Hyperspeed Ambush

Surprise!

Ghost: Wait wait wait, what happened to my jamming fields? Rourke, what have you done?
Rourke: [laughs] Sascha, it's time!
Ghost: Time for what?
[short beat, a cyno lights up]
Admiral Eisen: Jump!
Rourke: It's Hot Drop O'Clooooock!
[Caldari superheavy fleet warps in]

— Clear Skies 3

In effect, the inverse of Hyperspeed Escape. Instead of using hyperspeed to escape a bad situation, you use it to cause a bad situation by jumping into the immediate vicinity of your target to take them by surprise. Alternately, you can just lie in wait where you know the enemy will exit hyperspace, and pounce on him before he has time to react. Immediately departing the area as soon as the attack is concluded is fairly common for the jumping-in-to-attack variant, but optional for the defensive lying-in-wait variant.

Unorthodox use of Faster Than Light travel in combat is fairly common in military science fiction literature, particularly justified in a setting where Hyperspace Is a Scary Place and therefore most people in the universe are unwilling to push the possible uses of FTL to the limits. For example, a ship might use tactical hyperspace jumps to jump into and out of hyperspace over relatively short distances and short periods of time to make themselves harder to hit or otherwise throw off the enemy, when conventional wisdom would suggest that such a tactic is far too risky to be possible, usually due to the risk of a ship falling afoul of a Tele-Frag with a planet or other celestial body. After all, traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops.

The actual applicability of this trope is limited to settings or situations where at least one of the parties involved cannot detect other ships that are traveling FTL, either because they are limited to light-speed sensors, or because their sensors cannot penetrate into whatever other dimension is used for FTL.

Contrast with Hyperspeed Escape. Not to be confused with Tele-Frag, although that can be a very real risk of this strategy. If you combine it with Hyperspeed Escape, you get a form of Hit-and-Run Tactics. If you do it many times in repetition, you are using Teleport Spam.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Macross franchise:
  • In Macross 7, veteran fighter pilot, now Battle 7 captain Maximilian Jenius, orders the Macross Cannon be fired at empty space. When questioned, he calls it "The intuition of a genius." As the beam shoots forward, the enemy fleet drops out of Fold space directly in its path.
  • Conversely, Macross Frontier: The Macross Quarter skewers an enemy ship with its main gun as it comes out of Fold Space narrowly rescuing Battle Frontier from destruction.
    • In The Movie, The Wings of Goodbye, the entire New UN Spacy fleet Folds directly into the middle of the Final Battle to save the Frontier fleet from the planetary swarm of Vajra.
• A massively scaled-down variation in Dragon Ball Z: during his bout with Cell in the aptly-named Cell Games, Goku charges up a Kamehameha from high up in the sky to fire down at his green foe—much to the panic of his friends and allies and to Cell's delight, as such a blast would destroy the Earth as well. But at the very last second, Goku uses the Instant Transmission technique to instantly teleport right under Cell, and unleashes the attack upwards at him before he has a chance to blink, vaporizing his entire upper half.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: Nemesis, the Scimitar pulls this on the Enterprise by following under cloak, waiting until the Enterprise enters a nebula which will block outbound communications, then shooting until the Enterprise drops to impulse.
  • Star Trek (2009): We get to see the Enterprise pull one of these in the film's climax, for a Gunship Rescue. Inverted earlier in the movie, where the fleet comes out of warp and unexpectedly encounters the Narada, and they're quickly destroyed. The Enterprise only survives because they were Late to the Tragedy.
  • In the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Dreaded Dreadnought USS Vengeance is designed to overtake and gun down its quarry at warp, something most other ships can't do. The Enterprise ends up getting run down by the behemoth starship and gets torn up pretty bad by it and is sent spinning out of the warp corridor like a boxer reeling from a sucker punch. It helps that ships don't have their shields up at warp in this era, and Armor Is Useless.
• Star Wars:
  • The Empire Strikes Back: Inverted. The Imperial Fleet loses the element of surprise when Admiral Ozzel has the fleet jump out of hyperspace too close to the Rebel base on Hoth, causing them to be detected immediately rather than being able to sneak up on the Rebels. Lord Vader is not very happy with Ozzel and Captain Piett finds himself an Admiral before Ozzel's body even hits the floor.
  • Return of the Jedi, the Rebel Fleet attempt to pull one off when they attack the Death Star II, only to find that the Empire is running the stationary variant with an unexpected and much larger Imperial fleet lying in wait.
    Admiral Ackbar: It's a trap!
  • In The Force Awakens, Han bypasses the planetary shields of the Starkiller base by dropping out of hyperspace a kilometer or so from the surface.
  • Rogue One features two during the Battle of Scarif. The first one is the Rebels launching the attack as pictured above. The second comes near the end of the battle — the Rebel fleet has successfully retrieved the Death Star plans and is about to retreat... and then, while the Death Star itself is appearing over the horizon, the Star Destroyer Devastator jumps in right on top of them. The first few ships actually crash into the Devastator as they're winding up to jump into lightspeed, being smashed like bugs on a windshield without scratching it.
• The lying-in-wait variant happens at the end of the Wing Commander movie. Thanks to the Tiger's Claw getting word to Earth about the imminent Kilrathi attack, the ensing "battle" amounts to shooting fish in a barrel as the Kilrathi exit the jump point one at a time.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation. The Foundation space fleet is facing a numerically superior Kalganian fleet. They send a squadron into hyperspace, with orders to return in a specific place at a specific time. They then maneuver the Kalganian fleet so the returning squadron will appear and attack them from behind with complete surprise, winning the battle.
• This happens twice during In Pursuit of Bark's Finest. First at the start of the book when Captain Fuller surprises a defenseless freighter. Then later when a fleet is dropped on his location that massively outnumbers and outguns him.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe had "interdiction fields," artificial gravity wells which would prevent anything inside from jumping into hyperspace, or would forcibly pull ships that crossed their path out of hyperspace. These fields could be generated by specialized ships of sufficient size, and were used for a variety of tactics, usually preventing a Hyperspeed Escape.
  • Used by Grand Admiral Thrawn in Timothy Zahn's The Thrawn Trilogy, precisely placing interdiction ships to pull his own ships out of hyperspace at a specific point. It worked so well that other commanders started using the tactic whenever possible, including Admiral Ackbar.
  • At another point in this series, Han Solo uses a "hyperspace microjump" to position the Millennium Falcon exactly where it needed to be against an enemy force. This particular tactic is possible but rare in-universe, as many people point out that a micro-jump towards an enemy is so insanely risky that only a Corellian with Plot Armor would attempt it.
  • The first variant happens repeatedly in the X-Wing Series.
• A strategy that comes up from time to time in Honor Harrington, though mostly only when the characters are near a Wormhole Terminus. Since Wormhole Terminii located near populated systems tend to be extensively surveyed and plotted, any ambush through them requires overwhelming force, as one can usually find fleets of warships, arrays of massive space fortresses, and remotely-launched missile pods waiting for any unwelcome visitors in hopes of making their visit a short and spectacular one. There is also "moustrapping" where a fleet about to be engaged (or in some cases already engaged) in battle will send a single ship into hyper to tell the reinforcements hanging out there that they are needed. Naturally, this does require a good bit of prior preparation.
  • One notable example is the Royal Manticoran Navy's successful assault on the Havenite forces at Trevor's Star. They first launched a conventional attack with a fleet dropping in from hyperspace, and once that battle had enough time to develop fully, another fleet jumped in directly from the Manticoran system via the wormhole that connected the two star systems to strike the Havenite forces from behind.
    • The main problem is that every transit destabilizes the Wormholes for a time, based on the transferred mass. With one ship, there is a very short cycle until the next one comes through. Sending the maximum mass in one transit (for a Manticorian Terminii about thirty Superdreadnoughts) will make further use impossible for hours. Which means no retreat if something goes wrong and makes tactics as used above very risky. And sending your ships in one after another would just give the other side a chance for some target practice.
  • The Second Battle of Basilisk features a failed one and a successful one. The Havenite ships assigned to attack the Basilisk System's Wormhole Terminus overshoot their target by millions of kilometers due to a very small mathematical error. Having lost the element of surprise, the Havenites need over an hour to reach their target. Meanwhile, Admiral White Haven has brought Eighth Fleet from Trevor's Star via a double Wormhole jump (Trevor's Star to Manticore, then Manticore to Basilisk) with their stealth systems on. When the Havenite ships come into range, the Grayson pod-laying superdreadnoughts of Eight Fleet introduce them to a salvo of 19,000 missiles.
• Gordon R. Dickson's novel Dorsai!, Donal Graeme stages a daring raid against an enemy planet. He uses multiple swift hyperspace jumps to simulate a huge armada attacking his enemy, even though it drives him and his crew to the edge of collapse, with each jump leaving them more and more in pain and disorientation.
• In David Drake's RCN series Daniel Leary, frequently uses FTL in unexpected ways to take enemies by surprise.
• Elizabeth Moon:
  • While short-range hyperjumps are possible in the Vatta's War universe, it is a technique generally limited only to some of the better equipped space navies; most civilian and commercial-grade equipment just isn't designed for that sort of thing. That said, limitations in sensors and communication (limited to light-speed within a star-system, given that the FTL communications arrays are space stations unto themselves) preclude this strategy from being used. Until someone develops a FTL communications rig that can easily fit aboard a starship.
  • It's a standard battle tactic in the Familias Regnant series, standard enough to provoke in-universe comments on various combatants' proficiency.
• A key battle in The History of the Galaxy series during the First Galactic War was supposed to be an ambush by the Colonial Fleet against the Earth Alliance armada. The real goal was to test its new Wave-Motion Gun capable of obliterating small planetoids with a single blast of Anti Matter. The colonists baited the Alliance by gathering its entire ragtag fleet at a key Hyperspace Lanes node. The Alliance sends ships after it. The plan: surround the intended Alliance "surface" point and force the enemy close to the target planetoid, at which point it would be destroyed with the Anti Matter cannon with the resulting explosion taking the Alliance armada with it. Unfortunately, the Alliance has decided to double-up (literally) and brought two armadas under AI control. The AIs use a new tactic of "combat surfacing" to send probes before emerging from hypersphere. They locate the Colonial ships and have their own ships emerge between them. Seeing that there's no other choice, the admiral aboard the Wave-Motion Gun station orders the weapon to fire anyway. The annihilation of the planetoid takes out the enemy armadas but also leaves the Free Colonies with a total of 8 combat-capable ships, while the Alliance can quickly get together another fleet.
• Starship Troopers: The Terran Federation try to jump an entire fleet into orbit over Klendathu, in order to best exploit the element of surprise. Unfortunately, slight miscalculations cause many of the ships to collide with each other soon after the jump, causing widespread confusion and chaos which contribute to the Terrans' defeat in the battle.
• Lensman: In order to get around a major difficulty in space battles — that the other side can see you coming long before you are within combat range, and has plenty of time to organise a suitable defensive formation — Boskone develops the "hyperspatial tube", which is more or less an on-demand wormhole that allows them to have ships suddenly appear at any desired location (as long as it is not too deep in a gravity well). Civilization counters this by developing a means of detecting the wormhole as soon as it begins to form, and using their superior discipline and command-and-control structures to enable them to rapidly assemble a globe of ships around the point of emergence before the enemy can complete the transit, and pot the enemy ships as they come out.
• Happens from time to time in Old Man's War. Notably, a Colonial Union attack to retake a captured colony world ends in disaster when the enemy forces are able to predict where the human ships will come out of FTL and lay into them without warning, something which is supposed to be impossible under everyone's (incorrect) understanding of the physics involved in faster than light travel.
• AncillaryJustice: In the third book, Mercy of Kalr uses this to fight against four larger warships, but the fourth ship catches on and turns it around by setting down mines where Mercy of Kalr was about to attack from.

Live-Action TV

• A common strategy on Babylon 5 for many of the races with a long history of spacefaring, thanks to many larger ships being capable of producing their own jump points into and out of Hyperspace. Since ships in hyperspace can not detect anything in real space, and vice versa, this requires the attacker knowing where and when the target will be in a particular location ahead of time. Most battles of this sort tend to be very short. One such battle we see involved baiting an enemy fleet into a pre-arranged location, then opening the gate right into the middle of them; the gate itself did as much damage as the attacking ship. Inverted about half the time, with ships lying in wait just outside a jump gate where they are not expected, allowing them to rip an incoming ship apart as soon as it exits the gate.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • The Battlestar Pegasus got the jump on a quartet of Cylon Base Stars when they were focused on attacking the Galactica. Indeed, the first moment that even the audience knows anything of the sort is going on is when one of the Cylon ships is suddenly pummeled by a massive amount of incoming fire from offscreen before we see the Pegasus sail into view.
  • Meanwhile, the fact that Cylon fighters possess FTL (in contrast to the Colonial Vipers, which have no such ability) means that the crew of Galactica have to constantly be on the ready for the small Raiders to come from anywhere at any time, only adding to their already substantial Paranoia Fuel. They keep a flight of Vipers on standby to launch within moments at all times.
  • Also Starbuck's mission to evacuate the Caprican resistance had several Raptors jumping directly into Caprica's atmosphere (though one came out inside a mountain). Later that tactic is used to communicate and resupply the resistance movement on New Caprica.
    • Speaking of New Caprica, Adama jumps the Galactica past the Cylon fleet during the evacuation and into the atmosphere, launches a squadron of Vipers to cover the civilian's Hyperspeed Escape, then jumps back into space just before hitting the ground.
  • The Battle of the Binary Star System in "The Captain's Hand" begins with three Cylon Baseships luring the Pegasus into a trap, then jumping in and disabling her FTL drive with a well-placed nuke.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation featured a variation in the form of the "Picard Maneuver", where a ship (typically already engaged in battle) would use its warp drive to make a very short trip at very high speed^note In the specific instance depicted, Warp 9, or approximately 1510 times the speed of light. to another part of the battlefield. If done properly (precise timing is required in order to not overshoot — or worse, collide with — the enemy), this allowed a starship commander to make his ship appear in two places simultaneously, because the sensor return from the ship's previous location had not yet gotten back to the enemy ship. This tactic was notably of limited use, only being effective against enemies who did not possess subspace sensors.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In the two-parter "Equinox", Janeway did a rather mundane version of this against the titular ship. Since Voyager is faster than the Equinox, all they had to do was catch up and knock out the Equinox's warp drive.
  • "Flesh and Blood" features a variation. Voyager hides in the ion wake of a Hirogen battlecruiser in a similar way to a submarine following another one in its baffles. When the Hirogen ship drops out of warp, Voyager starts shooting.
• A common tactic of the titular character of Tracker (2001). He can only do it once per day, though.
• In Stargate SG-1, the Asgard are able to calculate the precise exit point of a ship in hyperspace and blow it away before it can raise shields. Unfortunately, this was a Replicator ship. While they certainly destroyed it, the pieces survived re-entry and landed on their homeworld, quickly reforming into footsoldiers.
• Blake's 7. This sets off the plot of "Stardrive", when the crew of Scorpio witness three Federation warships exploding for no apparent reason. They rewind the tape frame by frame and discover a tiny one-man spacecraft moving at a hitherto inconceivable speed. Given that our heroes are stuck in a clapped out space freighter, they're determined to get their hands on this new stardrive, which would give them the same advantage they had with the Liberator.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech:
  • There was both a version of and a counter to this during the Amaris Civil War. Terra's AI-commanded satellite defenses would have eaten the Star League Defense Force's ships alive if they just tried to use pirate jump points to close in on Terra immediately. So before the full attack, General Kerensky commenced Operation BARBICAN, in which drone-controlled ships jumped directly on top of the AI command stations, firing at close range to cripple the defenses. They were followed up by Warships performing the same maneuver, only to fall prey to a counter called the Caltrop Constellation, a group of asteroids placed in the vicinity of the stations and packed with explosives, turning them into mines which did not so much damage the newly arrived ships as become a hazard to counter further ships from jumping into the area.
  • During the Dark Age, the Republic of the Sphere's Fortress Wall turned out to be this. Rather than some sort of impenetrable barrier that prevented jumpships from passing through, it was instead a case of using K-F Drives to aim hyperspace pulses at the emergence waves of an incoming jumpship, forcing the incoming ship to misjump with fatal results for both the ship and crew. Doing this, however, burned through an inordinate amount of K-F Drives, making it unsustainable in the long run and badly straining the economies of the systems protected by the Fortress while it was up. It also turned out to have a vulnerability: ships jumping into a protected system from a distance of less than half a light-year simply didn't emit enough of an emergence wave (the size and duration of emergence waves being determined by the mass of the ship and the distance of the jump. This allowed Clan Wolf and Clan Jade Falcon to eventually penetrate the Wall and attack Terra itself.

Video Games

• Happens some in FreeSpace. One mission has an enemy ship about to open fire on a station you are protecting (an enemy ship too powerful for your fighters to handle), when all of a sudden, the very-aptly-named Colossus warps in and blasts the crap out of it.
  • The Shivans are also very fond of this trope, especially given their mastery of hyperspace and that their ships are configured for pulverizing alpha strikes.
• Sword of the Stars has variations.
  • With lategame FTL techs you can cross from outside an enemy's system-based sensor range to his systems in one turn, giving him no time to build additional defensive forces or rally defenders from elsewhere. It's even worse in the sequel where you need an extra turn after construction to move the newly-constructed spacecraft into an active fleet, meaning you have even less warning than in the original.
  • Also, this is one of the uses of CnC ships. Without them new ships that jump in to replace your losses will appear far from the planet and waste time getting to the action. If you have them, the new ships jump in right next to them. This creates an interesting tactical dilemma in the earlier stages where CnC ships are fragile, as players have to weigh the advantages of getting reinforcements right on top of the enemy to the chance of losing the CnC ship.
  • If all the ships in your fleet have cloaking sections, then the fleet isn't even visible on the strategic screen, unless you happen to have researched the Quantum Tunneling tech and have a Deep Scanner in the system. Sometimes, not even then.
  • Doesn't much work against the Hivers, whose Portal Network allows them to bring in their entire defense fleet from all corners of their empire, although the number of ships that can be transported at once is directly proportional to the overall number of active gates and relies on there being an intact gate. So if the ambushers immediately gun for the gate and take it out...
  • Morrigi military strategy is built around this. They start with stealth armour, which reduces the range at which enemies detect them strategically, and are amongst the best at researching cloaking tech. Their ships are also fast but fragile. Using two to three good fleets, a morrigi player can bring an enemy to its knees by hitting weak spots in their defensive line and then retreating before a counterattack; especially devastating against human and zuul players who can't recall fleets committed to nodespace travel.
  • In the sequel, the Zuul can research an ability that lets them drop out of Nodespace near a target system's star rather than on the edges of the system, which may catch opponents expecting the usual extrasystem incursion vector off guard.
• Mass Effect: A Collector Cruiser does this to the Normandy during the intro to Mass Effect 2, leading to Shepard's death.
  • It happens again to the second Normandy, resulting in the abduction of most of the crew after a virus is used to disable most of the ship's systems.
  • In Mass Effect 3, according to the Codex, the Turian fleet managed to effect one of these against the Reaper fleet during the invasion of their home system. They waited for the enemy to finish jumping into their system, then did an FTL hop into the middle of the enemy formation, inflicting heavy casualties early in the battle. Soon after, the enemy performed an FTL hop themselves to place themselves near the homeworld, forcing the Turians to fight them on their own terms.
    • Inverted by one of the Admirals of the Human Alliance, who parked his dreadnought at optimal firing range from the mass effect relay once he realized they were being invaded and took out one of the Reaper capital ships straight out of the gate. Unfortunately, since Earth was the primary target for the Reapers, a lot more capital ships followed that one.
  • An inversion of this happens in Mass Effect: Andromeda, The Tempest is forced out of FTL when something ends up being in its path. The ship comes face to face with a Kett fleet with The Scourge behind them. Only some skilled piloting though The Scourge gets them out of the ambush.
• In Star Control II, the VUX ships are MightyGlaciers. They can't move fast but have a powerful laser that can take care of most ships in a few seconds. They compensate for the speed disadvantage by slowing down enemy ships with gravity mines and warping into battle right on top of the enemy.
• Homeworld, in all its incarnations, makes this a plot point and a game mechanic at once. In the story, hyperspace cores and drives are used as a blitzkrieg weapon on more than one occasion. The tables have been turned against hyperspacing fleets just as much, provided a ship has a gravity well generator installed to interfere with the hyperspacing equipment. The same ideas stretch onto actual gameplay, although in much smaller scales than those found in the plot, for balance reasons.
• Given that FTL in the X-Universe series is dependent on jumpgates, the lying-in-wait variant is to be expected. In X3: Terran Conflict, there's not much that can get through a gate blockade consisting of three Terran Osaka-class destroyers operating in tandem. The games' two Hard-Coded Hostility factions — the rogue Xenon terraformers and the buglike Kha'ak — possess jumpdrives that allow them to jump to specific points anywhere in space; Xenon need to use jump beacons, whereas the Kha'ak can jump anywhere, which they used to wreck havoc on the system of President's End by jumping a flotilla of destroyers past the system's defense forces. In the Xtended Terran Conflict Game Mod, all M2+ battleships have a point-to-point jumpdrive that can be used to jump anywhere in friendly space, allowing the ponderous multi-kilometer ships to jump around ambushing enemy raiding parties.
• The intro to Freelancer shows the Coalition fleet doing this to The Alliance when assaulting the last Alliance-held colony after nearly 100 years of fighting. Fortunately, the Alliance manages to put up a fight, delaying the Coalition forces long enough for 5 colony ships to launch. The sleeper ships manage to break through the Coalition blockade and jump to a faraway sector. According to the original intro (before it was cut down for the game), the Solar System is destroyed by an unknown alien ship (the Nomads) shortly after that. The game itself takes place 800 years later, when the Alliance colonists have settled many star systems and have mostly forgotten the old war.
• In FTL, everyone seems to travel through the same hyperspace beacons, so the player constantly runs into patrols, plus chance encounters that didn't even expect to fight. Other times pirates will set off a distress signal intentionally to attract ships (such as yourself) to a hyperspace beacon. The player also sometimes gets an optional event where they can booby trap a beacon with a couple of missiles to slow down the Rebel fleet.
• In Shores of Hazeron, a skilled player with fast reflexes can pull this off, allowing ships with a range disadvantage to close the gap. Add a big enough capacitor, and both the hit-and-run and Teleport Spam variants become possible. For the less skilled, tele-fragging is a likely outcome.
• In Sins of a Solar Empire, every offensive maneuver against enemy planets is this until the victim researches the technology that warns them of an incoming fleet. Also, the Vasari Phase Lane Stabilizer can make its owner do this to ANY target, not just adjacent ones.
• Standard defense protocol in the Space Empires series: build a space station/small group of ships, plunk them at any and all wormholes in the system. Particularly effective against AI opponents (and some players) that send their ships through one at a time, rather than as a fleet; a strong enough defensive line means you don't even have to worry about planetary defenses. At least not until one of the other empires researches the ability to open wormholes manually, and by nature of the turn system, you likely don't realize this until you get the combat screen as a fleet is descending on your homeworld.
• A fairly standard tactic in Darkspace, known as "pointjumping". Often practically required with Torpedo Ships (which are more effective than you'd imagine in space, but are still limited to close range due to the ability to dodge).
• How does the UNSC Infinity introduce itself to the Covenant fleet over Requiem in Halo 4: Spartan Ops, you ask? Simple. By jumping out beside a Covenant cruiser, ramming through it, and then unleashing a small fleet of frigates upon them.
• EVE Online has several ships dedicated to either preventing targets from escaping or dragging them out of warp. Waiting next to a stargate and trying to kill anyone who jumps through is such a common tactic that it is unwise to ever allow your ship to fly long distances on autopilot.
  • Another common variant, as seen at the top of the page, involves using a cynosural field to allow friendly capital ships to jump directly from another system to your location. A Titan can even send subcapitals.
• In Star Ruler, interstellar and interplanetary travel is traditionally done via slowboating in normal space with thrusters, but the Jump Drive allows ships to instantly warp to a star after a short charge up. Jumping has no warning for inbound jumps, allowing an attacker to suddenly dump a fleet of recursively large carriers on an unsuspecting star system, whereas slowboating ships can usually be detected from lightyears away during their deceleration phase. In Star Ruler 2 has no instantaneous point-to-point jumpdrives, but hyperspace drives or the even faster fling beacons can be used to dogpile a fleet onto hostiles.
• Every now and then in No Man's Sky, you will find yourself thrown straight into the middle of a space battle when warping into the next system. Should you kill off the attacking pirates and meet the admiral aboard their freighter, you're given the choice to either accept a substantial reward or gain the opportunity to buy their ship for yourself.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary:
  • When the Toughs' teraport drive was still the only one in the galaxy, they would use this strategy to great effect against enemies who thought they'd be forced to use a wormgate instead. Various methods of preventing Teraport usage were developed later.
  • The Toughs' "Terapedoes", Teraport-equipped warheads, would transport inside an enemy's warship, before giving a friendly verbal countdown to detonation just so that the enemy would have time to realize what was about to happen.
• Unwinder's Tall Comics: In an in-universe novel by Gary P. Rastov, Krohn attempts to pull off a hyperspace ambush—but the solar system he's attacking has a fifty-second warning of his fleet's arrival. More than enough time for their Lightning Foundries to produce another fleet capable of reducing Krohn's to its component atoms.

Western Animation

• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "No Small Parts", the Season 1 finale, an unidentified ship downwarps in front of the USS Solvang and destroys her. When the Cerritos arrives in the system, said ship attacks and cripples her while the captain reveals himself to be a Pakled, a race that Took a Level in Badass from Harmless Villain to Not-So-Harmless Villain. It then escalates after the Cerritos barely manages to destroy the first Pakled ship, only for three more to downwarp and surround her. And then the Titan pulls this with a Gunship Rescue, driving away the Pakleds and saving the Cerritos.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • In the appropriate named episode "Ambush" Yoda's ship is jumped by two Separatists' ships and fired upon. To continue his mission, he takes an escape pod with several clones and has his ship escape.
  • "Storm Over Ryloth": Tuuk has four Munificent-class frigates join the battle just as the Republic fleet closes to engage his flagship.
• Star Wars Rebels: "Stealth Strike": An Imperial Interdictor-class Star Destroyer pulls the Liberator out of hyperspace and grabs it with a tractor beam.

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