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Macross Missile Massacre
That'll teach 'em.
A tactic wherein a military vehicle or craft—often a Humongous Mecha—launches a massive salvo of missiles at a target, often more missiles than the craft should be able to hold. The missiles often follow artistic curving trajectories for no apparent reason, though strategically it may simply make them more difficult to dodge (or intercept, if there's any usable point defence). Occasionally, this is explained in Space Opera as the effect a ship's energy/force/gravity field has on the missiles. In some cases, this is justified by having the missile silos oriented up (or down) to allow for more surface area-and, in turn, more missiles.
Expect the target to try a Beehive Barrier to block the incoming ballistic barrage. A high speed missile dodge is usually an effective counter as well. A slightly more proactive solution is to launch your own missiles or, if you have the option of More Dakka, shooting them down. Trying to lead them away and crashing into an enemy is usually reserved for Ace Pilots.
Named after the Humongous Mecha in the Macross metaseries who fire swarms of missiles (specifically, 'micromissiles') that behave in precisely this way. It has also been called "Itano Circus", after animation director Ichiro Itano, who pioneered the most common aesthetic look of the MMM.
There are several actual weapons that fire a Macross Missile Massacre. In fact a whole lot of real-life weapon systems are either designed or can be adapted to use this tactic, and if nothing else you can just gather a whole bunch of one-shot launchers together Hamas or Hezbollah-style; see Real Life examples below.
A form of Death in All Directions, There Is No Kill Like Overkill, and Impossibly Cool Weapon. If this is fired from another missile in the form of a cluster or multi missile, then it's Recursive Ammo. See also Beam Spam. See also the related video game genre, Bullet Hell.
Examples of Macross Missile Massacre include:
1 Anime and Manga
2 Comic Books
3 Fan Works
6 Live Action TV
7 Tabletop Games
10 Western Animation
11 Real Life
Macross does this a lot, such as the YF-21. Taken to the extreme with the VF-25 Messiah Armored pack, which carries 210 Missiles.
Taken to the next extreme in episode 47 of Macross 7 when the fleet launches an MMM composed entirely of NUKES.
The trope is so integral to the series that the Insectoid Alien Vajra from Macross Frontier actually produce missile like growths within their bodies to invoke the trope..
Even in the Gundam Multiverse, the MMM is a viable tactic employed by the Dendrobium Orchis (One huge missile splits into at least 80 smaller ones), Heavyarms (Lots and lots of missile launchers), and Leopard (Expy of the above, same method). Specifically:
Trowa Barton's Gundam Heavyarms from Gundam Wing. Despite an armament of 52 missiles + 36 homing missiles, instead of using them against multiple targets, he invariably launches all of them in a single barrage against a few targets.
Wing also has a non-Gundam example: the Preventer ship in Endless Waltz has dozens of detectable modules, each of which fires out quite a few guided missiles.
Ptolemaios II, the Celestial Being mothership from the second season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 is heavily guilty of this. Gundam Arios (and to a much, much smaller extent, Gundam Cherudim) has been guilty of this too. But its support unit, GN Archer, really takes the cake, especially considering its relatively smaller dimensions.
In the first season, the Assault Containers are actually equipped with two Gatling Guns... that fire fricking GN Missiles!. In the second season, these are moved to the main ship, as they don't need Assault Containers anymore. Yes, they have a battleship with Gatling Guns that fire missiles. Regular Missile Launchers are overrated.
The Arios's first season predecessor, Gundam Kyrios, sort of does this, but has to carry a large missile launcher on it's fighter jet mode.
Still, episode 22 of the second season takes the cake when the bad guys spread a cloud across the entire battlefield which prevents the use of beam weapons. Cue nearly two minute long battle royale of everyone firing and dodging MM Ms. Yes, it's exactly as awesome as it sounds.
Taken to another level by the Gundam Dendrobium of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Its basic "Stamen" form is a conventional RX-78 clone with no missiles at all. But when it docks with the "Orchis" mobile armor, it can launch a salvo of almost TWO THOUSAND missiles.
If this seems like overkill, pause to think that the Dendrobium Orchis is much larger than the average MA, closer to the size of a ship. Actually, it's still overkill...
Also bearing mention is the METEOR support craft from Gundam SEED and its sequel Gundam SEED Destiny. A Spiritual Successor-slash-Homage to the Orchis, it carries a grand total of 77 missiles spread all over its body. Combined with its beam cannons and the weapons of the mobile suit that pilots it, it can pull off the MMM and Beam Spam all at the same time.
SEED and SEED Destiny also feature the Eternal, the ship that Lacus Clyne captains and houses the METEO Rs when not in use, which has missile launchers for most of its weaponry. Though the exact number of launchers isn't given, going by what is seen on screen it has at least 74. As a result, almost every shot of the ship firing its weapons is an MMM.
As crazy as it might seem Dragonball Z managed to do this with Ki attacks, the best example coming from Piccolo, said attack, the Renzoku Sen Kōdan 連続閃光弾[1] was a series of Ki attacks that Piccolo first spread around his enemy and would then close in on his opponent to do massive damage.
Parodied in Love Hina Again, where Kaolla Su uses missile launchers attached to her arms and legs to generate the effect. Subverted somewhat in the Love Hina Spring Movie, when the latest incarnation of Mecha Tama does not, in fact, have unlimited missiles. It runs out.
Cowboy Bebop.
Episode "Gateway Shuffle", in which a baddie fires a giant missile full of a biological payload which the goodies attempt to intercept, which then splits into three missiles. They destroy all but one and are about to blow up the last when it splits into thousands more missiles.
Episode "Honky Tonk Woman". The criminal boss's ship fires one of these at Faye's fleeing ship.
Not surprisingly, The Big O also carries a stupidly large number of missiles in its chest cavity. Unfortunately, while they are deployed nearly every episode, their total destructive power barely rivals that of a road flare.
The anime Zoids had various individuals who enjoyed this trope, most notably Leena Toros in the New Century Zero series. Her only attack in an entire episode typically consisted of one giant Macross Missile Massacre, usually launched while shouting "Wild Weasel Unit Total Assault!!"
This was also the main attack method of the Panzer armour of the Liger Zero- which overheated the Zoid so much that the armour had to be ejected after using it. Fortunately, it's re-usable.
The attack was first used to destroy an entire armada of flying enemies. Then later, it was used to destroy the chunks of a satellite so large its impact was going to devastate most of a continent. When locking onto its targets, it achieved so many missile locks that the cockpit sprouted new monitors in order to keep the targets on screen. He even fires missiles from his * tail* .
Zoids Genesis had Ron and his Bamboo Lion, who carried a limited number of cartridges with him anywhere he went, but they were usually key to destroying enemy bases, escaping, or otherwise taking down enemies that no one else could realistically fight.
Project: A-Ko: B-Ko's "Akagiyama Missiles".
In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann the Missile Massacre is a favored "tactic" of Attenborough, who is prone to pushing the Fire button of the warships without warning, hence his nickname Beam Spam McMuppet.
It does become useful later on when the Missile Massacre simultaneously hits every point at every time in the universe, annihilating the entire enemy force throughout all times, until that point it never really does much.
Simon did something similar to this a couple of times with projectile drills.
Not to mention Rossiu had a small Crowning Moment of Awesome for himself as he takes over while Simon rests after that projectile drill attack—he weaves and dodges the Gurren-Lagann through a veritable three-ring Itano Circus worth of missiles.
DAKKA. COMPLETE WITH RAINBOW TRAILS.
In the second movie, Yoko pulls off one of these by herself right after Kittan's death. The camera has to pull back a few times to show the sheer number of Anti-Spiral mechs she destroyed in one salvo.
Even better, the silhouette of her Ganmen from behind stylistically resembles the Macross after it lost its Wave Motion Tuning Fork in The Movie. Shout-Out, much?
In Mahou Sensei Negima, the Sagitta Magica spell is a common attack spell that launches anywhere from one to a hundred and ninety-three homing elemental blasts at a target, making it a 4M(Macross Magic Missile Massacre). Chachamaru did this at the end of the first anime adaptation using a pactio power.
In the recent manga chapters, Negi uses 1,001(!) Sagitta Magica("Sagitta Magica-Series Lucis!") on Fate. Fate comments that even though the spell Negi used was a basic attack spell, he's developed it so much that it was no different from a large scale war magic.
In early episodes of Space Runaway Ideon this appears to be the Ideon's only method of attack. In later episodes, when said missiles have (literal?) god-like power, this will easily devastate fleets.
Something of a Digimon tradition: the highest digivolved form of The Lancer's partner tends to be (but isn't always) an insanely weapon-laden cyborg. Digimon Tamers offers the most badass: the Humongous Mecha-sized MegaGargomon has literally hundreds of missiles of all sizes that come from various hidden compartments all over his body. (However, this attack, while cool-looking, seldom finishes a fight. They just soften the bad guy up for the two hugely oversized (and oddly happy) shoulder missiles which are the finisher.)
In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Homura uses her time-stopping power to do this manually with thousands of bazookas.
A sequence in School Rumble had Harima racing to deliver his finished manga manuscript to the publisher while riding a giant curry dish as a sled. A truck carrying frozen tuna crashed—and fired its cargo at him, Macross Missile Massacre style.
The final battle of Voices of a Distant Star ends with a Macross Missile Massacre launched by Mikako, wiping out a good chunk of Tarsian Fleet.
The Nirvana from Vandread shoots lasers this way, with the bonus that they can circumvent friendly troops while streaking toward their target.
Not only Nirvana, Rabat's pet Orangutan is also intelligent enough to pilot a robot. "Intelligent" meaning, getting strapped in and firing 3M's at anything that moves 'til it runs out of ammo. When she used it the last time, she got lucky since Nirvana's crews are actually more than ready to resupply her.
Even the small fighter craft are fully capable and willing to spew out several times their vehicular mass in missiles at the drop of a hat.
While not technically a complete Macross Missile Massacre, the ending battle in OVA 5 of the air combat series Sentou Yousei Yukikaze resembles a pseudo 3M, as every surviving aircraft is remotely taken over by the Yukikaze AI and salvo fires all of their remaining missiles simultaneously. The result is several hundred to several thousand full-sized Air to Air missiles blanketing the horizon. Called a pseudo 3M because all those missiles really were needed and because all of the aircraft carried a finite and generally realistic number of missiles individually.
Kaoruko from Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge often does this with her Powered Armor, which has four missile launchers (two on her legs, two on her arms) that fire like this.
Spells from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, such as Axel Shooter and Plasma Lancer, invokes this image, only using balls or blades of energy. A straighter example can also be found in the Type-2 Gadget Drones of the third season, which launches salvos of small missiles as one of its attacks.
In Nanoha, if any character (particularly shown: Fate and Chrono) using an attack with "... Shift", you can expect massive missile rain.
We thought Fate had reached the epitome of this with Photon Lancer, Phalanx Shift. Then Reinforce turned it against her: Photon Lancer, Genocide Shift.
Reinforce (that now dead Reinforce, mind you) also used a similar move called Bloody Dagger. It probably can be used by Hayate too, but.
A variation, Mashiro Rima accomplishes this using six juggling pins, hitting a target as small as an (highly manoeuvrable) egg in Shugo Chara.
In Kirameki Project a giant fighting mecha called "The Perfect" fires a ridiculously large salvo of missiles at a magical girl, Nene.
In Samurai Pizza Cats, Lucille has this occur when she's upset, and the projectiles are stored within her hair.
Crest of the Stars and its sequels made their battleships purely missile platforms that take Macross Missile Massacre to the absolutely ridiculous extent (the majority of the mass of ships multiple kilometers long consists solely of thousand and thousands of missiles). The sheer weight of fire ONE battleship could deliver would put Honor Harrington to shame. Of course, they were almost entirely Point Defenseless, but that's another matter.
Well as David Weber pointed out many times, that is the trait of a low quality military or of pirates. The professional, high quality military, prefer adequately point defended ships, with fewer missiles. I mean what's the point in delivering 10000 missiles in a salvo if the enemy squats them all and blows you up, with his 1000 missile salvo, that gets through because you were Too Dumb to Live.
In the Abhverse the opening stages of battle consist entirely of missile volleys and counter-missile volleys across huge distances, most of the missiles carried by the battleships are counter-missiles. Patrol ships, which only carry offensive missiles carry about twenty missiles. Also both Abh ships and Alliance ships are anything but point defenseless.
In the Suzumiya Haruhi anime, Kyon does this with a bunch of fireworks from his bike, proving that even he is willing to do something stupidly dangerous for the sake of a Shout-Out.
Two-thirds into Code Geass R2, Jeremiah Gottwald new mecha, Sutherland Sieg, fires a huge missile barrage he refers to as... THE STORM OF HIS LOYALTY!!!
Eureka Seven features the Macross Missile Massacre prominently, in both missile and "homing laser" form. Unsurprisingly, it shares a mechanical designer with the Macross franchise.
Gokudera's Rocket Bombs in Katekyo Hitman Reborn tend to be used like this.
Pokémon: In Johto's "The Big Balloon Blow-Up," the Team Rocket trio fires miniature missiles at a chasing Noctowl and Pikachu. At least six rounds of at least six missiles in two small rocket launchers were fired in the episode, and the launchers couldn't possibly hold more than one round.
Kouji Kabuto pulls this off in the final episode of Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-hen, with Rocket Punches, no less.
And in the original Mazinger Z series, several Mechanical Beasts (such like Brighton J2, Jinray S1 and Daima U5) used that strategy to attack Mazinger Z with sundry results. The mobile fortresses of Baron Ashura and Count Brocken also deployed an unholy amount of missiles -or torpedoes- when they engaged in combat against Mazinger Z.
And in the sequel, Great Mazinger, one of the most used tactis of Jun Hono was showering her enemy with Venus A's OppaiMissiles.
The Vegan warships and mini-saucers of UFO Robo Grendizer also blasted their targets with barrage of missiles.
And in the short story New Mazinger Mazinger-Z itself used that tactic against an army of monsters.
London. An armored airship, turning out hundreds of V2 missiles, like they're paper planes. And that's discounting the artificial Nazi undead the airship keeps belching. Little gems like that make Hellsing Crazy Awesome in all its gory glory.
In the final episode of Blue Submarine No. 6, the titular Blue Sub 6 launches a Macross Torpedo Massacre at the Ghost Ship.
The anime adaptation of Naruto's 6-tailed Kyuubi form can fire a barrage of mini chakra-balls, as well as a concentrated beam... of chakra.
The manga Sengoku Youko gives us one made of trees.
Cure Sunshine's Gold Forte Burst in Heartcatch Pretty Cure.
Eureka Seven does this as well, only they don't use missiles very often, and instead use fricking Homing Lasers. Just about every battle in the last half of the show has at least one mecha being chased by a MMM of lasers. No, it doesn't make much sense, but it's still Understatement really, really awesome!
In the backstory of Infinite Stratos, the nuclear weapons of the world's superpowers were hacked and launched at Japan. White Knight, the first IS, destroyed all of them single-handidly. It is all but stated outright that the inventor of the IS set up both the missiles and the White Knight to make the IS look good.
In the Apocalypse War plotline of Judge Dredd, East-Meg One destroys half of Mega-City One with nuclear missiles that split into smaller missiles, filling the entire skyline. They retaliate, with no success.
Anansi, the Spider Tank boss in The Legend of Zelda fan fic Exoria, can launch multiple top-attack missiles at once.
In An Entry With a Bang, Clancy-Earth aircraft throw a lot of missiles around. Then again, given how tough BattleTech armour is, this is rather necessary.
Fan Vids based on Touhou Project often use this to portray how danmaku would look in three dimensions.
In The Last Starfighter, the GunStar 1's "Death Blossom", takes out an entire fleet of enemy fighters in seconds.
In Avatar, an entire fleet of helicopter things each launch all their missiles in rapid succession to defeat a tree.
The Dragon also has lots of miniguns mounted on it. It gets to use them fully, suffice to say, and could clearly Take on the entire Na'vi population singlehandedly with it's dozens of miniguns and missile launchers. And WAS. Until Jake Sully used that brain of his. Sure you're rooting for the Na'vi but ask anyone who's seen the movie and they'll tell you they'd rather have seen the dragon in full force.
This is kind of the point of the Hailfire Droid's existence. Read this if you haven't got what the Hailfire is.
The Jericho Missile of the Iron Man movie, which starts off as a single missile that splits up in mid-air. As Tony himself describes it...
Tony Stark: They say that the best weapon is the one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once. That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it... and it's worked out pretty well so far. I present to you the newest in Stark Industries' Freedom line. Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain, and I personally guarantee, the bad guys won't even wanna come out of their caves. Ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration... the Jericho.
"To Peace!"
The new Star Trek movie has a Romulan Cool Ship called the Narada that seems to have missile tubes coming out the yin-yang, and those missiles themselves are fragmenting. It gets more interesting when you learn that the Narada is a mining vessel that has been hastily converted into a warship and that the missiles it fires are developed by the Romulans from reverse-engineered Borg technology. Repeat after me, There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
Yet in the end, the Narada's Macross Missile Massacre is no match for the Enterprise's Beam Spam.
Well, the missiles aren't. The Narada itself is no match for Spock's ship of doom. Interestingly one of the few genuine examples of Ramming Always Works.
I don't know if that really counts as ramming, since Spock's ship of doom is more like a guided missile itself, with singularity-creating red matter as the warhead
Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Henry V and its famous scene when all of the longbow archers fire simultaneously.
Which was a standard tactic for massed archers since ancient times. But if we count this, don't we have to count every period war movie from Pharaohic Egypt to the American Civil War?
The Humongous Mecha (very Real Robot, interestingly) sequence in District 9 has an awesome example.
The director, Neill Blomkamp, referenced the 3M almost by name in the DVD commentary.
The title of Korean film The Divine Weapon refers to the hwacha (described in the Real Life section below). The film's culmination revels in this trope, and is probably the best example you could get out of a non-Speculative Fiction story in pre-Modern setting.
Despicable Me does this... a lot. The most notable - and probably the only real example that fits THIS trope - is where Gru, in his spaceship, is trying to steal back the shrink ray he just stole. One of his Minions hits this trigger, laughing maniacally, and two panels snap out from the sides of the ship that take up way more space than the ship itself. Vector responds by sending out these little drones that intercept the missile's heat-seeking technology. Then he shrinks Gru's ship to the size of a child's ride-in car.
During the climatic scene at the Cuban waters in X-Men: First Class, the American and Soviet Navy decide to bombard the shore with the mutants with their rockets and missiles AND complimentary shelling thrown in. Of course, at that point Magneto has just recently developed his control over his power recently, so one can imagine what a spiteful Magneto was going to do right after.
Do arrows count? In 300, "Our arrows will block out the Sun".
The same thing happens at the end of Hero.
Iron Man launches one in The Avengers.
This is standard military operating procedure in the Honor Harrington Space Opera series by David Weber. The in-story justification is to overwhelm the computerized defensive systems of enemy vessels. (A.K.A. the Manticore Missile Massacre.)
To add to the awe-inspiring slaughter, given that the missiles are for delivering bomb-pumped lasers, with the tens of thousands (or much more) missiles launched, even accounting for countermeasures to defend against that, it also makes your average fleet engagement in the Honorverse an exercise in Beam Spam as well. Add the tribarrel for More Dakka goodness, and you have the Hat Trick of spam attacks.
Count that a Grand Slam at least—you also must add Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs due to lots of characters knowing martial arts or simply being Super Soldiers. And 'cats. And then there's Implausible Fencing Powers thrown into the mix, but they haven't got much screentime except once.
Alfredo Yu's full-auto flechette gun from The Honor Of The Queen is feeling left out. Honor Harrington basically embodies every Spam Attack trope known to man, and then some.
Also the trope is played straight in the later part of the series with medium combatants (cruisers, destroyers, battlecruisers) that get the opportunity, through off bore targeting missiles, to fire all their on board launchers at a single target. Considering that the launchers are fixed in position, for all the missiles to hit some of them will have to Roboteching to hit their targets. Also it's standard practice to have the missiles spreading so as not to kill one another with their drives, which begets, you guessed it, more Roboteching.
The largest battle so far in the history of the series features a combined opening salvo of seven hundred thousand missiles (and the emphasis is Weber's). Seven hundred thousand. So many that they fry most of the sensors being pointed at them. For reference, humanity has thus far built MAYBE 80,000 nuclear weapons total, each of which is of minute power compared to these. That right there is nine times the number and God knows how many times the firepower of the most destructive weapons available to mankind at the moment, and it's. The. Opening. Salvo.
During the attack by the aliens in the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall, one of the main characters explicitly comments that the barrage of incoming alien missiles reminded him of a Japanese science fiction cartoon.
Done to an American convoy in Red Storm Rising. although that's with many aircraft flying two or three missiles each..
Actually done so much in the novels by both the Soviets and allies that an alternate title for the page could be 'Soviet Misssiles Massacre' or 'Cruise Missile Massacre' or simply 'Red Storm Rising', but that doesn't sound so good with out the third "M". As revealed in the Real Life section bellow this is actually truth in fiction. Let's count them:
The NATO airfield in Iceland
The Nimitz battle group, with disastrous results: Nimitz heavily damaged, the French carrier Foch sunk, one Amphibious Combat Vessel with 2000 marines aboard blown up, no survivors.
Not one, but practically every Allied Convoy in the beginning of the war.
The Russian airfields near Murmansk also get this treatment at the hands of sub launched American Tomahawk missiles.
The Kirov gets the torpedo equivalent by four torpedoes fired from a Norwegian diesel sub.
Kirov's escorts get mauled by a sub launched Harpoon MMM.
USS Ticonderoga fires all her 96 missiles in less then 3 minutes while trying to defend the Nimitz Battle Group
Also the F-14 Tomcats in the naval air battles described fire these at the squadron level
This is actually a well-known tactic in naval anti-ship warfare—you launch missiles with the expectation that your target will launch countermissiles that will take out some of your missiles; the remainder will get closer while your target reloads its countermissile launchers to fire a second wave; the survivors of that launch will get closer while the target reloads again, repeated until the target can't reload and fire before the survivors reach the target. The VLS system on the Aegis cruisers and destroyers eliminate the reload time, but if you fire more missiles than the air-defense ships have countermissiles, your target is SOL even if all the countermissiles work.
In the Antares novels, an attack carrier is a converted freighter carrying about ten thousand nuclear missiles each. In the first novel, the Ryall send three of these against Sandar. The purpose is to overwhelm planetary defense computers—oh, and to cause destruction on an untold scale.
Generator's arm bracers in the Whateley Universe. Her friends said she'd been watching too much Project: A-Ko.
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the X Wing Series, Booster Terrik's station from The Bacta War - three hundred torpedo and missile launchers. It was all a ruse, with only the sensors in place, but the weapons themselves were loaded onto freighters and put to use against Lusankya later. The actual first salvo clocked in at eighty missiles (still enough to disable a small Star Destroyer, per shot).
UNSC warships in the Halo novels are capable of firing very large numbers of Archer missiles. The typical Archer pod contains 30 missiles, and even small ships like a frigate have over two-dozen pods, resulting in total payload of hundreds of missiles (perhaps thousands for larger ships). Unfortunately for the UNSC, all those missiles are useless against a Covenant warship if its shields are up, and even if its shields are down, its point defense lasers can shoot down a large portion of even a large volley of Archer missiles.
It is also mentioned a single Archer missile is capable of disabling or outright destroying smaller human ships, so either warships were severely overpowered in engagements or the Human-Covenant war prompted the upgrade.
In addition, the typical tactic against covenant warships was to launch a Macross Missile Massacre to weaken the shields before shooting a MAC round or two. This was, however, often weakened due to the fact that Covenant targeting systems were precise enough to destroy at least half of the missiles during their flight to the target.
In the Dale Brown novel Plan of Attack, the Air Battle Force takes severe casualties after Russians lob many, many missiles at them. Including nuclear ones.
The Bolo tanks often carry a VLS battery or two capable of unleashing the MMM. Their excellent point defenses and armour allow them to survive multiple MMMs.
In The History of the Galaxy books, dedicated missile frigates are equipped with a 100 missile tubes, able to launch them simultaneously at 50 separate targets. The novel where they are described shows one ambushing two frigates and blowing them to smithereens, although they are able to shoot a number of the missiles down. Then a heavy cruiser shows up. The missile frigate launches another 100 missiles, but the cruiser only sustains light damage thanks to its superior point-defense systems and EM screens. For reference, a heavy (or flagship) cruiser is ten times the size of the missile frigate and roughly 7 kilometers (about 4.3 miles) long.
In Fyodor Berezin's Ash, Earth is at war with its off-world colony in another star system. By the time of the novel, the colony has been turned into a radioactive wasteland by constant nuclear bombardment. However, it is revealed that at least two habitats exist: one is deep under a mountain range, while the other is at the bottom of the ocean. The leader of the first knows their society won't last long. His only goal is to strike back. Since he can't attack Earth, he plans to destroy the Earthlings' base on the planet's moon. To this end, they construct thousands of MIRV missiles and launch them. When the missiles split, they also release duds, which are basically inflated objects with radar-reflecting paint. Altogether, the enemy sees hundreds of thousands of targets coming at them, only about 10-15% of which are real nuclear warheads. Despite this, the automated defenses built years before do a good job at reducing that number substantially. In the end, only a few impact the vicinity of the base, killing dozens of pilots. Several missiles are also shown to have cluster warheads with "mini-nukes" using californium, which has a much smaller critical mass than plutonium. Also, the attack on the base turns out to be a diversion, as several missiles break off and proceed to knock an asteroid off its orbit to fall on the base.
Troy Rising: Humans and others, particularly in The Hot Gate, throw around up to hundreds of thousands of missiles, depending on the specific engagement under discussion, at one point outdoing the entire missile expenditure of both sides at the Battle of Manticore.
In Manifold Space, a fleet of Planet Looters in orbit around Mercury is completely obliterated when liberally-seeded, re-engineered lunar flowers, which fire rocket-propelled seed pods, simultaneously fire from all over the planet in a single massive bombardment.
Happens during a major battle in Stargate SG-1. Jack uses an Ancient command chair to destroy Anubis' mothership with a veritable legion of Drone missiles, which compensates for being grossly unnecessary in volume with its sheer awesome. Though, Anubis survives.
The Ancient drone weapons were apparently designed specifically for this tactic, but in Stargate Atlantis the team never had enough to spare because of limited supplies. Apparently in the war against the Wraith, the Ancients themselves couldn't produce enough to deal with their onslaught.
Well, they only had a few dozen during the Battle of Atlantis at the end of the first season, but after the events in the second season episode The Tower Sheppard claims they were able to trade medical supplies and an IDC for enough drones to restock Atlantis.
A more straight up example is when the Daedalus ambushes a pair of hive ships in the episode "No Man's Land" and the ship rapidly deploys it's entire battery of VLS launched nuclear missiles and has them fan out into a wave while trying to overwhelm the fighter screen of a Wraith hive ship. It partially works.
Kamen Rider has more than one example:
Kamen Rider Ryuki: All Riders have a "Final Vent". Most of them are melee attacks that create perhaps a man-sized explosion at best. The Final Vent of Kamen Rider Zolda (And by extenstion, Torque), on the other hand, is a barrage of dozens upon dozens of missiles resulting in a humongous explosion and frequently beating the shit out of several other Riders. It is appropriately named "End of World".
Kamen Rider 555: The super-charged bike of Kamen Rider Kaixa has a mecha mode that can fire one of these.
Kamen Rider Den-O: Boistous Shot, Climax Form's Gun Form-based 'Charge And Up' finisher is this.
Kamen Rider Double: LunaTrigger's finisher, "Trigger Full Burst", is this. A rather neat trick considering it's laser bullets and not missiles that are doing the trajectory curving, but the Luna form combinations regularly break the laws of physics anyways.
GrandLiner, the Mid-Season Upgrade Humongous Mecha in Rescue Sentai Go Go Five, essentially a giant walking fortress formed by train cars, combines a Macross Missile Massacre with a hail of bullets from a giant Gatling engine, both shoulder-mounted; the technique is called "Grand Fire".
Oh, but that's not its real finisher, no... When its time for the endgame move, "Grand Storm", it equips the Gatling and Missile engines onto its fists and lets out two solid punches with them while firing them at full power. Overkill...
Happens routinely on the new Battlestar Galactica. Cylon basestars are especially prone to firing gigantic salvos of missiles (with cool vapor trails) that home in on the Galactica. If Galactica is on top of its game, the missiles get shot down by Vipers and the battlestar's anti-aircraft guns. If not, expect some breakage.
They also really like to jump away right before the missiles hit.
Racetrack's Raptor in the Grand Finale
A group of Cylon Raiders use one of these to kill the non-FTL capable civillain fleet in the miniseries. Granted, there were enough targets to justify the manoeuvre.
In Babylon 5, the Shadows' planet killer fires 13,000 missiles at its intended target...a planet. They burrow into the planet and then detonate underneath the crust for hundreds of Megatons EACH. This results in a tectonic shock that causes the planet to "literally fall apart from the inside out".
A lesser example is provided by the Earth defence platforms in "Endgame".
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, though it doesn't quite match the aesthetic, has Deep Space Nine launch 5000 photon torpedoes at an invading Klingon force.
Specifically, in the episode "The Way of the Warrior", the titular station surprises an attacking Klingon fleet with a bevy of newly installed weapons, including rotating photon torpedo launchers that pretty much fill the intervening space with antimatter missiles.
A Jem'Hadar battleship does this to a lesser extent in "Valiant" against a single ship.
The favored tactic of Andromeda in the early seasons. At one point a FLEET of ships did so, which one captain described as 'Carpet Bombing Space'. It was pretty impressive.
The primary purpose of the Siege Perilous-class assault ships built during the Commonwealth's final days. With their 180 missile tubes, they can launch more missiles than an entire fleet, making them perfect ship-killers.
Of the four built, three were shown on screen and played important roles: the Balance of Judgment survived the Nietzscheans rebellion, but its AI went insane; the Balance Wrath of Achilles was captured in battle and kept in the "starship prison" system; the Resolution of Hector was built by the New Commonwealth but hijacked by the Judgments's AI. The unnamed fourth ship was destroyed in port by the Nietzscheans.
Done several times on MythBusters to test various rocket myths. Notable one being the alcohol myths episode where the build team tested a Korean arrow launcher (the hwacha mentioned below IRL).
Space: Above and Beyond has a very memorable use of it in the duel between Lt. Col. T.C. McQueen and Chiggy von Richthofen, ended when McQueen sends all six of his missiles into Chiggy at once.
In the season one finale of Terra Nova the bad guys spot Col. Taylor and his soldiers trying to get away in a vehicle. The vehicle is hidden by a dense tree canopy so they cannot target it directly. Instead Lucas fires off a missile that splits into multiple smaller missiles that then rain down on the forest in a wide spread.
Rifts has several mecha who can do this, being mounted with Mini Missile launchers that carry obscene loads of small missiles almost designed to be used in this way. Not unsurprising as Palladium Books also published an RPG based on the Robotech franchise that used the same system.
The Robotech RPG was released prior to Rifts, and was the first instance of the name "Mini Missile" actually being used.
Both Eldar Dark Reaper Reaper Launchers and Space Marine Heavy Bolters are described in the Warhammer 40,000 fluff as firing many miniature missiles and firing rocket-propelled rounds respectively, although scale-wise those are closely to More Dakka. The Tau get a Missile (Im)Barrage on their Skyray Missile Gunships, not to mention multi-launch missile systems on their battlesuits. The Sisters of Battle have Exorcist artillery organs that do this. Space Marines also have multiple missile tubes on their Whirlwinds, but not to as over-the-top extents as with Skyrays or Exorcists.
By the way, those Exorcists? They're fired by Sisters who play the keys of the pipe organ that serves as the launcher for the rockets.
So you could say that when it comes to missiles, the Sisters of Battle pull out all the stops?
Cthulhu Tech, Homage-storm that it is, features rocket-pods that use exactly this method as heavy weapons for their Humongous Mecha. The big winner is the Cherub-class Engel, a middling-sized support mech that can hit a target with up to a dozen rockets at once.
Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has one Prestige Class, the Force Missile Mage, dedicated to turning the Magic Missile spell into this.
Not quite, the Force Missile Mage just adds an additional two missiles, making a total of seven for a high level caster. However, if you combine this with creative use of Metamagic (namely Quicken Spell and Twin Spell) one can easily fire off as many as 28 in a single turn, if you use Delay Spell you can end up with over fifty Magic Missiles going off at once.
The "Magic Missile Shotgun": a Rod of Wands (holds up to three wands and allows you to use those wands simultaneously) and three Wands of Magic Missile (high level crafter = five Missiles per use each). Pull the trigger and it fires fifteen unerring bolts of magical force. Upgrade those wands to Maximized Magic Missile (automatically does greatest possible damage) and that's 75 points of damage per turn that cannot miss.
And like everything in DnD tactics like this can be optimized to insane extremes, as can be seen in this set up which launches well over a hundred orbs of force and does just a hair under 4000 damage on average.
BattleTech, for a long time only used their missiles this way. The individual missiles themselves were rather weak though, and could only do damage in numbers or through a lucky hit. With the exception of artillery and warship-mounted missiles (which soon became extinct in the main setting), it was centuries before somebody revisited the concept of a powerful missile. Some mechs that are practically made of this trope. Gaze upon the Yeoman, ye mighty, and despair!
The Yeoman's nothing. Check out the mighty Kraken 3. No other mech epitomizes the Macross Missile Massacre to the same extent- this mech mounts 8 LRM 15 pods. That means it has 8 different launchers that each fire 15 missiles, giving it the capacity to launch a staggering 120 missiles simultaneously.
The vehicular 'SRM Carrier' has 18 6-packs of short range missiles (thats 108 missiles per shot, thank you). One * will* sand all the armor of the biggest mech in the game. The tricky part is living to take the * second* shot.
Also worth noting: standard BattleTech missiles are individually actually very small. One metric ton of long-range missile ammo for example consists of 120 individual missiles (launchable in salvos of 5, 10, 15, or 20), which works out to each of them weighing 8 1/3 kg or about 18.4 lbs. This puts them firmly in the 'man-portable' weight class, and indeed missile-equipped infantry exists in the game, but well below 'real' real life rocket artillery or guided missiles. (The WW 2 Katyusha mentioned in the Real Life section below fired salvos of individual missiles weighing five times this much.)
In GURPS, firing a sufficient number of projectiles at an enemy gives a free increase in accuracy because it's harder to get out of the way. Unfortunately the rules don't allow for a successful MMM (more than a fraction hitting) except on a critical success. Though there are rules for firing 20 round salvos for weapons with very high rates of fire which produce a dozen or so hits even with an unsuccessful attack.
Unless the projectiles are guided or homing, then they kinda just hit stuff, pretty much regardless.
In the "Interstellar Wars" setting for Traveller, this is standard Vilani naval doctrine.
In Mekton, missiles are virtually worthless unless fired en masse, necessitating the use of large numbers to hurt your enemy. (The Mekton Tactical Display explained how to build a MIRV: cram as many missiles as possible onto a flying Remote, then point it at the enemy and watch.)
In Battle Machines the dakka infused biggy gun can be upgraded to have explosive rounds. Of course its just one of the many weapons you can make.
The Kzinti in Star Fleet Battles usually try to overwhelm their opponents' defenses by saturating the battlefield with drones (which is what missiles are called in that universe).
Standard capital ship stand-off tactics in Starfire. Necessary due to the presence of Point Defense systems on most targets.
Any game based on Macross, of course. There's a whole bunch of 'em.
The best one has to be Macross Ace/Ultimate Frontier. Not in the sheer number fired, but there's a title that's awards when you've killed one million enemies with missiles. The use of missiles is so ubiquitous in the game that the developers anticipated that a lot of enemies would be killed using missiles. There's even a counter for how many missiles you've fired, which goes up to the hundreds of millions.
The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road gives the Red Glare: A scoped, fully-automatic missile launcher that can fire up to 13 rockets in less than 5 seconds.
Mushihime-sama - Missiles like the world has never seen before. And probably never will again.
At least one type of weapon/plane/bombs in almost every Shoot'Em Up game.
The giant mecha in Armored Core can be designed with massive missile supplies, in some cases firing dozens of light missiles at a time. Given the agility of some opposing mecha, and the cost of replacing missile stores, this isn't a popular option, but it certainly has a place.
Kisaragi in Armored Core Last Raven developed Micromissiles, missile launchers that fired up to 9 missiles in one salvo (13 if you have the extension part), this was perhaps the best weapon a non OP-I Core can have on his back. Unless he faces off against mechs with good anti missile weapons. The Nymph series compensates instant missile salvos with more stopping power and better firing trajectory, the Taurus also provides a spectacular display of an insane barrage of missiles. The best way to stop the Nymph and Taurus is to equip a lock canceller which resets the lock.
In the fourth installment, combining Macross Missile Massacres with hit-and-run tactics is arguably the safest, and cheapest, way of disposing of enemy mecha—at least, if you're not up against a skilled human opponent.
To elaborate, earlier games has missile barrages about 12, or maximum 16 missiles at a time. In for Answer, a dedicated missileboat can launch a whopping 128 missiles continously (WHEELING01/03 back launcher(s) launches 32 missiles per shot, the MUSKINGUM02 shoulder weapon fires 64), at a single target, with fire-and-forget capability (meaning that once a lock-on is ensured and the trigger is pulled, each missiles launched will track the locked on target even when it's no longer on the lock-on arc). This makes missile dodging paramount to survival itself. Hope you're packing flares, buddy.
Of course, you could just shoot the missiles, causing them to blow up in their face.
Bangai-O, a fairly obscure Dreamcast game, follows this trope to the letter. Your tiny Mecha can release up to 400 missiles at once, which all have the ability to home in on your target. If you haven't played this game, you should.
In Bangai-O Spirits, Missile Massacres halve in number and double in size when they go over a hundred, so while the Bangai-O can't actually release 400 missiles, it can reach up to 100 quadruple size missiles. And it's still enough to lag the DS's graphical renderer (The game knows this, and will warn you about it in the tutorial). And it's still a bucket of fun.
But if you have the reflect EX attack on, you reflect more than 800 missiles at your enemies, in addition to the 100 you can already launch.
Note: this is a main feature of the game and some parts of the game REQUIRE you to do this to have a fighting chance. And THEN there's the bosses that will do this to YOU as well, which results in a 3M being used to COUNTER another 3M (each launching 400 missiles). This is as awesome as it sounds.
How it works is the EX attack is charged by danger. The more enemies and bullets the are near you, the more awesome the Macross Missile Massacre is. It's effectively a smart bomb, and you use it to get you out of trouble. The game encourages you to get in trouble and then use it. If you destroy an insane amount of enemies, and then collect the fruit from them, you can actually gain temporary invincibility. This is also as awesome as it sounds.
Also, doing this can cause the number at the top-center of the screen (a counter for the number of simultaneous on-screen explosions) to max out at 999. At that point, even the Dreamcast—a system designed to be able to handle absurd amounts 2-D graphical objects—will get slowdown. Note that, because you have to risk getting creamed in order to do this (by being close to the incoming 3M swarm and/or enemy), hitting the 3M trigger just a hair too late means instant death. Success, on the other hand, means several nail-biting seconds of 3M's countering one another in rapid succession until one of you either runs out of 3M ammo or doesn't counter in time. It's a sight to see if you can pull it off.
The BattleTech series has two main missile types: Short Range Missiles and Long Range Missiles. SRMs are shot, according to the launcher type, in salvos of two, four and six. LRMs, in contrast, are shot in salvos of five, ten, and rather more ridiculously fifteen and twenty. Super-heavy Mechs can be armed with as many launchers as their weight allows, one can mount, say, six LRM20s on a single mech. Shooting them all at once causes a barrage of 120 guided missiles that will overpower any anti-missile system and very probably destroy any Mech in one shot.
That's assuming the missiles hit, of course, depending on how lucky you are with the dice. However, two more missile types do exist: Medium Range Missiles and Clan-only Advanced Tactical Missiles. ATMs come in launcher sizes of three, six, nine and twelve missiles, but MRMs are loaded in salvos of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty. Good luck hitting something with it, though—MRMs are naturally inaccurate.
Then there's XRMs, which are practically cruise missiles. Sidenote: always turn off your night vision mode (even during night missions!) in Mechwarrior 4 before launching a missile volley, or you'll get blind.
Such tactics are the origin of the term Missile Boat, whose modus operandi is nothing but missiles, missiles, missiles.
While not nearly as numerous as the above mentioned examples, the SRM launchers of Mechwarrior 3 deserve some mention for making their missiles the only ones to spiral wildly about instead of firing in nice, tight clusters like the Streak SRMs and LRMs of the same game. The Vulture A OmniMech in particular deserves note for managing to fit the aesthetic of the trope, as it carries six SRM-6 launchers, resulting in 36 twisting, swirling contrails with every pull of the trigger.
Perhaps in a nod to this trope (or at least the frequency of Missile Boats and such), the concept art for the Catapult in the upcoming Mechwarrior Online has "Missile Massacre" written on the inside of one of it's missile rack covers.
The player mod "Mechwarrior: Living Legends" for Crysis Wars has LR Ms that rocket into the sky before arching over and bombarding the target.
Pandora in Devil May Cry 4 has a flying missile platform mode capable of pulling this off. In the third game, Kalina Ann had the "Hysteric" move which launched cluster micro missiles.
Most missile systems available to the player in Project Sylpheed work this way. The heaviest is capable of launching 60 missiles at once.
Actually, it only launches six missiles. Then each missile shoots ten missiles.
The Isaac's Greater Missile Storm spell is animated this way in Neverwinter Nights 2.
The spell also exists in the expansions to Neverwinter Nights, where it's almost a Game Breaker for its absurd damage potential when the Maximize Spell feat is applied to it.
And if that wasn't bad enough; imagine a spellcaster throwing two Maximised IGMSs out while Time Stop is in effect. Imagine what that would look like to the poor bastard/s on the other end!
Baldur's Gate 2 topped this though. With Time Stop, Improved Aclarity, the Robe of Vecna, and Amulet of Power, it was possible to cast Magic Missile without pausing between spells, and very quickly. Quickly enough to cause even the most powerful computers to stutter as they calculated graphics and damage of the various spells, which all occurred as soon as the time stop /ended.
The Project Snowblind rocket launcher has two firing modes. The primary one fires an unguided rocket, but the alternate firing mode splits this rocket into four independently targeting, homing minimissiles.
Hijack a artillery tank in Red FactionGuerilla , turn on cool turrets, and go to a large EDF base. Hold down the left trigger the entire time.
In Free Space 2, you can arm your fighter with 2 types of missile that fire off four (or 8 if you double fire) mini missiles. They also home in. Sadly, you can't load up completely on these and fire all of your ordnance racks at once, although you could (if you were good and fast) fire all of them in very quick succession.
You can also equip the other fighters in your squad and up to three additional squads with swarm missiles and then order them to get into formation with you. When you then command all of them to attack the capital ship in front of you, they will all fire their missiles at the same distance from the target, for a possible total of 128 missiles. Unless they send a second wave three seconds after that.
One of the very first missiles you have access to not only takes up a lot of space in your fighter, but also has poor tracking capability (tail-chase only) and mediocre damage to boot. However, it is a staple of multiplayer partly because it requires no lock-on to track targets but also because the firing intervals for the weapon are lower than just about any other missile weapon. This allows you to "ripple-fire" them in salvos in order to make them harder to shake off and in order to ensure a kill.
Freespace mods also cop to this on occasion. Wings of Dawn contains a frigate that fires several dozen missiles per salvo, and Blue Planet has this as one of the UEF's main tactics: since they lack the Wave Motion Guns the GTVA uses, their strongest attack is a massive, continuous swarm of nukes.
In Wing Commander Prophecy and it's sequel, Wing Commander Secret Ops, the player on occasion has access to the Wasp interceptor. One of it's weapons is the Swarmer, a launcher that with each shot fires eight missiles that track your locked target—as long as you keep your target within your front view, otherwise the Swarmers will lose lock and fly off aimlessly. If you possess the piloting skills to keep your target in your view (often not possible without jettisoning the Wasp's booster), it's a one-shot kill. See also the Tracker, which is 4 Friend-or-Foe missiles connected to one common launch body that eventually splits off into its separate missiles.
To a lesser degree than a full MMM, using the salvo function, one can dump all of one's missiles in a short time. This is a cheap way to kill "Flash" in the sim contest in Wing Commander III, if you don't want to take forever to kick the little twerp's ass. This method also works on potting Thrakhath after the Behemoth is destroyed in the Loki system, but in the Kilrathi Saga version of WC3, unlike the initial DOS release, the instant Thrakhath dies your carrier jumps out, even if there's still time left on the countdown. Of course, being The Dragon, Thrakhath returns at the end anyway, even if you do kill him and get to land.)
The military chopper fought in Half-Life 2 that can inexplicably spew out a gigantic swarm of several times its own vehicular mass in antipersonnel mines, and will do so repeatedly just to show you it can.
Interestingly, the most memorable version of this attack actually spawned from a glitch. When you nearly have the chopper taken down, it will start spamming mines in a gigantic three-line stream, covering wherever you are with explosives. This used to be a glitch, but when Valve discovered how effective it was and the lasting memories it impressed upon players, they turned it into a tactic.
Actually, the bombs were collapsible and inflatable, so that they could float on water. They just poof up when they're released. That's why it has such a small explosion for such a big bomb.
From Metal Wolf Chaos, firing a ludicrious amount of missiles:
HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW!?
A rather early example can be found in the intro of the 1997 game, Pax Imperia. "You didn't have to use those Swarm Missiles, did you?"
The Comanches in Command & Conquer: Generals can utterly saturate a small area with a storm of rockets given the Rocket Pods upgrade, making it extremely potent at stopping tank rushes. The Rocket Buggy, another unit, can do a similar attack that is equally effective.
Just how insane is this? Use Multiple commanches (ie. 5) And make them shoot at once, there are no rocket trails anymore, why? because the sheer amount of rockets OVERLOADED THE FREAKING GRAPHICS ENGINE. and lets not even start about the mods modspeople add to the game
In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the Allied Aegis Missile Cruiser starts off as a powerful anti-air unit that fires damaging missiles at targets. However, as it begins to rack up kills and gain promotions (which isn't too hard as it's pretty good at its job) it gets becomes even more powerful and fires missiles nonstop.
To elaborate: An elite (fully promoted) Aegis Cruiser can destroy a Kirov Airship in three seconds.
Red Alert 2's Allied Rocket IFV is quite capable of triple-M'ing when it's fully promoted. Rack up as many elite Rocket IF Vs and you can guarantee that you'll have a real triple-M show.
And in Red Alert 3, we have the Rocket Angels, who do this whenever they're not using their paralyzing whip.
This is one of the Empire of the Rising Sun's specialties. One of their special upgrades makes any units with rocket weapons fire even more rockets when attacking.
The Imperial Giga-fortress from Uprising is a floating battleship that mounts four photon rocket launchers, each equivalent to a Rocket Angel in firepower, plus four beam-cannon batteries.
And also in Red Alert 3, we have Soviet Dreadnoughts that can utterly spam targets with missiles--really, really huge missiles (these are full battleships after all), but at the expense of the unit's health. Allied IFVs and missile turrets can spam nearly as bad as a Rocket Angel, however, if you put a Javelin soldier in there, and the Soviet Twinblade attacks targets simply by unloading a ton of rockets onto it.
Oh, not simply—the Twinblade also uses tons of machine guns.
In the final Rising Sun mission, the Soviets use increasingly improbable uses of this trope, spamming first their satellite-drop power and then their superweapons at certain predefined points. It doesn't save them.
The GDI MLRS (yes, the an American M270) is this in Renegade, Tiberian Dawn's spinoff. Six rockets per salvo, compared to the original's two.
The Nod Multi-Missile superweapon from Tiberian Sun is, put simply, Macross Missile Massacre plus Recursive Ammo. It's the only weapon that can let off more than two missiles in a go, until Firestorm added the Cyborg Reaper, which lets off four missile a salvo.
The mode of attack of the Nod Stealth Tank from Tiberium Wars is—you guessed it—a triple-M, a feat that its older versions could never pull off in the previous installments. To make it clear: older Stealth Tank models let two missiles off per salvo; these new toys let off at least three to four times as much.
Also in the same game, but at a lesser extent is the Orca Gunship, firing 6 air-to-ground missiles each. but since you usually have 4 of them, it ends up barraging 24 missiles on your enemies. The Kane's Wrath expansion even has a +2 missiles upgrade to these aircrafts, bringing up to 32 missiles in one quick run! Stack it up with a cheap Orca Strike Craft, and you get a full-fledged missile massacre.
Samus Aran of Metroid fame generally ends up with a veritable Hyperspace Arsenal of missiles. In Metroid Prime 2 she gains the ability to lock on and fire five of them simultaneously.
You remember that section in "Beam Spam"? About how people freak out and fire on seeing or hearing a Metroid? This is how they react in Metroid Prime 3, since they're using Ice Missiles now.
And yet, she can only fire one missile at a time. a Macross Missile Massacre would have been more doable in the original Metroid Prime, where you could fire a missile, tap the beam fire button, then instantly fire another missile instead of waiting for the reload, resulting in 4 to 6 to 10 missiles headed towards the same target. 2-D Metroid games are more Macross-friendly too, being as those ones don't require a reload. However, they also don't track, at all.
Meta-Ridley in Metroid Prime has a multi-missile attack, in which he launches several missiles, complete with the curving trajectory.
At the beginning of Act 5 of Metal Gear Solid 4, Liquid's futuristic floating fortress Outer Haven launches one of these against the approaching USS Missouri. This results in a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the Missouri when she manages to shoot down nearly the entire swarm and destroy the launchers with WW 2-era flak cannons and naval guns... and the couple of modern Phalanx CIWS she has, but it's still a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
During the final moments of the act immediately preceding this, you can pull off your own with the weapon systems provided by Metal Gear REX. Action Commands accessible during your incredibly awesome boss battle with RAY will even let you grind Liquid Ocelot into the dirt with a missile barrage if you catch him while he's downed.
The Level 3 Rocket Power-Up in Modnation Racers, rest assured, just have excellent timing with that shield button and you'll be fine.
In Unreal Tournament 2004 onward, there is the Cicada. It is an airborne vehicle that fires missiles in quick succession. The alt-fire lets you target a spot and load up to 24 missiles. Boom.
In Fable, the spell "Multi Shot" lets you do this with a bow and arrow. Keep in mind that the arrows will Robotech en-route to their target, so using this in an enclosed space will result in only one or two arrows hitting the target, while the walls around you will resemble a feathery pincushion.
The two expansion sets for Star Wars: TIE Fighter featured a new Imperial prototype fighter known as the Missile Boat, which was armed with four Missile Launchers capable of holding different types of missiles pending on the mission objectives, a Tractor Beam, Shields, a Hyper Drive and a SLAM System which doubled the Missile Boat's speed momentarily while draining laser energy (to compensate, the Missile Boat had only a single laser). Admittedly it was specifically designed to counter the threat of the renegade Admiral Zaarin's new TIE Defenders (two Advanced Concussion Missiles dual-fired will destroy a TIE Defender outright even with full shields), but the two launchers that usually held Advanced Concussion Missiles had 20 each. That's a maximum of 80 Advanced Concussion Missiles which you can fire with a few second cooldown, two after another, without limit until you run out of missiles... Not only did this allow the Missile Boat to smash any other starfighter with relative ease, it could also singlehandedly take down large warships with little difficulty. It makes you wonder why the Empire didn't cut back on warships and make more Missile Boats.
Unsurprisingly, the multiplayer-oriented sequel Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter excluded the Missile Boat for being too much of a Game Breaker, though the later Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance included a nerfed version in its multiplayer mode. The missile spam aspect remained intact, though; it was the ludicrous speed and agility that were toned down.
In Warhawk (1995 video game), there is a weapon for the titular aircraft to use known as the Swarm Missile, which can lock on as many times as you want before firing, with the only limit being how many you have. Naturally, this can get extreme.
In Ace Combat 6 there's the special weapon of the CFA-44 Nosferatu called the ADMM which includes 3 body-mounted dispenser units (one on top of each wing and one on the bottom-middle section) that fire off the rounds in a manner akin to countermeasure flares; these are retracted into the body and covered by doors when the special weapon is not selected. Unlike all the other "Multi-Tgt" missiles, each Macross Missile Massacre equals one expended missile (out of up to eighteen) and not however many targets you locked onto, usually up to four, or six with the new XMA6 air-to-air missile... it's even enough to (usually) negate the "inefficiency" flaw of air-to-ground missiles.
Warship Gunner 2 can have this depending on what missile systems you've installed on your warship, especially if you've mounted a Vertical Launch System (VLS) and the Aegis (allowing multiple simultaneous targets, up to nine at Level 3). Since anti-aircraft missiles (and their VLS version) are autofire-capable, you'll get this when you hold L2 for manual countermeasures—the AI will aim and fire all autofire-capable weapons—or use a certain system that applies that to all weapons.
Unfortunately unless you have the two special "systems" that give infinite ammo and the other which has all of your weapons firing pretty much constantly and aimed by the AI, missiles and lasers are worthless at higher settings because of all the counter measures. The solution? Rock Beats Laser aka a large battleship load with large turrets(not to large or you wont fire fast enough) and maybe a Wave Motion Gun for bosses. Ironically a large battleship with turrets for most ships, LOTS of anti air measures, thick armor and maybe that one so-so anti submarine counter you can equip on your battleship is a Game Breaker
Golden Sun: The Lost Age has the Daedalus summon, which has the immediate effect of summoning a Macross Missile Massacre and then the delayed effect of launching a single, much more devastating missile at the end of the turn after the summon is used.
In Sonic Adventure 2, the Tails/Eggman mechs can produce one of these in the second boss battle and in 2P battle mode. Eggman also has one of these on his "Egg Dealer" robot in Shadow the Hedgehog.
A better example is in the beginning of Sonic Unleashed, where Sonic crashes onto Eggman's flagship. The doctor targets every turret and robot, in the dozens and hundreds respectively, onto him and fires. The target being Sonic and all...
In Time Splitters: Future Perfect, the rocket launcher can be set to fire six rockets in rapid succession, in accordance with rule #37.
The Marza Dreadnaught's Missile Barrage in Sins of a Solar Empire release absolutely massive amount of missiles. Just think of a large spaceship sitting duck, release missiles to hit every enemy ships in large radius for 60 seconds. It's as deadly as it sounds, if you don't get disabled, that is.
The Javelis LRM Frigate is another example. Each frigate is practically built with this trope in mind, with launching volleys of missiles being their sole purpose. It gets even better when you consider that those missiles can be upgraded with cluster warheads and that the relatively cheap cost of the frigates allow insanely large fleets of them to be built. Such a fleet can decimate low-to-mid-level capital ships in seconds.
The Vasari are no slouch in this department either, with the Kanrak Assailant and Vulkoras Desolator being their equivalents to the Javelis and Marza respectively. The volume of missiles they shoot is lower than that of the TEC fleet, but then, they shoot phase missiles, which can fly through enemy shields and hit their hull directly for deadly effect.
The First-Person Shooter Rise of the Triad had the Drunk Missile, which fired five missiles which flew in a wild pattern and tracked enemies. Firing "drunks" into a crowd of enemies resulted in a huge, gibletty mess.
The Skyray Missile Gunship of the Tau in Dawn of War pretty much does the same as its counterpart in the tabletop game: Burning the Enemies of the Greater Good with a wave of missiles to the ground. Same for the Sisters of Battle Exorcist.
This is how Ork Tank Bustaz work in Dawn of War 2, they even come with a the ability "barrage" which lets them fire their roketz all at once in da air to rain death upon their foes.
Once you unlock the Fragmentation Missile Pod for the Tau Commander in Dawn of War 2 Retribution's Last Stand mode, equipping it allows you to fire off a triple-M at a target area, damaging everything in it. The Anti-Armor Missile Pod, while less trope-obedient, still fires a cluster of missiles at a single target.
The Terran Valkyrie of StarCraft: Brood War can fire up to 12 missiles simultaneously at different targets, with a fairly high firing rate. These are cheap air units that are intended to be used in large groups, so seeing a dozen valkyries throwing out over a thousand missiles in about ten seconds is not uncommon.
The Vulture gunship from Halo Wars has the Barrage ability wherein it launches a salvo of missiles at a ground target. It's also equipped with two air-to-air missile launchers.
Pelican dropships can also be equipped for a missile massacre. This is most visible at the end of the Halo 3 campaign level Sierra 117 in which a single Pelican blows two Covenant Phantoms to hell with a relentless bombardment of missiles. It will also shoot at any surviving Covenant infantry, often to comedic effect.
The last cutscene of the Halo 3 level "The Storm" has many dozens of Longsword fighters, not to mention several frigates, firing a huge volley at the Forerunner Dreadnought, the fighters using missiles and the ships using MAC rounds. The explosions that result from the attack cover almost the entire target, which is (read it) a little over 7 miles long. Unfortunately, they don't do much against whatever was shielding the ship.
The ranged special attack of Ruru in Magical Battle Arena has her launching a barrage of homing drill missiles.
The RYNO (or "Rip You a New One") in Ratchet and Clank functions by spamming a hail of missiles at everything in shooting range.
Later versions, such as the upgraded forms of the third game's RY3NO, hybridise this with Beam Spam into a spray of light/missile/whatever darts that disintegrate their opponents. Overkill? What's that?
The WWII MMO naval-simulation game Navy Field contains an interesting case, in that instead of missiles there are torpedoes. Quite a few Japanese ships in the game could be outfitted with a stupidly large number of torpedo launchers, which allows for massive 3M-type volleys of torpedoes (a practice the Navyfield community calls "torp-whoring"). Add to that the fact that the Japanese side uses the Long Lance torpedoes (which, historically, were the longest-range unguided torpedoes ever built, with a 20-mile range), plus the fact that said torps seem to explode with the force of a small atomic bomb, even when they self-destruct (and thereby sinking or severely damaging any ship that's too close by), and it's no wonder that torp-whoring is quite controversial among the Navyfield community.
As the Metagame of Navyfield progresses, however, torpedo whores are seeing less and less use, as players wise up and protect their ships from torpedoes through armor. Additionally, as players play, they get access to better and better ships, some of whom can shrug off insane quantities of torpedoes before suffering any noticeable damage. "Torpedo whores" are also usually the first target in any battle, as they are generally the first in line so as to not damage friendly ships inadvertently.
Interestingly, this is actually somewhat realistic, tactics-wise. Japanese battle plans called for hundreds of torpedoes to be launched in the general direction of the enemy fleet from stupidly long ranges in the hopes that this would disable at least some of the enemy ships before the main fleet engagement; this is why they developed the "Long Lance" in the first place. Of course, this large surface fleet engagement never materialized, and so the ships outfitted to fulfill this role were never used as anything more then AA support.
Made even more interesting by the fact that nearly nothing else of the game is realistic.
The Mirak race in Star Trek Starfleet Command have this trope as their hat. Out of all the races, their ships are the only one that can put out such an ungodly amount of missiles.
The titular Limit Break of After Burner Climax allows the player's fighter to lock onto all visible targets and launch missiles at all of them. That number does go over ten often. Of course, the player ends up on the receiving end of this often too, not just from the numerous enemy planes launching at once, but in late-game also from lone planes as well..
In Air Rivals, most missiles are usually fired two or four at a time. However, if using certain skills in conjunction with a certain weapon, it is possible to fire 42 missiles per salvo (which can be fired every few seconds or so). Using specialized weapons with increased rate-of-fire might achieve an even greater amount of missiles over time.
Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII can call a minor massacre from his airship as a Limit Break.
The Al-Bhed leader Cid in Final Fantasy X takes his airship and releases a considerable amount of missiles upon the Al-Bhed Home, once it has been overrun by Fiends and enemy forces.
He also uses it in the Evrae boss battle if you use the trigger command and wait for his turn.
The enemy skill Matra Magic also takes this form in Final Fantasy VII.
So I suppose it's a Matra Magic Massacre.
While Matra Magic is also usable in Final Fantasy IX, a better example is the Ark summon: a large warship that descends from space, transforms into a Humongous Mecha, and releases a laser-targeted M3 before finishing off the whole mess with a Kill Sat.
Quistis' Blue Magic 'Micro Missiles' in Final Fantasy VIII is a M3, complete with the missiles roboteching their way from her back to the enemy.
The most obvious example of this is Kuja - he uses an attack which launches hundreds of magic missiles, similar to Matra Magic, TWICE in two separate cutscenes.
Boss fight Havoc Skytank, Final Fantasy XIII has an ability called 'Missile Barrage', guess what it does to you?
In Contra III: The Alien Wars, a monumental number of missiles (and not small ones, either) is shot at one of Red Falcon's flying fortresses. The player has to destroy the forcefield protecting the fortress' core, leaping from missile to missile as they impact and detonate. And not jumping from foothold to foothold, either, but handhold to handhold, with a single hand (the other wields a weapon, of course.) Once the field is down, the player can allow the missiles to hit, although most of them will be destroyed by flares coming out of the core unless the player dissipates them first.
In the third stage of Contra: Rebirth, there are numerous missiles fired (which you can also shoot down with missiles of your own). There are many enemies hanging from the missiles and finally the first form of the boss of the stage is a missile that can shoots missiles.
X3: Terran Conflict introduced the dedicated M7M missile frigates which replaced the gun turrets of a regular M7 with missile bays. Load up, hold the launch button, and watch gleefully as an almost uninterrupted stream of missiles pour into your chosen target. For an added bonus: load some of the multiple warhead missiles.
This goes even more into Macross Missile Massacre territory when you locate the Barrage command in the control console. 1 Barrage is 8 missiles. One multi-warhead missile fires as 8 missiles. One Barrage of Multi-warhead missiles generates 64 missiles in the air. It's possible to launch more than just one barrage at a time.
Any M7M is fully capable of singlehandedly leveling sectors, but the ATF's entry, the Skirnir, takes it Up to Eleven and crosses it with There Is No Kill Like Overkill. Its anticapital weapon is the Shadow missile, which does 650 megajoules of damage per warhead on an eight-warhead missile. The toughest ships in the game as of X3: Albion Prelude have 14 gigajoules of shielding. Do the math.
Oh, and Shadow missiles retarget if their original target is destroyed.
This typo in the missile data was corrected in Albion Prelude. It was fun while it lasted.
Also included is the fighter sized M8 Bomber class, launching extremely powerful Tomahawk missiles. Used to provide fighter squadrons with Anti-capital punch, some versions are able to launch up to 792 missiles at once. Missiles which reach the target late will lock on to any enemy target around.
In Albion Prelude missile frigates now automatically use small countermissiles for point defense. Given that some of these ships have up to 16 launch tubes, they launch huge waves of missiles in second intervals to intercept incoming missiles, resulting in a Macross Missile Defense.
While Albion Prelude made point defense (through lasers and missiles) far more viable, AI ships—especially missile frigates—spawn with a LOT more missiles, making sure that these improvements are going to be needed.
Even outside of M7Ms, triple-M is a really effective tactic. A couple of Teladi fighters (the Falcon Hauler and Falcon Sentinel) have enormous cargo bays. Some players arm them with Tornado missiles, making them pretty effective as missile boats against capital ships.
In World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack, Mages who spec deeply into Arcane can get a Talent called Missile Barrage, which, on proc, turns their next casting of Arcane Missiles into this.
A mission in Northrend has your character riding a gnomish helicopter defending a dig site from incoming gargoyles. There is a missile attack that is exactly this, including the randomly spiraling missile paths, smoke trails and More Dakka. Given the number of other Shout Outs in WoW it would be no surprise if this were a direct Shout-Out to the original MMM.
Fraxy gives you the missile part, which fires 5 missiles before reloading at rank 100. What if someone added an event to loop the missile launching?
In City of Heroes, the Macross Missile Massacre is often the first attack used by the Malta Group's Zeus Class Titan. After their second upgrade, a Robotics Mastermind's Assault Bot gains this ability.
In the Dual Pistols set, the Bullet Rain power is a miniature version of the trope, with the character waving their guns around in a cone firing rapidly, after which the bullets Roboteching to their target (and the enemies in an area around the target).
While ships in EVE Online can have up to eight missile racks, all missiles launched from a ship originate from the same spot, causing simultaneously launched missiles to travel in a neat, glowing ball'o'death instead of a swarm.
The upcoming Dominion expansion introduces the fighter bombers, which pelt the enemy capital ship from all angles with torpedoes.
While the fighter bombers have been delayed the Titan Superweapons of the Caldari and Minmatar are a shining example of this trope. The Caldari Titan in particular, known as the Leviathan, launches a literal barrage of anti-ship missiles that deal a whopping 3,000,000 damage before resistances. Anything smaller than a supercarrier or another Titan is going to die in one shot unless purpose-tanked against the attack.
For a more traditional example, some players are fond of "line torping" which is basically creating an uninterrupted stream of missiles between you and your target. Originally done with torpedoes because they were relatively slow; patches have turned them into fast, short-range weapons but some still attempt this with other long-range missile types.
Caldari being the missile favouring race of the bunch has plenty of ships that deal carnage via different sized missiles. Whilst in-game the Drake Battlecruiser can fit "only" 7 launchers (although State Issue Raven, a very rare battleship is the only ship that can fit 8 launchers), it's in-game model has no less than 16 launchers (eight on each side) with three missile tubes each. Canonically, it looks very capable of performing MMM, even if it's game version can't.
As of the latest expansion (Inferno), missile graphics have been updated to add both trails and missile separation, so it appears much closer to MMM than before.
Artix Entertainment's game Mechquest has MULTIPLE weapons that can pull off the Macross Missile Massacre. No Roboteching, mostly because the weapons are forward-locked. But launching about twelve missiles for several turns in a row does have its charm.
Duke Nukem 3D has the aptly-named Devastator weapon. It fires small missiles very fast. In fact, it's so effective that you can easily beat the third boss in the game in a few seconds with it.
In Galactic Civilizations II, the Missile weapon type turns into this rather fast. Culminating in Black Hole Eruptors.
Homeworld features the Missile Destroyer, which has 4 missile launchers and has a special feature that allows it fire 32 missiles in about 5 seconds. It could single-handedly wipe out entire fleets of strike craft.
An even better display of fireworks is from the surprisingly smaller and weaker Missile Corvette. If a player can get a hold of one of these, he essentially has the ability to rain sixty missiles on his enemies.
In Homeworld 2, many of the Vaygr capital ships are armed with anti-ship missiles as their primary weapon. When a large group of these ships open fire at once, an instant missile massacre ensues. Hiigaran Torpedoes have a similar effect through Recursive Ammo.
Cataclysm does it best: while Somtaaw destroyers are equipped with two forward-fixed ion cannons, the engineers saw it fit to increase weapon coverage with a top-mounted missile turret that fires in salvoes of four. The inverse happened to the dreadnought: it's main weapon is even more missiles (six or eight per salvo, can't remember which) but to prevent the enemy from attacking the slow ship from outside missile coverage, they put an ion cannon turret each onto the top and bottom.
Star Wars: Empire at War gives the Rebellion a corvette-sized ship, the Corellian Gunboat. Like other Corvette's, it only takes up 2 population, and its primary weapons are concussion missile launchers. Even without using the no-pop-in-battle mod, massed Gunboats can easily overwhelm and destroy an IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER with few (if any) losses. As well, there are also the Anti-fighter/space station Marauder-class Cruiser and Broadside-class Cruiser, who's special ability is to saturate an area with missiles for a (short but sweet) period of time.
War Machine's War Destroyer super move in the Capcom vs. Whatever games is a barrage of missiles (the main difference between him and Iron Man is that the former's weapons are mostly ballistic while the latter's are energy-based).
Maxima in The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match plays this trope nice and straight with his newly altered MAX2/HSDM, wherein he blasts the opponent senseless with a barrage of missiles from his own body (He's a cyborg). You would think that would be enough to put the opponent away permanently, but oh no, Maxima wants to be sure of his opponent's demise and proceeds to fry them with a fricking huge laser beam from his own chest cavity.
Jehuty, the Humongous Mecha piloted by the protagonist in both Zone of the Enders games, has a "Homing Laser", which targets as many as 40 on-screen targets and launches beams Macross Missile Massacre style. It is more of a mix of MMM and Beam Spam, and it offers some serious eyecandy too boot.
Jehuty gains the Homing Missile program in the sequel, Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner which enables Jehuty to generate up to 16 homing missiles (each one of them half as tall as Jehuty itself) from its Vector Trap as long as the sub-weapon energy gauge is still available (which can also be replenished by obtaining Metatron crates either scattered in various locations or dropped by destroyed enemies.) The entire game is essentially a grand and glorious exercise of beam spamming overkill.
In Sword of the Stars, missiles are one of the three weapons you are guaranteed to get at the start. They can be placed in medium or large turret mounts, and most combat-oriented cruiser or dreadnought designs can hold at least four. Add in the fact that point-defense weapons are murder on missiles, and the 3M is about the only way to use missiles in this game.
And for those who prefer quantity over quality in their 3Ms, Expansion Pack Born of Blood added the Dumbfire Missile Rack: the individual missiles are smaller, weaker, have less range and no guidance, but the rack fires them in volleys of ten (or twenty for the large mount version) and can launch volleys twice as often as regular missiles.
A Murder of Crows. Multi-Warhead Missiles. "Yo dawg, we heard you like missiles, so we put missiles inside your missiles so you can shoot missiles while you shoot missiles."
The Finishing Move of Craft in Mega Man Zero 4, the second time Zero fights him.
Descent 3 follows this closely with its Cyclone missiles. Shortly after being launched, a Cyclone separates into five smaller missiles, which lazily swoop and spiral out toward the target. You can easily get several of these things in the air at once, leading to a rain of warheads down range.
And several of the bosses like to missile-spam you, in combination with Teleport Spam.
And pretty much any normal robot packing missiles will unleash these upon you at the higher difficulty settings.
Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter has this as one of Nym's later attacks.
Most types of missile in Gratuitous Space Battles carry onboard decoys which surround each missile in graceful curves. A ship (or better - a fleet of ships) with many missile launchers often exemplifies this trope.
Let's just say that each medium or larger battle turns into a missile massacre whether you want to avoid it or not. But why would you want to avoid a MMM in the first place anyway?
Machines has the gorilla, which fires lots of small missiles at long distance, which kind of compensates for it's slow speed and it's other attack being very short range.
The undeservedly little-known flight-based FPS Flying Heroes has two Macross Missile Massacre weapons: the Magion clan gets the Freezer, which releases a swarm of icy magic orbs, while the Lizard Riders get the Bombardion, which fires a single large rocket that releases a swarm of smaller Roboteching missiles on impact.
Master of Orion series allow to pack lots and lots of missiles on a ship, especially if you don't care about having many shots. In the second, two strategies are to have the last missile you can outfit with MIRV (4x damage, needs 2 more TechLevels) and other improvements that make them hard to kill or jam at the cost of bulk and thus total number of missiles or hurling unholy amounts of spam with plain (at best one minor mod weakening some antimissile measure) missiles in an attempt to overwhelm point defences and have enough left after other anti-missile measures to inflict great damage. Dauntless Guidance allows the remains of the swarm killing a target to lock on the next one. In the first game, "Scatter Packs" are a separate tech, and may be a better early investment than the relatively weak guns available at lower tech levels.
The Dark Magician class in the free-to-play MMORPG Rappelz gets a spell called "Darkness Arrow" that is more accurately described as a Macross Missile Massacre of shadow-element magic.
Champions Online: The Power Armor Framework includes "Micromunitions". Several salvos of missiles are fired from the shoulders: Both, left, then right. It's a ranged Area Attack ability.
Shadow Hearts: From The New World gives us Ricardo's "Fated Day's End". He plays a few notes, throws his hat, swings his guitar onto his shoulder and releases about twenty missiles, which rain down on the enemy.
The Twisted Metal series has many weapons like this, including the MIRV, Rain Missile 2, Satellite, Reticle, Zoomy, etc.
Krakens in Razing Storm love to use this on you. The third boss of the game, a Spider Tank, does this when defeated in a Taking You with Me move. If you don't destroy enough of his missiles in time, it will destroy the walkway connecting two skyscrapers, of which your squad is on, leading to a Nonstandard Game Over.
On a much smaller scale, we have EarthBound. Rocket-type weapons have a distinct sound effect for when they're fired. Bottle Rockets do it once, Big Bottle rockets do it several times (presumably for igniting a bigger engine). When Jeff uses a Multi-Bottle Rocket, it layers enough repetitions of this "engine ignition" sound that the attack sounds more like a machine gun going off than a rocket. One can only imagine what this attack would look like if it were animated. It's as powerful as it sounds, too.
Soldiers: Heroes of World War II featured the Katushya, the T34, and a German equivalent (see the real-life examples), who could shower any area on the map with missiles. Almost every multiplayer PvP game had No Rockets (or even No Artillery) as the game name, since they could kill just about anything by sending a single scout forward to find the enemy tanks, and shower it with nearly pinpoint accuracy.
Supreme Commander featured not only the Cybran T2 gunship, but also the Cybran Hoplite, which launched a volley of rockets. Not a massacre on it's own, it's very effective in groups.
The Flash tower-defense game Desktop Defender has the Dart Tower, which can be upgraded to the Advanced Dart Tower. Level 6 Dart Towers have massive range and do a lot of damage; however, level 6 Advanced Dart Towers gain the special ability "SHOCK AND AWE". Need I say more?
This is the basic principle of Ray Series. :) Players can accomplish this by firing multiple rays at the enemy crafts once they finish aiming. Many bosses and some minibosses do it as well.
Alien Swarm has the "Hornet Barrage" and "Smartbomb" weapons, which fill the screen with guided missiles. Hornets come with three salvos while the smartbomb has only one, but more missiles total. Some clever folks have been using the console commands to modify them, it's possible to spew out twenty missiles a second for the whole level this way.
In Operation Flashpoint, EVERY helicopter is armed with tons of unguided air-to-ground missiles. These suckers are meant to be fired in salvos while strafing the target. You can launch them as fast as you can click the mouse. A Is even use them in copter-vs-copter duels (which makes sense since only the combat copters have a 30mm machine gun and it's not that powerful). Need any more explanation?
Falcon from Power Stone.
Mercenaries 2 has the Venezuelan Cortez RA. A military truck with a rocket launcher on top, which fires 11 rockets in rapid succession.
If you ever need to fire eleven missiles in just over a second, the Cortez Rocket Artillery Vehicles is the easiest way to do it.
This is one of the game mechanics you can find in the Japanese indy shmup, Ether Vapor. The Attack Drones accompanying the protagonist uses lasers, while his enemies uses missiles. It story's first Bonus Stage is about the game showing off its Triple M abilities. You, as the protagonist, get to use Roboteching lasers to shoot missiles down while doing some very impressive High Speed Missile Dodges.
You are can really be sure that at least one of Morrigan's Specials in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is this.
In the Psygnosis-made strategy game Metal Fatigue, Rimtech has access to this from the get-go. Build a Combot with dual heavy missile arms, a drunk missile torso, and drunk missile legs, and you have a recipe for bombardment. Salvage homing missile arms from Neuropa and the resultant missile-spam Combot will have no shortage of explosives to dole out. For bonus points, the 'drunk' missiles will bob back and forth in the spirit of this trope and Roboteching.
Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier features the Judgment missile, which splits in to three independently targeting missiles. Which then split into another three. Each. Then you can buy an Unlimited Ammo cheat. Yeah.
While not as effective at completely clearing the airspace around you as the Judgement missile, the Swarmer Missile aircraft weapon also sends a barrage of missiles towards whatever happens to be in your way.
Airforce Delta Strike, Players can fire up to four regular missiles in rapid succession, then quickly switch to special weapons and shoot off four more. It is a good way to waste ammo.
Holly Summers in is fond of launching salvo upon salvo of missiles from her prosthetic leg.
The player is also capable of doing this in the Sequel, in the mecha fight against Charlie MacDonald.
The Cluster Launcher gun skill in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten unleashes one.
A lot of weapons in Tyrian.
Frequently, this lot of weapons would be fired in tandem to increase an already respectable Massacre.
In Borderlands, any grenade mod that's labeled "Rain" will, after being thrown, shoot up into the air and explode, sending multiple grenades raining down on the enemies.
Multiple missile weapons in Armored Core fire multiple warheads. One particular part in armoured core: for answer fires sixty-four missiles with one press of the trigger
Fallout 3 has the Experimental MIRV, which qualifies despite only firing 8 missiles. Why, you ask? Each missile contains a nuclear warhead.
Warcraft 3 has two abilities that come close to this: Barrage and Cluster Rockets. Barrage gives Steam Tanks a missile launcher that can attack up to three air units at a time, while Cluster Rockets fires a swarm of weaving missiles into an area, stunning units caught inside (and the number of missiles increases with the level).
Star Craft 2 has the terran Banshee, Battlecruiser and Missile Turret. The banshee fires barrages of about 4 missiles once every second, the Battlecruiser fires small missiles at a constant rate of around 2-3 a second, and in the campaign can also have an anti-air Barrage ability that fits this trope better, the missile turret is similar to the banshee, but like the battlecruiser, has a campaign upgrade to fire an an additional barrage after each normal volley.
In Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, the Commando class (Duke in the story mode) can have a shoulder-mounted missile launcher which shoots multiple missiles at the chosen target.
Vanquish has one boss that when you defeat its first form, will fill the sky with missiles in order to kill anything and everything not currently cowering behind a large piece of concrete.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault has a mission where you take out a battery of Nebelwerfer 41 multi-rocket launchers. And yes, you must run through their line of fire. In Frontline's Rough Landing level, you use one to destroy an out-of-reach tank.
In Blazing Lazers, the player can acquire homing missiles which fire in many different directions. One type of enemy can also do this with its own missiles.
In F.E.A.R., you encounter the Power Armors, which can dual-wield the triple-shot rocket launcher available in the game. Do the maths, that makes a total of six rockets every time the Power Armor attacks. It's its only atack, but damn, it's not like they need another one.
Fester's Quest has a Roboteching quad missile launcher.
Vega Strike treats rocket pods as power-saving autocannons that need a special mount, so due to limited reactor size lighter fighters tend to pack rockets. One of them is called Hail (see Real Life section). Proper missiles are used by almost everyone and many heavy fighters have 4 launchers or so, but with default parameters AI doesn't launch much.
Warzone 2100 has this for most of the higher-tier artillery units, such as Ripple Rockets, which fire about 20 missiles in an arc to a target up to half a map (even further for some others) away, and take about 10–20 seconds to reload.
In Company of Heroes, choosing the tank specialisation on the allied side allows you to call in the Sherman Calliope, an M4 Sherman with sixty missiles strapped on top of it. It can be fired as often as you want, if you have the resources. Gets better if you have several of them, as you can fire them all simultaneously, resulting in huge missile strikes. Again, if you have the resources.
Team Fortress 2: A level 3 Sentry fires missiles at a target in a spiraling-inward fashion.
Teams with multiple Soldiers can end up looking like a MMM. This was so prevalent in the Soldier versus Demoman update that some servers crashed because they couldn't handle the number of explosive objects being lobbed.
Even Empire: Total War has this at times with the Rocket Troop artillery unit (the "rockets' red glare" type of rocket).
One of the earlier trailers for Asura's Wrath had an entire spear unit throw spears this way at the Title character. He just Runs right through it.
With enough research in Star Ruler, your missile launchers can spew out a ridiculous amount of firepower. Galactic Armory removes this scaling with level but gives Barrage and Cluster launchers in return.
This is entirely doable in Kerbal Space Program. Just stick a few liquid tanks and engines to your rocket onto some decouplers, and watch your DIY MIRV rain down hell. Now we just need to wait until an update adds cities...
Design-wise, this is the Hat of Federation warships in EV Nova. One of their most feared ships is the Fed Destroyer's Heavy Missile Version, which loves to fill its vicinity with Hellhound missiles and EMP torpedoes.
MIRVs in Missile Command were based on a real weapon (see Real Life below).
Outsider: This page provides a beautiful example... the ships committing the Missile Massacre look designed precisely for such a purpose, and we even see empty launch tubes being left behind by missiles that have already been expended.
In Dragon Ball Multiverse, the first opponent Uub face use this... on a one on one combat in a tournament.
The Whiteboard: In the 2010 Zombie Apocalypse story arc, the APC from Alien included, as part of its armament, an ungodly amount of guided missiles, which it spent liberally. Considering Doc and Roger are worshipers at the Church of Spam Attack, this is probably not surprising.
Bob and George: while Protoman doesn't normally have this, a common tactic of his is to merge with Nate, producing a rocket-heavy combined form known as Protean. While normally fitted with eight missiles, Nate being a shapeshifting goo monster, they can easily go up to this. And Nate can regenerate them when he's not building up a large coating of goo on his target to produce a massive crushing fist around them.
The B-Movie Comic during mecha action:
Not[e] that these are neither guided missiles nor unguided missiles. They're the third kind – anime missiles.
Parodied in Megas XLR episode "TV Dinner", where Coop pushes three buttons on his control panel that are labelled "Missiles", "More Missiles" and "All The Missiles." The missile swarm turns out to be ineffective, as the Monster of the Week it was used against was the size of a small planet.
Also in "S-Force SOS", with Coop's "Super Destructor Mode" modification. Coop screwed up the targeting system, hitting the S-Force by accident, but failed to kill them.
Any number of Transformers can do this, though Demolishor's rebuilt form in Energon is the one that comes to mind first.
Lugnut and Blitzwing from Transformers Animated do this too. In Blitzwing's case, his missiles freeze whatever they hit, and he even fires them out Valkyrie-style.
Lugnut just hits the deck and becomes a living missile platform. The fluff states his missile payloads are nigh unlimited.
Before them, Overlord in Transformers Super God Masterforce had such an attack, called Bolt Masher.
Evac from Cybertron can fire large missiles which explode into a swarm of smaller missiles which can decimate a small army of Mooks. (Unfortunately, Starscream had a big army of Mooks.)
Powerpuff Dynamo (Dynamic Nanotechnic Monobot) in its debut episode, "Uh Oh, Dynamo", is anywhere between Subversion and deconstruction of Triple M. The heatseekers massacre everything in the city... except the giant Puffer Fish. Maybe its cold-bloodedness has something to do with it.
Episode "Live And Let Dynamo" goes differently. No matter how hard the Girls try, the missiles won't miss. It's a good thing that the Girls are Made of Iron, though.
Meatwad does this to Shake in one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Frylock has just built a humongous mecha as a body replacement for Carl, who had been reduced to a disembodied head. Meatwad takes control of the robot, grabs Shake, throws him up into the air and blows him up with a barrage of missiles.
Used in an episode of ReBoot. Matrix's flying motorcycle surprisingly produced several rows of missile racks behind it to launch one of these at the enemy, and does a pretty good job with it.
His gun also has a "Death Blossom" mode that is a Shout-Out to the Last Starfighter entry above.
In Swat Kats, the Turbokat performs this attack twice. The first time with buzzsaw missiles while under the control of Hard Drive in "Night of Dark Kat", the second time in "When Strikes Mutilor", to destroy the fighter Mutilor was intending to use to destroy the drive and crash the mothership into the planet's surface.
Deliberately homaged in Justice League Unlimited, with one hero in a Powered Armor using this against the near-unstoppable android Amazo.
It didn't work. Didn't even slow him down.
In Star Wars: Clone Wars, a Macross Missile Massacre was fired at the Republic starfighters by the droid starfighters. Anakin Skywalker got them all following him, then used the Misguided Missile technique and flew straight through the nearest enemy capital ship's starfighter launch bay, For Massive Damage. He still had a swarm of missiles after him, though, so he got his fighter squadrons to line up a shot at where he was going to be and fire off another Macross Missile Massacre. The two Massacres collided in midair (-space?) and wiped each other out.
The Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot intro shows the Big Guy being able to do this with dozens of spiraling missiles. Sadly he prefers using the machine guns in his armpits rather than falling for the rule of cool and spamming missiles.
The Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! Super Robot has this one. As well as about every other Super Robot trope... In fact it can deploy this attack from the fingertips, the arms, or the feet.
The concept of Multiple Launch Rocket System / Free Rocket Over Ground: see a concentration of enemy troops, quickly unload a lot of cheap unguided rockets to scour the whole area.
Surprisingly, this is Older Than Steam: The historical Korean hwacha—which can be best described as a Schizo-Tech Katyusha—also functioned in much the same way, a 15-16th century saturation artillery piece capable of firing up to 100 steel-tipped rockets or 200 singijeon (effectively fire arrows). Therefore although there are hints of a Chinese version, it's likely that this trope was invented in Korea.
Soviet MLRS, starting from BM-13-16 and BM-8-48 (132mm / 82mm, second is the number of rails) "Katyusha",[2][3] also known as "Stalin's Organ" due to their distinctive sound. They had variant ammo (like anti-armor, or spreading thermite elements for even more Impressive Pyrotechnics); most fighter-bombers and ground assault planes also carried launchers: 132-mm x10 on Su-2 x4-8 on Il-2 (save last anti-tank mods) and Il-10, 82-mm x6 on some I-16 (first used on Khalkin-Gol) and LaGG-3, as these worked both on ground targets and as pocket flak guns.
Its descendants the 9K51 (or BM-21) "Grad" ("Hail")[4][5] and the BM-30 "Smerch" ("Tornado")[6][7]—the first can fire 720 missiles at once when packed in a battalion of 18 launchers, while the second can fire a missile every 3 seconds or so. Ammunition varies from regular HE and HEAT rounds to mines. Of course, during Cold War many USSR allies got these as well. There's also a close-range (up to 6 km) TOS-1 "Buratino" [8] (Russian "Pinocchio", for its long "nose") is a 30-round MLRS mounted on the T-72 tank chassis. It's not just a regular house-sized rocket launcher, but a flamethrower system with incendiary or thermobaric warheads with a devastating area of effect. Also, unlike similar vehicles, it can launch rockets in pairs.
The Katyusha was outdone by the American T34 Calliope, basically a Sherman tank with sixty rocket tubes strapped onto it. Developed a year after the 48-tube Katyusha variant, one wonders if the designers were thinking "those Russians are onto something, but it needs More Dakka". USSR had a few experimental rocket tanks, but chose to stick with more mobile truck "artillery".
The modern American equivalent is the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System. Each MLRS vehicle can launch 12 277mm rockets within sixty seconds. Each rocket can contain up to 644 submunitions. Total throw is therefore 7,728 bombs launched in under a minute per vehicle. MLRS batteries are colloquially known as 'grid square erasers.'
The MLRS ain't called "Steel Rain" for nothing. It can also shoot guided missiles for extra precision.
The MMM was very much a planned tactic of Soviet Maritime Aviation in a World War Three scenario using a lot of Tu-16 and Tu-22M bombers along with missile subs like the "Echo". Since the Tu-16's reporting name is "Badger" and it carried Mnogo Nukes, the joke is obvious.... Sergey Gorshkov, commander-in-chief of the Soviet Navy from 1968 to 1985 called this "the battle of the first salvo".
The "naval missile massacre" came about with the advent of the cruise missile after World War II. These were basically jet-powered kamikazes that were controlled by inertial guidance systems and radar seekers rather than human pilots. The Soviets didn't have aircraft carriers nor could they have matched the U.S. even if they tried, so they turned to the cruise missile as their naval weapon of choice. The U.S. Navy noticed this and started arming their ships with anti-air missiles that could shoot down incoming cruise missiles. The Soviets responded by building better missiles and lots more of them; they put cruise missiles on ships, on planes, and on submarines, with the intent of firing a massive salvo at a U.S. carrier group to overwhelm its defenses. The U.S. responded with Aegis, a ship-based system meant to track and engage lots and lots of incoming missiles. The U.S. also deployed the F-14, a long range interceptor whose main mission was to shoot down incoming bombers before they could fire their cruise missiles, or failing that, shoot down the missiles themselves. At that point it really came down to tactics, as the Soviets would try to detect an incoming carrier group and then try to organize their killer salvo, while the Americans tried to stay hidden by keeping their radars turned off while using fighter aircraft to shoot down any incoming scout planes and disrupt bomber formations. Then of course the Cold War ended, and we never got the chance to see how this fight would turn out.
At the current state of the art, the US Navy's 'Aegis' missile defense technology is essentially undefeatable except by a wave (or waves) of inbound threats larger than what the system is capable of handling (which it does by launching counter-missiles rapidly enough to simultaneously engage them all).
Not so surprising, as the 'Aegis' was designed to counter massive waves of Soviet naval cruise missiles from Backfire bombers and Oscar-class SSGNs targeted on carrier battle groups. It was essentially one Macross Missile Massacre versus another.
The Navy antimissile people seem aware of this, as they have introduced point-defense Phalanx 20mm Gatling guns to the Aegis antimissile defenses. Designed to be able to take out a low-flying antiship missile before it hits the ship, this system can be overwhelmed as well (there's only a few guns per ship) - it's strictly a last resort weapon.
Which is why the Phalanx has been (partially) replaced by the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe (anti-missile) Missile. They are fitted in 21-cell launchers with full 360° rotation and 90° elevation. Unlike gun-based close in weapons systems the missile system can engage many target simultaneously via a Macross Missile Massacre style launch. Of course at $500,000 per missile such a Massacre is going to cost upwards of $10 million dollars.
They're also in the very early stages of working on a version of this system that, instead of a rapid-fire autocannon, uses a laser beam: the Tactical High-Energy Laser. This would provide greater accuracy, and possibly be harder to swamp. In ten or twenty years, we may have a Truth in Television example of Beam Spam. A more compact mobile version, the M-THEL is also in development for the ground forces, designed to shoot down mortar and howitzer shells as well as missiles. The THEL prototype has already successfully been demonstrated in defense against mortar rounds.
It is unclear whether the Russian Orlan/"Kirov" class can do the same. The nuclear-powered cruiser has a greater SAM capacity than most other vessels on the planet, with four different types carried.
It can. Its main SAM battery consists basically of navalized version of the venerable S-300 system, with eight vertical revolver-type launchers, each holding eight missiles. This gives us 64 large long-range missiles, but each cell in those launcher could accept from four to eight smaller, shorter range missiles, driving the number up to 512 missiles. These could be fired in salvos limited only by the fire control ability, which is, admittedly, somewhat lacking, but given that Aegis-analogue is already coming online[9] and it would be installed on them during a scheduled refit—all bets are off.
The U.S Navy also uses a Macross Missile Massacre as the main offensive weapon for its cruisers and destroyers: the Vertical Launching System (VLS). This badass launcher can pump out Tomahawks or SAMs at a ridiculous rate (about one every two seconds) to attack ground targets, aircraft, or even space targets like satellites and ballistic missiles. The VLS-SM3 combo has been demonstrated as easily capable of killing an orbiting satellite.
New Russian UKSK VLS is built around the same idea, but, as it uses a cold-launch approach, it's much cheaper and lighter on a per cell basis, so even a 2000-ton corvette is able to carry a couple of 8-cell modules.
However, the plan for future ships like the Zumwalt-Class stealth destroyer see the VLS-Tomahawk land-attack combo being replaced by the 155mm howitzer-based Advanced Gun System, and later, by electromagnetic railguns. BFGs are more cost-effective than MMMs.
There's also the Ohio-class SSGN submarine, which can carry up to 154 cruise missiles in it's VLS tubes.
A very large number of real-life weapon systems or tactics can be considered real-life versions of this, from multiple rocket launchers which can fire a large number of either "dumb" or "smart" munitions, to simply clustering a bunch of weapon launchers together or coordinating a large number of missile launches (works doubly best when paired with previous described weapon) or large bombers like the B-52 whose primary mission is to saturate a target area with missiles (back in the Cold War days, nuclear-tipped missiles. It's no exaggeration to say that a single B-52 with a full load of cruise missiles could effectively annihilate the Soviet Union by itself barring countermeasures or interception, and an equivalent Soviet bomber, the Tu-95 "Bear" for example, would likewise be capable of doing the same to the United States), let alone ballistic-missile launching submarines like the Soviet "Typhoon"-class (if you've ever seen The Hunt for Red October this is the real-life submarine the titular vessel is based on) which can carry 20 missiles with ten warheads each, or an American Ohio-class submarine converted to launch 156 land attack cruise missiles, also cluster-munition capable. A reason why the Macross Missile Massacre is such a popular trope, after all, is because it happens to be a very useful and devastating real-life tactic, especially when target destruction must be guaranteed, probability of missile evasion or interception is high, and when collateral damage isn't given an afterthought or when the missiles have sufficiently "smart" enough guidance to prevent such.
When engaged in air-to-air combat, opposing aircraft will "ripple-fire" missiles at each other to increase the probability of a kill. This especially occurred in The Vietnam War, early missiles being unreliable, frequently missing when they worked at all. In effect, the Macross Missile Massacre is really just an exaggerated, Rule of Cool-conforming version of this real life tactic.
It might be accurate to say that militaries were forced to use this tactic before the invention of guided weapons. Without the ability to target a single location, the only way to hit the enemy most of the time was to blanket the area they're in with shells, rockets, or bombs. Although an artillery barrage isn't as visually spectacular as a true 3M due to the lack of flames or smoke trails, it was just as effective. Also, the image of a massive bomber emptying her bays over a target has become a symbol of air raids since WW2, despite the fact that stand-off weaponry is increasingly now becoming the norm.
Pre-WW 2 British subs were designed with this tactic in mind. The Royal Navy believed that advances in ASW meant that British submarines attacking enemy warships would be unable to get close to their targets without being detected by the enemy's sonar. Therefore the attacks would have to be made at long range, and to compensate for the vagueness of torpedo aiming at this range this meant that a large torpedo salvo would be needed in order to guarantee hits. How large? The T-class boats had ten forward facing torpedo tubes (by comparison, the larger US boats had six forward tubes and the German type VII and type IX U-boats, only four).
Officially, Gary Power's U-2 and accidentally a pursuing MiG-19 (piloted by Sergei Safronov) were shot down with a salvo of fourteen S-75 Dvina/SA-2 "Guideline" missiles. Other versions of the event are:
A Su-9 caught the U-2 in her slipstream, breaking off the wings. The missiles hit the aforementioned MiG-19.
A first three-missile salvo destroyed the U-2. Other batteries were unsure about the success and thirteen more missiles were fired, hitting the MiG-19.
The term MIRV stands for "Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicle" and is used to describe short-range to ICBM class nuclear-tipped missiles that contain a single first stage with multiple warheads that will detach after launch, shortly before impact. (Reportedly the Trident II is capable of carrying at least 12 warheads per missile.) The contrails in Missile Command that would split up to hit multiple targets? This is the real life weapon on which they were based.
The British Starstreak Close Air Defense Missile is designed to kill low flying aircraft by launching three smaller guided sub-munitions that then home into its target mid flight. Think about it, it's a missile that launches a small Macross Missile Massacre, in real life!
Though not exactly missiles, multiple-launched aerial rockets were the primary armament of US Air Force interceptors in the 1950's. See article on other Wiki and this vid.
The German R 4 M rocket was intended as a way to destroy a B-17/B-24-sized target in one salvo. One 55-millimeter rocket may not have been much, but shotgun 24 of them at once and you've got something going.
The Nebelwerfer 41 and 42.
This trope is not quite as unrealistic as one might think since actual guided missiles often follow slightly erratic paths until they get up to speed and any course to intercept a moving target has to be curved by definition. Naturally the flight paths of real-world missiles aren't nearly as exaggerated.
Historically, it's taken an average of 20 surface-to-air missiles to bring down one aircraft.
The AGM-124 Wasp was a small "mini-missile" that could be launched in multiples on one pass against massed tank formations. Carried in launch pods, an A-10 loaded with them could launch a total of 40 of these things. Each missile acted autonomously and talked to each other so that only one missile went after a separate tank. It was, unfortunately too expensive to enter mass production and was canceled in 1983.
The tradition of Rouketopolemos (literally translated as Rocket War) in the town of Vrontados qualifies. The objective is for two churches to launch as many rockets at each other as possible, hoping to ring the other churches' bell with a rocket. The result is this trope. Here's another video.
The Type 45 "Daring-class" Destroyer, the UK's latest Cool Boat, has been designed with averting this in mind - its anti-missile radar is so good that the US Navy ask them to turn it off for exercises because it "constrains the training."
During the 1971 war between Pakistan and India a Pakistani destroyer was caught in one of these. Because he had zero effective air defense, he attempted to pull a Wronski Feint with his destroyer by hiding among merchant vessels and using the much larger vessels as targets for the incoming missiles. After running out of merchant vessels, he proceeded to do the same thing with dockyard facilities. By the time the Indians were finished shooting at him, the port and all of the merchant vessels are destroyed but the destroyer was still afloat. While it was commented that he should have been court marshaled, the skipper remarked "one has to be alive to be court-martialled."
↑ Or the Hellzone Grenade if you prefer the English name
↑ See on YouTube
↑ See in Wikipedia
↑ The Sigma system, installed on the new Russian frigates and corvettes, is just a somewhat scaled-down version of it.
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