History Main / ReadingsAreOffTheScale

* In the first book of ''Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', it is stated that while R17 is not a fixed velocity it is still clearly way too fast.

[[folder: Radio]]

* ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution'': A boss song can have one or more parts of its Groove Radar spill right over the edge. But the crowner would have to be the Groove Radar for the Challenge chart of [[VideoGame/{{Undertale}} "MEGALOVANIA"]], where it just looks like '''[[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTr9UkOaIAAfWIT.jpg one giant blob]]''' plastered on top of the thing.

** One episode features an incident with the Boss-O-Meter, which Arthur uses on his parents and teacher, rating their bossing-around skills. None of them even come close to his bratty sister DW, whose whiny screaming tactics break the machine.
** In "More!", when DW goes to preschool one morning, there is a scanning device from her POV that displays the supposed allowances of every other kid. The numbers go spinning when the radar's on Emily, DW's rich friend.

The measurement instruments used by the heroes -- whether it's a speedometer, a PowerLevel rater, or something else -- can never actually measure the full scope of their subjects. Nor can they be recalibrated to expand that range at the cost of some loss of detail. When one encounters an especially intense situation, one can merely stare slack-jawed at their pegged, now-useless meter, and yell "Readings are off the scale!"

--->'''Nappa:''' VEGETA! What does the Scouter say about his PowerLevel? \\

--->'''Sensor Tech Carson''': "Well, for one thing, your passive scans are ‘showing’ non-powered objects at five times the range my sensors could, and the couple of times your people went active my display wouldn’t scale far enough out to see what they were looking at!"

* In the ''Literature/{{Worm}}''/''WebAnimation/HazbinHotel'' crossover ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/21311359/chapters/50750065 WannaBee]]'', Clack gets a surprise when Taylor Hebert, upon getting her sins measured, actually manages to max out the [[ThingOMeter Sin-O-Meter]].

* In ''Videogame/SonicForces'', [[GadgeteerGenius Tails]] tries to scan [[BigBad Infinite]] to determine his powers... only for the results to come back so messed up, he can't make sense of them.

** According to the ship's name/acronym ''[=ZARYa=]'' (means "dawn"), the "R" standads for "relativistic", meaning the ship is actually designed to go to a significant percentage of the speed of light. The star in question is a real one; over 200 light years away, but with the TimeDilation, the teens were expected to only age about 20 years (requiring 90%+ lightspeed). Instead, they got into some NegativeSpaceWedgie, making it 20+ years on Earth, a couple minutes for them, and definitely FTL.

*** This is exploited in ''Film/{{Matilda}}'' by [[HonestJohnsDealership Harry Wormwood]] to make old cars look younger than they actually are by artifically rolling out the tape.

* Because of limited government data regarding air quality in Beijing, residents will often turn to the US Embassy, who use the AQI, a number between 1 and 500 calculated from a variety of indicators, where 1-50 is "good," 201-300 is "very unhealthy," and 301-500 is "hazardous"... until one day in 2010, the formula gave them a number ''over'' 500. The programmers of the automated report hadn't taken such a possibility seriously, and thus came the quickly viral report by the embassy that the air quality in Beijing was "crazy bad" before being corrected to a more sterile, yet still absurd, "beyond index." Article [[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/crazy-bad-beijing-air-pollution here]].
** There have been other known cases of AQI computed at over 1000, such as [[https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/hail-and-dust-storms-hit-Southern-California-16923332.php during a 2022 dust storm in Imperial Valley, California]] or [[https://www.ktvu.com/news/tahoe-air-quality-tops-1000-for-some-parts-bay-area-feels-effects in the Tahoe area on the California/Nevada border during the 2021 Dixie and Caldor Fires]]

* ''Literature/AscendanceOfABookworm'': Rozemyne,is already aware that she has a lot of {{Mana}} and was noted to already have more than [[spoiler:her duchy's archduke]] several years before the scene described below. When she enters the Royal Academy, a teacher takes her aside to measure her mana with a tool calibrated to measure that of Ferdinand, who in the the present day is celibate at a slightly advanced age due to having too much mana to be able to reproduce with any of the duchy's non-married women. The tool's measuring range turns out to be ''too small'' for Rozemyne's mana.

** This happens with the Ten Tails. When the Ten Tails finally appears, Kurama, the Nine Tails, tells Naruto that trying to measure the Ten Tails' chakra levels is pointless. Naruto goes into Sage mode, allowing him to sense the Ten Tails's Chakra, and is almost blown back by it, and we're given a visual of how much it has: [[spoiler:It's depicted as a ''Planet'']]. This is later taken further as the Ten Tails turns into its second form and, back at the Shinobi Alliance headquarters, an entire second sphere of chakra is created as a result of the mutation, symbolized as a planet appearing, and making it, in just its second form, have enough chakra to rival every living thing on the planet. And it just gets stronger from there.

** In the ''[=FireRed/LeafGreen=]'' saga of ''Manga/PokemonAdventures'', Orm uses the Dark Pokédex to gauge the power of Yellow's Pokémon and laughs at their low levels. And then Yellow's [[SuperEmpowering Viridian Power kicks in]], sending the numbers over the eighties, effectively freaking him and Sird out to the point that they know better than to try to fight her head-on. (Technically still on the scale, but the suddenness of the spike has the same effect that going off it would.)

* ''Anime/YuGiOh'': Seto Kaiba's computer control panels nearly [[ExplosiveInstrumentation exploded]] when Kaiba powered up his [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity +1 Card]], [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Obelisk the Tormentor]]. A bit peculiar considering that Obelisk was a hologram with no physical presence whose model, animations, and statistics were probably programmed into a Duel Disk with computers probably not too far off from the ones used to gauge its power level. And given that each card's statistics had to be programmed into the Duel Disk to begin with, it's not so clear why Kaiba needed to monitor any monster's power levels at all.
** The dub of the Duelist Kingdom arc has Tea saying (in an awestruck voice) "Blue-eyes Ultimate Dragon's Attack Power is [[OhCrap off the charts!]]" The card in question has 4500 ATK and at this point in the game and show normal Blue-eyes' 3000 ATK was considered [[GameBreaker overwhelming,]] so the reaction was justified.
** In ''Anime/YuGiOhGX'', Amon becomes wise to Professor Cobra's plan to kill him by increasing the power to his D-Belt; so Amon sabotages Cobras equipment so that the same thing happens to ''everyone's'' D-Belt and then throwing a party where dueling is involved. (Amon realizes that Cobra will be forced to abort the plan, lest ''every student in the school'' die as a result, something he would ''never'' get away with.) The result is an OhCrap from Cobra as readings on his equipment goes haywire, followed by him panicking as he tries to shut the system down.

* In ''[[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/its-an-unliving-young-justice-si.865009/page-25#post-69292216 It's An Unliving]]'', the SelfInsert Black Lantern has a timer built into his power ring that states how much time he has remaining before his ring is shut down[[note]]As said ring is the only thing keeping him sorta alive, shutting it down will instantly kill him[[/note]]. The timer maxes out at 640 hours and killing evil people fills the timer. A random serial killer earned him an hour. Lex Luthor earned twenty four hours. And Ra's al Ghul earned 213 hours. When he kills Vandal Savage, he's informed that the timer only gained 282 hours and the remaining ''17,843'' hours are available to use for alternative usage[[note]]For some quick math, the timer maxes out at twenty five days while Vandal provided over two ''years'' of time[[/note]].

** Later, a dosimeter that went up to 1000 roentgens was [[ReadingsBlewUpTheScale outright fried]] by the radiation.
** A 200 roentgen dosimeter survived, but also reported the radiation as the highest it could go.
** Finally, the characters receive a heavy-duty dosimeter and Pikalov goes up to the core in a lead-lined truck to get an accurate reading of ''15,000'' roentgens, the equivalent of [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure two Little Boys]] per hour, confirming the true scale of the disaster. And in real life, it is suspected that ''that'' dosimeter maxed out too.

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E12ThePandoricaOpens "The Pandorica Opens"]]: River uses some kind instrument to detect that there are "at least ten thousand" warships in orbit above planet earth. When Amy pesters her for a more accurate number, she says that there are too many readings for her detector to measure.

* The page quote comes from ''Series/KamenRiderGaim''. When he performs certain attacks, the power is added up in multiples of ten, sometimes ending up at 100,000 or 1,000,000. When using [[SuperMode Kachidoki/Triumphant Arms]] (he gets a super-er mode later, but at the time it's the most powerful thing ever, able to contend with ''swarms'' of enemies. And that super-er mode is, in fact, at its best when using Kachidoki Arms' weapon!) and activates a finisher he's using for the first time in the big team-up with ''Series/ResshaSentaiToQger'', it goes up over a ''trillion'' before ''the ComputerVoice gives up,'' declaring its power level immeasurable.

** In the original ''VideoGame/{{Portal|1}}'' [=GLaDOS=] mentions that "Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees [sic] Kelvin." (It is implied that Aperture test subjects do not.) Such a temperature is ''far'' off the scale of household ''and'' most industrial thermometers. To put how hot this is into perspective, consider that the surface of the ''Sun'' is just over 5778 K. And the player has to use an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator to destroy Aperture technology, meaning it must be even hotter.

* During Chapter 3 of ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfHeroesTrailsInTheSky FC'', the party delivers a black orbment to Professor Russell so he can figure out what it is. Professor Russell decides to scan it, and the results are catastrophic. At first, the readings are erratic, then Tita reports that the needle is ''spinning'', meaning the maximum reading is being exceeded several times over. And that's before the scanning equipment ends up setting it off, forcing Professor Russell to shut it down when it becomes apparent that it's deactivated ''every orbment in Zeiss except the scanner''.

** For a downplayed example, Doofenschmirtz once bragged that his latest creation had a melting capacity of seven. And then remembered to explain that the usual scale was one to five.

** When the Chernobyl reactor exploded, it took the one dosimeter in the place capable of reading really high radiation with it. The repair workers and firefighters made do with ordinary personal dosimeters, which immediately pegged at at their highest settings, leading the crew to assume that the steam explosion hadn't penetrated the reactor (ignoring the pieces of reactor fuel lying everywhere). In reality, some areas of the plant had radiation levels 5,600 times the range of the dosimeters. And when a new dosimeter with a larger range was brought in, the high readings [[ItsProbablyNothing convinced them it was defective]].

** Geiger counters. Because of how a GM tube works (a low pressure gas inside is ionized, which causes a cascade effect that creates a voltage difference, causing an electrical dicharge which is registered as a "count", which then has to be quenched by an onboard power source before a new count can be registered), exposing a Geiger counter to a very high radiation field will effectively saturate it. With older counters, this would cause them to show a false reading that was MUCH lower than the amount of radiation that was actually present. This happened at Chernobyl, causing some people to think there was far less danger than there actually was. Newer meters that are computer controlled can detect this state and will usually display "overload" on the display. This doesn't damage the device in any way (removing it from the high radiation field will restore normal functionality), but a Geiger counter in the overload state cannot be trusted to give reliable readings. Geiger counters are therefore effectively useless in high radiation fields.

* Early on in ''Manga/MyHeroAcademia'', the members of Class 1-A are given several tests to assess their physical abilities and Quirks, including one where they have to throw a ball as far as possible. Uraraka uses her [[Gravitymaster anti-gravity Quirk]] on the ball and it just floats away, never to return, so her score is recorded as "Infinity".

If you're using a chart, OffTheChart will be the case, too. Compare ReadingsBlewUpTheScale for a reading that's so far off the scale it will cause the device to suffer ExplosiveInstrumentation. Also compare to AllOfThem, for someone giving a 'verbal reading' that's off the normal scale. When this is applied to media reviews, it's BrokeTheRatingScale.

** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS17E6Shada "Shada"]], attempting to use X-ray tomography to analyse the ancient Gallfreyan book causes it to explode violently.