http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RammingAlwaysWorks

Worf: Report!

Bridge Officer: Main power's offline, we've lost our shields, and our weapons are gone.

Worf: Perhaps today is a good day to die! PREPARE FOR RAMMING SPEED! Star Trek: First Contact Report!Main power's offline, we've lost our shields, and our weapons are gone.Perhaps today is a good day to die!

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In science fiction, even if a ship has shields that can shrug off atomic weapons, ramming it with another ship always manages to take it down.

This is, in fact, pretty credible. The impact of a heavy freight train going 60 mph is equal to that of 1 to 2 tons of TNT — it's just over a much smaller area, and going in one direction. Most spaceships are far heavier, and can go far faster. An object traveling at 3 km/sec does damage equal to its own weight in TNTnote Among hard SF enthusiasts, this is known as Rick Robinson's Law of Space Combat. An object impacting at 6 km/sec would do damage equal to 4 times its weight in TNT, and would be said to do "4 Ricks" worth of damage.; a spaceship traveling at 94% of the speed of light does damage equal to its own weight in antimatter. And that's not even taking into account the ramming ship detonating its reactors and munitions when it hits.note Consider that if such a collision occurs at such a large fraction of light speed, the attacking ship's mass will have increased according to relativity, thus also increasing its kinetic energy. And if the ship's mass has increased, so has the mass of said reactors and munitions, meaning that their explosion will release that much more energy. In a word: "BOOOOOOOOM!"

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In fact, the usual mistake is not to make ramming work too well but to make it work not well enough. Survivors are not unknown, and the effect is usually depicted as "Ship A crashes into ship B and ship B crumples and breaks apart in slow motion," where it should look like, and is only rarely is portrayed as, "Ship A crashes into ship B and both ships are vaporized in a titanic fireball". Likewise, small fighter craft often smash into bigger ships with no visible effect, when they ought to be wreaking massive devastation.

And then there's the momentum, even ramming at a few tens of meters per second could create enough force for the people in at least one of the ships to slam into the walls at speeds high enough to kill or injure them. Though interestingly when one of the ships weighs a lot more than the other the people in the bigger ship might only be knocked off their feet, so for a bigger ship ramming into a much smaller one at 10-30 m/s could be a great tactic for taking out enemy crews while leaving both ships intact...

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That said, there is one challenge for a ramming ship, which is reaching the target in the first place. At realistic space combat distances (hundreds if not thousands of kilometers), the target should have plenty of time to see the attempt coming and either blow up the ramming ship or dodge out of its way. This ought to lead to a tense cat-and-mouse game as the rammer tries to close the distance and compensate for the target's evasive maneuvers, and the target tries to stay clear long enough to score a killing hit — the ramming ship is essentially a large missile, and the target would be performing a High-Speed Missile Dodge. Sadly, things are never portrayed like this.

The reason for this, of course, is that space ramming depictions are probably based on the Space Is an Ocean mindset, and the cultural memory of Real Life naval tactics of the ancient world. Before the advent of cannons, ramming the other ships was the main method for taking them out (other than burning or boarding). Note that this is where the term "ramming speed" comes from — the horator would begin beating the drums faster so the rovers at the oars of the galleys rowed faster in order to drive the ram deep into the side of the enemy ship. Ramming tactics made a brief comeback in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with steamships, when they started making ships out of metal instead of wood which made older cannons obsolete. Even then, battleships continued to be built with bows designed for ramming for many years after the tactic ceased to be relevant. In fact, in the early years of ironclad battleships, their armor was so effective against the relatively primitive guns of the era that ramming was seen as the only viable tactic against an ironclad. Even past this point, many ships have done a LOT of damage to each other with accidental or deliberate ramming, in particular sinking a large number of surfaced submarines.

Compare Colony Drop, which, depending on what you're dropping, takes this trope to its logical extreme. When combined with the Drop Pod you get the Boarding Pod, which rams a target not to destroy it but to inject heavily-armed troops into it. Although ramming is not unknown in combat between large, heavy, main battle tanks, for land vehicles, see Car Fu or Forklift Fu. In sci-fi terms, a Sister Trope to Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better.

Examples:

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Flying (Planes & Spaceships)

Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Comic Strips

In the Garth Ennis revival of Dan Dare, this seems to be a standard tactic as the Royal Navy capital ships have extendible bow rams and Dare uses these to board the Mekon's flagship.

Fan Works

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

Many ships of the Imperial Navy of Warhammer 40,000: Battlefleet Gothic are built with prows designed for ramming. All Ork vessels have armoured prows, spikes and so on for ramming, with one type of ship, named the "Brute" ram ship by the Imperial Navy, designed specifically for ramming. Consisting of a gigantic armoured prow, a powerful engine and minimal weaponry, they are one of the least subtle devices in the entire 40k universe, which is a truly, truly impressive feat. The Cestus Assault Ram, as its name implies, is designed primarily to ram into enemy ships or fortresses and discharge its cargo of Space Marines inside. The ship is designed around a huge magna-melta that fires just before impact to soften up the surface. The Heroic Sacrifice of the Astral Knights chapter involved ramming their Tempestus Battlebarge (a kilometre-long battleship) through the void shields of a Necron World Engine (imagine a Death Star possessed by an Eldritch Abomination and crewed by ancient skeletal death robots). After punching through its void shields, hundreds of Astral Knights spent hours battling across the surface of the World Engine, destroying everything that looked remotely important while beset on all sides by thousands of Necrons. Nearly wiped out to a man, the Chapter Master himself led a handful of survivors down into the bowels of the Engine and destroyed the main shield generators with melta-bombs, allowing the Imperial Navy to finish it off. And so the Astral Knights vanished into legend.

The Battletech setting, both the tabletop games and the Mechwarrior video game franchise, allows you to attempt "death from above" — that is, using jump jets to lift yourself into the air and then land on your opponent, Mario-style. It's very difficult to aim, but when it hits, it results on 70 odd tons of giant war robot landing on the enemy machine — usually, right on the cockpit. Squish. The major reason for this is because the head is a 1 in 36 shot on the regular hit table (You need 12 on 2d6) however, the punch hit location table (Which is used for punches and DFA attacks) it's 1 in 6. Even if you miss the head, most of the vital components of a Battle Mech are in the torsos and arms. Taking out your opponent's weapons while knocking them on their ass is a very useful way to strike when you can survive it. In fact, one mech called the Highlander is specialized for this; the tactic is known as "Highlander Burial" when done by this mech. The boardgame also has charging rules for both 'Mechs and vehicles, allowing them to crash into each other at high speed under the right circumstances. The way the rules are set up, this usually tends to do rather more damage to the target than the attacker if done right. (This is deliberately unrealistic to make using this maneuver from time to time actually worthwhile.) Incidentally, since 'Mechs are significantly taller than regular ground vehicles, the latter can charge the former (hitting the legs unless the target just happens to be prone) but not vice verse. A BattleMech can kick a vehicle or make a death-from-above attack against it...but not charge at it outright. Also, in the background universe, there's the famous incident where Tyra Miraborg rams her near-wrecked fighter into the enemy flagship and thereby brings the entire Clan invasion to a halt for a year. Possibly in something of an aversion, the ship survives the attack reasonably well, though with damage to the bridge — what stops the Clans is the death of their war-leader and the need to convene on their distant common homeworld to elect another. Late in the fiction line, this tactic became fairly common in warship combat, being featured in numerous novels. Interestingly, the game rules themselves go out of their way to prevent this particular scenario from being commonplace. Among other factors, an aerospace unit trying to make a ramming attempt needs to roll dice to determine whether its pilot or crew is actually crazy enough to go through with it — on anything but an 11 or 12 on 2d6 (which is to say, in eleven cases out of twelve assuming fair dice), the attempt stops right there.

In hard sci-fi board game Attack Vector Tactical, ramming an enemy ship (if you hit) destroys it and your own ship. However, to be able to do this your crew has to be convinced to do it by the player making a speech the other players vote as suitably moving. And if you manage to move another player to tears, it upgrades the level of one of your other ship's crew.

In GURPS: Space, ramming the enemy is the most powerful attack you have. It doesn't always work but the amount of damage is tremendous.

An article in Dragon described a Traveller player, only identified as "Bob", who "obviously assumed that starships and ancient galleys were built alike." His attempted ram ("I've got the bigger ship!") turned both ships into clouds of debris, much to his confusion.

Star Realms has the Blob Ram, which from the name and card art appears to employ the trope. Seems to be a prestigious position too, as Ram Pilots are one of the Blob Hero cards in the Crisis expansion.

In Strike Legion, not only is ramming a very powerful weapon in its own right, but ramming is outright recommended to deal with one species' ships that have Mighty Glacier shielding and armor. Keep in mind, this is a setting where the average military warship can ram a planet and win.

In Hc Svnt Dracones a spaceship that rams another spaceship both deals and sustains damage equal to the number of hexes it traversed when the command was issued, and if the defending ship has a flak barrier its rating is dealt to the attacker as well. But ships can be equipped with "close-combat weapons" such as vent re-directions that can only be used after ramming.

Video Games

Web Comics

Schlock Mercenary: Justified: the ship doing the ramming is an ore freighter, with no weapons to speak of. Except, of course, for ramming. It uses the ore it's carrying as chaff to protect it as it closes in on the opponent, and it turns out the "battle" was a test . The narrator also has fun lampshading the obligatory "Ramming Speed" command: Narrator: : This is silly because technically you can ram at any speed. It would make more sense to announce an actual speed, using units of measure, appropriate to the amount of damage you wish to inflict. Shouting "Ramming Speed" only serves to alert everyone on deck to the impending event, allowing them to assume crash positions, or otherwise brace for impact. This of course renders the next mandatory shouted command redundant at best.

Captain: Brace for impact! Also Petey takes this in an interesting direction in his strategy for fighting big ships — his larger ships basically use his smaller ships as precision projectile weapons flung at close enough to the speed of light to punch all the way through an enemy ship and out the other side, taking out their power generators on the way. It's extremely effective offensively, but not all of the ramming ships make it back. He does have the advantage of being the boss of what's essentially a Cloud-based AI Hive Mind, so it's hard to call it a kamikaze strike. The second use for the ships, one humorously named Predictably Damaged following the scheme of using the initials P.D., is to insert a living clone of Petey to suborn targets, given that the ships targeted had AIs that were programmed to respond to their creators Also subverted when Breya's embassy ship rammed the Touch-and-Go. TAG was being torn apart (and held in place) by gravity weapons, and the ramming saved the second ship (mainly because they could combine their shields, and Breya still had all her fuel). Tagii Eldritch Abomination, and therefore had no shields or gravity weapons. Further subverted in that the actual ramming was a minor inconvenience to the city-sized warship designed to tank asteroid impacts; emptying the ordnance bays on the way out, however... Not to mention that said Eldritch Abomination could see them, and followed them through... In Delegates and Delegations, Admiral Chu ponders ramming a battleplate through a city's shields to save that city from an enemy attack, an act that would kill the battleplate (complement: somewhat above 30,000) and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the city, but still save most of the city's 4 billion sophonts aaand kill trillions in the ensuing civil war because it would have looked like Earth's military attacked its capitol in a situation that was already volatile. Good thing they found a better plan . Also discussed and defied by Iafa and Elf. Somewhat funny when you consider how often ramming has already been used in the comic. Elf: Okay, I'll bite. When do you want to ram things with your boats?

Iafa: As a feint, when I wish to appear both desperate and stupid. It's a great way to convince enemies that I lack the ability to ram them with little things like missiles, and high-energy protons.

In Terinu, the pirate Mavra Chan's flagship the Celestial Marauder is specifically designed for ramming attacks, with a heavily reinforced prow and emergency safety harnesses for the crew. Of course her primary targets are lightly armed civilian freighters. Still, the comic's fans don't call her "Psycho Pirate Bitch" for nothing.

In the Darths & Droids strip here, which follows Pete missing everything in the entire battle. He gives the required line " Ramming Speed. "

which follows Pete missing everything in the entire battle. He gives the required line " " In Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth, Flintlocke's party crash their captured blimp in the Cathedral of Light in Stormwind in an attempt to stop the Horde raid. Flintlocke: RAMMING SPEED!

Bloodrose: What are we ramming?

Flintlocke: EV'RYTHING!!

RAMMING SPEED!What are we ramming?

Web Original

Invoked in AH.com: The Series, "The Ultimate Showdown" in which the crew have expended every last weapon on the ASB ship that's about to destroy the multiverse to no effect, and this is all they have left. Doctor What: I paid attention to one lesson in the war at least... ramming always works.

Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG: Mr. Welch is prohibited from doing this with a probe droid at light speed. Becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when The Last Jedi does essentially that, and you can check out the film folder to see how well it worked.

The Jenkinsverse: Justified by aliens being, by human standards, rather terrible at warfare. Several humans have programmed autopilots on shuttles or dropships to turn them into very large guided missiles. Since aliens don't have any actual missiles at first, this is their only option, and it works because the aliens are completely unprepared for it. Adrian Saunders is particularly fond of letting his ship get boarded, killing all the boarders, and then sending the boarding pod back at the enemy as a kinetic projectile. It takes a minute for anyone to realize what's happening, and by then it's too late. Eventually actual missiles and missile counter measures are introduced, causing a sharp drop in instances of this trope.

Western Animation

Real Life

Marine (Ships & Submarines)

Anime & Manga

Happens, with its potential ineffectiveness lampshaded, in Full Metal Panic! Sigma, when Captain Testarossa needs to get the Tuatha De Danaan out of a dock blocked by a Behemoth-class Humongous Mecha.

Subverted in episode 15 of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. After the Nautilus is crippled by deep-charges and narrowly missed by torpedoes, the enemy submarine attempts to ram it. However, the Nautilus proves much more resistant than the Neo-Atlantean sub, who totally crushes its prowl in the process before exploding (although it leaves a mark).

Black Lagoon: In one of the early episodes, Rock uses a derelict ship to ramp the title boat, then fire a torpedo directly into an attack helicopter — and flips them the bird in the process, establishing that Rock's got a bit of attitude behind him after all (as he's normally a somewhat milquetoast accountant and negotiator that plays a rather Chick-ish role in the show where violence is concerned).

Super Atragon: The climax of the opening battle and the final battle: the Ra and Liberty turn to ram each other, after the Liberty's drill-missiles are foiled by the Ra 's rocket-anchors, the Ra plows through the Liberty's bow, destroying her and killing Avatar .

. In Submarine 707 R, the titular submarine does this to the U-X at the end of their battle, having run out of torpedoes.

Comic Books

In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Nemo's vessel has rather more sensible armaments than the literary version, like big honking artillery pieces. And mechanical tentacles. Which lead, FWIW, to the awesome moment when we combine this with the previous trope. And Nemo blasts the jelly out of a couple of tripods.

Fan Works

Films — Animation

The Little Mermaid (1989): Mega-giant Ursula is finally taken down by ramming a ship's prow straight through her. Ouch.

Films — Live-Action

Played at its most blatant in Jaws: The Revenge. Apparently ramming a sailboat into a roaring shark will cause it to explode. Great stuff, guys. To be fair, that was the studio-ordered SECOND ending of the movie. The original ending had the shark bellowing away as the prow of the boat skewers it like a cocktail weenie, the shark's weight tearing the boat in half as both sink into the water.

In The Abyss, the Ax-Crazy is trying to kill the male main character by pretty much running him over with a minisub (said character being in a diving suit, with nothing to hide behind). Cue the main female character ramming the Ax-Crazy head-on in her own minisub. She cripples his engine and winds up knocking him over the edge of the Cayman Trench, where the mounting pressure makes his sub implode. An awesome use of Ominous Crack

In the climax of The Enemy Below, Captain Murrell (Robert Mitchum) rams his critically damaged destroyer into Von Stolberg (Curt Jürgens)'s submarine.

Possibly the Ur-example of this trope is the galley fight sequence of the film Ben-Hur. At the very least it's probably the Trope Maker for yelling "Ramming speed!" In this case it's an order to the galley slaves to row very fast for a short burst.

In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Frankie Cook rams one of Totenkopf's underwater machines with her amphibious fighter/sub to allow Sky Captain to make his way to Totenkopf's lab, but ejects just in time.

In Pirates of the Prairie the mutinous crew find themselves transported to the title prairie, and the house their ex-captain (and a horde of silver) is hiding. The now-Captain declares "ramming speed!" To wWhich the crew complies. When the ship rams the house, the now-captain admonishes the crew. "What did you do that for?"

"You said 'ramming speed'..."

"It's a unit of measurement, not an order!"

300: Rise of an Empire has Athenian ships made this way to ram unto the Persian ships to destroy them quickly. To quote "Themistocles: The Persian ships are strong at the front, but they are weak in the middle", thus those numerically superior Persian fleet must retreat or they'll be reduced a lot.

At the end of Assault on a Queen, the sub surfaces too close to the Coast Guard cutter for them to use their main guns. Instead, the captain orders the cutter to ram the sub

Gamebooks

Lone Wolf: In Fire on the Water, the flagship of the death-hulks fleet (sunken ships manned by The Undead) has a huge ram on its prow ◊ . At the beginning of the naval battle, it rams the Durenor, the admiral ship of the Durenese fleet, which quickly sinks, forcing Lone Wolf overboard.

Literature

Live-Action TV

The Last Ship: During the Grand Finale, the Nathan James is critically crippled by the Colombians' battleship and starts to sink. Determined to make it a Mutual Kill, after the rest of the crew abandons ship, Admiral Chandler arms every remaining missile onboard the James and then sends it careening on a collision course for the battleship. Both ships are then destroyed in the subsequent explosion.

The Boys (2019). In "Over The Hill With The Swords Of A Thousand Men", The Deep uses his powers to send sharks ramming into their motor yacht, forcing the Boys to Abandon Ship in a speedboat. Then Deep appears riding the back of a sperm whale which he uses to cut off their escape route. Crazy b***d that he is, Billy Butcher just keeps accelerating, ramming straight into the whale, totaling the speedboat and covering them all in whale guts.

Tabletop Games

GURPS, being a generic system, addresses issues of ramming in its vehicle rules; how well it works depends on the vehicles involved and their other combat options. Some are fitted with rams that make them a bit more effective for the purpose. GURPS Vehicles: Steampunk Conveyances has details for a torpedo ram, an historical design which, despite its heroic appearance in The War of the Worlds (see above), didnt turn out to be that great an idea. A brief scenario suggestion in the book does actually find a situation in which torpedo rams could be useful. GURPS Vehicles: Transports of Fantasy has some tweaks to the vehicle damage rules to ensure that ramming combat is a viable option between classical Greek-style warships but less useful for Renaissance-style galleys. (Basically, being holed below the waterline becomes a lot less devastating for a more technologically advanced ship.)

In Rocket Age the Silt Sea pirates of Mars use raiding ships built out of the bones of silt dragons. The prow, made from the skull, is used as a ram and does a devastating amount of damage.

Toys

Beast Wars: Uprising: In the finale, the Builder ship Tidal Wave (formerly the Decepticon Tidal Wave) is ordered by its captain, Banzai-tron, to ram the Resistance ship Broadside in a final act of suicidal spite, since Banzai-tron refuses to surrender or flee. The result is a massive explosion which takes out both ships.

Video Games

Web Original

Web Videos

World War II: Episode 33 - "The Invasion of Norway and Denmark" tells the story of HMS Glowworm which rammed the German Admiral Hipper. The Glowworm failed to destroy Hipper, and sank while on fire shortly after.

Western Animation

In the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Avatar Returns", Prince Zuko has his ship ram a Water Tribe village in his search for the Avatar. His (relatively small) ship blows through at least fifty feet of glacial ice to have the front open right in front of the village. (Which isn't too extraordinary, since this is the primary purpose of icebreakers .)

.) In ReBoot, the attack on the Megabyte-controlled Mainframe Principal Office is initiated by a kamikaze charge by the pirate ship Saucy Mare. It gets shot down right before reaching its target... but was loaded with enough explosives that this turned out to merely spread the damage around and wipe out even more of Megabyte's outer defenses.

In Cat City, Grabowski sunk the cat pirates' submarine by ramming it with the ship they thought to have captured, and had in a tow.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Sea Hawk's preferred method of attack involves lighting his ships on fire and ramming them into the enemy. It works because he has no other weapons, and because Glimmer can teleport them off the ship at the last second.

Real Life