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Explosive Instrumentation

 Explosive Instrumentation
type
FeatureClass
 Explosive Instrumentation
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Explosive Instrumentation
 Explosive Instrumentation
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ExplosiveInstrumentation
 Explosive Instrumentation
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Explosions look cool. As a result, in the future (and sometimes in the present) there are no such things as fuses or circuit breakers, and every control panel, sensor, and shield has C4 built into it. That way, if the Readings Are Off the Scale, the user will be sure to notice. Also, no matter how deeply buried inside a ship its bridge is, you are guaranteed a shower of sparks and a deadly explosion when the enemy gets through its shields, or if some other disaster befalls the ship.
Long considered an unrealistic but effective way of showing battle damage when you don't have the budget to mess up a miniature or — in modern works — create damaged versions of CGI models. Realistically the console would be separated from the destructive effects of high-power circuits through various means of protection and would not harm its operator under any scenario. Worst case scenario the controls should simply stop working, or the screen should just turn off.
A Super-Trope to Readings Blew Up the Scale.
Compare No Water Proofing In The Future, Holographic Terminal (which doesn't explode — just get spammed with pop ups). Often the result of Tim Taylor Technology. Should require No OSHA Compliance, although that point is rarely touched. If someone is actually causing the technology to explode involuntarily, that's Walking Techbane. Squat all to do with musical instruments going kaboom, or the 1812 Overture. Thus, this trope has nothing to do with Orchestral Bombing.
 Explosive Instrumentation
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2024-03-15T15:00:34Z
 Explosive Instrumentation
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2024-03-15T15:00:34Z
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NarutoShippuden
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DBTropes
 Explosive Instrumentation / int_10b03dcf
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Explosive Instrumentation
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Hacking electronic locks in Batman: Arkham Asylum causes them to pop with a burst of sparks when you get them open for some reason.
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 Batman: Arkham Asylum (Video Game)
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Explosive Instrumentation / int_10b03dcf
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Explosive Instrumentation
 Explosive Instrumentation / int_1510822e
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GoldenEye. The eponymous Kill Sat fires an EMP burst that knocks out any electronics that aren't specially shielded. Given that this is a Bond movie they can't just have the lights go out, so it causes every single metallic surface to arc massive electrical sparks everywhere, and every single control panel and monitor to dramatically explode in huge showers of sparks forcing the Bond Girl to make a dramatic leap for cover. The same happens to the dashboards in the fighter jets caught in the EMP blast, causing them to crash into each other and also explode.
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Depending on the player’s choices in Sunrider Mask of Arcadius, Ava Crescentia can be severely injured by an exploding console. The sequel reveals that she survived, but she had to be fitted with a bionic eye and cutting-edge medical technology was needed to regrow her right arm.
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Explosive Instrumentation
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A realistic version in Rocketship Voyager. The fire in Sickbay that kills Voyager's medical staff is caused when an instrument panel that has been battleshorted overheats and starts a fire.
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 Rocketship Voyager (Fanfic)
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_1d367084
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Team Fortress Classic and its Fan Remake Fortress Forever also feature exploding Engineer constructions - however, being full of ammunition to either dispense or launch these devices tend to detonate a little more violently.
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_1e015a5d
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Any time that this occurs inside the cockpit of an X-Wing or Y-Wing fighter, odds are that the pilot inside is about to die. One exception is in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke's T-47 Airspeeder is shot down in the Battle of Hoth. The fighter's instrumentation starts sparking and blowing smoke, and the fighter itself falls to the ground and crashes. However, Luke survives.
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_22fa3992
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Explosive Instrumentation
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Usually subverted on The Expanse.
Crew members do face danger at the controls, but it's mainly from high-velocity slugs cutting straight through their ships. In the assault on Thoth Station, the cabin of the Roci is memorably hit by multiple through-and-through cannon shots, including one that drills a hole in Naomi's display screen without shutting it down.
Sometimes the trope is played straight, though; the command center of the MCRN Scirocco is a veritable fireworks factory during the Battle of Ganymede (With fatal consequences for poor Lt. Sutton).
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During the Bad Movie Beatdown review of Blade: Trinity, the line "cock-juggling thundercunt" caused Film Brain's Misogyny Meter to blow up.
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In a season three episode of Eureka, this starts happening to the android dogs townspeople have been building for a contest. Especially egregious since it wasn't even an energy surge, but a case of extreme computer processing potential that caused them to go asplode.
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In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, when the Book of Darkness started taking control of Clyde's Hestia, The Bridge had random explosions thrown in just in case the visual of the Book's tendrils spreading all over the rest the ship didn't seem threatening enough.
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Explosive Instrumentation
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Remotely hacking cameras in 007: Blood Stone leaves them smoking.
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Taken to its logical extreme in Scanners when Vale starts psychically hacking a room full of computers, and Keller unplugs all the computers, thinking that the shock will erase Vale's brain. It turns out that Vale is way too bad a dude for that to work, and instead, the computers all explode simultaneously, in so spectacular a fashion as to kill Keller. And then Vale's phone melts and the phone booth explodes.
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Happens in the destruction of the Droid Control Ship by Anakin Skywalker in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. This results in the deaths of all ship staff inside, including the Captain of the ship, who along with his fellow crew members are right in front of the computer when it malfunctions and explodes as a result of the ship's destruction.
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Surprisingly, for the all the Spiral Power gauges in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann overlap, they turn out to be surprisingly durable as they usually just shift to a new color (each full meter apparently requiring exponentially more to fill than the last). One only broke in the final episode when a Beam-O-War with twice the power of the big bang is knocked back, send the meter overlapping so much as to be every color in the rainbow and the meter literally continues to rise off the gauge in mid-air.
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In Half-Life, computers, panels, and various other mechanisms throughout Black Mesa have a tendency to explode whenever the player is in close proximity. One computer manages to explode even before the resonance cascade. Another computer's keyboard shorts out violently after being tampered with in Half-Life: Blue Shift. Lampshaded in Freeman's Mind where Gordon both complains about it and blames the explosions on going with Cyrix processors, the lowest bidder.
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The very first battle on Star Trek: Discovery has the ops console on the Shenzhou explode when The Bridge takes a glancing torpedo hit, knocking its operator, Ensign Connor, to the floor with (non-fatal) burns.
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In the Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero episode "Ultrahyperball", the rules of the titular sport are so complicated that they cause Sashi's mechanically-enhanced glasses to explode.
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Subverted in the Bernice Summerfield novella "Jason and the Bandits", in which an Unreliable Narrator bemoans a pirate spaceship's lack of a Pointlessly Exploding Console, which ordinarily provides immediate tactile feedback that a ship operating under infradrive, rather than in normal time and space, has suffered damage. The pirate captain retorts that "The Pointlessly Exploding Consoles kill more people than they ever save."
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Transformers: Generation 1: This happens to nearly any invention that Mad Scientist Wheeljack makes. As long as it doesn't turn out to be sentient, that is.
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 Transformers: Generation 1 (Franchise)
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_3b182a22
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Explosive Instrumentation
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Played for laughs in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where the time-travelling Boimler gushes over Doctor M'Benga's tricorder, noting that they never improved on the design although they did get smaller, more powerful, and "arguably less likely to explode," to M'Benga's consternation.
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_467f18b8
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Pearl Harbor had Truth In Movies with a fighter having a cockpit fire in flight due to a leaking oil line. See Real Life below for why this could (and DID) happen in the period.
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Inverted in Return of the Jedi when an A-wing kamikazes into the bridge of a Star Destroyer, it causes explosions to break out in other parts of the ship.
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 Explosive Instrumentation / int_4f266e2a
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Explosive Instrumentation
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Occurs frequently in Star Trek (IDW), due to the crew's frequency of running into hostile alien lifeforms and phenomena.
 Explosive Instrumentation / int_4f266e2a
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In Homestuck, it happens to an on-screen (or not) Thing-O-Meter, but not to the screen itself.
Earlier during Act 3, PM attempted to contact Jade only for Becsprite to interrupt, blowing up both the screen and a hole in PM's vehicle.
During Act 5 Act 1 Karkat's computer explodes after he deliberately decides to run a computer virus.
Act 5 Act 2 has Eridan's monitor detonates when he decides to hit on Rose and demands she teach him magic. She gives him a lesson in showmanship.
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Star Trek (2009) only uses this in the teaser where the entire USS Kelvin is falling apart, thus somewhat justifying the trope. Otherwise it completely averts this, as do Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond.
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In Knights of the Old Republic, you can hack into computers and cause various part of the ship/base to blow up; pipes, fuel cells, etc. Given the option, you can even blow up the console you're using.
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Space: 1999. In combination with ceiling beams and ductwork tending to fall down. And then once when a planet "almost" hit the Moon, the actual desktops all the controls were set in caught fire and burned with the friendly yellow flame of a small campfire.
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In Superman: The Animated Series, a fight between Superman, Jax-Ur and Mala damage the bridge's controls of a starship. It's so bad, that it causes a chain reaction of explosions that completely destroy the ship.
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The few battle scenes, and any turbulence, in Red Dwarf usually involved random components exploding, sometimes knocking out the whole crew. Parodied in one episode where the 'Damage Report Machine' explodes in the Cat's face. Luckily, the crew is well-equipped with tiny fire extinguishers to deal with such events, probably a nod to Alien. This is also how the crew (sans Rimmer) go out in the season 6 finale.
In an early episode, Lister gets a premonition that he's going to be killed in one of these incidents. He survives, as it was actually his future son Bexley who dies in a similar instance.
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In Resident Evil 6, during Jake's campaign, a C-Virus zombie unintentionally destroys a control panel in the Seabed Laboratory. This somehow sets off a chain reaction that destroys the entire facility, causing it to cave in (in a very explosive manner).
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Stargate-verse:
Stargate SG-1:
It started happening to the crews once they get Earth-made starships.
Parodied in "200". The gate's dialing computer has done it a few times, as did the gate itself, once zapping a poor Siler who exclaims, "Why does this always happen to me?" But then that scene didn't actually happen. Also lampshaded in that same episode, after the Star Trek "homage" sequence, Teal'c says, "I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode."
In an episode of Stargate Atlantis, Michael throws a laptop in frustration, and it explodes in a shower of sparks when it hits the ground.
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Star Trek III: The Search for Spock has a straightforward example when the Enterprise manages to catch Kruge's Bird-of-Prey off-guard with some torpedoes right after it decloaks, albeit the only actual casualty is Kruge's pet. Not long afterwards, we get a different variation when the Enterprise helm console blows up in a shower of sparks and flames; however, this doesn't injure Scotty or Sulu, who are manning the console, but rather signals that the ship's primary systems have just been irreparably fried. And not long after that, every console on the bridge blows up along with the bridge itself, as the result of Kirk activating the auto-destruct.
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Explosive-rigged computer terminals appear in Fallout 3 as a booby trap. Subverted, in that it's literally just a computer case filled with grenades, in this case.
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Lampshaded on Farscape. When Moya's defense screen is destroyed, the controls for it explode leading Crichton to ask "Have you people never heard of fuses!?" Most alien technology seems to be highly unstable, to the point that when on Earth Crichton gave a group of human scientists a pulse pistol to examine. Somehow firing it destroyed not only their monitoring equipment, but the computers that were connected to them.
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Stargate SG-1:
It started happening to the crews once they get Earth-made starships.
Parodied in "200". The gate's dialing computer has done it a few times, as did the gate itself, once zapping a poor Siler who exclaims, "Why does this always happen to me?" But then that scene didn't actually happen. Also lampshaded in that same episode, after the Star Trek "homage" sequence, Teal'c says, "I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode."
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In Mass Effect 2, a few nameless crew membersnote until you play the DLC where you learn their names, as well as ME1 Mauve Shirt, Pressley, fall victim to this in the opening cutscene as the Normandy gets torn to pieces.
Possibly justified in that the ship is being shredded by incredibly advanced weapons, which may cause the ship's systems to behave in unusual manners. It could also be related to other explosive material in the wall near the cockpit, as that is the only time we see an actual exploding instrument panel, every other explosion in that scene is just an explosion.
Samantha Traynor's scene in the "Citadel" DLC features a strategy game with painful static as a key component. Apparently, "neural feedback" is an acceptable way to discourage players from being careless. When Traynor beats her arch-enemy T'Suza, the latter goes completely rigid.
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While Star Trek: The Motion Picture doesn't have any consoles outright explode, Chekov's console gets sufficiently electrified by V'ger's energy bolt that he sustains a nasty-looking burn from it.
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 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
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In Sabaton's music video for "Steel Commanders", the band members' Centurion tank takes a glancing hit to the turret from an opposing M103 heavy tank, knocking the band out and causing sparks to spew throughout the cabin.
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Given its source material, this obviously happens in Galaxy Quest. Both in the movie and on the movie within the movie. A possible case of Fridge Brilliance here in that the Thermians based their design exclusively on what they saw in the "historical documents", meaning they deliberately avoided standard safety practices in order to let the consoles explode, just like on the show. Same reason they have a room meant as an obstacle course.
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GoldenEye and its Spiritual Successor, Perfect Dark, nearly any kind of computer, console, or keypad you can shoot at blew up in a spectacular fireball. In fact, some already exploded objects would explode again if shot a few more times.
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 GoldenEye (1997) (Video Game)
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Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins: The Character Analysis Devices used by Agent Tawaki and his partners tend to explode at the slightest provocation, to the point of being a Running Gag. During the sporking of Tawaki's missions, Anis comments that the narrative is exaggerating the combustibility of the CADs because they typically only explode if exposed to really obnoxious Suvian presences.
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 Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins (Fanfic)
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Star Trek, Star Trek and more Star Trek. Sometimes it seems like more people died on the bridge of the various Starships Enterprise from exploding duty stations than were killed on away missions. Occasionally, the bridge consoles will even explode before the shields get under 30%, which makes you wonder what the shields are for. Went hand in hand with Trek's Impact-TiltCam and Flying Bodies.
Word of God from some who worked on the show is that the production staff knew that it was more accurate to have things like the ship being hit by weapons fire indicated by the lights briefly dimming and someone reporting on the effect of the incoming fire, but Executive Meddling by the studio/network insisted on more 'visually interesting' explosions and sparks instead.
Star Trek: Voyager:
Weaponized during the Seska arc, during which several people were injured or assassinated by exploding console!
In "Prey", the Hirogen take out Voyager's port warp nacelle, causing the console to the left of Tom Paris to blow up. They then take out the starboard nacelle, causing the console to his right to explode. Good thing Voyager doesn't have a central nacelle, or he'd have copped it right in the face!
The technical manuals of the Star Trek universe try to handwave this as a result of the inherent danger of using speed-of-light transmission between consoles and systems for faster response time, though the fact that the human response time will void any benefit gained from such a design makes this highly dangerous setup dubious at best. Also, a case of bad science. Real world fiber optic cabling provides speed-of-light data transfer between networked devices, but the amount of actual energy in the fiber is negligible, not even enough to blind a person if they pull out the wire and look directly into the connector. So really the explanation is just Artistic License – Physics meets Rule of Cool.
On at least one occasion, a console was demonstrated to still be functional after exploding. That's some kind of durable design.
The very first battle on Star Trek: Discovery has the ops console on the Shenzhou explode when The Bridge takes a glancing torpedo hit, knocking its operator, Ensign Connor, to the floor with (non-fatal) burns.
Federation starships are said to be powered by "EPS conduits" - the electro-plasma system draws plasma off from the engines and distributes it around the ship as a power supply. Why have boring old electrical wiring when you can have pipes filled with actual lightning, or even antimatter, or freakin' antimatter lightning?!
Played for laughs in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where the time-travelling Boimler gushes over Doctor M'Benga's tricorder, noting that they never improved on the design although they did get smaller, more powerful, and "arguably less likely to explode," to M'Benga's consternation.
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Hardspace: Shipbreaker: A slight variation in that the workstations involve burst not into a fiery explosion, but into massive arcs of lightning zapping everything in the vicinity (including you) if you accidentally whack them too hard against something while pulling them off; however, the results will be just as painful. Most electrically-powered equipment will react similarly.
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After decades both in- and out-of-universe, this is finally addressed in Dragon Ball Super: Broly, where the latest model of scouter will just stop trying to measure power levels if they get too high. Guess Freeza finally got tired of paying to replace the damned things.
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 Dragon Ball Super: Broly
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PKE meters in The Real Ghostbusters, when overloaded by psychic energy, explode quite spectacularly. Then again, so do overloading proton packs (which makes sense since they are portable nuclear accelerators). Not to mention Egon's various inventions. He even manages to overload a calculator with an offensive football play that would not only collapse the defense, but possibly all known space as well.
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BattleTech traditionally has "neurofeedback" — whenever a 'Mech suffers an ammunition explosion, the pilot's neurohelmet, a critical part of the user interface (but one which isn't connected so much to the ammo bins as to the machine's gyroscope, which can in turn take damage without causing any similar fuss) basically delivers an electric shock directly to their grey matter.
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In Plan 9 from Outer Space when one of the aliens pulls off a control panel to use as a club (alien technology beyond human imagining!) it unleashes a shower of sparks and sets their ship on fire.
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An unusual variation occurs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—during the Unwinnable Training Simulation, whenever a console sparks, whoever is operating it falls to the deck and plays dead until the simulation is over. During the actual battle—the Enterprise takes a torpedo hit from the Reliant and half the bridge seemingly explodes, but there are no obvious injuries that result from it. During the final battle, the Reliant itself has one console explosion take out Khan's right-hand man and then later another one kills almost the entire remaining bridge crew; however, the former happens after the bridge of the Reliant is struck directly by phaser fire, and the latter results from the Enterprise blowing off one of her warp nacelles, which is implied to kill everyone on the ship except for Khan himself (and even he only survives a few more minutes).
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The Abyss: When the nuclear submarine crashes into the wall of the underwater canyon, fires break out in the control room instrument panels.
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In Justice Society of Japan, right after Kallen starts developing superpowers, a DNA scanner explodes when trying to identify her identity. Justified later on, when Lightning explains that some kinds of magic react violently when examined too closely by science.
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In Futurama: Bender's Big Score, there was a space combat between the good guys ships and the Death Stars made of gold of the evil ones... who controlled them from Earth with a videogame. And when the good guys begin to destroy the Death Stars, the videogame exploded.
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Happens in one episode of SeaQuestDSV when the communications buoy gets struck by lightning.
Somewhat lampshaded in that deploying the communications buoy during an enormous hurricane was explicitly stated to be dangerous and run the risk of causing significant damage to the SeaQuest were something to go wrong.
Somewhat un-lampshaded in that this, the only time the SeaQuest was ever shown to deploy the communications buoy, was in the most dangerous conditions possible.
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In the second chapter of the series Rebuild of Evangelion, when Mari Illustrious Makinami activates the "beast mode" of her EVA, the energy countdown in the NERV room has problems like a stream with a wrong codec, although it's only a timer.
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Lampshaded but not actually used in an episode of Generator Rex. Ceasar is admiring one of the bridge consoles on the keep, which he describes favorably except for the "random power surges."
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 Generator Rex
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Weaponized in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger's final episode, where Gokai Red and Silver shoot up the Big Bad's flagship and then pin him to the main console while it sprays sparks, fire, and electricity.
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In Cryptonomicon "the Finn" has an old CRT monitor explode in his face, almost killing him because a virus overloaded the vacuum tubes, blasting glass fragments into his face. This can, with a faulty monitor and much (un)luck actually happen, though the chances are insignificantly small because there are safety features to prevent exactly this. There hasn't been any actual cases where this has happened; it's only theoretical.
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In No Gods, Only Guns, Mister Torgue's hacking works this way. He refers to it as "'splode-hacking" and says its extremely effective, because the enemy's IT department can't stop your hacking when you blow up their faces.
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A slight tap to the Megazords in any Super Sentai / Power Rangers series will cause a rain of sparks to fall on the team in the cockpit. In particularly bad cases, it can go through the communications and hurt the command centers too.
Weaponized in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger's final episode, where Gokai Red and Silver shoot up the Big Bad's flagship and then pin him to the main console while it sprays sparks, fire, and electricity.
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Alien. When the Nostromo lands on the planet, the bridge equipment starts exploding in showers of sparks and minor fires. The bridge crew starts spraying the equipment with fire extinguishers to put out the fires.
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 Alien
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In Team Fortress 2, the Engineer's buildings don't collapse when they take excessive damage - they explode into surprisingly-harmless bits of shrapnel. Justified, since the Engineer does have a radio detonator in his inventory for demolishing his buildings. They must actually have bombs in them.
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Doctor Who:
The TARDIS console throws off at least one shower of sparks in almost every new series episode that shows it in flight. No one has ever gotten hurt. This is typically a lazy shorthand for "TARDIS travel is exciting"; the only way to tell the difference between that and an attack is by the expressions on the characters' faces.
"The Long Game": The Editor's monitors start sparking when Cathica forcibly takes over the computer system.
In "School Reunion", a bunch of computers being used by the brainwashed students explode when Mickey pulls the plug on them.
Subverted in "The Sontaran Stratagem", when the Doctor and a UNIT soldier leap dramatically from a crashed jeep before the Evil GPS unit controlling it explodes, and are rewarded with the sort of spark you might get from a cigarette lighter and a "pff" noise. "Is that it?" asks the Doctor, visibly disappointed.
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Legacy of the Aldenata: In When the Devil Dances, during the Posleen assault on the Rabun Gap wall one of the consoles in SheVa 14, supporting the wall's defenders, explodes after a plasma gun hit penetrates into the command center. A few paragraphs later it's even lampshaded by the SheVa's commander.
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Blake's 7.
In "Stardrive", the Scorpio clips an asteroid and something blows up on the flight deck. Avon orders the Master Computer to activate the backup system, only to be told that was the backup system blowing up.
In the final episode the console not only blows up, it then breaks loose and starts sliding around the deck with Tarrant still strapped in the pilot's seat! Then Scorpio crashes causing the flight deck to break up completely, sending Tarrant sliding down a buckled deckplate while screaming in terror.
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Star Wars Rebels: In "Rebel Resolve", Chopper exploits this while infiltrating an Imperial cruiser to steal information. After he hacks the Imperial database, the port he was using explodes behind him, keeping the officers from following.
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The swishy French tailor from Beastmaster 2 puts out such an enormously gay vibe that it causes Dr. Insano's Gaydar to short-circuit and explode.
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 The Spoony Experiment (Web Video)
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In Exo Squad, a console exploding during the Exofleet attack on Enceladus in an early episode puts Admiral Winfield out of action for awhile.
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The Chaser's War On Everything parodied the exploding Dell laptop incident (see Real Life section below).
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 The Chaser's War On Everything
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Star Trek: Generations has perhaps the most over-the-top examples of this in the entire franchise, and certainly in the film series. In short, every Starfleet fatality in the film except for that of Captain Kirk is the direct result of an exploding console, with some of the explosions being so big that they launch crew members literally halfway across the bridge.
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 Star Trek: Generations
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Andromeda. Every time that ship is hit by anything at all several massive showers of sparks emit from multiple consoles. And yet the ship apparently suffers minimal damage, and is back running perfectly for the next impact (more sparks!).
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Battlestar Galactica (1978).
Also in Battlestar Galactica (2003) during the liberation of New Caprica. And pretty much every other major battle scene in which Galactica participates. Key word being 'major': when the Galactica takes a real pounding we see some of this trope, never more so than New Caprica and the finale, but the CIC is in the most secure part of the ship, and in usual engagements the most that happens is some shaking.
Justified in Flight of the Phoenix: The Cylon computer virus bypassed safeties to deliberately overload a console. Also, the resulting explosion isn't really that big.
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 Battlestar Galactica (1978)
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Also in Battlestar Galactica (2003) during the liberation of New Caprica. And pretty much every other major battle scene in which Galactica participates. Key word being 'major': when the Galactica takes a real pounding we see some of this trope, never more so than New Caprica and the finale, but the CIC is in the most secure part of the ship, and in usual engagements the most that happens is some shaking.
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Star Trek V: The Final Frontier sees the transporter blow up after Klaa's Bird-of-Prey ambushes the Enterprise-A with a torpedo. From the scene on the bridge afterwards it seems that a console or two exploded, though not with any consequences worse than inflicting the odd concussion and mild burn.
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 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
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In AKIRA, control panels blow up when Tetsuo takes out SOL.
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In Invasion of the Bee Girls, when the hero confronts the bee girls just as they're about to transform his girlfriend into one of them, he shoots a panel of instruments. This causes pretty much the whole lab to blow up.
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Guilty Sparks: When Zek and Varvok stage their mutiny against the Covenant armada and their ship The Fallen Serpent takes a pounding that causes all manner of damage inside the bridge due to firepower they're taking. The lights are out and emergency lighting is on, the bridge's glass viewport has been shielded over by the shutters and they're flying blind outside of their remaining sensors, coolant vents are bursting open from the heavy hits and power cables are exploding from feedback and leaving holes in the walls. The only things still working, ironically, are the monitors themselves and only because they put the upgraded safeties in that cause them to turn off rather than explode dramatically, which both Zek and first mate Retz have a Gallows Humor Lampshade Hanging about.
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In an episode of Stargate Atlantis, Michael throws a laptop in frustration, and it explodes in a shower of sparks when it hits the ground.
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X-COM: During missions, you frequently end up boarding alien UFOs that are chock full of valuable, salvageable, and explosive equipment. A stray bullet striking the navigation computer could cause a chain reaction of everything in the room exploding in a shower of stun damage and smoke. Conveniently, alien commanders tended to hide out in rooms full of computers and consoles. Alternatively, you can just clean up the area outside the UFO and then camp out at the entrance until about turn 20. Then the AI logic guiding behavior of alien characters causes them to go on the offensive... right into your firing squad. For best results, throw a smoke grenade to prevent the aliens from shooting your guys.
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Star Wars Legends: After the ISD Freedom takes a full broadside including several ion cannon hits from the super star destroyer Lusankya in The Bacta War, one redshirt on the Freedom's bridge crew is mentioned to have been killed by an exploding console.
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In the Star Control series, the Life Meter for the ships is supposed to literally represent crewmembers, implying their deaths via exploding fuses in lieu of any damage to the ship itself. This is used in Star Control II to put a cap on ship repair early on (the space station you recruit from only has a few thousand crew), and one quest in the game actually involves finding a race of rapidly reproducing allies to replenish your crew.
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The infamous scouter devices in Dragon Ball Z exploded each time they measured a rapid increase in a power source, something that happened regularly during the course of a battle. For a device held on the eye by people regularly fighting powerful enemies, the scientists probably should have reduced the amount of explosives apparently used for its capacitors.
One particularly ridiculous example was in a filler scene, when several of Freeza's mooks were watching the fight between Goku and Freeza on a computer, when the scanner explodes and wipes out everyone in the room. Even though they were on a different planet. And they were most likely super-powered Ki fighters.
Portable models ceased use for the most part once Frieza actually started fighting with Vegeta, given the power levels were starting to get flat-out ridiculous.
After decades both in- and out-of-universe, this is finally addressed in Dragon Ball Super: Broly, where the latest model of scouter will just stop trying to measure power levels if they get too high. Guess Freeza finally got tired of paying to replace the damned things.
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The Last Witch Hunter: Belial's attempt at kidnapping Chloe starts with him blowing up all the lights in her house. As she has entire chains of lightbulbs instead of curtains, it produces this effect.
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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country follows in the footsteps of II and III, where console explosions do happen, but are just used to signify systems starting to break down rather than actively being dangerous to their operators.
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Star Trek: Voyager:
Weaponized during the Seska arc, during which several people were injured or assassinated by exploding console!
In "Prey", the Hirogen take out Voyager's port warp nacelle, causing the console to the left of Tom Paris to blow up. They then take out the starboard nacelle, causing the console to his right to explode. Good thing Voyager doesn't have a central nacelle, or he'd have copped it right in the face!
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In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, a battle droid on the bridge of the Invisible Hand gets killed by an exploded panel. The novelization tells of worse deaths to the crew.
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Several years before the story of Mobile Fighter G Gundam started, a Neo-Egyptian Gundam and its pilot were destroyed when this trope took place in the cockpit. In the "present", the DG Cells take over the Gundam's remains and the pilot's corpse...
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MacGyver (1985): The bad guy in "Slow Death" is killed when he ignores Mac's advice and attempts to start the train again. The sabotaged control panel explodes and kills him.
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Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen gives a meta-example with Devastator. Devastator is likely Industrial Light & Magic's greatest accomplishment to date. The scenes with him had such a massive level of detail that rendering him took the ILM equipment to its limits. "Took the ILM equipment to its limits" as in smoking (possibly igniting) and melting one of the motherboards of one of the computers rendering him. He was originally going to be play a bigger role, but the destruction of a very expensive computer put an end to that. According to some of the crew, Devastator had so many moving parts and was so complex and detailed to animate that his animation model was the cause of the critical failure.
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Occasionally occurred in Babylon 5, especially in the prequel In the Beginning, where an Earth Alliance ship and a Minbari ship both suffer from things exploding and metal beams falling from the ceiling during the botched First Contact space battle. Sparks would sometimes erupt out of consoles during space battles, i.e. "Endgame", "And Now for a Word", "Matters of Honor", but they are rarely deadly. When Starfury weapons fire and debris struck the blast doors of C & C in "Severed Dreams", it generated a strong enough impact that a screen/console near Sheridan did explode and erupt in flames and Sheridan is hurt, but it was caused more by the impact of the weapons and the debris rather than the exploding screen.
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In one Gravity Falls short, Soos' extremely outdated computer monitor explodes and catches fire while rendering a video.
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Parodied in the Australian Star Trek: The Next Generation spoof Sev Trek: Pus in Boots. Captain Pinchhard (Picard) tells Ensign Cannonfodder to "man that console that's always exploding". Later Lt Gaudy (Geordi LaForge) notices his console is beginning to spark, so he quickly "reroutes" the explosion to the expendable ensign's console.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

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