History Main / ThatsNoMoon

* The (''[[Anime/TransformersArmada Armada]]''-based) ''VideoGame/{{Transformers|2004}}'' game had you fly out to an aircraft carrier to clear it of Decepticons. Then it begins to transform, and becomes Tidal Wave, the [[BossBattle end of level Boss]].

'''Obi-Wan Kenobi:''' That's no moon. It's a space station.\\

** Happens in UsefulNotes/GameBoy ''VideoGame/MegaManV'', leading to an UnexpectedGameplayChange: "What's that star?..." ''"Star" shoots its [[{{BFG}} Big Fraggin' Laser]] at Mega Man''. It's even called the "Wily Star".

%%ZCE ** The Big Gete Star in ''[[Anime/DragonBallZTheReturnOfCooler The Return of Cooler]]''.
** In ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'', the nameless planet on which the tournament between Universes 6 and 7 took place turns out to be the final Super Dragon Ball.

%%* ''WebVideo/DragonBallZAbridged'': Right around when Freeza notices the giant spirit bomb Goku's forming.%%Quotes are not context.
%%-->'''Freeza:''' What is that? That's not a sun, not a moon, and certainly not a space station!

* Besides the obvious ''Franchise/StarWars'' reference in the [[VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog2 Death]] [[VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles Egg]], the ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' series features the Space Colony ARK, which makes its first appearance in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2'' disguised as a very large asteroid/meteor, half of which disintegrates to show the Eggman-like facade.

* In ''VideoGame/TheDig'', the asteroid that nearly hits Earth turns out to be an alien starship sent to find sentient life and bring it back to its builders' homeworld. Unfortunately, when the astronauts get there, they find an empty planet.

** In ''Anime/DragonBallZ'', Freeza briefly mistakes Goku's Genki Dama for one of Namek's three suns. The second he figures out it's not, [[OhCrap he freaks out]].
** The Big Gete Star in ''The Return of Cooler''.
** In ''Anime/DragonBallSuper'', the unnamed planet on which the tournament between Universes 6 and 7 took place turned out to be the final Super Dragon ball.

-->-- ''Film/StarWarsANewHope''

* Arguably, the way the large [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole-Aitken_basin South Pole–Aitken basin]] in UsefulNotes/TheMoon was discovered. The presence of large mountains in the Moon's southern pole plus the pictures sent by early Soviet probes and other large mountains in the lunar farside photographed by the Apollo missions suggested the existence of such large impact crater, but only by laser altimetry from the ''Clementine'' mission its presence was confirmed without doubt[[note]]It does not help matters either the SPA basin is so old it has been thoroughly battered by posterior impact craters, some quite large.[[/note]]. Similarly, the much better preserved [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_Orientale Orientale basin]] was deduced to exist from Earth by seeing mountains of its rim in the Moon's limb and was only confirmed when probes photographed it.
* Likewise, [[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1500852 also in the Moon]], [[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012JE004154 Mercury]], and [[https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/7thmars2007/pdf/3070.pdf Mars]] (PDF file!) studies using laser altimeters, measuring the topographies of different areas and those that have measured crustal thicknesses have found impact basins, often very large, buried and/or more or less degraded by later impacts and/or geological activity.

* In ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' the brains of the ruling transhuman intelligences ''start'' at the size of the moon and go all the way up to being the size of the star Betelgeuse, which is larger than the orbit of Jupiter.

* ''Literature/AChorusOfDragons'': Dragons are so big that people tend to mistake them for parts of the landscape until they move. When Sharanakal is introduced, Kihrin first mistakes him for a craggy island...until the island opens its eyes.

* ''Literature/{{Earthsea}}'': In ''Literature/AWizardOfEarthsea'', Ged once goes to an island to fight off dragons. The first dragons are relatively small and easy to defeat...then the ''castle'' on the island moves and it's the main dragon... the BBC Audio adaption even gives Ged the line "you are right, my friend, that is no tower..."

* ''TabletopGame/RuneQuest'': True Dragons are very, very, very large, and their tendency to sleep the ages away and not move much even when awake usually leads them to become covered in soil and plant life until they become indistinguishable from the landscape. The result is that, while they're not actually especially rare, few people know precisely which rocky ridges, hills and small mountain ranges are actually sleeping dragons. During the legendary Dragonkill Battle, the ill-fated human army only fully realized how badly they'd miscalculated things when a considerable number of the mountains surrounding the battlefield stood up, shook off their coverings of soil and rock, and attacked.

* ''[[https://www.fimfiction.net/story/16375/sharing-the-night Sharing the Night]]'': Dragons are immortal and never stop growing, eventually become titanic things of earth and rock, enter permanent hibernations and become part of the landscape; most of the world is made up of unimaginably ancient dragons sleeping on top of and around each other, something most people don't realize unless something wakes the dragon up. The ones described in the story include Whiskers Whitetail, better known to the ponies as the Whitetail Woods; Emberstoke the Eternal, who in his sleep forms a large volcanic caldera; and Tartarus, who when awake decided that the best way to contain powerful, evil creatures was to devour them and [[CagedInsideAMonster imprison them in his cavernous gut]].

* One early-game anomaly in ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}} is about an unusual mountain range on a random planet. This event has multiple possible outcomes, but they all reveal the mountains as the skeleton of some gigantic extraplanetary lifeform that crash-landed on the planet in the distant past and eventually became part of the landscape.