Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Dr. James Van Allen

(for whom the Van Allen Radiation Belt

is named) was once asked by a reporter to 'define space'. He replied, "Space is the hole that we are in."

Most people (if not, in fact, everyone) can't get their minds around just how big the universe is. So it should come as little surprise that most Speculative Fiction writers can't either. This is chiefly true of creators of TV, film, and video game SF. Creators of written science fiction can be positively obsessive about accuracy (but on the other hand, sometimes they're not). If your qualitative yardstick is based around an author's ability to describe distances, this may be a useful way to distinguish good print science fiction from bad print science fiction. And it's why a lot of science fiction fans don't like the movie and TV adaptations of their favorite books and stories. The usual blend of Adaptation Decay and Did Not Do the Research is a surefire way to leave the adaptation with no sense of scale. On the other hand, "Space is so ridiculously huge that there is absolutely no realistic way that anyone could ever travel to anywhere even remotely interesting in the lifespan of most major civilizations", while not a total deal-breaker, does rule out an awfully broad range of plots.

For example, consider that a light year is about ten quadrillion meters or nearly six trillion miles. That's ten-to-the-power-of-sixteen meters, or 10 petameters. Let's assume your family car uses about 2 and a half gallons of fuel per 100km - about 25 mpg - and a gallon costs about US$ 4. Then one light year is roughly where you'd end up if you spent the entire national debt of the US on gas*. At the opposite end, an atomic nucleus is on the order of a quadrillionth of a meter. That's ten-to-the-power-of-negative-fifteen of a meter, or a femtometer. Such outrageous SI prefixes

rarely appear in fiction, and that's before we get anywhere near the scales of galaxies and subatomic particles. If it sounds like a number made up by a child (yottametres, septillion seconds), the writer might have actually taken it seriously.

Another example: the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri (the nearest star to the Sun) is about 4.4 lightyears. Traveling near lightspeed, that takes 4.4 years if observed by an outsider. The time that you, the traveler, experience is shorter due to Time Dilation, more so the closer to lightspeed you get. But when you get back to Earth, regardless of how fast you went, at least nine years will have passed there - leading to counter-intuitive but nevertheless real scenarios such as your younger brother having become older than you (if you were going really close to lightspeed). So even with our closest neighbor star, long-distance relationships will be somewhat strained; never mind the other side of the galaxy. Also, since lightspeed is extremely fast and the energy needed to approach it increases without bound the closer you get, there are many practical difficulties associated with traveling at so-called 'relativistic' speeds and undergoing high accelerations, so the journey is likely to take much longer times both in the vessel and on the planets our heroes travel between. This makes political conflicts hard to depict in an exciting manner.

An example which often comes up is the idea of beings coming to our galaxy from another galaxy. While there's no reason why a writer can't introduce beings from the nearest galaxy intent on contacting/conquering the Milky Way, there would have to be a pretty dang good reason to travel the incredibly vast distances separating galaxies — distances which make traveling between stars seem like a little hop.

Some would consider this one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality. If the characters didn't travel through space at thousands of times the speed of light, it wouldn't be very interesting, unless the focus was just the spaceship itself. Either you'd have to make the ship incredibly powerful to max out Time Dilation and shorten the time spent from the characters' perspective, put the characters into some kind of suspended animation (and just fast forward through their journeys), or even have entire generations of characters that would live and die on the ship before they even reached a known extrasolar planet (meaning the audience would say They Wasted A Perfectly Good Character or treat the new generations as a Replacement Scrappy), and so on... If Star Trek, for example, was realistically scaled, it'd be a lot less interesting.Unless...

A very common application of this trope is to treat planets like cities, so that to find someone, all you need to know is what planet they're on, even if there's no planetwide phonebook. This also results in characters who know each other meeting each other by complete coincidence, on the same planet, in galaxies of what are likely quintillions of people. This is usually also an Acceptable Break From Reality, because if you could just fly to a random terrestrial planet and make yourself a shed there and never be found ever, then, while realistic, it wouldn't make for an interesting plot. And good luck finding a terrestrial planet, if you don't already have an interstellar civilization set up to give you more interesting destinations than spheres of dead rock and gas floating around some distant star.

A related trope is Medieval Stasis, where society stays the same for thousands of years. It is a subtrope of Space Does Not Work That Way, which features a list of tropes that try to treat space in a way that it wouldn't realistically work. See also: MST3K Mantra, Bellisario's Maxim, Watsonian Versus Doylist.

Examples

open/close all folders

Distance Examples

Anime and Manga

The Five Star Stories: The titular Five Stars are most commonly referred to as "The Joker Star Cluster", even though real clusters have several thousand stars, but it's also referred to as The Joker Galaxy, which is even worse, and The Joker Constellation, which doesn't make sense either, since constellations are only called as such by people who can see them from a distance (and from one specific location. If you were to look at the constellation "Ursa Major" from the side, it wouldn't look anything like what we thought it would). It could possibly be a star cluster if the Five Stars are just the only ones with habitable planets out of a cluster of thousands. It could also be a multiple star system of five stars orbiting a common center of mass.
Averted in Crossbone Gundam: The Steel 7. The Remnant builds a colony laser at Jupiter, intending to fire it on Earth. When it looks like the heroes won't be able to stop it from firing, one pulls a Heroic Sacrifice and rams his Humongous Mecha into the colony. The impact only causes a 0.1% divergence, so the Jovians initially write it off as a Stupid Sacrifice...until someone actually does the math and figures out that that divergence, translated over the hundreds of millions of miles between Earth and Jupiter, means that the laser misses its target by a long shot.
Also averted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00, where outside close combat enemy ships and mobile suits tend to only show as tiny specks that are quickly zoomed in by the advanced HUD displays.

Comic Books

The Marvel Universe, despite usually playing this trope like a fiddle, has an aversion in Captain Marvel. Even though Mar-Vell's Flight is capable of reaching and sustaining escape velocity (7 miles per second) he realizes that it would still take him ten hours to reach the moon roughly 250,000 miles away.
New Avengers #19-20. Iron Man has a space-ready suit that breaks Earth's atmosphere to reach a small asteroid where Earth is seen with enough stars to look like a shot from Hubble. Retreating from a cosmic being who can fly across North America easily, Iron Man flies in an arc that goes behind our view of Earth, which looks like he's traveled more than 1/4 the diameter of the planet. He goes back to Earth's surface on Genosha, an island the size of the country Malawi, that looks like it could be jogged across when Magneto is levitated over it. Iron Man again goes from Earth's surface to space, keeping up with the Sentry near the moon. The Sentry travels from here to the sun and stares a couple feet away from its surface, which looks like a distance shot or a small model. Iron Man goes from space to back on Genosha. This whole sequence takes less than a day.
DC Comics' Infinite Crisis has multiple Earths being created and destroyed fairly close to Earth without causing massive debris or gravitational pulls, sound can travel across space to one of these Earths if you scream loud enough, Superboy Prime can push planets without digging into them, Kryptonians can fly to the nearest galaxy or the center of the universe in little time if they try hard enough, and a red sun, though it's supposed to reduce Kryptonians to the strength of a normal human, can be flown straight through the middle if you go in quickly and have the will to withstand the mass of several thousand miles of atoms in constant nuclear fusion.
Someone forgot just how far sending reaches in ElfQuest: The Searcher and the Sword. There are two bits worked out here: First, the troll tunnels that are so far underground that sending can't reach them, and secondly, Shuna and her friends being so far away from the hole that Dart must extend his sending "past the limits of his own range". Despite that, a half-dozen elves manage to clamber up a nearly vertical tunnel from the troll tunnels to the surface — without getting exhausted doing so, or, for that matter, losing breathable air. And just after Dart pushes his thoughts "past the limits of his own range," he leads Shuna in a wild dash for maybe a few blocks' worth of forest.
Another Marvel example, this time an aversion: When Quasar (Wendell Vaughn) visits Uranus (stop snickering) to explore the supposed origin of his power bands, the trip takes over two years, requiring hibernation and artificial life-support.
- He's able to go back in just a few minutes, but that's because on Uranus he discovered The Quantum Zone.
- In another issue of Quasar, a group of super-speedsters all have a race to the Moon. Despite their very high speeds, it takes them hours to get there. Mark Gruenwald actually did quite a bit of research for Quasar.
Lampshaded in Starman. When Jack Knight goes into space in a rocket that can travel faster than light, he assumes that getting to the Large Magellanic Cloud will be a cinch. He is told it will take in excess of 80,000 years.
Antarctic Press: In Gold Digger, the main cast travels to the planet where another cast member's people originally came from to colonize Earth, 50,000 years before, in about one day. The planet is noted as being five hundred million light years away - which would land it well, WELL outside the Virgo supercluster (The supercluster which the galactic cluster which the local group of galaxies which our galaxy is a part of, is a part of, is a part of) - a distance that can be drawn quite visibly on a reasonably-sized map of the universe. The distance has since been amended to five thousand light years. It is also never explained how these people decided to colonize a planet that is so very far away from them.
At the start of the Aliens: Female War miniseries, Aliens are running rampant on the Earth, across multiple continents. Our heroes dump a queen alien and a bomb in a bunker in the middle of America, wait for her to call all the aliens on Earth to her, and then set off the bomb, thus eliminating all aliens on Earth. It's implied the waiting is not longer than a few hours. How did aliens halfway around the world get to the bunker in a few hours, given that they're not shown piloting vehicles? Note: In the novel version of Aliens: Female War, the heroes decide to set the bombs timer for six months, to allow the aliens to get there from all over the planet.

Film

Not so much a problem of distance as of volume, but Starship Troopers the movie has starships flying so close together (while in orbit!) that one of them crashes into another when shot. Space is big, there's plenty of room. If you're flying within visual distance of another ship and you're not trying to dock with them (or ram them, which is another problem entirely), something is wrong. ...But just might be justified by Rule Of Cool.
- There's also the issue of the bugs directing an asteroid at a planet half a galaxy away and hitting. They're also patient enough to wait centuries (if not millennia) for that to happen, given the asteroid's speed.
  - Its hinted at that the asteroid impact was a coincidence and that it was used to fuel a propaganda campaign and help to launch an aggressive invasion of the bug planet.
The titular Paul has said that he comes from the "northern spiral of the Andromeda Galaxy". Aren't there plenty of nice spirals in the Milky Way? Not to mention that, if "northern" means "galactic north", then the "northern spiral arm" of a galaxy is sort of like the northernmost point on the equator...
In the original theatrical and VHS extended cuts of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the V'Ger cloud was described as "82 AUs" in diameter. In the DVD director's cut, the "eighty-" part is removed. While at first glance, it seems like 2 AUs is a bit too far in the other direction, when you consider (a) the fact that an AU (astronomical unit) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 150 million kilometers or a little over eight light-minutes, (b) that the Star Trek Encyclopedia pegs the Enterprise's top sublight speed around 0.25c, and (c) the amount of time spent just sitting there... the math actually (kinda) works!
And then, in Star Trek: Generations, Malcolm McDowell's fiendish plot involves blowing up a star.. with a dinky little rocket that is perhaps maybe 12 feet long, tops and does not at all appear to have a warp drive - based on its contrail and that it doesn't immediately blink out of sight upon activation, and yet still somehow manages to hit the sun about 8 seconds after being launched. Red Letter Media calls this 'Wile E. Coyote Logic' and it's kind of hard to deny it.
- This was a movie in which stopping all fusion in a star caused its mass to be reduced to zero. Even Wile E. Coyote can see what's wrong with that logic.
The 1997 movie Contact gets distance ridiculously wrong in its intro sequence. It's supposed to be a montage of Terran radio signals that get older the farther away from Earth the viewing audience gets, except that "Boogie Oogie Oogie" from 1978 can clearly be heard near Mars (which is actually only about four light-minutes from Earth).
- Not to mention that the planets themselves are waaaay too close together in that sequence. It's still fun to watch, though.
- Even The Bad Astronomer is willing to overlook the inaccuracies in that opening sequence, in acknowledgment of the Rule of Cool.
- It wasn't trying to show the passage of time, it was just someone flipping to an oldies station.
Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 claims that the Prawns come from the Andromeda galaxy to mine ore from alien planets, and live on their ships for thousands of years at a time. Unless they've stripmined the entire galaxy, which sounds impossible considering their technological level, it makes little sense that they'd have anything to do in the Milky Way. It would be so much easier to say that they're just few dozen lightyears away from home.
Spoofed in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, when Betty comments that the aliens came "over a thousand miles" to get to Earth. You might say that...
In Prince of Space, the Phantom of Krankor mentions that his planet is "half a million miles" from the Earth. For reference's sake, the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away.
Star Trek 11 opens with the discovery of a Negative Space Wedgie. On radio chatter, we hear discussion of whether or not it's due to the Klingons. The response is "No, the Klingon border is 75,000 kilometres away!". That's orders of magnitude less than even the distance to the star in the same shot. For comparison, telecommunications satellites in geosynchronous orbit around Earth are at about half the stated distance.
- In fairness, it's like standing a few feet away from the US-Mexico border fence. It may seem like a completely insignificant distance, but it's still there.
In the Sean Connery film Meteor, a manned Mars probe is redirected to investigate a comet passing through the asteroid belt. This "slight" course correction takes them a few hours out of their way, suggesting they're either traveling several million miles an hour, or that they'd begun their journey to Mars from Jupiter.
In Superman III, the villains hack into a weather satellite, and then send it to planet Krypton's original location to do an analysis of the kryptonite. So apparently someone built a weather satellite that can do geological surveys, and also fly across the galaxy faster than light. Not to mention finding Krypton in the first place. It's also capable of controlling the weather, rather than just observing it. That's some satellite!
- Worse, in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie, Krypton is stated to be in another galaxy. This weather satellite isn't merely crossing interstellar distances, it's crossing intergalactic distances.
  - With a movie as preposterous as Superman 3, it's hard to care about this howler, but even in Superman 1, Lex Luthor correctly deduces (by quite a leap of logic) that some of the fragments of Krypton must have "drifted" to earth. Whether Krypton is in another galaxy or just around the celestial corner, there is no way that anything could have "drifted" that far, let alone just happen to move in exactly the right direction.
In Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings Gandalf somehow travels from the Shire to Isengard (a distance compareable to going from England to Germany) in the same time it takes the hobbits to walk from Hobbiton to Buckland (maybe a day's journey). And this is before he gets his magical steed Shadowfax!

Literature

The Epic of Gilgamesh invokes this trope without leaving the surface of Earth. When you add up all the distance that Gilgamesh and Enkidu crossed to reach Humbaba and his cedar forest, you shoot way past Mesopotamia and end up in northern Siberia or the tip of South Africa or something. And yet they have no trouble floating the timber back home on a river when they're done. And you can't even say that they got lost and traveled more distance than they needed to, because they simply had to follow that same river upstream.
While it's not science fiction, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire qualifies. Although it's set on a continent about the size of South America (to judge by the distances given), distances are treated as much smaller when the plot demands.
David Eddings' Tamuli trilogy justifies something similar. The protagonists cover massive continental distances in short periods of time (as in, less than several months). An in-universe historian trying to explain it comes up with a Hand Wave about different calendars. The real answer is that the goddess traveling with them was cheating with space and time a bit.
Anne McCaffrey's The Death of Sleep has the protagonist's ship gets damaged, and she has to put herself into cryo in a lifeboat to have any chance of being found. The book goes out of its way to point out that if some benevolent aliens hadn't basically led a guy in a ship to her, she probably would never have been found.
- In another McCaffrey work, distances between places on the planet Pern appear to vary as the plot demands. In one story it can be several days travel by horseback ("runnerbeast") from point A to point B, in another, a few hours. The fan community calls this Anne's "rubber ruler".
One of James White's Sector General stories features victims from a space collision — and spends nearly three pages, A6 paperback, detailing the series of coincidences and bad judgment calls that managed to make it happen.
Sneakily averted by Douglas Adams, who concocted the Infinite Improbability Drive to get around the mind-boggling odds against Ford and Arthur being saved by another ship in the vastness of space, by making mind-boggling odds the very thing that powers their rescue ship. And then bumped those odds up to Infinite by having both Ford's semi-cousin and Trillian, the apparent only other survivor from Earth, be piloting it: something he couldn't plausibly have pulled off otherwise, again due to space's sheer size.
- Also both averted and brutally lampshaded in the form of the Total Perspective Vortex, a device which, when hooked up to a person's mind, will give them a perfectly clear conception of both the entire universe (as extrapolated from a small piece of fairy cake) and themselves in proportion to it. This has the effect of instantly and painfully annihilating their mind unless that person is Zaphod Beeblebrox and the Total Perspective Vortex is inside a simulated universe created entirely for his benefit, conclusively proving that the last thing anyone living in a universe this size needs is a good sense of ~~proportion~~ perspective.
A misunderstanding of the title of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea would imply Nemo diving by more that the diameter of the planet. Verne used a metric league, equaling four kilometres. Verne intended, and contemporary readers understood, the title to mean a journey of 20,000 leagues while under the sea. This is equivalent to two complete circumnavigations of the Earth.
- Spoofed in this Saturday Night Live sketch.
- A better translation of the title, from the original French, would be "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas."
In Legends of Dune, it is never explicitly stated whether or not interstellar travel before the invention of space folders was Faster-than-Light Travel. Most fanon seems to assume that all ships did was travel at relativistic speeds. However, this would mean that Salusa Secundus, the capital of the League of Nobles, is less than a light month from Corrin, the central Synchronized World, as it is specifically mentioned that it takes a month for regular starships to make the journey between them.
- It is generally accepted that space travel pre-Butlerian Jihad was indeed FTL, as the spice based navigators were developed as a way to travel in deep space without using computers to calculate the trajectories.
- In actuality, there was no such thing as "folding space" in most of Frank Herbert's original Dune novels. This started as entirely a convention of David Lynch and his movie. The Guild's ships merely traveled faster than light. That is actually the entire reason why their Navigators needed the Spice; in order to be able to navigate and calculate trajectories while going faster than light they needed to be able to see the future (traveling at 60 miles an hour when you can only see 5 feet in front of you is rather dangerous, as anyone who has tried to drive very fast on a very foggy night knows.) Thus, the Guild's need for the Spice. The concept of folding space wasn't introduced into the books until the next to last of the original novels; after the movie came out Herbert apparently liked the idea of folding space enough to retcon THAT in as the method of FTL travel used in the Dune universe (either that, or his son liked it enough that he managed to convince his father to retcon it in.) Unfortunately, this then begs the question of exactly WHY the Guild requires the Spice, since now they simply travel from point A to point B instantaneously. Perhaps to be presciently aware if anything would be in their way before they teleport to a location?
  - Then there would not be a vast empire of a million worlds spanning the galaxy, if it really were that dangerous just to get from planet to planet.
- Actually that is the exact reason for the spice. The ability to see into the future was so the navigators could "choose" a future in which the ship would arrive safely at its destination. While of course, avoiding those where it would not. The characters discuss this aspect in the novel.
- Another problem that arises from Dune involves population numbers. Apparently, we are to believe that an army of several million is able to conquer thousands of worlds (possibly, up to a million) using handheld weapons.
Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth has a thriving merchant trade. There would have to be literally millions of ships running nonstop routes between every star system to deliver even a fraction of the goods required to sustain an economy the size of the Commonwealth's. On the other hand, The Tar-Aiym Krang posits a concept both unique in space opera and brilliant; it is impossible to patrol interstellar space! If you don't travel within sensor range of a monitored system, you can go anywhere you want.
The aforementioned Starship Troopers: The Movie example occurs in the book too. Johnny explains that the ships were attempting to drop their Mobile Infantry in a meaningful formation... though he does not mention if one of them was hit by G-to-A, only that they collided, which opens the door to major piloting error. (This is also just one disaster in a battle where everything goes wrong. "I've heard it called a strategic victory... but I was there, and I claim we took a terrible licking.")
This is certainly older than space opera. Rudyard Kipling wrote a couple of science fiction stories about air travel in the 21st Century, and made his atomic powered airships pretty convincing given that hydrogen blimps were still cutting edge technology. But when it comes to speeds and distances, he treats them as if they were steamers in the English Channel. In one memorable howler, a captain gets so mad at another airship's dangerous handling that, too angry to use the radio, he opens the cockpit (Kipling also overlooked pressure changes with altitude, which was pure Did Not Do the Research, because any mountain climber could have told him) and yells at the other captain across the intervening space.
In Journey to the West, Sun Wukong is able to leap 108,000 miles In a Single Bound — or about four times the circumference of the Earth. This is actually a translation error, as "miles" here refer to li, which are only about 1000 feet... but in that case, Wukong should still wind up in California or someplace...
Averted in Dean Koontz novel, Strangers, where aliens travelling from their home planet to earth at the speed of light all die of old age 10,000 years before reaching their destination — despite having an estimated lifespan of 500 years, travelling in suspended animation, AND having magical healing/life extending powers.

Live-Action TV

Blake's 7 showed someone laying mines all around the Milky Way galaxy to keep out aliens. This is simply impossible. By the time you gathered enough matter to build this minefield, there'd be no Milky Way galaxy left. One way writers attempt to justify their 'space minefield' is to use mines with a very long engagement range, such as an X-ray laser that uses a nuclear explosion to create a big focused blast of energy headed towards the target. That way, the mines can still threaten your ship even though they're hundreds of kilometers apart and spread out all around a planet. In the case of the Milky Way minefield in Blake's 7 the minefield required control by the most powerful computer the Federation could build to serve its purpose as a barrier against invasion. This suggests that the "mines" were far more active and intricate than the traditional pressure-sensitive bomb with which we're familiar.
- Blake's 7 uses "galaxy" and "solar system" interchangeably. Travis on one occasion spots the Liberator and crows, "There he is! I knew he'd have to return to this galaxy!"
- Despite traveling from Earth to the edges of the galaxy and back, there was a part of the galaxy it would take them centuries to travel across.
- Blake's 7 is awful with this trope. Almost every single exterior shot shows a dozen planets in the frame, all big enough to make out surface details and arranged more-or-less completely randomly. Another technique they used was having the alien-designed Liberator measure speeds using a completely different system than the Federation, presumably due to having a different type of FTL engine (Standard by X, as opposed to Time Distort X). Due to the unfamiliar cockpit, none of the Liberator crew seems to ever figure out exactly how fast "standard" is, all they know is that it maxes out at Standard By 12, which is (evidently) faster than anything the Federation has. Even more confusing, the Time Distort measure seems to be non-linear, while the Standard measure is.
A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode featured a mine field around a solar system. While this is much more plausible than mining an entire galaxy (in the way that swimming across the Atlantic is more plausible than swimming across the Pacific), they did it in a 2D plane, so that anyone trying to avoid this minefield could simply fly over or under it. Even then, they were building it at a rate that would have taken them hundreds of years to complete. A later episode averted this with a space minefield around a very small area (the opening of a wormhole) with a realistically long time spent laying it (or rather, using matter replicators to let it lay itself - but that just gets into Energy usage, below).
- All the antagonists would have to do to make this possible is only mine certain areas that space traffic is known to traverse. Since most species' sense of scale would naturally be developed on a planet, it's actually likely that space traffic use common routes, if only for safety reasons (it's handy if you need help to be near where other ships are likely to be).
- The trope for distance is undermined by the fact that in-universe examples often have in-universe reasons for things to be as they are. For example, in Star Trek you have ships travelling many times the speed of light, but equipped with sensors that are capable of detecting anything at long ranges even while at warp. This makes any argument about distance irrelevant in Trek when talking about FTL. Most critics of sci-fi like to complain that space is 'just too big' for anything interesting to happen, but then forget that even at many, many times the speed of light it would still take quite a while to travel even a short galactic distance. So no, even at FTL speeds no ship would ever run into anything else by accident, whether another ship or a stellar body.
The original Battlestar Galactica did this as well. Adama says that Earth is located in "a galaxy much like our own" ...not to mention that in the last episode, the basestar is apparently the only one in the galaxy in which the Galactica is located, and the rest of the Cylon fleet is spread throughout the universe looking for the Galactica's fleet! They'd have greater success looking for an electron-sized needle in an haystack the size of Jupiter.
- In the new version, the close-range space battles are justified by the fact that if the Cylons didn't jump in really close to the Colonial fleet, they really wouldn't have any chance to hit them before they were noticed and the humans jumped away.
- If you remember well, in the old Galactica series, the fleet can "jump" between what is probably galaxies (and do it at least one time).
- Not only does Adama say that Earth is in "a galaxy much like our own", but he prefaces that by pointing out that the Earth is in a different solar system. While perfectly true, it's kind of like saying that your friend lives in a different house, in a continent very much like the one you live in.
- Also factor in that the show stated that Galactica's top speed was "light speed" and they spent the bulk of the series traveling at the pace of the slowest ships in the fleet.
- The pilot episode for the original show also had a spaceship's location described as "20 microns and closing." Yes, this was later explained as an invented unit of time, rather than the very small unit of length, but they clearly Did Not Do the Research.
While the new Battlestar Galactica avoids most of this kind of silliness, it still has the familiar problem of spaceships flying in formation about two meters away from each other, and fighting battles far too close to the enemy. They try to justify it early on: the Cylons have to jump in as close to the human fleet as possible to maximize their chances of destroying their ships before they jump, but later on they lost the justification and kept the shoddy tactics.
- Although how would you then justify realistic distances when the only way to move between ships is by non FTL shuttle and apparently only radio communications. At realistic distances it would take days to move goods and food around. Additionally, with things close those shuttles can burn back to the ship should they be attacked and not left to die.
- In later seasons, the Cylons discover the planet that the humans have settled because they detected a nuclear explosion from one light year away, which happened a year ago. From that distance, even the sun would appear as only slightly brighter than the other stars in the system (think Alpha Centauri). Yet the Cylons conveniently manage to detect and isolate the radiation of nuclear explosion which would be insignificantly small by comparison? Keep in mind that they wouldn't even know to look at this particular star, or they would have simply investigated it up close and discovered the human territory a lot sooner. So that means that their scanners would have to be searching for something infinitely insignificant from an infinite number of directions.
- They're Cylons. They could have been lying. Two far more possible explanations present themselves: First, Gina, who was the one who used the aforementioned nuclear weapon, managed to be resurrected and transmitted the coordinates, despite the "Jamming Effect," that the nebula supposedly had. Second, Deanna, a Cylon who was never exposed until the Cylons showed up, could have told them... somehow.
At one point in Babylon 5, a ship that has been supposedly lost deep in Hyperspace is reached by a chain of less than twenty fighters with only one thousand kilometers between each of them, meaning that the supposedly distant ship is less than 20,000 km from the jumpgate. This can be hand waved by saying "Well, it's Hyperspace", but...
- Mostly this was averted by not mentioning numbers at all. "How fast?" "Fast."
- J. Michael Straczynski acknowledged the problem of space's true scale when talking about showing space battles on TV, pointing out that TV viewers want and need to see the ships in the same screenshot pounding away at one another, but that any actual kind of space battle would likely take place at distances far too extreme for this (thousands of kilometers at minimum). The battle between the Shadows and the Narns in "The Long Twilight Struggle" attempted to acknowledge this on the screen; most of the fight consists of the ships simply accelerating towards one another, and only the last (catastrophic) few seconds includes any visual proximity. Nonetheless, most of the series' remaining battles gave in to the Rule of Cool anyway.
- The fact that space battles take place at ridiculously small ranges is partially justified by the nature of the FTL device used at the fact that most of the capital ships of the major powers carry said device. Attacking from several light minutes away with missiles would be useless as the target could jump into hyperspace then out of hyperspace near the shooter, completely avoiding the missiles. Also beam weapons and plasma weapons are realistically presented as not having an effective range of more then a few thousand kilometers due to dispersal, and an actual kill range of barely a few hundred, because of targeting issues (the famed Minbari stealth device actually prevents the targeting of the ship, not its detection). In "A Call to arms." one of the characters, orders the beam weapons of his ship (some of the most advanced in the setting) fired at a target 10,000 kilometers away, to which the firing officer replies that it would be ineffectual because of beam dispersal.
- At one point a scout was sent into hyperspace and failed to detect a whole fleet sitting nearby, so it does seem that hyperspace messes with sensors, thus making 20,000 kilometers a long way when someone needs to find you. An example involving distances in real space is the exploration ship (with no FTL) that managed to go from Earth to a site of Human and Minbari conflict to Babylon 5 (which is 2 days of hyperspace travel from Earth) in the space of a century. Considering that the rim of the galaxy is talked about as the frontier, Babylon 5 is certainly more than 100 lightyears from Earth.
  - For Babylon 5, distances and even relative positions in hyperspace do not directly correlate with realspace. Otherwise, how could anyone get lost within it or why would they need beacons to travel along it? No "normal" ship in B5 can actually go FTL, distances are truncated within hyperspace allowing for interstellar travel and it has no "landmarks" by which to determine relative position in realspace. As such even being slightly off course is pretty much lost deep in hyperspace.
- As most sci-fi uses energy weapons or projectiles of some sort, it makes perfect sense that nobody would simply waste their time taking potshots at ships that are light-minutes away. You might be able to get a targeting resolution at that distance depending on how good the setting's tech is, but why shoot? Your energy weapons are going to lose resolution and decohere way before they get to the target, and any pilot worth his salt would simply nudge the ship out of the way of missiles or torps (at these distances, you would have all the time in the universe to move your ship and be nowhere near the original target point). It's better if your ordnance is self-guided or otherwise smart, but this gives the enemy eons to deploy any and all countermeasures, and to begin using them as your ordnance slowly crosses into firing range. It also means a fighter group could easily pick them off, as they will know exactly where they are. So it actually makes sense that the ships would close to a more optimum range and fire at speed (if you're continually moving it means you'll be a target for less time). Also, in most sci-fi the distance the ships appear to be apart on-screen is MUCH further than it appears. Even on Trek, where ships have to be within a certain distance to transport between them, the distance is going to be measured in thousands of kilometres. This isn't much compared to the vastness of space, but it is a lot when considering the size of a ship (two ships a few hundred metres in length safely interacting at up to 10,000km). This is actually a lot more than the distances most naval vessels maintain, so actually in this respect sci-fi is playing it safe.
  - Word Of God (and the show itself, in the episode "And Now For A Word") place Babylon 5 as orbiting a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system - just over 10 light years from Earth.
The moon in Space: 1999 was variably described as being billions of kilometers, miles, and light-years from Earth, resulting in roughly equal difficulty in returning despite the fact that the first case would put the moon closer to Earth than Saturn, while in the latter case the moon would be vastly more distant from the Milky Way galaxy than the Great Wall, currently the largest known feature of the universe. It (the moon) passed between star systems at speeds fast enough that the passengers went through a star system per week, yet remained close enough to each and slow enough to reach a planet via shuttle for days at a time.
Firefly was ambivalent as to whether action was taking place in a "system", presumed to be a solar system, or the galaxy. It was finally pinned down into a series of five star systems, four of which were orbiting around a single giant star, which was reached from Earth by Generation Ship. The show was admirably vague about distances and speeds, e.g. "How fast can it go?" "Standard short-range."
- The followup movie Serenity has a barely noticed and 'lost' planet on the edge of the system. However, this planet appears to be known — it is in Serenity's navigation computer, but all reference to its name and population are wiped from the records, so no one knows what it is, nor do they want to approach it to check it out due to the presence of Reavers.
  - The Official Map of the Verse confirmed that Miranda was indeed on the very outer edge of the Blue Sun system, orbiting its own protostar, Burnham, at about fifty AU from the main star. At the time of the series, it was the outermost world in the entire Verse.
Probably the most spectacular example is in the first segment of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, where Earth was apparently hidden by moving its entire solar system several million miles, which is the celestial equivalent of hiding from your date in an empty movie theater by leaning an inch to the left. For scale, Mercury never comes within 28 million miles of our Sun, despite being its closest planet.
- The distance that the Time Lords moved Earth is given in various Doctor Who literature as being "Two light-years". Whilst slightly more plausible than several million miles, this is still only less than half the distance to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbouring star. It would be equivalent to hiding from your date in an otherwise empty cinema by moving one seat to the left.
- In Castrovalva, when the Tardis is flying through space out of control, Nyssa says it will fly until it crashes into something, and as "star density in this galaxy is very high", it will. Well, no. Just no.
- In The Wheel in Space the Cybermen divert a meteor storm in the direction of the titular space station by sending a star nova in the Hercules Globular Cluster, which is 25,100 light years away. The disparity in scale is at least 12 orders of magnitude.
- In the 1996 TV movie for Doctor Who, Gallifrey is stated to be some 250 million light years away from Earth, on the other side of the Milky Way. For reference, the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated 80-100 thousand light years. It is even sadder being said by the Doctor himself.
- In "The End of Time" A spaceship is described as 105,000 miles above Earth. The shot of Earth is far too big for it to be at that distance, which is nearly half-way to the Moon.
In the Groundhog Day Loop episode of Stargate SG-1 ("Window of Opportunity"), Teal'c mentions that a planet called Alaris is "several billion miles" away from Earth. The fact that the next closest star to Earth after the sun, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 25 trillion miles from Earth is, apparently, not relevant. Then again, the actual distance wasn't important (O'Neill was hitting golf balls through the stargate for fun) so Teal'c likely just made up something to the effect of "really far away."
Wizards of Waverly Place episode 5. They zap themselves to Mars and just happen to land right next to a Mars rover. Mars is a pretty big place and this is vanishingly unlikely (though as a comedy it runs by Rule of Funny anyway).
- This incident kind of belongs in the same category as the "landmark-seeking asteroids" in Armageddon, which only hit places like the Eiffel Tower.
Power Rangers Lost Galaxy the Terra Venture is traveling to the next galaxy, but they have used more than half their fuel a mere 14 light-years into the journey, and if they had traveled the entirety of the distance between the last time they gave an update on how far from Earth they are in 1 day (and they didn't) it would take over 500 years to get to the next galaxy.
The Invaders are aliens from a dying planet. They are coming to earth. They intend to make it their world. They originate in another galaxy... Considering that they'll need to do a partial terraform anyway, you'd think they'd have found something closer.
In the Farscape pilot episode, a Peacekeeper ship is chasing Moya, and Aeryn says that its weapons' effective range is "45 metras." Elsewhere, it's established that one metra is about a kilometer. A 45-kilometer range on a space-based weapon system would be like having a gun that was too short-ranged to hit somebody standing next to you.

Music

Europe's "The Final Countdown" contains the lyrics "We're heading for Venus... with so many light-years to go." Maximum Earth to Venus distance: approximately 0.000027 light-years. That said, they never said they were traveling from Earth to Venus, so maybe Europe is actually from Alpha Centauri or something.
- Or alternatively, they're going from Earth and heading *near* Venus as a waypoint on the road to a far, far, far different location "light years" away.
The music video for "The Ghost Inside" by the Broken Bells features a toll booth in space.
In "Written In The Stars" by Tinie Tempah, he sings "Written in the stars, a million miles away..." A million miles wouldn't even get to the closest planet, let alone stars. In fact, the nearest star from Earth that we know of (after the sun), Proxima Centauri, is about a quarter of a billion times further than one million miles.
Katie Melua's "Nine Million Bicycle In Beijing" featured the lines "We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no-one can ever say it's true," until a writer/scientist corrected her. She went on to record an alternate version, changing the line to "We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars,".

Radio

Planet Man referred to the Astro Drive, which would enable the hero to travel the "millions of light-years to Alpha Centauri." Alpha Centauri is just 4.37 light-years away — in fact, it's the closest star system to our own. Actually traveling "millions of light-years" would be a lot more impressive.
In Orson Welles's Radio Drama adaptation of War of the Worlds, rocket-launch explosions on the surface of Mars precede the Martian invaders' arrival by only a few minutes, as allowing any more time for their multimillion-mile journey would've run too long for the broadcast.

Tabletop Games

BattleTech was originally hit pretty hard with this, as the game stated that a Hex is roughly thirty meters, meaning that no weapon short of artillery had a range equal to or greater than a single kilometer. Catalyst Games, the present owners of the license, have kept the Hex and range measurements, but have gone on record saying that Battletech Weapons are really not that short-ranged.
- The problem with this stance being something like twenty years' worth of novels saying that they most certainly are and various plots and tactics that more or less hinge on this fact to work at all. At some point it really is just better to go "Yeah it's kinda silly, but this is a game about giant walking tanks a few dozen of which are considered an entirely reasonable force to invade a planet, just go with it."
Very carefully averted with the Warhammer 40000 space battle Gaiden Game Battlefleet Gothic, for all its joyful use of Space Is an Ocean and the Rule Of Cool in general. The actual models are completely out of scale with the rest of the game, but the manual itself tells that, in scale, the ship the model represents would be somewhere in the stand holding it up. Thusly, distances measured being from the center of the ships' bases so that you can have nice looking miniatures without also requiring a spare country to play the game in. Base-contact in the game is "close range," generally of the order of tens of thousands of kilometers. This is also the reason you need a command check to ram another ship - the captain not only has to order a potentially suicidal course of action and make it stick with the crew, he also has to hit a target equivalent to headbutting a pinhead from a mile away...
- Also Warhammer 40K Background fluff has reinforcements taking years sometimes decades to reach a planet.
  - Of course, given that it's The Warp, there are also accounts of ships arriving at their destinations before they left. One story about an Ork warlord has him somehow arriving back at his starting point before he left, so he attacks and kills his past self so he could have two of his favorite gun.
Half-averted in Mage: the Awakening. Though its unlikely players will ever actually experience space travel, it is possible to experience a version of it in the Astral Realms. In the Tenemos (the Dream World of humanity) it would be mostly played straight, because of human conceptions of scale and space travel. In the Dreamtime (the Dream World of the Earth) the conceptual representation of the universe is mostly to scale (since the Earth is devoid of any kind of romanticism). The sheer scale of the Solar System alone is presented as staggering, and since there is no FTL in the Dreamtime (though there is the rare shortcut), travel between conceptual planets has to be taken the slow (read, years long) way. And that's not even getting into traveling beyond the conceptual Solar System. The only reason any of this is practical is because of the Year Inside, Hour Outside nature of Astral Space.

Video Games

In Star Wolves most of space is empty, and you almost never visit space where inhabited planets are. Instead, you spend most of your time visiting out-of-the-way systems that have a couple space stations in them, if anything. And yet, for some reason, these space stations, which are placed five minutes away from each other, are treated as though they're light-years apart in terms of communication and physical contact.
7 Days a Skeptic by Yahtzee revolves around an old locker discovered floating in another galaxy by an exploration ship. Ignoring the staggering improbability of finding anything that size in an entire galaxy, the locker was launched from Earth four hundred years before the game starts, in the modern day. The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, our galaxy's closest neighbor, is 25,000 light years away. This simple metal box would have had to travel at multiple times the speed of light to make it out of the Milky Way in such a short time.
- This can probably be explained as the work of Chzo. Indeed, the supernatural nature of such an astronomically unlikely event is implied (though not stated outright).
EVE Online - distances in solar systems are realistic: from any particular planet, all other planets seem like points, and are several AUs away. FTL technology is required to get anywhere. There are even two types of FTL: short range warp drives which are used to travel within systems (fitted to ships), and long range star gates for traveling light years between star systems. Combat is frequently with ships that are only visible by their targeting icon.
- Interestingly, they also point out the sheer size inherent in a single system. The game's equivalent of dungeons and hideouts are not actually hidden, per se. It's just that there is no conceivable way to locate them without acquiring the specific co-ordinates. Complexes are reached by short-range intra-stellar "acceleration gates", which catapult you into the location. Of course, why a society with casual FTL drive lacks halfway decent sensor ranges is a mystery.
- Even so, ships don't need FTL technology to travel in-system. A ship would travel 100AU (i.e. out of the solar system) in a mere 12 days even at just 10% SOL, and 1AU in under 3 hours. Even at 5% SOL you would clear the solar system in 23 days (these figures are based on actual physics, not in-universe 'facts'). Couple that with the fact (se below) that some ships are capable of picking up objects within 14AU, and it seems as though the size of the system should not be such a problem but it's a game and most people aren't that patient (especially considering EVE's Griefer population).
  - EVE ships have incredibly powerful sensors - the maximum range for onboard sensors is around 14 AU - and they can find all the stuff in that radius (a sphere) immediately (very FTL sensors for those of you counting). This is also the problem - there is a lot of stuff in the systems. You need to isolate the stuff that actually concerns you. Even when you do, you still don't have the coordinates - you need to use scanner probes and by positioning them in space (again, at very FTL speeds) can you get accurate coordinates for warp-in. However, it isn't a complete aversion - due to technical limitations, this doesn't apply to missions - those generally pretty much create your own piece of space on demand and destroy it again as you complete the mission.
  - With ships capable of picking up everything within 14AU on sensors, it wouldn't take particularly long for the entire solar system to be scanned. Our solar system is quite large at 100+AU.
- Eve also falls victim to this trope, with the asteroid fields that tends to consist of a few dozen asteroids tightly packed into a crescent shape. In real life the average distance between asteroids is several thousand miles. However, since a realistically depicted asteroid field would be impossible to implement in a playable fashion, this counts as an acceptable break from reality.
Ratchet & Clank: Clank said early into the first game that Drek was going to 'Destroy the solar system'.
- The second game gave us a moon approximately 200m in diameter. It has its own atmosphere (probably; Ratchet has a helmet supplying him with air, so everybody else could have one too), and a fairly substantial city. Giant Clank can jump high enough to significantly reduce its size.
- Ratchet & Clank's cosmology and physical constants have extraordinarily little to do with our own.
Wing Commander was never all that clear on what units of distance to use, depending on the game, but pretty much all of them were ludicrously wrong. Less than 100km between planets in a system (Privateer)? Um, no. Just... no.
- There are also the shenanigans it plays with measuring speed, by using a variable "klicks" (which, unlike in real life, isn't slang for kilometers) for the distance portion of stated speeds...
- Let's face it: Pretty much every space shooter gets the distances wrong, assuming you don't vaporize enemies far outside of visual range.
Freelancer is often just as bad or worse about it, some planets being within tens of kilometers apart from one another and sometimes as close as 20 kilometers from their system's star(s). Said planets are sometimes visible from one another as sizes larger than the area the moon fills in the sky. But in spite of this, it's not so surprising since it is a spinoff of the above.
FreeSpace gets this wrong in the other direction for once. Earth gets cut off from the FTL network at the end of Freespace 1, and a major plot point of Freespace 2 is the chance of reestablishing contact with Earth, since nobody has heard from it in the intervening 30 years. However, we still have FTL access to Alpha Centauri, so in the 30 years between games, there would have been plenty of time for ordinary radio messages to and from home.
The Minecart Madness level of I Wanna Be the Guy starts with a sign indicating the distance of 10,000 kilometers to The Guy's fortress, which you reach in 78 seconds. That gives you an average speed of 286,786 miles per hour, or 373 times the speed of sound.
- Though it also means The Kid, as compared to the track's length, must be several kilometers tall, so maybe a kilometer is a much smaller unit in this universe. But then there's the issue of the apartment-sized moon that randomly falls to Earth...
According to the Pokédex, Groudon◊ is as tall as Arbok. That should set off some alarm bells, especially when you take into consideration that Groudon is a Legendary Pokémon, and is said to have created the planet's landmasses, whereas Arbok is a rather generic cobra...
- That's how long Arbok is. It's just like a 30 foot anaconda being as tall as a three story building if it can be completely vertical.
- And that picture shows a quite small Arbok. Anyway, Groudon IS as tall/long as Arbok: 11'06" or 3.5m.
The Space Engine-Free Universe Simulator, available [1], is demonstrates just how big space is, and how close one has to be in order for anything to look like more than a dot.
Raul in Fallout: New Vegas remembers that in the great nuclear war, he could see Mr. House's defenses shooting down the nuclear bombs heading for Las Vegas... from Mexico City 2,800 km away.

Western Animation

In Justice League Unlimited, an egregious case occurs in the second AMAZO episode, where the android, on an interstellar journey to Earth, destroys Oa —or rather, teleports it out of the way— rather than make what is, given the scale involved, a ridiculously minor course adjustment. This is meant to showcase just how ridiculously powerful AMAZO has become: given two choices (remove planet or go around planet), removing the planet is more convenient.
Challenge of the Super Friends was never known for its rigorous scientific accuracy... or even for being terribly coherent. In the episode "Conquerors of the Future," a distress call arrives from the planet Santar, and Superman announces: "Santar is trillions of light-years from Earth. We'll have to leave immediately!" (For comparison, the edge of the obervable universe is a mere 13 or 14 billion light-years from Earth.)
- In another episode, the Legion of Doom cut the moon in half, requiring Superman and Batman to come out and help. Batman and Robin fly to the moon in the Bat Rocket, a trip that lasts less than one minute. The Bat Rocket must have had some kind of inertial dampeners, because making a quarter-million mile journey in that kind of time would have required them to accelerate at roughly 20,000 g.
  - Never mind the fact that Superman pushed the two halves of the moon back together, and then welded them with his heat vision.
Justified in Mass Effect - the only places fleets fight over are planets and mass relays, which occupy tiny areas of space.
Futurama parodies broken physics very very often, often screwing with perspective, logical sequences of events, and so forth. It shouldn't come as a surprise that scale is messed with, too:
- Occasionally planets in Futurama will be shown to be several SHIP LENGTHS away from each other.
- "Just a few.. more.. hundred.. thousand.. miles!"
- In the episode When Aliens Attack, the camera starts at Earth, spends about 10 seconds panning through our solar system (with all the planets bunched together as usual), and once finished, takes 2 more seconds to pan to "Omicron Persei 8 (1000 light years away)".
The beginning scene of BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn messes up not only the canon continuity, but has scale and distance issues to boot. When the Mask of Life flies through space, we are treated to a montage of the object traveling past planets and whole galaxies under seconds, after which it curves around a bunch of other planets, and then finally lands on the planet Bara Magna. The scene didn't make any sense, thus the writers Retconned it for the official storyline, so that instead of traversing who know how many light years, the mask only flies from Bara Magna's "planet moon" to the planet itself. This also prevented Makuta's eventual journey from said moon to the planet from having distance issues, though the scale was still off.
The title theme song for the 1963 version of Astro Boy starts with: "Astro Boy, past the stars / On your way out to Mars!" Talk about taking the scenic route....

Real Life

This sort of went the other way the week of 8 November 2011, when the asteroid 2005 YU55 came past the earth. While 201,700 miles is indeed close on a solar system scale, you could see years of science fiction and Did Not Do the Research clouding the media into thinking this was an Asteroid Thicket and it was right on top of us. (Indeed, the astronomy community had known for some time that there was absolutely no danger.) Jet Propulsion Labratories even added to the public confusion by stating that the asteroid was "the size of an aircraft carrier", which is an oddly non-scientific description for something round, and did not apply to its mass, volume nor shape. There was even a comment on JPL's facebook feed saying that there was no standardized "Aircraft carrier units".

Time Examples

Anime and Manga

The Excel Saga episode "Legend of the End of the Century Conqueror" (a parody of post-apocalyptic anime, mainly Fist of the North Star) opens with the announcer shouting "The Future, 199X!" The studio audience shouts "It's already over!" and the flustered announcer replies "Oh Crap, you're right!"

Comic Books

In Watchmen, soon after Dr. Manhattan arrives on Mars, he mulls to himself about trilobites two million years earlier, at the time as the Andromeda supernova. Except that the last trilobites went extinct about 250 million years ago; he's off by two orders of magnitude. Rather, he should have been pondering Homo habilis.
The 1998 DC Comics crisis crossover DC One Million has members of the Justice League of America travel to the 853rd century (specifically the year 85.271, because that's the year when DC expects to release issue #1,000,000 of their original Superman title Action Comics), where they encounter their distant descendants, who are members of the "Justice Legion A".

Film

In Demolition Man, the entire mainstream society gets completely overhauled, eradicating violence, swearing, and anything deemed hazardous to one's health, within 30 years. There are people (or at least one police officer) who were working adults in the ultra-violent past society, who are still in the workforce.
- There is also no information on whether these practices are in use in the rest of USA, or for that matter the rest of the world. Dr Cocteau seems to only preside over San Andreas, so either it's the new capital or they seceded in the past (which is not entirely unlikely).
When The Matrix enters Bullet Time, the bullets from semi-automatic handguns are sometimes only a few feet away from each other. That would only be possible if those handguns had about the rate of fire of a minigun. Rule Of Cool almost certainly has something to do with it.
- In every movie that features bullet time, the gunshot is always heard when the bullet leaves the barrel, regardless of how far the camera is from the gun, despite bullet usually travel faster than sound wave.
At the end of Water World, the protagonists find the dry land - complete with sandy beaches. It takes a LONG time to erode rock into sand.
- Not to mention the confusion when you realize that their society somehow still has a supply of gasoline and canned goods are still edible, while no living person can remember dry land and some people have begun to evolve gills which would take hundreds of generations to begin. No spam would still be good at that point.
Santo and Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man: Before Dracula could be brought back to life, seven solar eclipses and seven lunar eclipses had to pass. This is specified in the film as taking 400 years. Earth averages one total solar eclipse every 18 months, and has at least two total lunar eclipses per year. (If those eclipses were all supposed to be seen in the same locale, which is not specified in the subtitles but might be in the original Spanish dialogue, Dracula and Cristaldi must have jumped in a time machine before their fight. The average cycle for total solar eclipses visible in one spot is one per 370 years; getting seven of them would take 2,590 years on average.)

Literature

The original Dune series by Frank Herbert was set 10,000 years (human history goes back 7,000 years at present) after the Robot War known as the Butlerian Jihad, featuring an old, decadent society that had presumably been going downhill for a long time. However, when Frank Herbert's son picked up the reins and wrote prequels set before and during said Butlerian Jihad, the prequels end with all the social orders and customs, and even the religion, of Dune already established as nearly identical to the ones in the original novel. And the reader is expected to believe that they stayed exactly the same for longer than the time between the invention of writing and the present.
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has the earliest dates in its fictional world's history set at 12,000 years earlier, with the oldest family in the land able to trace their history back 8,000 years with apparent accuracy and detail, and with that family name never once dying out due to infertility, war or famine caused by the planet's frequent mini-ice ages. However, in the third book when one character is about to be elected the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, one of his friends is puzzled he can only find records of less than 600 previous ones, indicating the dates may not be reliable. Furthermore, Martin later confirmed that there are problems with date-keeping in the fictional history of Westeros, and dates much past 2,000 years ago are to treated as mythological, legendary and highly suspect. This may be due to the planet's highly unpredictable seasons (which last for years at a time), meaning that only a tiny minority of the population (those who keep track of astronomy) can accurately track the passage of time.
R. M. Meluch wrote a military series, Tour of the Merrimack, about a war between the United States of America and an interstellar empire that models itself on Imperial Rome, a populous, widespread, and powerful adversary ... whose people left Earth one hundred fifty years before. There can't be that many people willing to emigrate in order to declare themselves the Roman Empire IN SPACE!, but in less than two centuries, they've multiplied and developed their industrial base so drastically that they're a credible threat to conquer mid-25th-century Earth.
- In series justification — the people who established the Roman Empire IN SPACE! were part of an Ancient Conspiracy that had been in existence since the fall of the actual Roman Empire.
Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series is set about 40 million years into the future, with an external force creating technological (and to some degree, social and genetic) stagnation. However, nothing is enforcing geological stagnation, and the series tends to be rather hit-or-miss on the sort of changes that take place. For example, the main characters pass by the ruins of a city carved into the side of a mountain. The city has been abandoned for tens of millions of years (with the aforementioned external force keeping people away), but the degree of erosion described is more typical of thousands of years. (A thousand years will round off the edges of stonework, and can cause localized collapses of structures. Ten million years will make the mountain hundreds of feet shorter, with the slopes moving back a similar amount to maintain stability.)

Live-Action TV

Doctor Who, particularly during the Patrick Troughton era, dated an awful lot of its high-tech future stories to the 21st century. Going in the opposite direction, the story Doctor Who and the Silurians named a species after the era a million years before they were around. Someone caught this too late, and in their next appearance, the Doctor pointed out that their name was a misnomer.
- And says that they're properly Eocenes - which is ALSO inaccurate.
- In Frontios, the Doctor and companions travel to the extrordinarily distant future (millions, billions, and sometimes even trillions of years), only to discover humans have not changed in any way. In the episode Utopia, which is stated to be set sometime beyond the year 100,000,000,000,000 A.D., the Doctor handwaves this by saying that humans have evolved into higher life-forms countless times, but keep reverting to homo sapiens sapiens out of nostalgia.
  - What this doesn't explain, of course, are the relatively conservative levels of technology people seem to have, given that present-day scientists are expecting things like an omnipresent connection to the internet or extensive mechanical augmentation on humans within the next century. With billions of years having passed since the 21st century, society should, by all means, be utterly incomprehensible for a time traveller from that period.
Space: 1999 had an advanced base on the moon in the year of its title. In fairness, that didn't seem so far-fetched in the heady days of the Apollo missions, which was when the programme was created. This is more a depressing case of the opposite of Science Marches On.
Power Rangers has shown the year 2025 (Power Rangers SPD) to be more advanced than the year 3000 (Power Rangers Time Force) with the latter series actually being aired four (4!) seasons before the former, and once traveled back to show Salem-esque witch hunts in 18th century English-colonized California.
Parodied on Late Night with Conan O'Brien's Year 2000 sketches, where Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter would make ludicrous predictions about the year 2000 (the show began in 1993) while wearing "futuristic" robes and employing "dramatic" lighting (flashlights held under their faces). The sketches were set to dream-like music with "In the year two-thoooousaaaaaand..." repeated by band member Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg. Even as late as 2007, Conan and different guests continue to make predictions about what will happen in the year 2000.
- The absurdity was lampshaded by Andy Richter on the second episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, which began in 2009. The replacement sketch, In the Year 3000 takes the lack of scale in the opposite direction, making predictions for a thousand years in the future based on current politicians and celebrities still being around.
The Star Trek episode "Space Seed" explained that Earth had been wracked by world wars and conquered by genetic supermen...in the 1990s. (If Khan were thirty when he ruled half the planet, the genetic engineering that produced him would have had to be possible at the time the show was first aired.)
- Of course, the episode aired in 1967, when the previous World War had only ended a little over twenty years ago. The idea that another world war might break out some time in the next twenty or thirty years was frighteningly plausible at the time. Producing supermen before 1970, on the other hand...
  - There's a series of Eugenics Wars novels (basically Khan's back story), written in the 21st century, that explains that the Eugenics Wars really did take place, they were just done via covert ops, the results were covered up, etc), and that Khan and the other superhumans were produced through selective breeding (literal eugenics), a technology that was well-established before written language even if it hadn't been applied to humans.
An early Stargate SG-1 episode had the team encounter a civilisation which used technology to allow the knowledge of one person to be given to everyone else on the planet (giving the donor brain damage in return). The entire planet had no concept of school, traditional learning, or play (even the word play was unknown), despite the introduction of the technology having been only 50 years previously.
The Eureka episode "Ship Happens" has an organic computer in the form (and with the rough physical capabilities) of a human being, said to be packed incredibly densely with information. It starts writing out the information by hand, but says that it would take 2000 years to finish writing it all out. In 2000 years, a human could write out roughly 100 GB worth of data — that is to say, the amount stored on a moderately-sized hard drive. If a human-sized object is densely packed with information, surely there should be a lot more of it than that...
Series set in pre-human times fall victim to this like woah. For example, there is currently some confusion as to when exactly Terra Nova takes place. Some sources say 80 million years ago, others say 150 million years ago. But heck, what's a 70 million year difference? Animals and environments stay the same for that long, right? Right.
Some science fiction series refer to the 20th century as "Ancient" despite only being set a few hundred years into the future; this is slightly jarring when you realise that applying the same scale to the present day would render the colonisation of the New World, the Renaissance and handheld firearms as also being "Ancient."
It is remarkable how many non-fiction TV documentaries there are that try to invoke a sense of foreboding when speaking of the fact that in four billion years our sun will swell into a red giant, frying the earth. "What will we do when this happens?" they ask. The earliest evidence of human history is a mere 35-40,000 years old. The human race as we exist is believed to be only about 200,000 years old. The dinosaurs were only 70 million years ago, and humans didn't exist then. Worrying about something that will occur four billion years in the future (that's 4,000 millions of years), as if we will be in the same boat then as we are now (or even still exist to worry about it!), is a little extreme.
- The classic response when someone tries to scare you with this: "Did you say four million years?" "No, four billion." "Oh, good, you had me worried there at first."

Religion

The founder of the Church of Happyology says that a lot of things happened to the Thetans trillions of years ago—gorilla-themed mental-implant carnivals, bear-themed mental-implant explosions, "little orange-colored bombs that could talk", a brass dog that sucked people through it with electricity, etc. He doesn't explain, however, how all of this happened despite the Big Bang happening around 13.7 billion years ago. Then again, the Thetans turned incorporeal at some point, so they might withstand the collapse of the Universe.

Toys

In BIONICLE, the average lifespan of the characters, both biomechanical and organic lasts for more than a hundred thousand years. After the Shattering happened, and the planet of Spherus Magna blew into three separate planets, all forms of advancement came to a halt on the largest chunk, the desert planet Bara Magna. The story picks up 100 thousand years later, and literally, beyond the creation of the Glatorian fighting system, nearly nothing has changed. The death-rates are said to be high, yet no indication is given towards new people coming into being. Then, there's the fact that even 100 thousand year-old fighters, such as Gresh, are considered youngsters, and others treat them as if they were kids. And he becomes a skilled veteran just in a few months' worth of story time.

Video Games

The original Mega Man series, set in 200X, includes 4-foot-tall robots equipped with fully developed artificial intelligence, superhuman speed, reflexes, and fighting ability, and weapons involving plasma cannons, lasers, time manipulation, and holograms.
- This was later revised to 20XX.
The speed of human political expansion in Mass Effect seems to follow this trope - integrating themselves into pan-galactic society to the point where they are commonplace throughout the galaxy and have the military-industrial capability to rival established alien societies that have been around for thousands of years; from Hidden Elf Village to N-11 in thirty-five years. And gaining (low or sole) G8 status by the end of the first game. However, that's the whole point: human expansion is so amazing and unprecedented that the rest of the galaxy is quietly terrified of humans. And even then, one has to realize that when aliens speak of colonies they are referring to hundred-million strong populations; humans are referring to supply outposts of maybe fifty-thousand. Eden Prime, the "pride of the Systems Alliance", has less than four million, Terra Nova only four and a half. And the push for colonization is so great because Earth is getting crowded; twelve billion people with all that implies. And on top of that, humans armed forces are only 3% (compare to 10%-40% of the others races) of the population, so they can't defend their colonies making them easy prey for raiders.
- Humans aren't commonplace around the galaxy - on the Citadel, they are only common on the Presidium, where it makes sense (that's where their embassy and top financial institutions are), and Zakaera Ward (which is basically the Citadel's "Humantown"). The other locations where you can reliably find humans are human colonies (most of the locations visited), and Omega (because humans are scary good at crime).
- Humans not putting armed forces, beyond a small ground force garrison, also part of what scares all the other races. They set up picket forces to defend each colony they have. Humans on the other hand, use the ground based garrison to get intel for the fleet of ships that show up within hours of the raiding force showing up. Sure you'll get to raid an undefended colony for a bit, but when that fleet then shows up your toast. There is a reason why humans have their armed forced nicknamed a "Sleeping Giant."
- Only the Krogan, who are now almost totally sterile, and the vorcha (who only live a decade and are very stupid) breed faster than Humans in the Mass Effect universe. Also, its implied that the human population has gone into overdrive since mankind got its new lebensraum in space.
Fallout 3 takes place around 200 years after the war, but by the general state of things you'd think only a couple years had passed. Unmaintained buildings are still standing, no new plants have grown, and pre-war packaged food is still fresh. Word Of God has it that the developers were aware that by 200 years later the buildings would have returned to nature and new growth would be rampant, but decided to go with style over accuracy - a "post-nuclear role playing game" set in virgin forests with no standing buildings left over wouldn't be much deserving of its title, after all.
Assiduously avoided in Frontier: Elite II, which featured proper Newtonian flight physics via a velocity-vector, view-vector, thrust-vector avionics system and a galaxy of realistic size and scale. For some reason (radiation? gravitational perturbation?), hyperspace jump exit points are on the outskirts of star systems, meaning about 3 days or so journey is needed to get to a planet, even after using hyperdrive to get to the star system in the first place. Luckily, like the military sims of its day, it implemented "accelerated time" in logarithmic increments, up to 10,000 times real time.
- The manual states that spaceships are legally required to do their jump into hyperspace at a minimum safety distance from the surface due to the harmful radiation produced from the process. The reason you exit hyperspace in the outskirts may be another safety measure, to avoid jumping directly into planets or other debris.

Western Animation

Spoofed in an episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. George Jetson, after arriving in our time, treats Birdman like an inferior creature, stating proudly, "We are from the future! The far off year of 2002!" Birdman glances at his calendar, which reads "March 2004".
- The Jetsons, according to The Other Wiki, was supposed to take place in 2062, but this was never mentioned in the series itself.
The backstory of the various Transformers continuities typically extends back millions of years from the present date, and that's just the most recent activities of the current generation of characters. Granted, they're immortal robots, but still.
- And in the original cartoon, it's implied that nothing of importance happened on Cybertron during the four million years the season 1 protagonists lay dormant on Earth until they reawakened in 1984. Shockwave promised Megatron that he would keep Cybertron as he (Megatron) leaves it, but... damn.
  - Shockwave is good at two things, being a Magnificent Bastard (a very creepy one) and taking everything to the logical extreme.
- The Dreamwave comic series attempted to justify this by stating that due to ongoing rebellion and quashing of said rebellion, both Autobots and Decepticons formed a truce because they simply ran out of energon, and needed to go into a long period of stasis. In fact, by the time the Earthbound Autobots and Decepticons get home, they find that Cybertron actually is much better. The War Within series also had characters noting how, despite their level of technology, they had yet to go beyond their own moons.
- The Marvel comics actually delved into the history of the war during those four million years in some detail, chronicling the rise and fall of multiple Decepticon and Autobot commanders, the raging of the battles over vast distances of the planet, and the gradual pushing back of the Autobots on every front, until by the time contact is reestablished with Optimus Prime and co. on Earth, the war on Cybertron has effectively been over for several thousand years and the Autobots are no more than scattered guerrilla bands fighting on against all hope. The comics also seemed to postulate at one point the existence of many other Transformer factions and neutral forces other than Autobots and Deceptions who rode out the war, but this idea was seemingly later abandoned with those factions not being mentioned much past the Target: 2006! story arc. The comic also suggested that many Transformer factions had abandoned Cybertron to live in peace on other worlds, such as the Cybertronian Empire under the Liege Maximo and the later-Headmasters under Fortress Maximus, spreading the war over a much vaster distance of space as well as time.
In the "Breakout" episode of Megas XLR, highly-advanced sentient beings are shown to imprison a criminal. A title card then says "1,987,462,128,012 years later..." and cuts to present day, making the timeframe a little over 132 times the current length of existence.

Size and Mass Examples

Anime and Manga

Ah, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. In a rare example from the show that can't be chalked up to Rule Of Cool, in the last episode, the titular mecha ejects its smaller forms at the enemy when it is restrained. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the size of a galaxy. Chouginga Gurren Lagann is the size of the moon. They appear in the same frame. The fact that this happens should make anybody with a passing knowledge of astronomy angry. Either the Gurren Lagann Universe has small galaxies or its planets are somehow resistant to turning into black holes.
- Not to mention the Great Zamboa (the antagonist's galaxy-sized mech) having a clearly visible planet set into its forehead,
- Most people seem to miss out that every single attack that the galaxy mechs throw had to go faster than light speed, or else the fight would have either lasted years or fought completely blind.
  - The show lampshades this when Kamina says "KICK LOGIC OUT AND DO THE IMPOSSIBLE, THAT'S THE WAY TEAM GURREN ROLLS!!!"
The Gundam-franchise has hundreds of examples of this. Most notably, the Mobile Suits are mostly made of a variation of Titanium, yet their density is lower than that of Papier-Mache.
- Another example is the vulcan-machineguns most Gundam-types have. Most of them (the Gundam Ground-Type being most notable) actually have realistic sizes for their vulcans, but others, such as the Gundam Mk.II are just plain absurd. They can't expect us to believe the Gundam Mk.II has two 60mm Machineguns installed in its head. A few other Gundam-types go even further, by having 200mm vulcans in its head. That's right. Head-mounted machineguns bigger than the machineguns carried by a Zaku II.

Comic Books

This is fairly common in Marvel Comics. Marvel measures its characters' Super Strength based on how many tons they can lift. The problem is most people at Marvel apparently don't know how many tons a given object weighs or how much space a set number of tons of a given material will take up. For their heavy hitters ( The Hulk, the Thing, Thor ) they usually put the number at around 100 tons, while showing them lifting something that would(or should) weigh hundreds of thousands of tons.
- This is because marvel considers 100+ to be potentially incalculable and powerhouses like Thor and the hulk are 100+.The Hulk once lifted a 150 billion ton mountain and Gladiator lifted an office building that was measured at over 100,000 tons.
  - One image from Marvel Team-Up was fairly infamous in its time, even receiving a massive splash page and a really long apology from the editors in their 'No-Prize' one-shot dedicated to pointing out their own errors that readers caught. The image? Hercules, of the Avengers, towing the Island of Manhattan through the Atlantic, bringing it back into the Harbor, by means of a gigantic chain wound about himself - thus not only stating that Hercules is capable of pulling Manhattan, BUT ALSO that Manhattan floats. Oh, if this wasn't ridiculous enough, he's pulling it back the wrong way around, so that Uptown is now Downtown and the Battery is the northmost point of the island. This happened.◊
  - Eventually, that particular story was stated to be simply one of Hercules' tall tales (the Marvel version has always been fond of them).
- Planet Hulk featured The Hulk shifting entire continental plates. While swimming in lava, but that's another issue.

Film

In Independence Day, the mothership is stated to be "over 550 kilometers across, and in terms of mass it's a quarter the size of the moon." Later images of the mothership showed it to be hemispherical. A 550 km diameter hemisphere, with 1/4 the mass of Earth's moon, would have an average density of 1687 grams per cubic centimeter. That's nearly 150 times the density of solid lead.
- Not to mention such a mass in close orbit around the earth would create massive earthquakes, storms and other weather phenomena.
- Interior shots of the mothership showed it to contain mostly empty space. This means the actual density of its structural materials must be much, much higher. The mothership must be made out of white dwarf matter or neutron star matter.
In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, they had to warp the ship around the sun, and relating the scale of ship and the sun, the sun would be only smallish world sized!
The narration in Water World begins with: "The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water." Even if the entire arctic ice cap, and the ridiculously huge antarctic ice cap, were to completely melt, the extra water would only cause the sea level to rise some 200 meters. That's more than enough to flood all existing coastal regions, but it wouldn't begin to cover even the shortest mountain range, let alone bring the ocean to within a few meters of the top of Everest as shown at the end.
Every Star Trek with a ship exploding SERIOUSLY underestimates the size of the explosion. Take the Constitution Class. To do what it does, with as much as "20 years" of time between refueling quoted in the original Manual, 10,000 tons of antimatter is not an unreasonable figure to allow the immense, continuous power uses. At ~39 million tons of TNT equivalent for a kilogram of antimatter converting to matter, which also converts an equal amount of the ship's mass to energy, so 78,000 Gigatons of TNT. To put it in perspective, a ship exploding in orbit around a planet would be very much like a Gamma-Ray Burst by the planet's host star. But we routinely see ships near other exploding ships being unaffected by the storm of hard radiation.

Literature

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, the planet Trantor is stated to have a surface area of 75 million square miles, and a population "in excess of forty billions". That puts the population density somewhere between 533 and 666 people per square mile. This is LESS than the average suburb, yet Trantor is described as being a teeming planet-wide city.
- Science Marches On?
- The average suburb is not self-contained. If you add in all the businesses, workplaces, industry, transportation and other infrastructures required to do that... it will start to feel rather more crowded.
  - Asimov also indicated that the structure of Trantor extended more than a mile underground and up to several hundred stories above ground. Taking into account the additional area therefore available, which may be a few hundred times the land area, the problem with Trantor isn't overcrowding, it's finding someone else to talk to face to face.
Despite containing one of the vanishingly rare aversions of distance and speed issues in military sci-fi, David Weber's Honor Harrington did suffer "The Great Resizing" as a result of the author forgetting the square-cube law while assigning the lengths and masses of his setting's starships. When the people trying to create a gaming spinoff crunched the numbers, they realized his smallest ships were about right, but the mightiest warships were "not quite as dense as cigar smoke!"
- Since the text makes only rare references to length, and very commonly notes mass as a determinant of acceleration, the author retconned in a new and much shorter length that delivered reasonable density.
Weber does it also in his story Mutineer's Moon and sequels, in which the starting premise is that the Moon (i.e. Luna, Earth's natural satellite, that Moon) is actually a starship. Yes, the whole thing. It has a layer of rock around the outer hull carefully sculpted to match the surface appearance of the original Moon that once orbited the Earth, tens of thousands of years ago, before the starship removed it and took its place. Incidentally, the entire human population of the Earth in these books descend from the human crew of that starship.
- At no point does Weber write the ship as if it was 2,000 miles in diameter, though, nor is it ever seriously explained why it needs to be that big. He writes the starship as if it were a few miles in diameter.
- The book does state that the type of FTL engine used and the reactor to power it (as well as the Hyperspace Radio) all reached optimum efficiency only when scaled up to planetoid dimensions. To give you an idea of just how much power their reactors put out, it took only six Battle Planetoids working together to force a star to go supernova.
Larry Niven's Ringworld takes the common misconception about the Dyson Sphere (see below) to a more 'practical' level. Why build an entire sphere around a star when a single continuous strip could house more life than could possibly fill it? But the example of this trope comes more into play with The Ringworld Engineers, which was written after Niven attended a convention where several college students were roaming the halls chanting "The Ringworld is unstable". Niven did the math and, nerds being nerds, discovered they were right. The Ringworld is indeed unstable, so he added some jets to allow it to maintain its position.
- Of course, Ringworld starts off with the Puppeteers fleeing the galaxy, dragging the five planets of their home system with them, which has its own host of Sense Of Scale problems (But come on, they're towing planets. How is that not awesome?)
- The whole of Known Space is a region of around 30-60 lightyears in diameter, depending on time. The Ringworld and the Fleet of Planets are both far outside this, and the Fleet is moving along at a steady clip of .8c. The Puppeteers are long-term planners who are perfectly willing to move thousands of years in order to be safe.
- Iain Banks has an even more practical variant in his "orbitals" - ring-shaped worlds that are only five million kilometres across and in a conventional orbit about their star. The size is chosen so that one revolution per standard day evokes one standard gravity of centrifugal force. In Consider Phlebas there is passing mention of Spheres and Rings, but by later novels they seem much less popular (probably because having decided to give the Culture's total population at ~18 trillion, it's immediately clear that even one such structure is unimaginably more than they could ever possibly need).
  - Matter is set on a "shellworld", effectively a planet-sized (and shaped) set of matryoshka dolls. The one in the book has 15 levels, coming to 11.8 billion square kilometers of space. Still only a tiny fraction the size of the Ringworld.
Also by Niven, in his Integral Trees setting: the so-called "integral trees" are plants in a free-fall environment typically between 50 and 100 kilometers long and 700 meters across. A small (few thousand people), fairly primitive (early Iron Age) society is harvesting these trees for lumber at an implied rate of one or two a year. Thing is, a single tree will yield about eight trillion board-feet of lumber, or about a century's output of the entire United States lumber industry.
- The limiting factor isn't the wood available. It's the food and water. The Smoke Ring being what it is, the people need to move fairly frequently to avoid starvation or thirst, and the more advanced societies don't move at all.
Stephen Baxter's Ring features an artificial ring the size of a galaxy spinning at something close to the speed of light, with the idea its sheer mass would rip open a hole to another universe. The enemies of the ring-creators are peeved at this and hurl entire galaxies at the ring (including ours, but it's okay as we won't get there for several tens of billion years) in an attempt to destroy it, to no avail. The plausibility of such an object's size and the ability to build it without either exhausting all matter in the universe or getting it finished before the end of time may depend on the reader's suspension of disbelief.
- To be fair, the ring-creators came into existence a couple seconds after the universe did, are born in black holes, have utterly ridiculous technology, and have a stable time-loop existence so that as soon as they came into existence, they were at their technological peak. They've had plenty of time.
  - And for all that, it sort of is the end of time (still-burning stars are starting to become scarce) before it all comes to fruition.
- Much worse is Orion Rock in Exultant, an asteroid said to be travelling a thousand years before reaching the black hole in the center of the galaxy. That's all fine and well, until a protagonist standing on it gets to see molecular clouds disappearing upon reaching the rock's destination. That means that the cloud is several orders of magnitude denser than any nebula ever known (probably around the density of water clouds), and that it has an impossibly crisp edge (going from that insane density to zero in only a few hundred kilometers tops).
Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern: If we go by the measurement system provided by the books and supplemental materials, the Queen Dragon Ramoth at 45 meters from nose to tail would be only slightly smaller than the Lockheed Tristar, a passenger jet capable of holding around 250 passengers (which is used as the example in the supplemental books), making her the largest animal ever, and the other dragons are no slouches either. Bronze dragons which are the only ones "allowed" to mate with the golds range from 30 to 42 meters in length. And all of these dragons only get one Rider. There's a reason why the fan roleplaying communities tend to believe that "meter" is a mistake and use the foot instead, making Ramoth only slightly larger than the Tyrannosaurus rex, which was not the largest animal ever on Earth, which makes it a hell of a lot easier on an environment by not having several hundred carnivores exceeding 100 feet in length devouring what are essentially Earth cows.
- And then there's the Hand Wave that a dragon weighs only as much as it wants to and can carry as much as it wants to being a result of their telekinetic powers which only get discovered in one of the last books chronologically.
Andre Norton describes the Free Trader ship Solar Queen as both "small" and "needle-slim." It's also clearly a rocket shape. But when she explains the accommodations on a single deck within that "small" hull, it's clear that to have "needle-slim" proportions at that size, it'd need to be about the height of a Saturn V.
Ship sizes in Andrey Livadny's The History Of The Galaxy series can be a little off, at least as described on his website. From 20-meter one-man Space Fighters to 7-kilometer flagship cruisers, crewed by 150 people. While the author tries to explain it by having most systems be automated (in fact, entire ships can run without crews, using only AIs), this does not explain why the ships have to be so ridiculously big. Interestingly, one novel specifically mentions a heavy cruiser (about 5 km in length) with a crew of 2000. However, even that is an extremely-low number of people to run a ship this size. For reference, a Real Life Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier will be about 333 meters in length and have a crew of 4660. This is not even to mention the stress of trying to maneuver a 7-kilometer beast in battle. The only thing the author got right is that any ship larger than 500 meters is unable to enter planetary atmosphere without assistance from technical carriers (i.e. tugs). Even corvettes, which are 500 meters long, come equipped with additional planetary engines to allow them to survive re-entry.
Another example showing how you can screw up sizes without going into space comes from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar. One scene has a lidi running in terror when pursued by two hyaenodons. The hyaenodons are described as being as large as ponies. The lidi is a sauropod dinosaur, 80-100 feet long. This is the equivalent of a pair of rats chasing a horse, or a pair of foxes chasing an elephant (this is one of many instances where Burroughs shows his total lack of understanding of animals).

Live-Action TV

The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Galileo Seven" in which Spock and a small crew were lost in a shuttlecraft while the Enterprise studied "quasar-like phenomena." The image on the main screen was clearly of an artist's rendition of a quasar. Today, we know that a quasar is the supermassive black hole at the center of a very young galaxy, spewing enormous amounts of energy as material falls into it. The implications are either of a galaxy-like phenomenon within a galaxy (?!), or that the Enterprise was at the far reaches of the universe studying a quasar with a very, very small number of worlds therein.
- No-one knew for sure that a quasar is a galaxy until the 1980s, and they don't look like one without additional information that wasn't available when the episode was made. This is more a case of Science Marches On.
  - Which makes its use as a wormhole of sorts in the Wing Commander film especially ridiculous.
  - Even at the time the episode was made, we knew that quasars had enormous redshift, implying that they were extremely distant phenomena (as in billions of light-years away, far far outside our own galactic supercluster).
- Hilariously, the remastered version added stumpy little relativistic jets and an accretion disc.
  - How is that unrealistic? Those features would also be found around a small (star-mass) black hole.
- The episode "The Corbomite Maneuver" has the Enterprise encounter a mysterious cube, which Sulu says is 107 metres on each side and masses just under 11,000 metric tonnes. Scotty says it must be solid metal, leaving him wondering how it could be powered and how it moves around. But the quoted measurements give a density of about 9 kilograms per cubic metre, significantly less than styrofoam - implying the cube is almost certainly hollow (they may have been aiming for 9 tonnes per cubic metre, which is between the densities of iron and lead, and dropped a factor of a thousand somewhere).
In at least one episode of The Next Generation turning off life support for five minutes was enough to exhaust the entire oxygen supply of the ship. Considering the absurdly spacious rooms, they should have lasted quite a while longer.
Used intentionally and cranked up to 11 via the Rule of Funny in Psych, where detective Shawn Spencer has to pretend to be the guide doing a laser light presentation at an observatory, but quickly makes it painfully obvious he knows nothing about space.
Shawn: There are almost 4... hundred stars, in our galaxy. Maybe more. No one knows for sure. Some say that the Milky Way may be larger than the Indian Ocean. Ah, and here are our constellations. Here's one of a fish...and here's one of a guy, holding........ some sort of a thing?
Janitor: (whispering) You're supposed to name them!
Shawn: And here is Monkey with Rash. The Egyptians used to set their clocks by it. And here is the Hammer of Jeff.
In Stargate Atlantis Season 3, First Strike, six "tactical nukes" take out sizeable portions of a planetary surface covering several hundreds of miles. The area covered is far too large: above 15mt, dampening effects of atmosphere and soil begin reducing the effective radius of the explosion with increasing energy of the weapon. (The 1961 50mt Tsar Bomba was not tremendously larger in extent than the blast radius of the 15mt Bravo blast, but it did dig a MUCH deeper hole.) Even MIRV weapons cannot cover that type of area, as it would require hundreds of warheads.

Toys

While the writer states Earth physics don't mean a thing in BIONICLE, scale issues come up frequently. There's Mata Nui for instance, a circa 40 million feet high robot with a whole ecosystem inside him, who was build under a fairly short time, standing tall on the surface of his planet, in secret. His prototype, which was two thirds his size, blew up shortly before his construction, and none of the planet's inhabitants seemed to have grown suspicious of the mountain-sized robot parts that rained around them, all over the planet. Then, when these two bodies fought a 100.000 years later, it was explicitly stated that the other, normal-sized characters simply ran around under their feet, crossing distances of thousands of miles within mintues. In the Mata Nui Saga, this scale issue had been taken into consideration, but they simply decided that the Saga's illustrations should depict both the giant robots and the human-sized characters within the same image. Otherwise, we would have only seen either the giant mechanoids duking it out alone, or the armies of the "regulars" clashing in front of a gray backdrop.
- Another example: the Mata Nui robot's mission, according to his hastily written backstory, was to study other civilizations and learn how to prevent wars. He did so by approaching a populated planet, lying down into an ocean, and covering his face with an artificial island. After thousands of years, he would rise up and continue his journey through space. Disregarding the fact that his massive chest would probably still have protruded through the water, just how does a robot as tall as Earth is wide lie in a body of water without anyone noticing, without raising water levels, or without simply having any effect on the planet itself? The Mata Nui Saga took a more reasonable route and depicted Mata Nui gathering information from civilizations through his special powers, while staying clear of any planet.

Tabletop Games

In the Wild Talents 2nd Edition superhero setting, one of the suggested campaign seeds is being part of an exploration team for a defunct alien "world-ship" that has moved into the solar system. The campaign text says, explicitly, "Every square inch of the 'ship', 6,123 miles in diameter, was to be searched under the express orders of Joint Space Command." This is a volume of over four billion trillion cubic meters they are talking about here. If the entire population of the planet Earth, all six billion people, were used for a search team, each person would still have to search over 660 billion cubic meters. Hope they packed a lunch!
- ...or just had a Talent specializing in investigation onboard, who could probably do so in a few minutes. This is a setting where teleporters routinely send space installations to Mars, gadgeteers mass-produce giant robots, and the World Ship and its inhabitants were possibly subconsciously wished into being by a suicidally despondent Talent, searching a ship that size in a timely matter isn't that unlikely.
- In the Progenitor setting for Wild Talents, the first superhuman was infused with 1% of the universe's Dark Matter energy. While obscenely powerful by supers game standards, her powers aren't anywhere near, say, Gurren Lagann level crazy, much less Bronze Age Superman crazy.
In Battletech, a large Dropship weighs ten thousand tons, and is protected by 30 tons of armor. Considering it's basically a hundred meter sphere, it comes to the ship being about fifteen times as dense as air, and the armor being literally paper thin.

Video Games

Super Mario Galaxy is very confused as to what constitutes a planet or a galaxy. For example: the smallest "planets" are maybe thirty feet in all directions, and the biggest are smaller than the Earth's moon. Meanwhile, "galaxies" are simply clusters of these "planets" or sometimes just one relatively big "planet," with no stars to speak of. Unless you count the abundant tiny black holes. It can be chalked up to Rule of Fun, though, the setting running on cartoon physics.
- Though the actual reason is that in Japanese, the same word is used to refer to planets, asteroids, galaxies, etc., the real confusion being why that was kept in the translation.
  - Probably to keep with the natural progression of things. Super Mario Land, Super Mario World, Galaxy was the next logical step.
The weapons in Deus Ex are ridiculously heavy. The Dragon's Tooth Sword, for instance, weighs about 20 pounds. For the uninitiated, a normal katana weighs about 3.8 pounds. Could be justified, but it isn't because normal swords in the game are also 20 pounds. In addition, the pistol is 10 pounds in weight and the wrist-mounted mini-crossbow is 15 pounds.
''Homeworld is ridiculously bad about ship weight. Most ships' weights in "tons" correspond to them being lighter-than-air craft. I guess that would make getting 'em into space pretty easy, though.
Halo is just as bad: while the games give no numbers, the novels cite insanely light weights for ships. The 480'ish meter long titanium armored frigate for instance is given a loaded mass of just 4,000 tons. Some rough math says that this results in a ship that's not quite lighter then air, which is about 1.2 kilos per cubic meter, but seeing as the frigate works out to something like 1.8 kilos per cubic meter it's damn close. It gets even more insane when we consider that the ship is supposed to be armed with a main gun that fires 600 ton slugs.
- More fun! Doing the math from Halopedia, which gets info from the novels, the Orbital Defense Platforms fire 3,000 ton slugs at 60% light speed. This results in a projectile that has 11.62 teratons of kinetic energy. That's 11,620,000,000 kilotons. For reference, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an energy yield of 15 kilotons or so, which makes that one slug over 774 million times as strong. For more realization of how ridiculous this number is, take the total energy consumption of the United States in 2005. Each one of these slugs, fired once every five seconds, contains about 467 times that amount.
Sins of a Solar Empire is surprisingly good about this, although planets appear only a few times smaller than some suns. The ships are comparitively massive compared to fighters, which are so tiny they have to have markers pointing out entire wings of them if you zoom out enough to view just one capital ship.
Pokémon sucks with Pokémon weights. A Wailord weighs a paltry 398 kg, despite being 14.5 m long. For comparison, a sperm whale can be 12 to 18 m long, and weighs more than 20,000 kg.
- This one's a sneaky one. Yes, Wailord is partially based off of a whale . . . but it's also partially based off of a blimp.
EVE Online is a major offender in the density department, with ships supposedly armed with Railguns averaging the density of Styrofoam.
- Roughly 30 Kg per cubic meter
- Also, when looking at the description of a gate, its stated mass is "5e+35 kg." For comparison, Sol's mass is approximately 1.989e+30 kg, making gates over 250,000 times as massive as the Sun itself. Of course, they also create and maintain stable wormholes between two star systems. Maybe the sensors can't really determine the actual mass (which has to be relatively low, since they were carried to their positions using STL ships).
- And then we shouldn't forget to mention the beacons scattered throughout the universe. They weigh 1kg, and have a volume of 1 cubic meter. Which is actually an acceptable size, but coupled with their low weight, they have a density lower than air! Seriously. Atmospheric air has a density of 1.2kg/m3. Interstellar Beacons have a density of 1kg/m3. That's 16.67% lighter than air. At least the chances of one of those crashing down on a planet is very small.
- EVE just gets ridiculously jarring in this department at times. Especially with the asteroid belts. It's actually possible to sit in a belt between two asteroids that are big and dense enough to have their own gravity-wells in a ship with a density equal to something like Papier-Maché, ''and not be ripped apart by the two gravity-wells.
- Titans have a density equal to that of aluminium, while Rifters have a density equal to that of solid gold. Who made up these numbers again?
Sword Of The Stars: Destroyers, the smallest FTL-capable starships, are around 30 meters in length... Seriously? For reference, the Space Shuttle is 56.1m.
- The assault shuttles are even smaller, at about 10 meters in length. And these are actually supposed to enter and exit the atmosphere (and don't look aerodynamic enough for that).
- There is also the problem of a Zuul slave disk that is, maybe, 60 meters in diameter being able to hold 50 million people.
  - Or a colonizer destroyer section that can hold 30-200 million people (depending on species, humans can fit 50) before researching suspended animation.

Web Comics

In Homestuck, there are a couple examples. A fireball wrapping around the planet instead of simply blowing a hole in the crust, a star twice the size of the universe, yet when a character flies next to it they are nowhere near dwarfed by that sheer size; they also plan to blow it up with something the size of a building that can eradicate something comparable to a solar system, and a few others. It's justified perhaps, via Functional Magic.

Western Animation

In the various continuities of Transformers, various transformers could change their size and mass. To give you an idea on how much of a change they could make, you could pick up and carry around Soundwave and his assorted Casseticons. (The fact that they turn into a cassette player of some kind and its associated cassettes is another quandary.) Soundwave in his robot form is something like a 30-foot-tall heavily armed and armoured war machine.
- Probably the worst example of this - worse even than Megatron and his gun transformation - was Reflector. Each one only slightly shorter than Soundwave, THREE robots (Spectro, Spyglass, and Viewfinder) managed to each form a different part of a camera that has been portrayed as small enough to fit into Thundercracker's hand.
- On the other end of the scale is Unicron. He is a Transformer the size of a planet. And picks up another, normal size Transformer between his fingers and drops him in his mouth. To say nothing of the rest of the fight scenes against him.
- The Transformers Wiki has an entire page dedicated to the wackiness of Transformer scale. Included is a diagram demonstrating, on the basis of his size relative to Unicron, that Galvatron must be approximately the same size as Great Britain.
- The size of Cybertron itself varies a lot in Transformers lore. Considering its inhabitants tend to be about 30 feet tall, it could be assumed that the planet is fairly big, but in fact when it gets knocked into Earth orbit (which happens twice in the series) it appears to be about the size of our Moon. Considering that Cybertron is apparently too big for Unicron to consume in planet mode, this means that the actual number of planets Unicron can consume without ripping them apart with his bare hands (which in the case of a planet like Earth would take a long time) is fairly limited.
  - Cybertron in the Transformers film series, when shown in Earth's orbit, is actually much larger. Given that it appears to be entirely metallic in composition, it would also make it much more massive, even if its outer layers have many hollow areas.
- Even more confusion: in the Armada anime series, Unicron is said to have been biding his time, disguising himsself as one of Cybertron's moons!
- See here for more information.
On an episode of the 2003 series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the entire city of Beijing is lifted into the air with alien technology. A view of the floating hunk of rock (significantly thicker than the Earth's crust) looks like the view out an airplane's window, with farm patterns visible below. A scientist states that the city is floating 20 miles above the ground, yet the city is easily 100 times its own height above the ground.

Tropes

Baby Planet

Other

Freeman Dyson's idea of the Dyson Sphere, a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely surround a star and capture most or all of its energy output, when typically misrepresented by journalists and sci-fi writers as a solid shell completely enclosing its star. Hear that sound? Yeah, that's the collective groan of pretty much every engineer on the planet doing a coordinated Face Palm at the sheer impossibility of a solid structure of that magnitude keeping itself intact. Not to mention the issue of where the hell one would get enough material to build something that would outmass the entire solar system it's supposed to hold several times over. Dyson himself had a sense of scale, was fully aware of the impossibility of a solid shell and had in mind "a loose collection or swarm of objects travelling on independent orbits around the star."
- Cricket magazine had an even worse example in one of their stories. Not only was there a solid Dyson sphere, but "a small strip around the equator was far enough away to support life."
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics" featured a Dyson sphere with land, water and a sustained atmosphere (judging from all the green) on the entire inside surface. Despite the fact that the surface had open doors.
  - Even if you could build a solid Dyson sphere, nothing would "stick" to the inside surface, because there is no gravity gradient inside a hollow sphere. Nor would the sun have any particular reason to stay at the center of the sphere.*
    Though, Star Trek does take place in a setting with cheap artificial gravity.
  - To compound their sins even worse, there is a visible curvature to the surface of the sphere as the Enterprise passes through the door — on a sphere with about a 100 million km radius.*
    That's about 2/3 the Earth's orbital radius; apparently it surrounds a smaller and weaker star.
  - To their credit the episode does say the structure is impossible. Or should be since it does in fact exist in their reality.
- Receives a lampshade in Schlock Mercenary, where aliens who habitually make Dyson spheres of a canvas-like material have a name that translates to "This was expensive to build."
  - The structural problems are also avoided by the implementation there: the material is very light, with a mirror finish, and is supported by light pressure from the enclosed star.
- In the Star Trek novel Inferno (book three of the Millennium trilogy) O'Brien is trapped in a Pah-wraith hell featuring a solid-shell Dyson sphere. The sheer impossibility of the thing slowly but surely drives him insane. Of course, being an illusion the whole time, it gets a pass on any sort of physical possibility.
The vast majority of giantess fap fics will have the girl end up at something like 1000 feet tall. That's more than a third the size of the world's tallest building.
For years, the assumption among paleontologists was that Quetzalcoatlus, a pterosaur with a thirty-foot wingspan, long limbs, and a long neck to match, weighed less than a hundred kilograms, or not a whole lot more than a human. This is how big they were. It's not at all implausible that something much heavier than the original estimate can fly, and then we can have had animals tall enough to look giraffes in the eye without having their interiors be blimps.
- Part of the problem was that until Mark Witton started doing images such as the one linked to, most recreations of pterosaurs didn't have them in context with anything humans could instinctively relate to. Seeing that image and one suddenly realizes the 100kg (220lb) estimate is completely absurd.

Energy Examples

Comic Books

In V4 Legion of Super-Heroes, the moon is blown up. Earth hardly notices, even though just a few chunks of it should wreak disaster on the Earth equivalent to being hit by hundreds of asteroids at once. Later on, the Earth is blown up and said to damage the moons of Saturn, when the effect should be unnoticeable.

Film

In the Back to the Future films, time travel needs 1.21 gigawatts — the only source of which is supposedly plutonium or a lightning bolt. Modern power stations can actually generate tens of gigawatts. Not exactly something you can carry around in a DeLorean, but not as unthinkably great as the films implied.
- Justified in that while a modern power plant could conceivably power the time machine, the portion of Back to the Future in which this energy requirement is shocking is not modern— it's 1955. The first commercial nuclear power plant did not open until 1956, and its maximum output was a mere 50 megawatts. The DeLorean would have needed the total maximum output of 25 such nuclear plants to utilize 1.21 gigawatts. Doc Brown's horrified reaction makes complete sense.
- A bigger issue is in fact that "gigawatt" is a power - but you'd rather expect an energy figure here (like gigawatt-seconds, or Joules). It's a bit like saying "in order to drive from A to B you need 150 HP"... much less sensible than saying "You need about 5 litres of gas".
  - Of course, it's time travel. Possibly the issue really isn't only about energy, just like black hole is not about total mass, just about density - taking the driving example, while you of course need energy to climb a hill, you also need enough force to overcome gravity (in real life of course only a part of the force of gravity thanks to being on a slope) - just the energy isn't enough because the gravity would pull you down; in effect, you could pump in as much energy as you can dissipate without moving more than a bit. Still, much more likely it's just Did Not Do the Research.
Armageddon provides a shiny example in the categories of size, energy, and distance: An asteroid the size of Texas (roughly 700 - 1,000 km across depending on the axis chosen) is not an asteroid - it's a planetoid. It is comparable in size to the larger moons of the outer gas giants. The movie states that our heroes drill 800 feet into it. Many modern rig operations close on to twice that, while diamond-head drilling goes to four times the stated depth before hitting its cost-effectiveness ceiling. And lastly, they they split the ~~asteroid~~ planetoid in two by setting off a 20 megaton nuclear device in the hole. Now, setting aside the concept of getting a nuke into such a hole (which is fairly narrow in diameter), this is roughly equivalent to taking a bowling ball, pricking its surface gently with a push pin, and then farting into the hole.
- That large an object that close to the Earth would be 3,000 - 4,000 times brighter than Ceres, the largest asteroid in the Solar System, and thus easily spotted with the naked eye. It would have naked-eye visibility for a least a few weeks before the 18-day deadline given in the film.
- If the object is "the size of Texas", we have a problem — we know how wide Texas is from east to west, and we know how tall Texas is from north to south ... but how thick is Texas? Is it only the thickness of its own topsoil layer? Is it a single molecule thick? Does it extend in a Texas-shaped wedge all the way to the center of the Earth? If we assume that Texas is only paper-thin, this object "the size of Texas" hurtling toward the Earth suddenly seems a lot less threatening.
- Ah, but wait! If what's meant is that it has a surface area roughly equal to Texas, you find that (assuming it's a rough sphere) the radius is about 400 km, or a bit less than that of Ceres. So, it's at least reasonable for being an asteroid, although cracking it open with a nuke still seems rather optimistic. Moving it into a different orbit (one that doesn't intersect the Earth), Orion-style, might work, though.
- With the amount of physics and general reality that got screwed in this flick, the above examples are merely a minor scratch of the surface. It's said that NASA test staff by having them watch the movie and seeing how many mistakes they can spot.
In Star Trek The Motion Picture the staggaring, awe-inspiring power of Vger's ball-lightning attack (which is at one point shown disintegrating an entire Klingon fleet) is measured by the Enterprise's sensors and reported by Sulu as being "One to the Twelfth Power". We will leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate what 1^12 is.
- Gene Roddenberry seems to have had a bit of a blind spot with the number 1. An original series episode reported viewscreen magnifications of "1 to the fourth power" and so on. In his original pitch, he reinvented Drake's Equation (he didn't have the actual equation on hand) to show how likely alien life was, and ended up with terms raised to the first power.
In Forbidden Planet, the crew of the spaceship is attacked by a monster and blast it with an impressive looking nuclear powered particle cannon. They then go on to mention that no living being should have survived the hit. The problem is, they give the output of the cannon as "three billion electron volts", presumably per particle, which is an utterly frightening amount. An electron volt is the energy carried by an electron that's been accelerated across a charge differential of one volt. So a three billion volt difference across which the particles are accelerated (or a roughly 1.2 million volt difference, if the cannon throws protons or neutrons) is enormous; the largest differential routinely created artificially is on the order of 100,000 volts, and that with equipment the size of a large building. It seems likely that the real issue here is that "electron volt" is a very different kind of unit from "volt", making this Unit Confusion of a sort: while electron volts are indeed a unit of energy — which volts are not — an electron volt is the sort of unit one would use on a subatomic scale, and not just some sort of energy-equivalent to similar numbers of volts.
The Terminator asks for a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range. The phased part is a bit of a mystery, but forty watts of plasma is about half a candle's output. Hitting your opponent with the output of a lit match might sting a bit, but it doesn't sound terribly lethal.

Literature

In the Riverworld series, food is provided by an energy-to-matter conversion. Three times a day, each Grailstone blasts out enough energy to create food for seven hundred people, and half that energy gets wasted into the air. There are some 20,000,000 Grailstones on the planet. Just for clarity, a one-kiloton thermonuclear explosion converts about .05 grams of mass to energy. The Grailstones should blow the atmosphere off the planet at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now that's a barbecue!
- The source of this energy is also a problem: it's stated that the Grail system is powered by thermoelectric generators under the planet's crust. The available energy (3.6 exajoules per day) sounds like a lot, but it's only enough to synthesize about 40kg of food.
- The extra matter also ought to turn the River Valley into a miles-deep sewer of human waste in a few short years. There would have to be some means of converting the mass back into energy to avoid this.
Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series is usually very good about keeping distances, masses and velocities in proportion (not too surprising, as Reynolds is an astrophysicist). He does lose track of energy sometimes though. "Redemption Ark" has "crustbuster warheads" with a yield of 1 teraton - that's a million million megatons, - and mentions that a destabilized Conjoiner drive on a lighthugger releases three orders of magnitude more energy than THAT. Granted, nobody sane ever tries to harm a lighthugger in vicinity of an inhabited planet, but couple times in the series starships do go up. In "Absolution Gap" lighthugger Gnostic Ascension blows up when less than 20,000 km from an icy moon Hela. At the very least on hemisphere of Hela should have melted.

Live-Action TV

In Space: 1999, an explosion at a nuclear waste dump accelerates Earth's moon to a speed that defies the laws of physics. In fact, the energy required to get the moon out of orbit is more than enough to completely pulverize it.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Conundrum," the crew is brainwashed by a Satarran into helping them win a war against the Lysians, whose hardware is "greatly outclassed" by the Enterprise-D. Specifically, the energy output of the Lysian Central Command is given as "4.3 kilojoules". According to its packaging, the energy content of a single piece of After Eight chocolate is 145 kilojoules. The Lysians cannot protect their own starbase from a flashlight.
- Even better: a Lysian destroyer effortlessly dispatched by the Enterprise earlier in the episode is mentioned as having disruptors worth 2.1 megajoules—500something times stronger than their starbase's shield output. The Satarrans' hat is brainwashing entire crews. Wasn't there a simpler way for them to win the war than to make an episode of television?
In the Secret of Bigfoot episodes of the Six Million Dollar Man, Oscar Goldman has to detonate a 500 megaton atomic bomb that's beeh burried 500 feet down to trigger a fault and stop a much bigger earthquake that will level the west coast. The Aliens, who have their base in the vacinity send The Beautiful Woman of the Week to defuse the device, and Steve Austin has to stop her. Steve overcomes the alien and then runs off with T -10 seconds before detonation. It's been established that Steve can run at a top speed of 60 miles an hour, so while I dont know the exact calculations, but 10 seconds of 60 MPH run from an atomic bomb (even 500 feet down) would mean that he gets turned into a slightly lesser grade of Extra Crispy. Although to be fair, writer Kenny Johnson pretty much addresses the problem and goes "Yeah, but what are you going to do?"
In the Supermarionation series Fireball XL5, it only took a few missiles to blow up an incoming planet.

Video Games

Kind of energy: the Pokédex entries for some Pokémon species. "Magcargo's body temperature is 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit" (Sun's surface: 5,800 Kelvin, or 9980 F), "Charizard's fire is hot enough to melt boulders" (1200 Celsius, 2192 F)...
- It should be noted however that numerous Pokédex entries are contradicted by both the games and the anime, contain a suspicious amount of rumours and conjecture, and considering the favoured tactic of Pokemon researchers is to recruit ten-year-olds and send them off without instruction, there's a strong implication that science in the Pokemon world is of a very poor quality.
In Metroid Prime Hunters, the Volt Driver is said to fire multi-terawatt bursts of electricity. A terawatt, or one trillion (10^12) watts is the unit that measures the total amount of power used by humanity (about 15 terawatts). The Judicator fires supercooled plasma that reaches near Absolute Zero. Both of these are hand held weapons.
- The annihilator beam of Metroid Prime 2 combines matter and antimatter. This would produce a blast comparable to a nuclear bomb. The beam is semiautomatic (0.5 grams of matter and antimatter produce roughly 9 * 10^13 Joules of energy — which is, roughly, the energy output of a Fat Man type nuclear explosion. And even 0.0001g of matter and antimatter each would still produce enough energy to melt a metric ,ton of steel.
- On the other side of the scale, the Shock Coil weapon somehow manages to kill things with neutrinos. Neutrinos are famous for having almost zero mass. Trillions of them are passing through your body right now. The description says these neutrinos are "high density" but the sheer amount it would take to do even the smallest bit of damage would be absolutely insane.
Averted in Mass Effect 2, with the Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space sequence. The gunnery chief is about right about the energy yield of the Everest-class dreadnought's main gun.

Western Animation

In Ben 10 the self destruct mechanism on the Omnitrix releases enough energy to destroy the entire universe. One of many problems with that idea is if you ever got that much energy into one point (assuming it existed in the first place), the total absence of energy from the rest of the universe would destroy it anyway.
- Also in the episode "Ben Versus the Negative Ten", the artifact the villains are trying to steal is described by Grandpa Max as containing "The power of a thousand suns... enough to blow a continent off the face of the Earth!" *
  Which is a true statement, if slightly misleading, as that sort of power could easily blow the face of the Earth off the face of the Earth many, many times over.
The Super Friends frequently have their heroes performing feats that even the pre-Crisis Silver Age comic authors would have blanched at:
- In one World's Greatest Superfriends episode, a giant Space Viking several times the size of Jupiter steals the Earth, puts it in his belt pouch, and stomps away (!) through interplanetary space. While Apache Chief distracts the villain by growing to his size and wrestling with him (!!), Superman sneaks into his belt pouch, recovers the Earth, and then pushes the Earth back into its proper orbit in the space of a few seconds (!!!). Ignoring the fact that pushing on the Earth that hard would turn it inside-out, this operation would require many times more energy than Superman can possibly store within his own body, even if he were powerered by antimatter.
- In the Challenge episode "Invasion of the Fearians", Green Lantern is sent out to divert some meteors that are on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, the meteors are yellow, so his power ring won't affect them. What does he do? He moves the Earth out of the way.
  - And neglects to put it back.
The nineties version on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had in one episode the attempt of villains Shredder and Krang of depleting the sun to power the Technodrome, it gets worse if you consider that in another episode they had tried to steal the power of a nuclear submarine for the same purpose. Go figure.

Velocity Examples

Anime and Manga

Space Cruiser Yamato has the Earth see the approach of the Comet Empire, even though it's light years away and the light from it wouldn't reach us yet. Also, the Comet Empire is the size of a small planet - big, but not big enough to be seen at that distance anyway.
- In the Americanization, Star Blazers, the newly launched Argo makes its first hyperspace jumps, traveling light years from Earth to Mars. Must have been a bit of a detour involved.
In Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, during the final battle against the Anti-Spiral, the TTGL uses an attack named the "MY WIFE IS THE BEST IN THE UNIVERSE SWING!" Safe to say, it swings the Granzeboma around, making it pass alongside the edge of the galaxy 2-3 times, before being hammered against a galaxy. All this happens in less than 10 seconds.
- Even earlier, when TTGL and Granzeboma approach eachother, first walking, then accelerating until they both run fast enough to cross the galaxy in a matter of seconds.
- At their sizes any movement is ways past the lightspeed. By that point in series, physics have been ground to a fine powder.
  - Go Beyond the Impossible, kick reason to the curve. That's the dai gurren way.

Film

Starship Troopers (The Movie) once again shines through with a huge asteroid passing a battleship vastly distant from Earth, with the same asteroid striking the Earth mere hours later. To add insult to injury, the battleship was also moving towards the asteroid, yet the asteroid seems to slowly pass by happily ripping off a section of the ship as it does so - suggesting the ship is, in fact, flying backwards at a velocity very close to but slightly slower than the asteroid.
- Might be handwaved by saying that interstellar travel in this universe works by distorting space around the travelling object such that lightyears are compressed to kilometers. Then speeds of a few km/h would be sufficient...
Parodied in Spaceballs:
Colonel Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, no. Light speed is too slow!
Colonel Sandurz: Light speed too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes. We're going to have to go right to...ludicrous speed!
Colonel Sandurz Ludicrous speed? Sir, we've never gone that fast before...I don't know if the ship can take it.
Dark Helmet: What's the matter, Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?
In just about every space opera, whenever there is a battle next to an "asteroid field", you see spaceships passing rocks at relative speeds that would be about right for seagoing vessels passing an island. If there is a chase inside this asteroid field, it looks like a downtown car chase (or jetplane chase, if you're generous). In reality, even with todays technology, flybys are measured in dozens of kilometers per second.

Literature

Justified in Animorphs where travel through Zero Space is explicitly stated to be relatively random, where the same distance can take either hours or months, depending on how Zero Space shifted.
Stationery Voyagers has all Physicalia settings happen in the Inktacto star system, with only six worlds "a few moons' distance" away from each other, and held in place by the Muellex so they won't crash into each other. Far from talking about astronomical units, let alone lightyears and lightspeed, characters travel distances in speeds described as Mach numbers. These, in turn, are defined as Mach 1 = 700 Mornots per hour (742 miles per hour), to get around the fact that a relation to the speed of sound would otherwise be meaningless in space. The entire premise holds together only because, with the exception of the frozen wasteland world of Menehune and the Muellex-engulfed-yet-oxygenated world of Haragad, all planets are ~~Earth~~ Mantith-like.
In Tunnel In The Sky, two teenagers notice a new visible star above the alien world they're stranded on, and conclude that they've just witnessed a nova. At the book's end, it's revealed a nova is what interfered with their Cool Gate back to Earth. If it's the same nova — which is strongly implied; indeed, the chapter where they see it is titled "The Nova", and it reads like a Chekhov's Gun — then the boys shouldn't have been able to see its light until years after it happened.

Live-Action TV

The USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Original Series traveled to the edge of the galaxy (in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name") and to the center of the galaxy (in Star Trek V) in the space of a single episode. The trip from one galaxy to another would take about 300 years (though the trip would be made with the modifications of extra-galactic aliens who had engines that were better than the Federation's). Yet in Star Trek: Voyager, when ships were about a thousand times faster, the estimated travel time to Earth from the opposite side of the galaxy was upwards of 70 years.
- Could be that the Enterprise was going from the center to the top or bottom of the galaxy, which is a significantly closer edge than where Voyager was. Of course, they also had an energy barrier enveloping the galaxy, so...
- Several episodes of original Trek have the Enterprise departing the planet-of-the-week at Warp Factor 1. This would mean they're travelling at the speed of light. At that rate, it would take them years just to get to the nearest neighboring star system. (Perhaps Kirk cranks it up to warp 6 once they're past the asteropause.)
By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a Warp Speed scale was firmly established by Paramount, where a speed of Warp X (below Warp 9) meant the ship was travelling at X^3.3333... times the speed of light. This makes Warp 1 equal to light speed, Warp 2 just a hair over 10 times the speed of light, and Warp 9 a little more than 1500 times light speed. Yet in the episode "Where Silence Has Lease", the Enterprise traverses the 1.3 parsec distance to the edge of a giant space cloud at Warp 2 in about 30 seconds.
- Which fits with the Voyager example, which has the cruising speed of the ship at about 1,000 times the speed of light.
- ...and which was completely abandoned by Deep Space Nine, where travelling pretty much anywhere invariably took about half a day. Runabouts (established as having a top speed of warp five) seemed to be able to reach Earth, Cardassia, and various other locations in the same short amount of time (while the distances aren't given, that would put both the Federation and Cardassian capitals within two light years of each other at most). On another occasion, a runabout travels to a planet given as five light years away in a few hours (it should take over a week).
In Star Trek: Enterprise, the Klingon homeworld is several days' travel from Earth, which would put the two empires right on top of each other, given the increases in cruising speed in the other incarnations of the franchise. (Though one interesting exception: in the first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Trip describes the ship's top speed in terms of how long it would take to travel to Jupiter and back, and he's exactly right, based on conventional estimates of how warp factors work). In fact if you use those same calculations, the Klingon home planet would be two and a half lightyears from Earth; the nearest star to us in Real Life is four and a half. Missed it by that much. Which is, really, still a hell of a big distance in conventional terms, but isn't that much in terms of space.
In Star Trek: Voyager, it is stated, that the 70 000 light years back to earth even at maximum speed (Warp 9.975) would take 75 years, so that would make a maximum of 933 light years per year or just under 3 light years per day. Of course only if they always travel at full speed (which they don't). Yet in every scene where you can see a window, you can see hundreds of stars passing by in a mere seconds. Never mind, that stars are usually light years apart).
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture started the tradition of showing stars streaming past the window whenever they were at warp speed. Even at the movie-Enterprise's maximum safe cruising speed of warp 6 (TOS scale), they'd still only be going 216 times the speed of light, too slow for distant stars zip past in a matter of seconds as shown.
- Never mind that you shouldn't be able to see stars behind you — or anything else behind you, for that matter — if you're outrunning light itself.
  - Some fans explains that these aren't stars but dust particles that interact with the warp field. Really, you shouldn't be able to see stars while in subspace.
- Getting back to Voyager, not surprisingly, the most ridiculous example in the other direction is the episode "Threshold", where Tom Paris briefly pushes a shuttle to "infinite velocity"(!) Not only is everyone on the ship shocked when the shuttle gets out of range of Voyager's sensors in seconds, but the shuttle's sensors only detect information from the sector. Later he does it again, this time trying to get as far from Voyager as possible, and he winds up parking on a planet that Voyager can reach at its usual speeds in three days.
- Even ignoring "Threshold," Voyager is guilty of contradicting its own warp speed scale. Although Voyager's top speed is supposed to be Warp 9.975, in the episode "The 37s" it's stated that warp 9.9 is about 4 billion miles per second, which works out to 21,473 times the speed of light. At that speed — which is lower than their own cruising speed — they could cross the 70,000 light years back to the Alpha Quadrant in a little over 3 years, unless warp 9.9 can't be done for years on end, the way warp 6 seems to be able to.
Space: 1999 comes through again by having characters track the approach of faster-than-light craft optically, and by allowing floating space rubble, conventional rockets, alien spacecraft, and a moon hurtling interstellar distances in days to be in range of each other for exactly as long as the plot demands.
In Babylon 5 hyperspace travel appears to be done at the speed of plot. For example, it takes 3 days to get from Babylon 5 to Earth, which is about 14 light-years away. It also takes 3 days to get from Babylon 5 to Z'ha'dum, which is about 20,000 light-years away. In fairness the creator readily falls back on the "It's hyperspace!" argument every time anyone even starts to talk about this.
- In fact, in the DVD commentaries he explicitly says that the White Star "moves at the speed of plot".
Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis zig zag this trope. One the one hand, the Daedalus is able to reach Atlantis for the first season finale in about three days while powered by a Z P M. The Pegasus Galaxay (assuming the one in the series is the Pegasus Irregular Dwarf Galaxy in Real Life as is implied) is 3 million lightyears from the Milky Way. That's a speed 365 million times the speed of light. It's also mentioned that the trip would take about 2 weeks without the Z P M. That's about 78 million times the speed of light. Taken by themselves, these don't seem horrifically unreasonable. The universe runs on more power = Up to Eleven. The problem comes when one considers that it usually takes them a few days to get any where in the galaxy. At the aforementioned speeds, they could traverse the entire observable universe in and 55 and 255 years, respectively. So either they normally run their engines far below their capacity, or it's this trope.
- At one point it was explicitly stated that ships had separate drives for interstellar and intergalactic travel, for whatever reason.

Tabletop Games

Handwaved in Warhammer 40,000 where the chaotic nature of the Warp means that the same trip can take vastly different amounts of time. We have at least one example of a ship arriving quite some time before it left, and another of a vessel arriving at it's destination millenia after it was supposed to arrive, though the crew seemed to believe it took only a couple of months. When your hyperspace is made of illogical thought, it's no wonder there's a bit of variation in travel times.
- To illustrate - a particularly powerful Ork Warboss, in the course of a WAAAAAAAAAGH!, managed to make his entire ship travel back in time to before the WAAAAAAAAAGH! even began. The Boss decided to find his past self and kill him so he could have two of his favourite gun. You heard me.
- Warhammer 40,000 also came up with a nice solution for the Necrons: the Inertialess Drive. It makes the ship unbound by inertia, allowing it to almost instantly (the time it takes for the drive to activate) accelerate to a practically infinite velocity, then immediately come to a stop. Necron phase technology would prevent them from crashing into anything, and the precision of their machinery (their weapons, for example, are crafted atom by atom, as an idea of how precise Necrons are) would ensure they don't go waaaay too far, out past the galaxy.

Video Games

In System Shock 2, it's discovered that a piece of the space station which was jettisoned by the player in the first game has crashed on a planet in the Tau Ceti system - crossing a distance of 12 light-years in a mere 30 years. This would require the ejection charges to have kicked the module loose at about half the speed of light...
- Then there's the issue about crashing the planet at half the speed of light...
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time has the titular heroes caught by Dr. Nefarious and propelled off his space station on a catapult-like device to their assumed deaths. They awaken on a planet "hours later". A large catapult is not likely to propel anyone to fast enough speeds to reach a planet outside presumed detection range without turning them into paste. Also may qualify as a Distance example.
- When comparing the distances and sizes of moons and planets in Crack in Time, this makes considerable sense. In R&C, the planets and moons really are that close together.
Each individual map in X series is at most hundreds kilometers across, and as little as tens of kilometers in the original Beyond the Frontier — almost comically small by astronomical standards — yet your ship requires a Time Dilation device to travel between locations on the same map in a reasonable amount of time. Unless the kilometer was redefined at some point, this suggests spaceships in the game are far, far slower than they have any right to be — raising the interesting question of how any of the spacefaring races actually managed to become spacefaring races when they don't seem to have any ships that come anywhere near escape velocity for a planet with a mass similar to Earth.

Western Animation

In The Magic School Bus episode "Out of this World", the class has to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth, specifically their school. It takes the whole episode for the asteroid to get close to Earth and that's with Dorothy Ann having tracked it for days prior to the start of the episode. They defeat it by changing its trajectory to Hurl It into the Sun, which it manages it hit within the span of a few seconds. This is Lampshaded in the producer segment ("Our show is less than thirty minutes long, what could we do?")

Other

Although this doesn't involve space ships, the roleplaying site Mega Man MUSH once had a memorable example of this in its news files for the various character stats, describing what the specific numbers for each stat would represent. In the news file for the Velocity stat, where 1 signified "less than 5 mph (8 km/h)", 5 meant "60-150 mph (97-241 km/h)", and 9 was specified as "767 mph (1235 km/h)" (the speed of sound), 10 was defined as "escape velocity". Hilarity ensued when someone pointed out exactly how fast escape velocity is.
- To those who aren't into reading through the math in that link, Escape Velocity is 11.2 km/s, or over 40,000 km/h, thus leaving a drastically large gap between ratings 9 and 10.

Unitless Number Examples

Anime and Manga

Neon Genesis Evangelion suffers from this. Pretty much all the Techno Babble related to the Evas (especially in the "Ritsuko shouts at a monitor and defeats the Angel" episodes) is given without units ("It's decreased by 0.3!"), although they do occasionally remember to use units for things like sizes. There's also plenty of cases of unitless numbers stated to absurd degrees of precision and probability calculations involving complete unknowns.
- Of course, units were lobbed off and scales not even mentioned whenever possible in regards to the titular cyborgs in order to justify drawing them to wildly-varying Rule Of Cool proportions (which is, of course, negated once you realize human pilots stand next to the Evas quite frequently). To balance this out, numbers that were of absolute importance to the plot that actually had units - "5 minutes" of internal battery power - didn't matter either.

Comic Books

Galactus is often called the "slayer of millions", when he has been devouring inhabited worlds at a rate varying from once a century (early in his life) to once a month (more recently) since shortly after the Big Bang. This is...technically accurate, but not really indicative of the real scale of things. Even if the "millions" is a count of worlds, he would already be well into the billions by now.
There are about 7200 Green Lanterns to patrol the entire Universe. Considering how big 1/7200th of the Universe is, it is little wonder the Green Lantern Corps has failed to stamp out evil in the cosmos: sheer lack of manpower.

Literature

In Dune there is talk of the need to raise "four or five" battalions to defend an entire planet against invasion. Assuming that a "battalion" is the same size as it is in real life, this would consist of no more than a few thousand troops. This is somewhat justified in that the planet is mostly uninhabited ( or is it?), and an invasion force would only need to capture a few small population centers to conquer the planet. Also averted, because when the invasion does come, it is suitably massive, much larger than the defenders predicted or expected.
- On the other hand, the assumption about battalion size may be wrong. For example, Sardaukar legions are five times bigger than Roman legions were.
- Historically, militaries have alternated between "mass-conscription armies" and "small elite forces". Dune is implied to take place during a "small elite forces" portion of the cycle, in which case a few thousand troops to defend a planet is realistic.

Live-Action TV

In Farscape Zhaan claims to have searched planets for three people in hiding, over a period of time roughly equivalent to 20 days. Of course, they also mention how completely ridiculous the chances of finding them actually are, so maybe it's just supposed to show how desperate she was.
In Babylon 5, the Earth-Minbari War was the most significant war in human history. However, in terms of deaths it's a little lacking, as the human death count was only 250'000 and the Minbari significantly less. For comparison, World War 2 had a death toll in the tens of millions.
- In fact, most battles in B5 are like this, even planetary bombardments only have a few thousand deaths the only one with a more than a million had asteroids (and that took weeks of nonstop dropping), its rather narmy.
  - However, one of the canonical novels says that 600 million Narns died in the bombardment. Given that one of the producers on the show ensured that a ship mentioned in this novel as being at the first encounter between the humans and Minbari was represented in a flashback to the event in the series itself, this was taken seriously at the time. However, in Season 3 Straczynski said that only '5 or 6 million' Narns had died, which seems preposterously unlikely.
- The significance of the Earth-Minbari War was not the numbers lost, but that fact that, during the entire war, the Minbari annihilated almost every human starship sent against them, while losing only one capital ship (and an unknown number of fighters). The whole thing was totally one-sided, and promised to end with humanity's near-extinction.
- According to some estimates, during the war, Earth had tens of thousands of warships. While that number seems mindboggling, especially given that we don't see nearly as many ships on-screen, there is an episode of Crusade that seems to indicate that Earth has way more ships than most people think. When the Warlock-class destroyers are first introduced, Gideon mentions that these are extremely rare and valuable, with only 50 having been built so far. Given that the Warlocks are the first Earth warships capable of going toe-to-toe with a Minbari Sharlin-class warcruiser, it would seem likely that a hell of a lot more would be on the way.
Deep Space Nine tells us about one of the Klingon Empire's most epic battle. Ten thousand warriors attacked a city. Considering that Alesia involved 60,000 legionnaries fighting and defeating 330,000 Gauls, the Klingon Empire's battle history is very small scale.
- The number of fighters involved in a battle is not necessarily an indicator for the "epicness" of said battle. Battles like the Alamo or the Battle of Thermopylae were fought between just a few thousand participants on both sides, and they are still regarded as "epic battles".
- Unit numbers also fluctuated wildly between the series. The original series said there were only 12 Constitution-class ships, and showed little evidence of any others on Starfleet's possession; in The Next Generation there were intially only six Galaxy-class ships built, with another six on order, and a loss of 39 vessels against the Borg at Wolf 359 was apparently a total catastrophe that crippled Starfleet. By Deep Space Nine, the Federation was regularly committing as many as six hundred ships at a time to individual battles with the Dominion; and in response to questions about the unexpectedly-high registry numbers of Voyager and Defiant, Ronald Moore went on record as saying that Starfleet probably had at least thirty thousand ships.
- That might be explained just by the event of Wolf 359 as Star Fleet might have decided to build more ships in case something like that happens again, plus the buildrate would probably have increased even further during the Dominion war.
  - Still, to go from dozens to thousands is a little drastic, not to mention building an infrastructure to support that many ships.
  - One could assume that Starfleet registries cover everything from Starships to shuttles to orbital transports. That might help matters some.
In Doctor Who episode "Voyage of the Damned", one of the tourists confesses to her husband that to pay for this trip she incurred a debt that they, a couple of middle-class shopkeepers, will never be able to repay. At the very end of the episode we learn the exchange rate, which makes their hopeless debt equivalent to a few hundred pounds.
- If you listen to dialogue, it's more assumed that whatever the currency used by the civilisation is worth far less per unit for services when compared to the Pound Sterling (compare the Yen and the old Italian Lira for real examples of this). The debt run up was probably still genuinely huge in materiel terms, and the comparison to the Pound is irrelevant due to both there not being an exchange rate (why would there be?) and the established "Pounds Worth More" is more down to an individual character failing at maths and basic economics.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40,000 has this off and on, likely as a result of the huge number of different writers and developers who have worked on it. At times, distances, timescales and the number of soldiers needed to launch a sector-spanning crusade are handled "realistically," but just as often a few hundred space marines purge an entire world in a few weeks. Bear in mind that it's easy to interpret it as Imperial propaganda. Also, five Space Marines would certainly be more than sufficient to, say, assault a rebel governor's palace and decapitate the government, making it easy for the Imperial Guard to roll in and mop up.
- This is borne out in much of the fluff, as the Space Marines seem to be employed to turn the tide, taking a strategic location quickly before being redeployed to another, or taking out an enemy commander. After that, it's the Guard's (or the Planetary Defense Force's) job to sustain casualties and win the war.
- One should also note that this isn't as ridiculous as it seems: excluding tanks and artillery, most worlds lack any weaponry capable of actually damaging Astartes.
Only the Planetville nature of the BattleTech universe combined with its quasi-feudal nature can really explain how, given the bottleneck of interstellar travel, any major planet ever changes hands as the result of an invasion. The thought of using some non-microscopic fraction of the industrial capacity of an entire world to create a defensive force that would simply swamp a few dozen 'Mechs dropping out of the sky by weight of numbers is never seen to enter anybody's mind. (Of course, since that sort of thing could easily encourage disobedience towards one's liege lord and thus be considered potential treason, it's probably somewhat justified given the societies depicted. And, naturally enough, it would render the game itself kind of pointless.)
- One of the ways that the game rules attempt to justify this is that it takes significantly more damage to disable a Battle Mech than another vehicle of comparable tonnage. A "decent anti-tank rifle" will accomplish squat against a 'Mech under the rules, as a well-armored 'Mech can shrug off dozens of anti-vehicle missiles without suffering systems damage. Realistic? No, but it does serve the purpose of the game (giant robots pounding away at each other) better than more realistic rules would.
- There is a crossover Fan Fic in the works on Spacebattles Forum,An Entry with a Bang!, where the authors took this and ran with it. There the Earth of our present day (actually, the one from the novels of Tom Clancy, but that's close enough) gets transported into a BattleTech times, and some enterprising Sphere lord decide to stage an invasion. So far, the mechwarriors were getting trounced quite convincingly, even if the cost is significant. At one point, an Inner Sphere ruler asks one of his agents to obtain data about the 21st century Earth (nobody knows that's the case, but he has some suspicions) and give him an estimate of a force capable of conquering it. She states that not only is is impossible by the existing states, the old Star League armies would have had a hard time doing it without glazing the planet over.

Star Wars

In the Attack of the Clones movie, there was a mention of two hundred thousand units being ready and a million more well on the way. Cracking open the movie novelization, we find out that the million more well on the way equated a million clone warriors (the term "unit" was referring to a unit of production). Really? 1.2 million clones for a million star system Republic? Coruscant alone has a trillion people on it. Later EU sources upped that to three million clones. Not. Much. Better. And there obviously wasn't much coordination between the writers, since the EU droid numbers were in quintillions.
- The droid numbers are also a bit sketchy in the opposite direction. A quadrillion droids represents an occuption force of about 1 billion droids per star system in the million system Republic. The quintillions figure offered is even more ridiculous, seeing as that translates into trillions droids per star system in a galaxy where planets like Coruscant are the exception, not the rule. The Separatists represented a small percentage of that Republic plus a few greedy major corporations, and yet they're supposed to have an army that could occupy it a thousand times over? Or more, given The Phantom Menace movie novelization implies the Republic only has 100'000 worlds?
  - Particularly implausible when you consider that virtually all the separatists are in it for the money, hoping that a destabilized galaxy will increase their profit margins. Just how cheap must those battle-droids be, if they're deploying quadrillions of them and still expecting to come out of the war with a net profit?
- Meanwhile, there seems to be only one military academy - admittedly one which takes up most of a planet - for the entire galaxy. For comparison, there are four in the US alone. And that's not counting the three major service academies. There are others referred to occasionally, but one gets the spotlight far more disproportionately than the others.
- In Shatterpoint, Mace Windu points out that the million-odd clones work out to roughly one per system, and suggests that the majority of the fighting, especially in the less-critical areas, is being done by regular militia forces.
It gets even worse in the NJO novels when the New Republic, losing planets to the invading Yuuzhan Vong left and right, is described as having problems finding shelter and food for millions of refugees.
- There are two reasons for that: one, the Vong are invading the underdeveloped backwater end of the galaxy, and two, most of the population didn't survive long enough to become refugees.
Some of this is the result of the Star Wars EU having an extremely inconsistent portrayal of it's basic scale. The movies give numbers in the range of "tens of thousands of worlds", including a lot of marginally developed worlds while some EU sources bump this up to "millions of worlds" with a lot more development. Somewhere along the line, the math is bound to not add up.
Little bit of math fun here: Han Solo owed Jabba the Hutt the price of a dumped shipment of spice. 17,000 credits, apparently (based on Solo and Jabba's discussion in Ep IV from Special Edition onward), works out to Solo's original debt plus an extra 15%. Now, Han was smuggling glitterstim spice, which is considered rare and exotic. According to certain sources, exotic spice is worth 20 credits a gram. This, however, means that the 14,782 credits Jabba lost (14,782.6, if you want to be exact) adds up to about three-quarters of a kilogram of spice. Unless this stuff is less dense than the average sparrow feather, 0.73 kilos should be small enough in size to fit into nearly any small compartment (or possibly up Chewbacca's butt ... hey, these are professional smugglers).
In one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe technical manuals, a starfighter's main guns are about 1/200'000'000th that of a capital ship's heavy guns, and yet starfighters still try to shoot at enemy capital ships like they can do more than annoy the enemy captain by obstructing his view out the bridge. The series that book belongs to throws out words like kilotons for star fighter weaponry, megatons for Slave-Is weaponry, and gigatons for capital scale weaponry. All this for weapons which, for the films that they're detailing, display yields that rarely stack up to the more extreme episodes of Mythbusters. The light ion cannons on the Invisible Hand are supposedly throwing out as much heat as a 4.8 megaton thermonuclear bomb, which is strange when compared to the Hoth Ion cannon, a weapon that disabled an Imperial Star Destroyer in a handful of shots and yet didn't produce enough heat to melt the surrounding snow. In general, you could probably knock off about six to nine orders of magnitude on anything written in those books and you'd still get way too much.
For a big universe, Star Wars is extremely small. In Knights of the Old Republic, where did the Sith hide their maps? Tatooine, Korriban, and Kashyyk. Rancors turn up all over the place. We mostly bump into the same few races. Luke flies off to Dagobah, and happens to crash-land — out of an entire planet — next to Yoda. The only possible explanation is "The Force makes it so".
- Actually in this case, Yoda himself did it. He sensed Luke coming and used the force to make him crash-land near Yoda's hut.
- And part of the reason why Yoda decided to live on Dagobah is because of the Dark Side presence there- the Hand Of Thrawn trilogy made it clear that the high amounts of dark side energy given off by the famous "Tree of the Dark Side," naturally cloaked Yoda's force signature, protecting the aged Jedi from agents of the Emperor.
In The Courtship of Princess Leia, Han wins a planet in a pot of cards worth 1.6 Billion Credits. Luke's speeder got 2,000 credits at a used car lot (for a maximum of 1 credit to $10 US purchasing power). This means an inhabitable planet is worth $16 billion? Even for one under imperial interdiction, that means Bill Gates could purchase 3 planets! The estimated price of Earth is 10 QUADRILLION. This is also ignoring the fact that Han started the novel with an amount of money that is unspecified, but certainly not much more than the cost of his Millennium Falcon, so assuming he leveraged that at a starting bid, he went from owning 100k-1M credits to nearly 2B credits. What luck to increase your net worth by 3-10 orders of magnitude in one night.
- Of course, standard economics says that the larger of a supply of something there is, the cheaper it is. The characters in Star Wars have potential access to billions of planets, while we really only have access to one. It could be that since planets are so plentiful in the galaxy, it doesn't take much money to buy some uninhabited one off in some remote corner.
- Also, the warlord who bet Solo the planet did so pretty much on a whim, suggesting that it would probably be worth more if she actually cared. (She doesn't. Her species can't survive in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, so it's not very useful to her.)
Star Wars: Han Solo's infamous (in nerd circles) boast that his ship is so fast that it "made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs." A parsec is a unit of distance, not time or speed (and it's a blatantly Earth-based terminology, so we'll assume Translation Convention). Later explanations had included some really complex technobabble that doesn't actually address the speed of the ship (though it does mention that the Falcon's Hyperdrive computers being so good they can find shorter routes, which could translate into faster speeds). The original novelization and script refers to Obi-Wan seeing through Han's transparent lies.
- The film does too, just in a more subtle way... watch Obi Wan's face after Han says the line.
- Supposedly the actual original script included "Ben reacts to Han's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation". It's later explained in the Jedi Academy Trilogy that the Kessel Run involves skirting around several black holes and thus it would take a fast ship to cut closer to the holes, thus shortening the route, without getting sucked in. This is more of a retcon, perhaps, since said black holes, as well as Kessel itself, are incorporated into the story of the novels.
- Either way, it's probably a subtle jab at this instance when, in one of his many Star Wars parodies ("Star Wars Cantina"), Mark Jonathan Davis corrects it by introducing Han Solo as having "a smile 12 parsecs wide".
- This sort of claim is also attributed to such navigators as Anakin Skywalker. A comprehensive knowledge of the system in question (or a connection to the force) is needed to avoid obstacles while in hyperdrive, especially since more of the galaxy remains uncharted than everyone would like. Those not in the know are forced to take more well-travelled routes, not necessarily the shortest.
Writers in the Star Wars Expanded Universe generally are aware that space is big, and they try to avert this (although a depressingly large number keep revisiting the planets established by the movies for no good reason). In the first book of The Thrawn Trilogy, Luke flees from a Star Destroyer by going into hyperspace, and since his X-wing is damaged it falls back into realspace after he's gone about half a light year - and he's stranded impossibly far from anything, only likely to be found on accident since his communications systems have gone out. On two occasions TIE fighters, which have no hyperdrives, struck out on their own and couldn't really get that far before life support ran out: an alien fleeing genocide nearly died before reaching the nearest system, and a handful of deserters had to turn back to the ship they'd abandoned when they ran out of atmosphere scrubbers.
- In The New Rebellion, after casually lampshading the idea of 2-D Space, Wedge takes a turbolaser cannon and shoves aside the targeting computer - he doesn't have The Force, but he's confident in his own abilities and, while normally targets are too far away to get a visual, this one is close enough to see.
- Some authors apparently decided to balance these efforts by putting in some egregious errors. For example, Sernpidal, a planet that orbits its star at the same distance our moon orbits Earth. While this could potentially work were Sernpinal's star a White Dwarf it is also the third (or fifth, there are conflicting accounts on Wookiepedia) planet of the Solar System.
  - The same planet gets half destroyed and knocked out of its orbit by an impact with its own moon when aliens pull said moon out of orbit. Considering that Sernpidal is described as being roughly Earth-sized in most sources, while Dobido (the moon) is about twenty kilometers wide. Such an impact should have rendered the planet almost uninhabitable for a few years (see: the K-T event on Earth), but would have been nowhere near powerful enough to shatter the planet as depicted.
  - Although, given that they were later seen strip-mining the remains to build a worldship, the Vong almost certainly came along after the moon had hit and finished the job.
One of the biggest time examples comes in A New Hope with Obi-Wan's line that the Jedi Knights were the guardians of the Old Republic "for over a thousand generations". A generation is about 25 years (defined as the time from one generation's birth to their giving birth to the next generation), so 25 times a thousand equals... 25,000 years?!? Just for reference, that's the same amount of time that's passed between the end of the Neanderthals to the present day. The Expanded Universe has kept faithfully to that number, even though it means that the Republic has gone the whole length of human civilization with no major advances or changes. George Lucas may have eventually thought better of it: the prequel trilogy has Palpatine saying instead that the Republic's stood for "a thousand years", which seems like a more reasonable estimate. The EU justifies this by claiming that the Republic did start for 25,000 years ago, but it reformed in the "Ruusan Reformation" about 1,000 years before the movies (nowhere is it suggested that Obi-Wan was just being figurative).
- It could be argued that since a trainee "graduates" to Padawan at about 10-13 years of age, 25 generations of Jedi would only be about ~2500 years. Still a ridiculously long time of stagnancy (about the time of Socrates to today), less crazy than other ideas.
  - 25 generations would only be 250 years, but it was about 1000 generations, which would be 10.000 years.
- Or perhaps the "generations" aren't generations of humans, but (say) generations of Ewoks, or some other creature that matures in one year.
Similar to the Dune example, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has planets, cities, societies, and even technology virtually identical to the six movies. Despite Knights of the Old Republic being set 4,000 years prior.
- Some sources suggest that a massive galactic civil war (yes, another one) about 2-3 thousand years before the movies forced most of the galaxy into a sort of dark age (apparently, Jedi and Sith armies fighting with iron weapons were not unheard of). Given this, it seems technology is doing pretty well just to be in the same place. And it is somewhat more developed, especially with capital warships — the Endar Spire in KotOR is a Republic Hammerhead-class cruiser, the backbone of the fleet. It's small enough that details like bridge viewports and individual escape pods are clearly visible even from a distance. They're not much bigger than Tantive IV, let alone Star Destroyers.
  - The novelization of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, (the pilot movie) has Jabba in discussion for a material used in hyperdrive production, which he is bidding low on because he knows that said material is going to be replaced by a much better material in a few years, and new fighters brought out in the New Jedi Order series are stated to be much better than previous generations, so there is advancement in the Star Wars universe... just not as fast as, say, Earth society advanced from the year 1900 to 2000.
The Yuuzhan Vong War, in Star Wars, seems to get this one about right. The agreed-upon figure seems to be 365 trillion dead over the course of a 4-year war, which comes to about 3 million people every second. The death rate on Earth is about 2 people/second, so the war is equivalent to the death rate on 1.5 million Earths. There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy - so if the galaxy in Star Wars is of a similar size, and one in every 70,000 stars has an Earth-equivalent inhabited world, then the war just about matches the natural death rate. So the 365 trillion figure, despite sounding ridiculously large, is actually probably on the low side, depending on how densely the galaxy is assumed to be populated.
- Sources put the Droid Separatist army at a quadrillion. This is enough for an average occupation force of about one billion droids per system in the Republic, or about 100 billion per Separatist System. If Palpatine really did foresee the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong and founded the Empire for the purpose of strengthening the Galaxy against the Vong invasion... why was this huge-assed army decommissioned?
  - Can't blame the movies for not foreseeing Expanded Universe stories, but from Palpatine's standpoint the droid army was a huge threat and set a bad precedent, since it was basically a privately built and maintained corporate army, droids may be easier to control than sentient soldiers but Palpatine A. didn't want the Trade Federation getting any ideas about challenging him once he rolled over their leader and B. wasn't about to deal with the political hot-potato of staffing the galaxy with the same droids that had been killing billions of people earlier, Palpatine's reputation and rise to power stemmed off a cultivated image of a great wartime leader who did what was necessary to bring the war to an end, the Separatists and all that had enabled their resistance had to be destroyed, for both security and political reasons.
- The problem with the 365 trillion number is the size compared to the Republic's population. Remember that their invasion path occupies less than a quarter of the galaxy, and that in most cases they don't make an effort to actually wipe out the defenders. And consider how big the Republic is: sure, Coruscant has a trillion people, but planets like Corellia have a much more Earth-like population density, and given the prominence of each one there can't be that many worlds this size. Most of the worlds in the Republic seem to have far, far fewer people. Their fleets aren't going to make up the balance either, since even one trillion people makes up the crew of some thirty million Imperial Star Destroyers.

Video Games

The Armored Core series is a serial offender here, all the stats (armour strength, speed, weight, weaponry hitting power, generator capacity, lock on range, radar scanning speed and area, etc) are measured in numbers, with absolutely no indication of what unit of measurement is being used for any of them (except temperature and speed during gameplay, which are measured in Degrees.C and km/h respectively).
Jeff Waynes War Of The World gets around this by giving the Martians nonsense Martian units like heat ray output in krk.
Mech Warrior 4 has a heat gauge that measures your reactor's temperature in hundreds of degrees Kelvin. This wouldn't be such a big deal (it can range up to about 1400 degrees, a substantial but by no means unreasonable temperature swing) if it didn't start at zero. In the Kelvin scale, zero means absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible.

Web Comics

In Nip and Tuck, the Show Within a Show Rebel Cry features a Royal Brat who doesn't get it.

Western Animation

Parodied in one episode of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, where Evil Emperor Zurg decides to make a team of evil, cloned rangers. Towards the beginning, the following conversation takes place when trying to decide how "Evil" to make the rangers:
Zurg: Give them... a hundred evil! No, wait, a thousand evil! No, make it a MILLION evil! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Grub: Gee, that's awfuly daring, your evilness, seeing as you only have an Evilness rating of 13.
Zurg: Oh. Well, um, on second thought, how about we just give them a twelve.
- There was also the whole episode which consisted of Zurg and the Rangers building bigger and bigger mechs. "And you're sure there is nothing bigger than grande?" "Meet my Vente range bot!"