This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Describe Arbitrary Maximum Range Discussion here.
Peteman: If there are so many aversions, why bother mentioning them? Aversions are supposed to highlight how often the trope comes up that its absence is notable, where this page has something like a third of the listed examples as aversions.
onyhow: It looks like a lot, but the thing is, what that has been played straight is way, way more than aversion, so this is only a small collection. Sure, it might not be so much in Literature (because of nature of medium), but in other medium, it is. Just look at how small the anime section is, and that's the aversions. Then try to think of sci-fi anime (including Humongous Mecha series) and compare it to this list...you should get the idea. Originally, I hoped to launch this thing to get only aversions, not straight examples, so it's not quite strange there's more aversions than straight examples.
Ninja Vitis: There's "no such thing" as gravity in space? Newton and Einstein both had something to say about that. Reality: the hardest thing about launching an interstellar probe is getting enough kinetic energy to escape the Sun's gravity well.
onyhow: Well, it's basically that it's low enough to not being a factor. Seriously, space is actually not empty, there are hydrogen atoms in space, but there's so little of them that friction is non-factor. So, considering that if you're 2-3 AU away from a planet and you fire a shell at a target only 2-3 light seconds away, does gravity of that planet matter? It probably matters if the range is extreme enough, but in most cases, even in space combat, a battle at distance of A Us are pretty unlikely because of factors described in the trope page (the effective maximum range), so the "no such thing" still stands...probably.
