their animations. One notable example is Maria exploding the entire planet with a meteor in Kerplode XXXII's animation.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, the Bozja Southern Front has a boss called the Red Comet, a red chocobo that introduces itself with one of these to the point that both everyone in and out of universe pulls a Screw This, I'm Outta Here at the incoming meteor it pulls down... and that's just before the start of the Critical Engagement. It summons meteors like a Macross Missile Massacre that you have little time to run to safety or you end up another notch on its feathery belt.
• Fragile Allegiance, a strategy game focused on mining asteroid fields for minerals, allows this tactic in two forms. The lesser involves building a device capable of launching lumps of minerals from one asteroid to another, the kicker being that any asteroid without a corresponding receiving device that a lump lands on gets wrecked. Far more interesting, however, is mounting engines on one asteroid and smashing it into another, obliterating both.
• In Galactic Civilizations the "Mass Driver" invasion type involves bombarding the planet with engine-strapped asteroids before landing troops. This seriously weakens the defenders but also permanently lowers the planetary quality.
• Golden Sun has the Meteor summon, which drops a meteor on the opponent. Megiddo, the special ability of the Sol Blade, does the same thing with the sun — and you hit it at them with your sword.
• Heavy Gear II: The bad guys try to do this after dropping big bombs stopped working.
• The original Homeworld has a variant, in which the asteroid is thrown at the player's mothership, and the Big Bad added an escort fleet.^note If you're wondering why they don't just move out of the way, it's because they can't. The player can't order The Mothership to move in the Campaign because its only working propulsion system is the Hyperdrive, and that's being jammed.
• Jet Force Gemini: After your first confrontation with Mizar, he escapes to a random asteroid and sends it hurtling towards Earth, requiring you to scavenge parts to rebuild a space ship that's fast enough to catch up to it before it hits and stop him. A cutscene after arriving on the Gem Quarry also shows one hitting the Tribals' home planet of Goldwood, though beyond a large explosion we don't see how much damage it causes beyond the sky turning red in that cutscene.
• The King of Fighters 2001 has this once you defeat the Lovable Igniz. He has a huge god complex, but once you beat him, he decides to become a demon and attempts a colony drop. It fails, miserably.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: When the player is escaping the Peragus mining facility, the whole thing blows up when either the Sith or the player fires on the asteroids. This was the only source of fuel for a station hovering over another planet, Telos. Later on, you can get a Hutt on Nar Shaddaa to send fuel to the station.
• Mass Effect: In the DLC mission "Bring Down the Sky", Commander Shepard has to prevent a group of alien terrorists from dropping an asteroid on an Eden-like colony world. In this case it's also a literal colony drop, as the asteroid itself has a scientific research colony on it.
  • In the Mass Effect 2 DLC Arrival, an asteroid is used to destroy a mass relay, and in the process destroys a star system.
  • One of the reasons the turians had the salarians create the genophage is that krogans got the idea of dropping asteroids on their planets and colonies.
• Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon has a giant asteroid that turns out to be computer-controlled. The Navi operating it, Duo, wants to destroy Earth because it is a wicked planet. Mega Man stops the asteroid and convinces Duo to leave Earth alone.
• Mega Man Star Force 3 uses the same plot with Meteor G, a giant meteor made of crystallized "noise". Not only is it headed for Earth, but it's interfering with wireless devices and corrupting wave beings. Geo and Omega-Xis later learn that Geo's father Kelvin, in wave form, has been holding the meteor back since the day the space station Peace was destroyed.
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The Pirates and Dark Samus drop Leviathans — sentient Phazon asteroids, each with a Big Bad inside — on four planets, including their own. It's also implied that the planet Phaaze was responsible for dropping two more on Tallon IV and Aether in the previous two games of the Metroid Prime Trilogy.
  • The one on Elysia is particularly bad, as there is no way to get down into the planet's atmosphere to disarm the shield. The solution? Spend a few hours converting sections of SkyTown into a gargantuan nuclear weapon and countering Dark Samus' Colony Drop with one of your own!
• The Might and Magic series frequently does this.
• The Mother series has PK Starstorm, considered one of the most powerful PSI techniques in any context and acting as a group-hitting attack with an immense amount of power and PP cost to use. The move is wielded by prince Poo in EarthBound (1994) and princess Kumatora in Mother 3, who have to first be taught it by the enigmatic Star Master and Ionia of the Magypsies respectively, both mysterious masters of PSI themselves. Aside from them, it's only ever used across the series by high-ranking Starmen, certain bosses like Fassad and the Barrier Trio (the latter of which were created directly by one of the Magypsies, and the former of which is a Magypsy), and a Men's Room Sign.
• Stellaris: The DLC-exclusive lithoid species can pick a civic that allows them to perform literal colony drops as a method of colonization. Being essentially living rocks, they load themselves onto an asteroid en masse, launch it at the target planet and disembark after the impact to initiate the usual colonization process. These asteroids are much, much faster than the lumbering regular colony ships, but the impact has predictably devastating consequences for the planet, adding a lot of temporary devastation that hinders colony development while also significantly and permanently reducing the world's habitability for organic species, making it unattractive as a target of conquest. It's an all-around win for the lithoids, but a firm middle finger to everyone else in the galaxy, especially when combined with some of their other world-destroying traits.
• Super Smash Bros.: PK Starstorm shows up in the series from Brawl onward as the Final Smash of both Ness and Lucas, who are implied to have been taught it by their party members for Smash (and accompanied by said party members directly for the attack in Ultimate), which shows the move to be a storm of shooting stars (something somewhat unclear in the games themselves, where attacks are vague in appearance and the move is cryptically described as "shaking off the stars").
• Mysterious Journey II: The Reveal explains that instead of an alien ship being shot down by rival factions of planet Saarpedon, starting a war against the faction who wanted alien contact; personnel of the orbiting space station who wanted to leave the planet "mostly untouched" in its terraforming process, started a firefight that downed an orbiting ship containing the colonists in suspended animation, with no clear knowledge if it was accidental or not. Fortunately, the sentient "oracles" noticed this and mindwiped the population to prevent this terrible truth from being lived with.
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan: The final stage has the titular Ouendan joining forces with the entire planet to destroy a meteor hurtling towards Earth using nothing but the power of music.
• Outpost: The franchise kicks off when the attempts to change the path of the asteroid "Vulcan's Hammer" fail, just break it into pieces and the two largest of them strike Earth with the force of a billion megatons (ten times the force of the dinosaur-killer).
• Pokémon has several cases.
  • The first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games feature a colossal meteor as the main story's final and overarching threat, threatening to obliterate the world and causing severe natural disasters simply through its presence in the atmosphere. This requires the assistance of Rayquaza to deal with, who destroys it with a Hyper Beam, the recoil of which is so severe it's implied to briefly kill the player character until Gengar unexpectedly helps them out. The exact origin of the falling star is never explained, though a post-game dungeon reveals that a sleeping Deoxys was attached to it, though they don't seem to have had any doing in its fall or possess awareness of the meteor's trajectory.
  • Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's Delta Episode contains a very similar premise, in which you're tasked with stopping a meteor from destroying the world by capturing Rayquaza, riding it into space to destroy the meteor. And just like the Mystery Dungeon games, there's a Deoxys on it, resulting in a battle with it when it subsequently awakens from having its ride blown to smithereens.
  • To a less overtly calamitous extent, there's also the move Draco Meteor introduced in the fourth generation, a secretive move widely considered to be the ultimate Dragon-type attack that can usually only be taught exclusively to Dragon-types with a high level of friendship. Its visual depiction has taken many forms, but it's generally shown as either summoning actual rocks of varying sizes from the sky or the Pokémon in question creating and raining down comet-like energy blasts in a devastating assault. It seems like Dragon-type Pokémon get a lot of ties falling asteroids.^note Among the only non-Dragon-type Poke´mon that have been able to use Draco Meteor are Olympus Mons including, appropriately, the star-themed Jirachi (through an event) and Arceus itself, who can learn the move while in its Dragon form and retain the move in any other type it takes on. The move's Japanese name even directly translates to Meteor Shower!
• Planetary Annihilation: Part of the game appears to be building bases on asteroids so you can crash them into planets.
• Quantum Protocol: The unnamed country of the setting was almost completely destroyed by a comet, leaving nothing but an island city. It turns out the comet was piloted by Dragoon aliens, who crashed the comet by accident. When Omega loses control of his virus, a second comet that the virus-infected is set on a collision course with the planet.
• SimCity 4: One of the disasters is a meteor strike. Which you, as Mayor, can inflict on your hapless citizens any time you want.
• Sins of a Solar Empire has the Advent starbase meteoroid control signature ability, which allows it to use the crew's Psychic Powers to rams asteroids onto hostile planets being orbited or dropping entire swarms of small asteroids onto enemy fleets.
• Skies of Arcadia had the "Rains of Destruction", a deadly shower of Green Rocks from the Moons orbiting the world that wiped out almost all of civilization and set humanity back from space-faring to just getting the hang of electricity again when the story begins.
  • There's also the "Prophecy" special attack, which has slightly less impressive aftereffects for consisting of dropping a whole friggin' moon.
• Spore: In the Space Stage, there is a tool called Call Asteroid. It is "Supposed" to be used to improve the Terra Score of a planet, but it is far more useful to drop asteroids onto enemy colonies. On top of that, it is cheaper to use than Anti Matter bombs which serve the same purpose.
• Super Robot Wars Alpha and OriginalGeneration 2: RyuKoOh's second attack is the simple but brutal method of dropping a small mountain on the enemy. In Alpha 3, it's Mid-Season Upgrade drops even bigger ones.
• Sword of the Stars has Siege Drivers, the ultimate mass driver weapon. They're so huge only specially designed dreadnoughts can carry them, have infinite range on the tactical map, and cause 150 million casualties per shot. The human version looks like a giant revolver with the barrel rotating after each shot.
• Averting this trope is your objective in the adventure game The Omega Stone, in which a comet is on a collision course for Earth.
• Tabula Rasa: This MMORPG had this happen to Earth as part of its backstory—in addition to invading directly, the Bane also dropped a "shard-ship" on the planet, a combination of asteroid, superweapon, and terraforming device that spreads toxins and organisms suitable for Bane habitation after impact. This is apparently a favored tactic by the Bane. It's been used on a planet belonging to another member of the Allied Free Sentients: the Brann's homeworld of Erdas.
• Terminal Velocity (1995) has one mission in which you must stop the (former) asteroid Ceres, that has been fitted with an engine before it crashes against Earth.
• Total War: Warhammer brings back the Comet of Cassandora as a high-level spell that allows them to drop a huge blue comet on top of the enemy army, doing terrible damage to any unit caught in the general collision area.
• We Love Katamari: One level requires The Prince to roll up all the countries on Earth to stop a meteor from... destroying all countries on Earth. This foreign object hurtling through space will be, alternately, a big meteor, a bigger and spiky meteor, or the Prince's very own Space Mushroom planetoid. (Somebody really dropped the ball on that one. One of the quickest ways to lose fans is to send them hurtling towards Earth and incinerating them.)

Webcomics

• In Bob and George this is how Future Bass and Future Mega Man try to defeat Bob when he becomes the villain in the fifth Mega Man game. Bob blows the f[BLEEP]ing asteroid up, but the event sends Bob through a rip in space-time, and he stays in the resulting subspace rift for some time until he's (unwillingly) rescued later by Dr. Wily.
• Freefall: Played with. Ice asteroids are routinely dropped on the colonized planet as part of the terraformation process. (Also done in The Stone Canal, part of Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series). Two robots also mention digging a river with asteroids. And while they were at it, timing and sequencing the asteroids to produce a rhythm...
  Dvorak: Ah, yes. Orbital bombardment in D minor.
  Sawtooth: It's not often you get to play an entire planet as a percussion instrument.
• Homestuck: If the White King loses on the Battlefield (which he is always destined to), the Black King (or Jack Noir in this case) initiates the Reckoning, which takes the asteroids which comprise the Veil and sends them flying toward Skaia and the Battlefield with the intent of destroying it. Skaia's defence mechanism opens portals to Earth (or whatever planet the players in question come from) at various points in its history, in the process setting up some of the parameters of the game, including the players. The majority of the asteroids sent to the players' planet arrive around the time the game starts being played, or April 13 2009 in the case of Beta Earth, which amounts more or less to the end of the world; the entire point is to end mankind as Earth has served its purpose. All of the player's homes in particular are menaced by an incoming meteorite, requiring them to enter the game and start the adventure before it strikes; the largest one menaced Jade's home somewhere in the Pacific Ocean shortly before she entered, and Becquerel's blast to destroy it was so powerful that its shockwaves were more or less the last nail in the coffin for Earth. Eventually, Skaia runs out of defense portals, so players in the game have to defeat the Black King before the Battlefield is destroyed.
• In Schlock Mercenary, Battleplates were originally developed by the UNS to prevent the natural impact of meteorites on human worlds. Once the UNS realized that the Battleplate was also excellently able to deflect some other things that might threaten Earth, like the intentional impact of meteorites and other celestial bodies of a similar size and higher acceleration, and decided they'd better build a few dozens of them. You know, just in case. And as long as there's no pesky rocks that need to be swatted, well, there are many other uses you can put a several-kilometre long warship with grotesquely overpowered gravitics control to...
  • And by "several kilometers long," think of an equilateral triangle 1,000 meters thick and 8,000 meters on each side. That's one of the smaller ones.
  • This is also the reason for their Theme Naming — with names like Tunguska, Morokweng, and Vredefort, they are all named after significant earth impact events too.
  • This trope is also a good part of the reason why getting a DUI on a starship is an automatic death penalty at minimum, the other part being that you'd need to circumvent the many safeguards against that while sober to even achieve it.

Web Original

• In one nightmare on the Nightmare Project titled "Waiting for the Wave," a colossal tidal wave is caused by an asteroid striking the ocean.
• Not exactly asteroids per se, but one of the disasters induced by Yahweh on Earth, following the Book of Revelation, in The Salvation War is to open portals from Heaven to New York at heights of kilometers, and drop there big rocks. You can guess humans are NOT amused.
• The SCP Foundation has SCP-515, a young man that causes a series of asteroids to move toward the Earth every time he moves, at speeds proportionate to the degree of movement. Fortunately, he's constantly asleep and has no apparent needs; the bad news is that he sleepwalks, so the Foundation has to chain him to a bed and break his limbs for good measure, and even that's not a foolproof solution since his breathing also counts as movement. And they can't just kill him, either, as doing so causes another person with the same properties to pop up out of nowhere.

Web Videos

• In the NatOne Productions story-line, Denazra, kral'shir extremists want to do this to the rival planet of Corifan by using a combination of three asteroid drops and Orbital Bombardment. They succeed.
• Noob:
  • Gaea has a Summon Magic spell that lets her make a small asteroid crash on her opponents. The area of damage is usually implied to be not that much larger than the asteroid's radius, making it a case of Artistic License – Physics semi-justified by the fact that the story is set in a Fictional Video Game.
  • In Noob: Le Conseil des Trois Factions, the end scene has Arthéon announce that he set an asteroid to crash on Olydri in ten days, with the intention of completely destroying it. That one may have the completely opposite problem, as the last shot of the movie shows it to be close enough to Olydri for both to be in the same shot and still have Olydri seem much bigger; that hints that it may not be falling fast enough to do the damage it's supposed to do.

Western Animation

• The Arthur episode "The Boy Who Cried Comet" has Buster Baxter using a fancy computerized telescope in the treehouse to try and find U.F.Os. He ends up finding a comet and becomes interested, starting to track its path, only for the telescope computer to tell him that the comet is on a collision course with the Earth! At first, no one believes him, due to his history of claiming he's found an alien or a spaceship, until he gets "The Brain" to check his findings. At first, when they find Buster's right, everyone panics, but Fern finds a piece of the telescope that fell out of the treehouse during assembly, and they fix the telescope and discover it was giving the wrong readings and the comet wasn't going to hit the Earth. But a story still gets published in the newspaper for Buster discovering a new comet.
• Cow and Chicken had the episode "Comet!", where Chicken, bored out of his mind on a class field trip to the "Cometorium," decides to liven things up by rigging one of his father's golf balls on a fishing line in front of the telescope, leading the Red Guy and everyone else to panic, thinking the "Dad's Ball" comet is heading towards Earth.
• Justice League:
  • In "Maid of Honor", Vandal Savage holds the world hostage with an asteroid-firing railgun. In the central control room, they are unable to stop the asteroid that he fired but are able to change its destination.
    Wonder Woman: Where did you send it?
    Batman: [with a smile] Right here.
  • In "The Once and Future Thing: Time, Warped", time-travelling villain Chronos punishes Chucko for his betrayal by sending him back to the moment where the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. In fact, it looks like the asteroid is going to hit him directly. Chucko's last words are "Oh, phooey."
    Chronos: Do you know what killed the dinosaurs?
    Ghoul: No... sir.
    Chronos: Well, Chucko does.
• In The Magic School Bus episode "Out of this World", the class stops an asteroid from hitting their school. Ultimately, they make the bus planet-sized, draw the asteroid into an orbit, and then return to normal size at just the right moment to send the asteroid on a collision course with the sun. The presumably catastrophic consequences of a planet-sized object appearing in space so close to Earth are never brought up.
• In the Monsters vs. Aliens (2013) episode "The Beast From 20,000 Gallons", an asteroid (which Dr. Cockroach has named Big Ned) is headed for a collision course for Earth. An attempt to blow it up with a rocket is complicated when B.O.B. ends up inside the rocket.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Ice Sore" has Townsville undergo a massive heatwave, later revealed to be caused by a giant flaming meteor hurtling towards the city (which everyone refers to as a "giant fireball".) Blossom, having sworn off using her newly-found ice breath power, initially doesn't want to use it to try and save Townsville, but gives in and uses it, turning the giant fireball into a giant iceball, which the girls are able to easily pound into snow. A humorous exchange from the Mayor and Miss Bellum during this near-disaster...
  Mayor: Oh good! Blossom has stopped the giant fireball.
  Ms. Bellum: Yes, but now there's a giant iceball hurtling towards us.
  Mayor: Yes, but it's not a giant fireball!
• The Simpsons has a couple of examples...
  • The most memorable would have to be "Bart's Comet", in which a comet Bart Simpson discovered is on a collision course towards Springfield.
  • In "Simpsons Tall Tales", the first story, in which Homer plays Paul Bunyan, eventually leads up to Homer/Paul having to save the town from a flaming meteor, to which the town forgives him for the damage he previously caused. Homer catches the meteor in his rear, pulls it out, and hurls it to Chicago, where its impact starts the Great Chicago Fire.
• Inverted in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) series, where time-travelling demon Savanti Romero threatens the future by trying to make the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs miss Earth. The turtles' mission, thus, is to assure that the colony drop happens.

Real Life

• Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck the Earth in the Yucatán Peninsula. Not only did this asteroid wipe out all of the non-avian dinosaurs on Earth at this time, but it killed a good portion of life on Earth, including the pterosaurs, the sea reptiles (mosasaurs and plesiosaurs), the main reef builders, some of the crocodilians, a lot of the plants, etc. Mammals, birds, and others are thought to have barely gotten through the extinction with the skin of their teeth.
  • A growing body of evidence also exists that dates the Nadir crater in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Guinea to around the same time as the Cretaceous impactor hitting the Yucatan Peninsula. Whether the asteroid responsible was a fragment of the Cretaceous impactor, or another asteroid which happened to be following close behind, is currently unknown, but it shows the possibility that the survivors of the extinction event lived through not one, but two massive collisions!
• Or the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, it definitely dwarfs the above one. One of the probable causes? Whatever created this◊ crater, speculated to be an asteroid over 55 kilometres across (by comparison, the asteroid that landed in Yucatan was "merely" 10 kilometres across). This is truly a Colony Drop of epic proportions. Note, however, that there are several other highly credible explanations for the P-T event, most notably the Siberian Traps. It's likely that it was the two together caused the changes that killed off so much life.
• Now that the Yucatan evidence has largely substantiated the K-T collision for dinosaurs' extinction, the notion that other extinction events or disruptions of climate could be a result of other, smaller-scale impacts has become somewhat more acceptable. It is theorized that the cause of the Late Devonian Extinction was multiple asteroid impacts.
• Astronomers got to observe this type of Colony Drop firsthand (but, luckily, at a distance) in 1994 when the fragmented pieces of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. If this would have hit Earth, the impact would have been greater than the above two combined.
• Although of a smaller scale than most fictional examples, meteorites play this trope straight. Documented cases of them killing people or destroying property on impact bring a new dimension to bad luck, considering the odds against it. Though, if it doesn't hit you, large meteorites can sell for a tremendous amount of money. Legally, since asteroids and meteors in space are ownerless, if one lands intact on your land, it’s yours to do with as you wish, though depending on the object in question, there’s a good chance you might get an offer in cash from a research institute or two. One woman in the 1970s had her car totaled when a watermelon-sized meteorite caved in its roof. She sold it, and was able to buy a new car, and still have a fair amount of money left over.
• This prank involving an HD tv replacing a window and a fake job interview.
• The Tunguska Event is considered the largest "impact event" in human recorded history (though as documented above, much larger events happened in prehisoric times), where in a June 1908 morning in Siberia, a massive explosion ripped through a remote forest area. No actual meteorite or even a crater was ever discovered — the general scientific consensus is that whatever celestial body had entered Earth's atmosphere (either a comet or an asteroid) exploded before it hit the ground, which still impressively levelled the area in a 2,150 square-kilometer reach, with there existing photos of trees having been charred and knocked down by the shockwave. Had fate been less kind, the explosion could have decimated an entire metropolitan area.
• The Chelyabinsk meteor — while being much smaller than most examples on this list, with it also breaking apart before impact — it still hurt quite a few Russians who saw it as they stepped towards their windows, only to get hit by glass shards as the shockwave (moving at the speed of sound) knocked out their windows. This "superbolide" became the largest known natural object to have entered Earth's atmosphere since The Tunguska Event, and also has the dubious honor of being the only meteor confirmed to have resulted in human injury (though thankfully, no deaths). Thanks to the Russian love for dashcams, there is actually quite a bit of footage of the event that scientists are quite gleeful over.
• The "Qingyang event" was an incident documented to have taken place in 1490 near Qingyang, China, with several surviving documents describing a massive and sudden shower of rocks that allegedly resulted in over tens of thousands of human fatalities. While said historical documents are usually considered accurate, modern historians and astronomers have been unable to decisively prove that this incident occurred, let alone the damage it was described to have wrought, though general consensus sides towards the belief that there was in fact an ancient meteor shower that took place, even if the "10,000 deaths" count was likely an exaggeration.
• There is also the Theia Impact, a theory that suggests that the Earth collided with an object the size of Mars. The impact was so powerful and devastating that the debris launched from the Earth formed the Moon, as well as giving the Earth its axial tilt. Fortunately, nothing was alive at the time.
• While it has been known for decades that most of the Moon's "seas" are actually humongous impact craters ("basins") filled with solidified lava, only has recently been possible to calculate with accuracy the size of the impactors that formed them. Estimations for the one that formed the large Imbrium basin give a size of 250 kilometers, twice as large as previously thought, and it's not the largest lunar basin, with even much larger ones having been proposed.
• The Solar System is awash with examples of truly epic colony drops in asteroid/comet fashion, from the Caloris basin on Mercury to Callisto's Valhalla and passing in between the lunar South Pole-Aitken basin.^note And these are just the known ones, as it's more than likely Earth and/or Venus would have received similar or even more spectacular whacks, but the scars left by them would have been healed by geological activity on both. This period around 4 billion years ago is referred to as the Late Heavy Bombardment, because impacts by large asteroids are believed to have been extremely common on every planet in the Solar System.
• Carl Sagan warned that, if we develop the technology to deflect dangerous asteroids away from the Earth, we should be careful since, due to Earth's history of genocidal leaders, it wouldn't be unreasonable for an Omnicidal Maniac to use the same technology to deflect a harmless asteroid into Earth's path.
  • As of 2022; we have the technology, with NASA demonstrating deflection on an asteroid that can't hit Earth and that was pushed slightly further away. The "deflection dilemma" is being resolved by not building more deflection spacecraft unless they are actually needed; which also saves space agencies a lot of work.

Moons

Anime & Manga

• Shelter is a short film about a young girl named Rin who lives in a world she can control at will, however towards the end of the film we learn it's because she's in a simulation. Her body is unconscious in a drifting escape vessel which was built by her father. The reason he did so is made obvious through various background clips as we see a massive object the size of the moon (it's never confirmed it actually is the moon) on a collision course with Earth. The implications are Earth either was destroyed or, at the very least, humanity was decimated by the incredible impact. All that is left is Rin and her memories.

Comic Books

• Buck Rogers knocks Phobos out of orbit to destroy a Martian invasion fleet.
• The Marvel Graphic Novel The Futurians has this as part of the backstory. In Earth's distant future, there are two major powers, locked in near-constant war: the city-states of Ghron and Terminus. Ghron developed a weapon called the Sky-Grabber, and used it to pull the moon towards the Earth so as to collide with Terminus. Terminus survived thanks to an extremely powerful forcefield and is self-sufficient enough to live in total isolation for centuries, but 95% of all other life on the entire hemisphere Terminus is situated on died. Ghron was no worse for the wear, being located on almost the exact opposite side of the planet, though obviously there was some embarrassment that such a huge endeavor ended in failure. So they fled to the past and tampered with the sun just to spite Terminus.
• In the Sonic the Comic story "Return of the Nightmare", Super Sonic pulls Mobius' moon out of its orbit and sends it crashing into the planet... in what turns out to be an illusion created by Ebony.

Fan Works

• The climax of the third Godzilla MMD, Planet Eating Wings, sees King Ghidorah attempt this after being overpowered by a Mothra empowered Godzilla Earth. Ironically, Godzilla Earth overpowers him in the resulting Beam-O-War and kills him by slamming the moon into him and blowing both of them up.

Films — Live-Action

• Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos uses the Power and Space Stones to shatter one of Titan's moons and launch the fragments at the good guys. They survive, but everyone except Iron Man and Doctor Strange is taken out of the fight.

Literature

• Empire from the Ashes: The Achuultani are already fond of hurling asteroids at planets, but in the second book, after Earth mounts a fierce resistance against them and prove themselves capable of destroying any asteroids the Achuultani scouts launch at them, the scouts decide to crank it up a notch and steal Iapetus from Saturn, cover it with deflector shields, and throw it at Earth, using their own ships to further shield it. The moon is stated to be much larger than the kind of projectiles they typically use.
• Pug uses a moon to attack a single creature in The Riftwar Cycle, by opening a wormhole-like rift connecting a point just in front of the moon's path to a point just above the creature in question. Hilarity Ensues. To be fair, the creature had already destroyed two dimensions, and Kelewan was doomed even before the Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
• Star Wars Legends: In the New Jedi Order series, the new enemy, an extremely xenophobic machine-hating race called the Yuuzhan Vong, are introduced by using their ships' gravity controlling features to smash a planet apart with its own moon. Among those killed is Chewbacca. They later duplicate it during their successful invasion of Coruscant, using the planet's orbital defense stations.
  • The Yuuzhan Vong actually have a name for this tactic: Yo'Gand's Core. Supplemental material indicates that overuse of this tactic in a war in their home galaxy is why they spent hundreds or thousands of years travelling to a new one.

Roleplay

• A rogue moon in The Gungan Council crashed into Taris on Xyra's command, wiping out everything on the planet's surface.

Toys

• Non-Earth example: In BIONICLE, Makuta Teridax is killed when the planet-sized robot he's inhabiting has one of the moons of Bara Magna smash into his head. He was trying to invoke this trope by slamming it into the planet in a destructive manner, whereas Mata Nui was trying to gently merge the planet and moons together.

Tabletop Games

• The D20 fantasy setting DragonMech is in the middle of having its moon descend upon the planet. This is quite possibly the worst thing to happen to the world of Highpoint in a very long time, given that it's already destroyed the societies of several different races and it hasn't actually hit yet.
• In one of the black books for the Horus Heresy series, it's mentioned that Autek Mor of the Iron Hands Legion destroyed Bodt, the World Eaters' main recruitment world, by dropping the planet's moon onto its surface.

Video Games

• In Dead Space 3, it turns out that the moon in orbit around Tau Volantis is a gigantic necromorph. Isaac manages to kill it, at which point it falls onto the planet. The Awakened DLC reveals that both Isaac Clarke and John Carver somehow survived the impact, which confuses the two of them as much as it does the player. Isaac guesses the alien Phlebotinum they used to kill the moon had something to do with it. Carver thinks that's a stupid idea, but he can't come up with a better explanation.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind includes a fantasy version of this in its backstory. Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness attempted this by hurling the rogue moon Baar Dau at Vivec City. Vivec, the Tribunal deity, froze it in place above the city. It would later be hollowed out for use by the Tribunal Temple as the Ministry of Truth, a high-security prison for heretics and blasphemers. Vivec tells his followers that it is held in place by his people's love for him, and that should they stop loving him, it would fall. As a result of the Nerevarine's actions, Vivec disappears following the events of the game. The stop-gap measure implemented by the Temple to keep it in orbit is destroyed, so the moon resumes its fall with its original momentum. Vivec (the city) is destroyed, Red Mountain erupts, the mainland of Morrowind is devastated by tsunamis and choking ash, and, even some 200 years later, the crater/bay that lies where Vivec used to be still has its waters boiling. Notably, this later led to the fan joke in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion that, when Sheogorath executes you for attacking him, he isn't teleporting you a mile above his execution grounds to let you fall to your death; rather, you remain stationary and he hurls the whole damn planet at you.
• The Last Federation: The Hydral homeworld was destroyed when the Acutians strapped a moon full of engines and sent it into a collision course with it. With enough influence, you can convince them to do it again to a faction of your choosing.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: As part of the Skull Kid's "game" due to the influence of Majora's Mask, he pulls the Moon out of its orbit and plans to drop it on Termina in three days. The Moon hangs over you in gameplay, complete with its Nightmare Face, and if Link can't revive the Four Giants in those three days, the Moon obliterates all of Termina and everyone living in it (which means a Game Over).
• Stellaris (yes, this game is very Colony Drop-happy) has an archeology event called Moon Bump on a previously life-bearing, now barren world. Investigating it reveals that its late inhabitants had the bright idea to pull their moon closer to the planet for easier exploitation, but a minor miscalculation in the giant Tractor Beam they built to facilitate this ended up dragging the moon into the planet's gravity well, sending it on a very slow but unstoppable collision course. The pre-FTL aliens could do nothing but watch in horror as their inevitable doom crept closer by the day until it eventually hit, ending all life on the planet.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses: Moon Envoy◊ attacks by summoning a (relatively) small moon and crashing it onto the enemy monster.

Webcomics

• Drowtales: In the distant past, the elves apparently managed to take a piece out of one of the nine moons, and the resulting impact from one of the pieces hitting the planet is implied to have created the underworld where the story is set. The city of Sha'shi contains the most complete fragment of this piece of the moon, and it's implied that something about the moon is responsible for the elves mutating into drow and the reason that later generations have a higher rate of health problems.
• Homestuck: The Big Bad cuts the moon loose from Prospit, sending it crashing to Skaia below and killing Dream Jade.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation: SCP-736 is an unknown anomaly that very slightly nudges the orbit of Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons, every so often before returning it to normal. Then they ran simulations of the predicted trajectories and received large amounts of radio transmissions from Iapetus's surface. As it turns out, something lives on Iapetus and wants to exterminate humanity in particular, so they're planning to slingshot one of Saturn's moons at us by smashing Iapetus into it, and the fluctuations in orbit are them taking aim.

Web Animation

• Kurzgesagt's "What if the Moon Crashed Into Earth?" explores this, but instead of dropping the moon straight down, a magic spell is cast on it so it's slowly pulled in by Earth's gravity while still in orbit.
• The shattered Moon of RWBY is the result of this happening in ancient times. After wiping out Humanity as punishment for Salem's rebellion, The Brothers abandoned the world of Remnant. While the God of Light simply teleported away, the God of Darkness smashed through the Moon as he departed, hurling chunks of it down onto the planet. Salem's curse of Complete Immortality meant she survived the destruction, but was left alone in a ruined world for untold eons.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: The Core is revealed to have had a contingency plan if it was ever defeated- it filled the moon with advance technology and rocket boosters so in such an event, it could crash the moon into the planet and thus destroy everything that led to its downfall. In the Grand Finale, it ends up attempting to do just that after it is overthrown, and it takes a Heroic Sacrifice from Anne to defeat the Core once and for all.

Real Life

• Phobos is one of Mars' moons. Its orbit is slowly weakening (due to the tidal effect of its orbiting Mars faster than the planet's rotation rate), and in about 11 million years, it will either collide with Mars's surface or break apart.
• A recent hypothesis to explain one of the most mysterious features of Mars (its northern hemisphere is significantly smoother and about a mile lower in average elevation than its southern hemisphere) is that nearly the entire northern hemisphere is an impact crater from an object slightly smaller than Earth's moon. The same impact might also be the reason why Mars no longer has an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which it likely did a few billion years ago. The explanation for the lack of an obvious rim to his possible impact crater is that billions of years' worth of additional impacts by smaller meteors has erased it.
• Neptune's largest moon, Triton, is in a similar degrading orbit, but due to its size, it will take much longer for it to hit the Roche limit (about 3.6 billion years) than Phobos.
• A theory to explain why the far side of the Moon has a thicker crust than the near side is that a second moon, formed by the same massive impact thought to have formed our natural satellite, would have collided with the Moon at a very low relative speed, simply piling up.

THE Moon

Anime and Manga

• In Aldnoah.Zero, much like the example in Cowboy Bebop above, a catastrophic malfunction of the Hypergate blew the Moon to pieces, bringing an abrupt end to the first Terran-Martian war. The event, known as Heaven's Fall, sent enormous pieces of debris crashing down to Earth, killing hundreds of millions and permanently altering the planet's geography.
  • Orbital Knights space stations are also capable of dropping themselves on cities with the force of an atomic bomb, and surviving. Granted it's based on alien tech, but still.
• Cowboy Bebop, kind of. It's more a constant rock shower from pieces of the moon after it got torn open by the Gate Accident and the main reason why humanity has abandoned Earth.
• The whole point of The Last: Naruto the Movie is stopping the moon from crashing into Earth.
• A moon drop is used as part of a sequence of Stock Visual Metaphors in My Bride is a Mermaid. Yes, Amazoness!
• In Episode 2 of the Pretty Sammy OAV, Bif Standard builds a series of tractor beams across Earth to drop the Moon on Earth, so that he can build his own "standardized" world.
• Dropping the Moon on Earth is the Anti-Spiral's failsafe plan for eliminating humanity if it looks like they're getting too uppity in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Though technically speaking, it was actually the battleship Cathedral Terra that was transformed into a moon. On the other hand, Lagann-hen successfully ups that by having the Moon transform into Cathedral Lazengann and try to punch the Earth.

Board Games

• In Netrunner, normally the corporation can target the hackers with goons and hit squads, which deal two or three damage out of the hacker's five live points. A corp willing to go that extra mile can use the card "I Got A Rock", which drops an asteroid on the hacker for a total of fifteen damage.
• What's this? Risk 2210 AD has the moon as a playable map and gives you several blank cards for your own rules? Sounds fun. Who wants to play a game?

Comic Books

• In the final arc of BIONICLE, this is how they finally get rid of Makuta Teridax.
• In Black Moon Chronicles, when the leader of the Black Moon is defeated, his vengeance consists of dropping the moon onto the planet over about a week.
• In the Justice League story "Terror Incognita" the Martian Manhunter is confronting dozens of powerful White Martians on the Moon after those same White Martians have all but conquered Earth. While The Manhunter has them distracted the rest of the Justice League pulls the moon toward Earth so that the entry into the atmosphere will burn the Martians to nothingness if they do not surrender and enter the Phantom Zone. Spell Casters cast a massive spell to keep the gravity of the Moon from destroying Earth, and the Justice League (after imprisoning the surrendering White Martians) pulls the moon away from Earth before it can impact and destroy the planet.
• A combination of "THE Moon" and "Asteroids and Comets". At the end of the Superman storyline Time and Time Again, Superman is ejected back to the present from the 31st century of the Legion of Super-Heroes when the Linear Man reactivates a bomb that ends up destroying the Moon. The following LoSH comic after this deals with the aftermath with the Legion trying to stop as many pieces of the Moon from striking the Earth.

Fan Works

• A Rule 34 fan comic of Avatar: The Last Airbender ended with the Princess Yue, Sokka's old squeeze turned Moon Spirit, getting turned on by the naughty activities the main cast gets into and, well, decides to come on down as the Moon itself and join the fun. Yeah...
• "The End of Ponies" has the moon Falling to equestria in the cataclysmthat brings an end to the ponies, with the exception of the protagonist.
• Played for Laughs in the Friendship is Witchcraft short "Star Waving Mad" in which Twilight gets bored of playing with the Moon and unceremoniously drops it on Ponyville.

Films — Live-Action

• In the '80s remake of Flash Gordon, Ming the Merciless is sending the moon spiraling down into the Earth. It doesn't get there, but it gets close enough that things must have been pretty messed up.
  Doctor Hans Zarkov: Check the angular vector of the moon!
• In the 2002 film incarnation of Wells' The Time Machine, the extinction of most of humanity, leading to the Eloi and Morlocks evolving, is caused by lunar colony construction causing the moon to break apart.
• In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit and sends it hurtling on a collision course with Earth.

Literature

• One of Larry Niven's prehistoric The Magic Goes Away stories featured a group of magi seeking out a comatose god on a "mana"-starved Earth in the hope that he will be able to help them land the Moon on Earth. How big can it be, after all? The magi think this is a great idea and awaken the god using the mana left in the comatose worldwyrm of Norse Mythology. The awakened god shows the relative sizes involved to the magi, who now realize just how bad it would be... but the god thinks it's a fine idea, and even promises to remake them afterward. As the god awakens, he stretches up to grab the Moon with his hands and push against it, presumably to stop it from orbiting the Earth.
• In the Magic: The Gathering storyline, Yawgm— er, The Lord of the Wastes is attempted to be killed by Urza and Gerrard dropping the Null Moon, a storage facility for pure white mana, on him.
• Neil Gaiman's The Matrix short story, Goliath, had inexplicably pissy aliens follow one of the Machines' "seed-probes" back to Earth. The aliens begin dropping rocks and warn that if the Machines do not surrender immediately, they'll drop the moon on them.
• This trope is best summed up with Jack McDevitt's book Moonfall. The dust jacket explains thusly: "A comet is coming. It is going to hit the Moon. And the Moon is going to fall. ON US."
• In the Nightside novels, John Taylor notices that the moon is absent from the skies when he visits an After the End future and theorizes that it's fallen and caused the devastation all around him. Twice subverted when he A) finds out it was a war between himself and his mother, Lilith, that was to blame, and B) ultimately prevents it from happening.
• A major theme of The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin is a traumatized girl's plan to end oppression on Earth by crashing the Moon into it and ending everything. Averted.

Live-Action TV

• The first series finale of The Sarah Jane Adventures, where Mr Smith, Sarah's Magical Computer, who is revealed to be from a race of alien sentient rocks attempts to smash the Moon into the Earth to free members of their species who are stuck in Earth's crust. The episode before also had The Trickster, the living embodiment of Chaos, remove from the Earth the person fated to stop a large meteorite naturally smashing into the planet.
• In Three Moons Over Milford, an asteroid has broken the Moon into three huge (and a number of much smaller) pieces and it is unknown when or if any of them will fall to Earth.

Tabletop Games

• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Baron Blade, the nemesis of Legacy, is so caught up in his Roaring Rampage of Revenge that he is willing to do this while standing on the earth. He has created a Lunar-Terra inplosion beam, essentially a Tractor Beam powerful enough to pull the Moon out of its orbit and into the Earth, killing everything on it and obliterating the planet. In game terms, you have to defeat his first side before he gets fifteen cards in his trash, or else the beam finishes pulling the Moon down and everything dies. As the hero Luminary, he uses a smaller beam that pulls pieces of the moon down and drops them on OblivAeon's forces.

Video Games

• The Tower Defense game Canterlot Siege has Princess Luna drop the moon to attack enemies as a superpower.
• In Daemon X Machina, most of the Earth was rendered uninhabitable after a chunk of the Moon suddenly broke off and collided with the planet.
• In Dark Chronicle:
  • When Griffon can no longer keep the Moon Flower Palace aloft, he sets it on a collision course with Palm Brinks. It takes a Humongous Mecha the size of a mountain to stop the impact.
  • We learn the Precursors that created the three Atlamillia stones realized that bringing them all together would invariably corrupt their wielder with limitless power. Therefore, they rigged the stones to summon the Star of Destruction upon said person — namely, the Blue Moon itself. It's just too bad for anyone else standing in the wielder's vicinity.
• The Big Bad of Disgaea 4 attempts to destroy the game's Netherworld in this fashion.
  • Amusingly, this is exactly what the Entei's team attack in Disgaea Dimension 2 accomplishes, via transforming itself into a chain that its partner uses to yank the moon out of orbit.
  • Before either of these was the Cannon Shower spear skill in Disgaea 3, which had the user shoot the moon out of orbit and down onto their enemies.
• In Donkey Kong Country Returns Donkey Kong punches the moon into Tiki Tong's tower. DK isn't trying to destroy the world, only the tower, and the resulting explosion pops the moon back into place.
• Don't Escape 4: The entire premise of the game is that the planet is being decimated by countless meteorological and environmental disasters, the insectoid life is mutated, and society has almost entirely collapsed in little more than raider gangs and roving bands of survivors. The reason? The Moon was split in half by a mining expedition and is now on an inevitable collision course with Earth. To make things worse, we eventually learn this has happened probably a good dozen times as the company responsible uses bizarre dream technology to essentially jump host from a doomed planet to a planet where they haven't started mining the Moon yet and try again, often with the same disastrous result. It's entirely possible the mutations are a result of the crystals this organization is obsessed with getting and exist within the Moon.
• In the DS game Infinite Space, during the Irvest Sector war, Kalymnos attempted to obliterate Najbaro by crashing its moon-equivalent, Monarho, to said planet.
• I Wanna Be the Guy: Occurs several times, with the first one being a Brick Joke of sorts: you go past a screen that prominently displays the moon in the background, and a few screens later it falls on you and tries to kill you. It gets to the point of being a Running Gag: if the moon appears on screen, sooner or later it will try to kill you somehow.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The whole point of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is to prevent what may be the creepiest moon known to man from plowing into Clock Town and killing everybody in Termina. You get three days. Fortunately, you have the Ocarina of Time to help.
  • This Moon (or a magical recreation of it) reappears in Hyrule Warriors during "The Shadow King" scenario, where the Great Fairy pulls it from the sky and drops it on top of Argorok to weaken it. One of Link's combos with the Great Fairy weapon has her do something similar. Young Link also has an attack where he summons the Moon only to slice it in half while wearing the Fierce Deity Mask. It also appears as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• In Serious Sam 3: BFE, the game ends with Sam making it through the time-lock just as Mental crashes the moon into the Earth, obliterating it.
• In Skies of Arcadia, one of the special party skills is called Prophecy, where the party throws the Silver Moon at the enemy.
• Stella Glow, The True Final Boss attempts this after her defeat in the Golden Ending
• The World Ends with You: the second week's game master Sho Minamimoto leaves a note saying "Any tree can drop an apple, I'll drop the freakin' moon!". He doesn't actually do it, it's just a note proving his insanity. Joshua can actually drop the moon or some sort of astral body on your enemies with the right upgrades.

Visual Novels

• Tsukihime has this in the nebulous Backstory, where the Crimson Moon (the guy) tried to drop the Moon onto the Earth only to be stopped by the then-young Zelretch. Zelretch pulled him to an alternate reality and dropped the moon on him instead.
• Melty Blood, Red Arcueid's Arc Drive, the "Blut die Schwester", is this, where she summons the moon to fall from the sky. Provided that she's not hit for a short time after sending the moon down, it hits with an unblockable attack that covers the entire screen. She can also perform a similar attack in Battle Moon Wars, where the way it's used is expanded upon — Red Arcueid roars before throwing her arm into the air and sending a mass of chains flying into the moon, which dig into it and allow her to rip the damn thing from orbit, before launching it into her helpless opponent, all while a remix of "The End of 1000 Years" plays. It needs to be seen to be believed.
• The Blut die Schwester appears in the second episode of Carnival Phantasm, where it's used to simply score a point in volleyball. To be fair, Arcueid's opponents use their supernatural powers as well.

Web Animation

• A Running Gag in The Demented Cartoon Movie is that when an object of any size crashes into the Moon, the Moon will fall and crash into the Earth, which then falls into the Sun if it doesn't just explode.
• Vegeta tried this on Shadow in one DEATH BATTLE!. Chaos Control put it back where it belong.
• Gaming All-Stars: Part of the Greater-Scope Villain's primary scheme in The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered is to send the moon hurtling toward Earth in order to trophify everyone he can.
• How to Kill a Mockingbird: The only way to kill a mockingbird was by hitting it with the moon.
• Kurzgesagt deconstructed the entire trope in their video "What Happens if the Moon Crashes into Earth?", including the fact that due to the Moon's mass and velocity, anything short of magic or apocalyptic circumstances would barely move the moon, let alone send it on a collision course with the Earth. And even in the case of the Moon falling towards Earth, it would never collide as the Earth's gravity would rip the moon apart once it crosses the Roche limit. While the duration leading up to the Moon's destruction would kill off the vast majority of human life through floods, earthquakes, volcanic activity and the collapse of civilisation, the odds of such an event killing off enough people to cause Humanity's extinction are surprisingly low, and any survivors would at least get to rebuild society with the view of beautiful rings in the sky.
• Yahtzee for his review of Sim City Societies had it to where God dropped the moon on him.

Western Animation

• Babylon 5: The Road Home: In the timeline where the Shadows won the war, the Vorlons decide to destroy Earth. However, because Earth is a fairly large planet compared to most habitable planets, instead of using their planet buster directly, they use it to push the moon out of orbit and into Earth, achieving the same effect with less energy expenditure.
• In Despicable Me, the villain tries to steal the Moon by using a prototype shrink ray to make it pocket-sized. It turns out that the shrinking is not permanent and the shrunken Moon is now on Earth...
  • While they did manage to push the moon back in space in time, it is implied that the new orbit is much closer to Earth and may not be stable.
• In a Dexter's Laboratory episode, Dexter launched a tractor rocket that moves the moon so he will gain strength from the rays of Saturn. But suddenly, the rocket gets broken so the moon will come crashing down into Earth, wreaking havoc by rolling across the city and then his laboratory.
• In Megas XLR Gorrath tried to ram the Moon into Earth by strapping a giant engine to it. Coop instead flip the engine so its tail end pointed down, blasting a huge crater into it. It permanently altered weather patterns on Earth.
• PJ Masks: In "Owlette's Luna Trouble", Romeo steals Luna Girls' magnet and uses it to try and make the moon crash on the PJ masks' HQ. In "Gekko's Special Rock", Luna Girl likewise tried to pull the moon to earth, though not with the intention to destroy something.
• In Rick and Morty, the action movie parody Two Brothers has an escalating series of disasters, ending with the moon crashing into the Earth.
• In an Itchy & Scratchy show in The Simpsons, Itchy takes Scratchy's tongue and ties it to a rocket. The rocket makes several circles to the moon, ties the tongue around it, and begins to fall. When Scratchy realizes that the moon is falling over him, he tries to hide inside a closet.
• In The Tick, evil boy-genius Charles randomly gets the idea to smash the Moon into the Earth using a tractor beam, simply to demonstrate how smart and/or evil he is. Either it doesn't occur to him that he will still be on the Earth when the Moon smashes it, or he simply doesn't care, because it's the most evil thing he can think of.
• Inverted in Titan A.E..: When the Drej blow up Earth, a piece of it shatters the Moon.
• Season 2 of Transformers: Cyberverse begins right in the middle of a Decepticon scheme to crash the Moon into the Earth. They plan to destroy the Earth and sift around what remains for the Allspark.

Real Life

• It has been proposed that the impact of another planetary body with the Earth, that is believed to have formed the Moon, actually created two moons, that not much later (in astronomical terms) collided and merged.
• Some astronomers have suggested that in the very far future, when the Sun becomes a red giant and it's about to engulf Earth, the interaction between the Moon and the Sun's distended atmosphere will cause it to spiral inwards until the Moon reaches the Roche limit, breaking up apart and forming a short-lived Saturn-like ring system around Earth.

Planets

Anime and Manga

• Avenger deals with a dying colony on Mars that's about to be crashed into by one of the moons.
• DieBuster inverts this: the human race plans to deal with an extremely powerful (and extremely large) Space Monster by dropping Earth onto it. Fortunately, Nono shows up and stop this plan before dealing with the Space Monster herself.
  • In the episode before they Lal'c earned the nickname "She Who Moves the Stars" by using her powers to throw the core of a (fictional) gas giant at the same Space Monster. The plan using the Earth was actually inspired this stunt, except that time they decided to up the ante by accelerating the Earth up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
• Pecola: It's believed that a planet is headed towards Earth in "Constellation Pecola" after Dr. Hornbender sees it has been knocked out of orbit. That's only because Pecola rearranged the stars on his rendering of the solar system to look like his face, though.

Asian Animation

• Episode 14 of Happy Heroes is about Smart S. having a battery installed in him that enhances his Magnetism Manipulation abilities. The episode's climax has the magnet become so overpowered that it nearly causes nearby Planet Gray to fly into Planet Xing. Planet Gray native Big M. nevertheless gets excited since this might be his chance to finally return to his home planet.

Audio Drama

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who War Doctor story The Heart of the Battle, a faction of Time Lords are negotiating a peace treaty with the Daleks, in which the Daleks maintain control of a region of null-time containing a thousand worlds, which they can do with as they wish. And, to the shock of the lead negotiator and almost nobody else, what they wish is to replace all the worlds' cores with warp engines and fire them straight at Gallifrey.

Comic Books

• The Marvel Universe massive crossover The Infinity Gauntlet takes this one step further: The Celestials throw planets at Thanos. Thanos himself later defeats an enemy by smashing two planets together in his face, along with a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs.
• In The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman), this is the end result of an Incursion if nothing is done: both Earths collide and are destroyed, which also obliterates both universes as well.

Comic Strips

• "Spaceman Spiff"^note Read as "Calvin daydreaming" did it to solve a math problem for Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes. It Makes Sense in Context.

Fan Works

• In Shinji and Warhammer40k Kaworu slams Pluto and Charon into the moon to attack Lilith.

Films — Animation

• In Green Lantern: First Flight, Hal takes a page from Lensman below, crushing the Yellow Lantern Battery between two massive moons of some gas giant.
• The follow-up movie, Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, has the Lanterns defeat their planet-sized antimatter enemy by hitting him with a planet, both of which are then crashed into the nearby star.

Films — Live-Action

• Dr. Nazo's plot in Golden Bat is to redirect the rogue planet Icarus to smash into the Earth. The heroes fortunately destroy it in time with their Super Destruction Cannon.
• Lars Von Trier's Melancholia revolves around the planet of the title crashing into Earth, obliterating all life in the universe.
• When Worlds Collide has the Earth getting run over by a brown dwarf or rouge giant planet. Fortunately and in defiance of all physics, it also brings in with it a Earth-sized planet that ends up in a habitable orbit around the Sun out of the plane of the debris. A Lottery of Doom follows for the limited spots on spaceships to escape Earth for the new planet. Based on the novels by Wylie and Balmer.

Literature

• The Dwellers, from the Iain M. Banks novel The Algebraist, crank this up: fuck with them and one day, though it may come far, far, far in the future, and they will throw a planet at your homeworld. Surrounded by moons, which are in turn surrounded by thousands of asteroids, which are in turn surrounded by millions of smaller chunks of rock. And the whole horrific mess is traveling at a sizable fraction of light-speed...
• Mixed planet/moon example in the climax of All These Worlds. What's the best way of dealing with a Swarm of Alien Locusts scouring nearby star systems to build a Dyson Sphere? Take a small planet and a large moon, accelerate them to very close to the speed of light and slam them into the local star (one from the "north" pole and one from the "south") and let the resulting nova sterilise the system.
• Lensman probably takes this to its most ridiculous extremes when they variously squash a planet between two planets (the "Nutcracker"), colony-drop on a planet and its sun with two planets moving faster than the speed of light, drop a planet-sized load of antimatter^note referred to as a "negasphere" because the term "antimatter" wasn't in use in the 1940s on a planet, and used planets and planet-sized buckets of antimatter as anti-missile-missiles. There's a reason we call it the Lensman Arms Race.
• Unique variant: In The Shattered World, a fragment of a planet collides with a bigger, inhabited chunk of the same planet, causing massive death and destruction. This is possible because magicians intervened when their world was broken to bits a thousand years ago, and equipped the pieces of world with Artificial Gravity and a shared atmosphere. Unfortunately, the spells that keep the fragments safely confined in their orbits are wearing out, so this isn't the last Colony Drop in the offing. Also, a Colony Drop strike by another planet, not the Necromancer, is what really shattered the world.
• In Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Sunstorm, it's discovered that the reason the Sun is going berserk (soon to send out a 24-hour pulse of energy that will destroy life on Earth) is that thousands of years ago vastly powerful and paranoid aliens saw sentient life had developed on Earth, figured we'd eventually be a threat, and flung a Jupiter-sized planet into the Sun. The idea was that this caused instability in the Sun that would (thousands of years later) cause it to lash out and cook us. However, one does wonder why they didn't simply fling the gas giant at the Earth, thus saving time and solving the problem directly (and preventing the primitive humans from doing anything about it, unlike how things turned out).
• "When Worlds Collide" and ''After Worlds Collide", by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, Earth develops extra-solar colonies, and they eventually go to war. By throwing planets at each other. The one headed for Earth is barely diverted but causes the Sun to become a red giant star.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The End of Time", the Master opens a link to Gallifrey, causing it to materialise directly beside Earth. The two planets' gravity starts pulling them together.
• Loki: In "Lamentis", Loki and Sylvie find themselves stranded on Lamentis-1, a moon colony that is about to be obliterated by a collision with the planet that it orbits.
• Used rather unexpectedly in the series finale of Smallville, with Apokolips being summoned next to Earth, nearly colliding with it. It is stopped by Clark/Superman pushing it away with his bare hands.
• A two-part story in Ultraman Leo saw the Land of Light, the home planet of the Ultras themselves, face catastrophic collision with Earth when an alien named Babalou steals the Ultra Key, the artifact that keeps the Land of Light in orbit, when disguised as Leo's brother Astra in order to start a civil war amongst the Ultra heroes.

Roleplay

• Destroy the Godmodder: One of the players performed a special attack that lined up every planet in the solar system and slammed them all into Minecraft. The Battlefield was leveled.

Toys

• BIONICLE: Makuta finds himself, while controlling Mata Nui's original body, on the receiving end when Aqua Magna returns the favor.

Video Games

• The Tera Star spell in Disgaea 4 drops most of the solar system on the target.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, attacking Sheogorath causes him to teleport you high above the Shivering Isles, letting gravity do the rest. Some fans have jokingly theorized that when he does this, you actually remain stationary and Sheogorath hurls the planet at you. (Supporting this theory is the fact that he has used celestial bodies as weapons in the past, as mentioned above under "Moons".)
• Final Fantasy:
  • Happens in Final Fantasy XIII's ending cinematic, wherein the floating planetoid of Cocoon is sent crashing down towards the lowerworld of Pulse after the god-like machines, the fal'Cie are defeated with the death of their leader, Orphan.
  • Inevitably, this becomes part of the main plot for Final Fantasy XIII-2. Three quarters through the game, we learn that Caius Ballad is responsible for causing the potential world-ending paradoxes that ultimately end in Cocoon's collision with Gran Pulse. He doesn't seem to mind living in a cold, lifeless, crapsack of a future, so long as he saves Yeul from falling victim to her own visions. Meanwhile, Noel, living in the same dull, lifeless future, travels back in time and works with Serah to resolve these paradoxes. Although the fall of Cocoon still manages to happen anyway, they are able to give Hope enough time to construct a new Cocoon. Caius STILL tries to turn the launch into a disaster.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, the final boss of the Endwalker expansion (and the original story), the Endsinger, does this twice, creating and dropping planets on your head. the first time, you need to use a Tank Level 3 Limit Break to survive. The second time, the Scions bail you out with The Power of Friendship, which sends the Endsinger into a Villainous Breakdown.
• The point of The Guardian Legend is to prevent this from happening to Earth. However, the planet that's zooming toward it is alive and filled with hostile life forms. Should the planets collide and somehow not destroy all life on Earth, the survivors would have to deal with all kinds of freaky Mechanical Lifeforms and organic multi-legged things After the End. Not fun at all.
• At the end of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Kirby separates Elfilin from his "other half", Fecto Elfilis, after the Final Boss battle. Realizing that their body is starting to melt, Elfilis attempts to use the last of their power to create a huge dimensional rift and hurl Kirby's homeworld of Planet Popstar through it (for bonus points, the boss theme is titled "Two Planets Approach The Roche Limit", referring to how close a celestial body can be to another before tidal forces overcome its gravity and tear it to shreds). They don't get the chance.
• In Makai Kingdom, mere moments after Zetta finishes restoring his netherworld after accidentally incinerating it, Salome immediately crashes her own world into his.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story pulls this one, as the planet of Expel is destroyed by crashing into Energy Nede, a planet made out of Pure Energy and populated by one of the most ancient and knowledgeable races in the series' existence. Makes sense that their artificial planet would be powerful enough to vaporize anything else it hit. They never intended to hit anything anyway, but that's what bad guys are for...
• This was the Great Fall disaster that the heroes of Tales of Eternia are trying to avert.

Webcomics

• During the [S] GAME OVER animation in Homestuck, one antagonist uses her powers to telekinetically throw planets at another antagonist. Who responds in kind by using her own powers to move another planet in the way of an incoming shot, blocking it. While no character dies on-screen as a direct result of planets getting launched into each other, when all is said and done a grand total of six planets have been involved in devastating collisions.
• Schlock Mercenary: Done unintentionally here where a group of characters destroy a gas giant colony planet by crashing it into another planet, along with at least one other planet that got caught in the ensuing catastrophe and screwed up the ecosystem of the one planet in the system that actually had one.
  Ennesby: They crashed a gas giant.
  Tagon: You mean they crashed into a gas giant?
  Ennesby: They did that, too. They crashed one gas giant into another.

Web Original

• "Humanity, united, thinks this should be a big enough rock."◊
• SCP Foundation: SCP-4100 is planet Earth millennia in the future. The Stellar Congressional Protectorate, a large galactic power implied to have been founded by the Foundation, has classified it as desolate and without interest beyond the home planet of the extinct human race. That is, until a massive, red entity called the Destroyer in human legends (and implied to be the Scarlet King) shows up in the system and attacks the planet. Turns out the Foundation left a little gift for their old enemy.
  We can't contain you. But we can destroy you. We've waited for millennia to say this:
  Our planet has FTL. And I don't mean our ships.

Western Animation

• In an episode of The 7D, Hildy Gloom has her eye on the largest diamond in the universe, the size of a small planet. She and her husband Grim try casting tractor beam spells to obtain it. At the end of the episode, it crushes their house.
• In Carol and the End of the World, Earth is doomed to be destroyed by an incoming planet in mere months. Knowing death is inevitable, everybody on the planet has whipped out their bucket lists and indulged in their most shameless, fearless whims.
• In the Invader Zim episode "Battle of the Planets", Zim discovers that Mars is actually a planet-sized spaceship and takes control of it, planning to roll it around Earth and squish all its inhabitants.
  Zim: People of Earth, prepare to taste the mighty foot of my planet!
• A close call with a "runaway planet hurtling between the Earth and the Moon" kicked off the collapse of civilization in the backstory to Thundarr the Barbarian. Neither Earth nor the Moon was struck, but the Moon cracked in half, while Earth suffered massive tsunami, quakes, etc.
• In The Transformers, Galavatron's plan in the series finale involved crashing Cybertron directly into earth.

Real Life

• One hypothesis about the Moon's formation is that it was produced by the ejecta thrown out from Earth as the result of a collision with a roughly Mars-sized body. This hypothesis has enough evidence behind it that the hypothetical impacting body has a name, "Theia".
• Similar early collisions may have knocked Uranus's axis to its present 98-degree tilt and blown off much of Mercury's original crust and mantle (leaving a small, dense remnant that is mostly the original planet's core).
• Similarly Venus spins the wrong way which means it likely got knocked upside down at some point in the past. It's possible this happened the moment the planet was formed when one planetoid hit another at just the right angle.

Stars

Anime and Manga

• Magical Project S: In the final arc, Romio attempts to send the Earth on a collision course with the sun.

Comic Books

• When Deadpool temporarily become a Herald of Galactus, he created a star out of energy and tried to drop it on a planet to kill the Silver Surfer. Surfer caught it and threw it back at him.

Fan Works

• Aurora (PonyholicsAnonymous): At the story's climax, the Princesses decide to destroy the evacuated Canterlot in order to kill Dawnbringer and his army of monsters, which they accomplish by having Luna call down dozens of stars (which in this setting are "only" a few hundred feet in diameter each) like missiles in order to obliterate the city.
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: Princess Luna can call down stars like orbital missiles (stars in this setting are a lot smaller than in Real Life) as a counterpart to Corona's ability to invoke solar flares to roast things she doesn't like.
• Sharing the Night:
  • When Luna fell, became Nightmare Moon and was banished from the world, the night sky became destabilized and several stars fell to earth, eventually gathering together to become the star beasts.
  • Much, much earlier than that, a far more disastrous version of this occurred when the two moons that existed at that time crashed into and destroyed each other, scouring the world with a hail of burning rocks that lasted for years, wiping out the ancient world's civilizations; the bits of wreckage that remained in the sky became the first stars.

Films — Live-Action

• The film of When Worlds Collide, if it was a passing star that ran into Earth rather than a planet. The filmmakers could not seem to make up their minds, calling Bronson Alpha / Bellus a star in the script but labeling it a planet on promotional posters and depicting it as being comparable in size to Earth.

Literature

• Archchancellor Ridcully of Discworld reminisces about the time a star crash-landed near his family's estate in one of the Science of Discworld books. Of course, in his Verse, stars are balls of flaming rock only a few feet across, so it wasn't a particularly-destructive example.
• The Xeelee Sequence features the extreme colony drop option where a Neutron Star is accelerated to high fractional C and smashed into a Cosmic String.
  • Other examples ramp up the magnitude, including accelerating entire galaxies to use as projectiles.

Tabletop Games

• In Magic: The Gathering several Red spells are related to throwing stars at your opponents, though in some cases it's ambiguous if these are meant to be actual stars or falling stars.

Video Games

• Asura's Wrath: Chakravartin's Basic projectiles in the first phase of the fight with him are both Planets and Stars, and even includes a Red Giant in his arsenal.
• In SaGa Frontier 2, The Egg's final form has a skill called Xenocide, where he'll throw the fucking sun at you! He'll use this skill every other round.
• Sonic Forces: Once the Phantom Ruby reached its full power, Dr. Eggman initiated his plan to eradicate the Resistance: have Infinite drop an artificial sun onto them.

Visual Novels

• Dropping stars at his opponents is part of Mercurius' standard arsenal during the final battle in Dies Irae. They count among some of his less outlandish projectiles, as he can also toss singularities, galaxies and even the frickin Great Attractor at his foes.

Western Animation

• Inverted in The Transformers, during the episode "The Revenge of Bruticus" when Onslaught attempts to fling the Earth into the Sun. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

Terrestrial objects

Anime and Manga

• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Radiosonde Castle was intended to be used in one of these to kill Touma and destroy Academy City.
  • And Touma crashed the Star of Bethlehem into the Archangel Gabriel.
• In Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Gamma 2 does this with himself, using up all of his energy for a Suicide Attack on Cell Max and dive-bombing him from orbit. It doesn't finish him off, but weakens him enough for Gohan to deliver the killing blow.
• In Fairy Tail, King Faust plans to use the lacrima of the Fairy Tail guild as a magical bomb on Extalia.
• Heaven's Lost Property, with flu medicine. We wish we were kidding.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is the tactic of Sahaquiel, the massive eighth/tenth angel, dropping itself from the Earth's orbit to impact Tokyo-3.
• One Piece:
  • Vander Decken, the infamous pirate captain with the powers of the Mato Mato (target target) Fruit decides to kill the Mermaid Princess (who rejected him) by throwing a giant ark at her. It should be noted that this is an ark nearly the size of an entire island.
  • The villain of the tenth movie, Shiki, can do this with battleships or entire islands because he has a power that can make anything float.
  • Kaido's Evil Plan involves moving his private skull fortress, Onigashima, into the sky with his cloud-generating powers, flying it over the capital of Wano, and then dropping it onto the city (inevitably killing the thousands upon thousands of people gathered there for an annual festival). This turns Luffy's battle with him into a Race Against the Clock, as he has to defeat Kaido before it gets there.
• In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, the Seed of Magic transforms the defeated Lurguat into a spherical mass of flesh large enough to flatten a city as large as Akarina. It takes the Maximum Kizuna Kaiser pushing it into space to avert this disaster.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Yliaster's plan to destroy Neo Domino City and erase Momentum from history appears to involve dropping the Ark Cradle, a floating fortress made from the ruins of the future Neo Domino City, on it.
• In Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i, Radium Lavans attempts to drop a space elevator on the earth by destroying the large mass at the top of it that is acting as an anchor. Dolores prevents it by compressing the space between the earth and the moon to increase the moon's gravitational pull on the space elevator until enough mass can be added to keep it stable.

Comic Books

• In a comic series called Meridian, a large number of the population lives on floating islands while the ground (At least most of it) is too heavily polluted. Naturally, the threat of a city-state falling down onto the ground is present.
• In later years, the Marvel version of Asgard, a mystical city-state, has hovered over the American Midwest. During the Siege story arc, Asgard fell to the ground.
• Sonic the Comic:
  • Done by Knuckles, who punches a fault line near the Carnival Night Zone. Since the Carnival Night Zone was built on the edge of the Floating Island, Knuckles completely smashed off that portion of the Floating Island, removing the Carnival Night Zone from the island and sending it falling to Mobius, slightly cushioned by some remaining power of the Master Emerald. The crash-landing of the ruined Carnival Night Zone was a shock to one Emerald Hill boy who had just before wished that the Carnival Night Zone was closer then it crashes in front of him.
  • In the Sonic Adventure arc, in order to stop Chaos from absorbing the Chaos Emeralds, Knuckles hesitantly ejects them from the island, which without any power then crashes down into the sea.
• In an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man in the '90s, Spidey and the original X-Men teamed-up against Professor Power who was in control of a floating castle. They defeat him and his Mooks but the castle is sent plummeting toward New York. Obviously, they stop it just in time.

Fan Works

• Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: Near the end of Chapter 18, a recently-resurrected Darth Nihilus uses the Force to telekinetically pull General Ironwood's Cool Airship down from the sky and crash it into the Vytal Festival. The resulting explosion obliterates the Vytal Festival's fairgrounds, destroys most of Beacon Academy, and knocks most of the heroes unconscious while killing dozens of students and Atlas soldiers.
• The Moonstone Cup: One of the possible futures that Twilight sees after Draining the huge mass of clouds she's standing on is the corpse of Najstariot the dragon queen, who in her true form is about the size of a city, falling on top of Canterlot and utterly annihilating it.

Films — Animation

• Astro Boy: In the 2009 movie adaptation, the power goes out in the floating city during the climactic fight, which causes it to start falling. Astro slows down the fall enough to avoid a catastrophe.
• The LEGO Movie: Lord Business and Bad Cop attack Cloudcuckooland with their aircraft (a Fluffy Cloud Heaven in this world), causing it to fall into the ocean. Only Emmet, his team, and Captain Metalbeard make it out — all of the other inhabitants are arrested or presumably perished in the waters below, as Bad Cop finds no signs of life after scouring the area.
• In The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, the Big Bad levitates Dr. Venture's skyscraper into space and he has to find a way to bring it down safely so it doesn't destroy Manhattan or get blown up by the OSI with him in it to prevent it. In the end he manages to safely bring it down where his old house was with a Humongous Mecha and the help of the OSI and the Monarch.

Films — Live Action

• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, when denied the access to nuclear codes, Ultron decides to "restart" the world by lifting a whole city into the atmosphere via a connected set of jet engines and drop it at a suitable altitude in a crude replication of the K-T Extinction Event.
• The school in Sky High (2005) has its floatation device disabled by Royal Pain. Will just barely manages to slow down the school long enough for his friends to fix the device and stop it from crushing a neighborhood.

Literature

• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Greystone Fortress is a tremendous mountain, that has been artificially expanded to stretch from ground level all the way to the top of the fourth stratum. The golgari blast a chunk of it free, the size of several cities, in an attempt to squash Anthony and his fleet.
• In the Dragaera novels, every floating castle in the Dragaeran Empire fell out of the sky when sorcery stopped working at the beginning of the Interregnum.
• In Gulliver's Travels, the Laputan emperor's ultimate punishment against wayward earthbound cities was to land his floating island on them. However, this punishment is more of a controlled descent than a drop, or otherwise Laputa would be badly damaged. The Laputan emperor explains this as the love of his people being so great, he wishes to permit them every chance of survival.

Live-Action TV

• In My Hero (2000) 6x08, "Believe", Thermoman accidentally drops a village in Bavaria on another village, causing them to both catch fire and set alight to a third one. However, no-one actually gets hurt as Thermoman manages to rescue them all from his blunder, though they weren't overly grateful about it.
• Power Rangers RPM: To finally defeat Venjix, the Rangers blow up the Corinth control tower and drop it on Venjix's head. The Stinger suggests he's Not Quite Dead however...but it would take 10 years for this to become relevant.

Music Videos

• The Gorillaz' floating windmill ends up being shot down by pirates in the video for "El Manana".

Toys

• BIONICLE: when Mata Nui crashes onto Aqua Magna thanks to Makuta.

Video Games

• In the Arc the Lad series, the Sky Castle rises and drops no less than 3 times. The first time causing The End of the World as We Know It, subsequent falls are nowhere near as destructive because the plot says so.
• Breath of Fire II has an unusual heroic example as part of the Golden Ending, requiring the party to have the airship: instead of the player character sacrificing himself to seal the gate to the underworld, dropping the airship on it and burying it under several thousand tons of solid rock works just as well.
• In the standard ending of Cave Story, the entire floating island crashes to the ground after defeating the final boss. In the Good Ending, defeating the Perfect Run Final Boss will save the island from falling.
• The destruction of Zeal in Chrono Trigger results in the floating kingdom falling from the sky. Between Lavos generally causing havoc and chunks of islands falling from near-orbit, the world is destroyed and flooded. It gets better, though. In fact, it's implied that the disaster is what ends the Ice Age, in the same way that Lavos's arrival started it... which qualifies for this trope as well.
• Final Fantasy VII: In the double-decker city Midgar, one of the villains manages to drop a large section of the affluent layer of the city above onto the slums below, killing thousands of people.
• In the grand finale of Final Fantasy XII, Sky Fortress Bahamut is fatally damaged by the Undying's unrelenting assaults on it during the Final Battle. The miles-and-miles-tall Floating Tower falls from the sky in a collision course with Rabanastre, to everyone's horror. Although the lowest bits crash into the city's Paling, it's obvious that this shield won't hold, and last-ditch, desperate actions are taken to ensure the city's survival, from suicidally ramming it away with a capital ship, to staying behind to rig emergency power to its engines.
• In Legend of Legaia, after you defeat Zora and reach the Mist Generator in the Floating Castle, Songi destroys said Generator, causing the castle to tumble toward the Earth. In an unusual twist on this trope, Songi wants to use said Colony Drop to kill the people in the castle, not necessarily anyone on the ground.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Link wishes to the Triforce to destroy the Imprisoned for good. It grants the wish by causing the statue of the Goddess in Skyloft to break off and fall, landing directly on the sealing pit just as the Imprisoned is breaking out of its seal, squishing it.
• In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals Doom Fortress was used to attempt to destroy Parcelyte as a last-ditch effort by Daos.
• In Septerra Core, the nation of Ankara uses this method to destroy its Shell 5 rival Janam, slamming the continent into the base of Shell 3.
• As mentioned above under Artificial Space Stuff, in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Angel Island's levitation is powered by the Master Emerald, which means Dr. Eggman stealing it to power the Death Egg causes Angel Island to start falling. Unusually, no real damage happens with this, as Angel Island is always over the open ocean, it has fallen and risen many times in the past, and the things on the island are designed to withstand the impact. The danger is what happens afterward, as the Death Egg is capable of destroying the planet and Sonic cannot let that happen.
• Angel Island is also shown falling into the ocean in Sonic Adventure after the Master Emerald is shattered, freeing Chaos. Again, the island itself survives unscathed, but this time the impact is shown to produce a massive, circular tidal wave, and Angel Island itself (at least, in-game) is shown to be much closer to land...
• Bombing planets with mass driver packets is a possible tactic in Stars! (1995), albeit one that really only works in small universes because by the time you can fling large packets, your opponents will likely have the technology necessary to catch them.
• RyuKohOh and it's derivatives in the Super Robot Wars Alpha games typically have an attack that warps a small mountain directly above the enemy's head.
• It's an odd example, as the city starts on the surface and then falls through the crust and into the planet's poisonous-gas-filled yet oddly populated core, but this is pretty much what happens to Akzeriuth in Tales of the Abyss.
• The Solarian tethered sky colony Etrenank in Xenogears smashes into the surface and erupts into a nuclear fireball after Id shoots it down For the Evulz. Its counterpart and rival Shevat suffers a similar fate off-screen, but remains somewhat intact on the surface.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: A pissed-off Sarda teleports Black Mage away "to Hurt". BM ends up in the middle of the ocean, next to a sign reading "Welcome to Hurt, Australia". As he's wondering what an "Australia" is, the reader's view is pulled back so you can see the Australia-shaped shadow looming around him.

Web Original

• The Neopets story arc 'The Faeries' Ruin' had an epic Wham Episode which revealed that not only was Xandra the villain, she just crashed Faerieland — that is, a giant floating city-state- into Neopia.◊
• In Worm a member of the Thanda, a group of Indian supervillains, uses his teleportation powers to shift skyscrapers or small landmasses into orbit so that they fall on his targets.

Western Animation

• Invader Zim: In "The Wettening", Zim levels the city with a meteor-sized water balloon dropped from orbit in response to Dib hitting him with one.
• My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "Flight to Cloud Castle, Part 2", once the spell that created the flying castle's magic is broken, it promptly falls out of the sky — which is something of a problem for the characters, as they're all inside it when this happens.
• We Bare Bears: In "Braces", Panda, gone power mad thanks to his new electrokinetic powers gotten from his braces, attempts to destroy San Francisco using the bears' cave and every Smartphone in San Francisco to create a makeshift meteor.

Real Life

• While not exactly a floating colony, earthquakes can cause enough ground disturbance to cause landslides, which if near a body of water, may cause a megatsunami. Such is the case with the 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami, which caused waves over 1700 feet tall.

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