History SciFiWritersHave / NoSenseOfDistance

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'', with EarlyInstalmentWeirdness varied in this trope.
** Regarding space battles, sometimes the enemy ship was shown on the viewscreen as coming out of the far distance, firing, and passing out of view and others where it seemed to always be in visual range.
** Interstellar distances and speed tended to be wonky, as it was not established properly yet how fast the Federation's spaceships could go. The crew of the Enterprise went both to the edge of the galaxy and to its core over the course of the series and movies, both of which would be years long journeys in the other series of the franchise.
** The second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," attempted to described the vastness of space to their new audience. Owning to EarlyInstallmentWeirdness, Kirk described what happened in his log as:

* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''
** The episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E15YesterdaysEnterprise Yesterday's Enterprise]]" features Capt. Picard telling Wesley Crusher to keep Enterprise-D "within two hundred kilometers of the Enterprise-C" [[ItMakesSenseInContext during their battle against the Klingons]]. Enterprise-D and Enterprise-C are both around half a kilometer in length, so at 200 kilometers apart (400 times their length), the ships shouldn't be visible to each other except by sensors or scanners. Yet in the very next shot, the two ships are shown sitting almost next to each other.
** In the two-part episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS4E26S5E1Redemption Redemption]]", the Federation needs to prevent the Romulans from using their [[InvisibilityCloak cloaked]] ships to deliver supplies to one of the factions in a Klingon civil war. To do this, ''twenty-three'' Federation starships create a "tachyon detection grid" that somehow covers the entire Klingon-Romulan border without leaving a gap of a few hundred square meters that a ship could sneak through. The border would have to be ridiculously small for something like that to work, even though on most maps it was on the order of thousands of square light years.
* ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'':
** In the series pilot, [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS01E01E02Emissary Emissary]], Deep Space Nine is physically moved from a near orbit of Bajor to the mouth of the wormhole in the Denorios belt, a "charged plasma field" some 116 million kilometres from Bajor (expanded universe sources suggest that the Denorios belt is the Bajoran system's equivalent of our own asteroid belt, which is around 330 million kilometres beyond Earth's orbit). With only six working thrusters on the station, even miracle worker O'Brien believes this would take at least a month; but they manage to make this trip in less than a day by using the station's deflector shields to generate a low-level warp field and "lower the inertial mass of the station", which nearly tears the station apart in the process. Even O'Brien's original estimate suggests the station's sub-starship thrusters are ''very'' powerful, since it would need to achieve an average speed of ~47km/sec to do that journey in a month; for comparison, Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 15km/sec.
** The series, however, did get better with distances. In several episodes, the cast gets stuck without warp drives. It was noted that planets that had taken a few hours to get to at warp speed would now take years if not DECADES to get back with impulse engines (in "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS06E01ATimeToStand A Time to Stand]]" this was a real problem since the ship they were on only had several weeks worth of field rations). Only the intervention of friendly, warp capable ships, saved the crew from a long trip back home.
** The episode "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS05E15ByInfernosLight By Inferno's Light]]" has a trilithium weapon like ''Film/StarTrekGenerations'', only this time fired from space. This should solve the problem of depicting distance to the sun, but here the Bajoran sun appears to be no more than the same scale as its own model relative to the ships flying close to it, instead of the model successfully conveying a far off distance with perspective. That means the sun is really, really small.
** The episode "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS05E26CallToArms Call to Arms]]" featured a [[SpaceMines mine field]] around a solar system. Even ignoring that the characters seemed to be operating under [[TwoDSpace 2-D space]] logic so that anyone trying to avoid this minefield could simply fly over or under it, they were building it at a rate that would have taken them hundreds of years to complete. A later episode tackled the issue a bit more sensibly with a space minefield around a very small area (the opening of a wormhole), as well as using matter replicators to let it lay itself.
* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager''
** In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS7E22RenaissanceMan Renaissance Man]]", the Doctor complies when aliens capture Captain Janeway and demand Voyager's warp core in exchange for her release. His justification: "Voyager can survive without its warp core... but not without its captain." Though heartwarming and poetic, the ship was in interstellar space and without it the ship can only travel at sublight speed using its impulse engines, meaning that in this case it literally ''cannot''. Losing Janeway, while tragic, is the more sensible option.
** In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E4TheSwarm The Swarm]]", Voyager's initial phaser shot against the Swarm doesn't work, and Lt. Paris says that the Swarm is only "7,000 kilometers away". At that distance, the Swarm wouldn't be visible to Voyager's crew except by using long-range scanners. Yet during the chase, multiple shots show the Swarm literally on Voyager's tail. Judging by Voyager's length of 345 meters, the Swarm is less than 700 '''''meters''''' behind them for most of the chase.[[note]]The change in on-screen distance is likely a post-production visual effects decision [[RealityIsUnrealistic to heighten the tension of the scene]]. There probably wasn't time for [[Creator/RobertDuncanMcNeill Robert Duncan McNeill]] to loop a corrected version of his off-screen dialogue.[[/note]]
** In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS5E14Bliss Bliss]]", an anomaly is described as 300 million kilometers away.[[note]]About the diameter of Earth's orbit around the sun, or 15 light-''minutes''.[[/note]] ''Later'', Seven states that they are 3.4 light-''years'' away from it.
** In the series finale, "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS7E23Endgame Endgame]]", the Borg transwarp conduit that Voyager emerges through is stated to be "less than one light-year from Earth". However, the ship appears to emerge closer to Earth than the Moon is; approximately one light-SECOND away from Earth. [[ExactWords Which that is technically less than one light-year from Earth.]]
* ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'': in the pilot, it's stated Warp 4.5 can get the ship from Earth to Neptune and back in six minutes, placing it around 82c. Then, they need to get to Qo'noS in 4 days, which is about 90 light years away, yet the ''Enterprise'' manages to do it using aforementioned Warp 4.5. Thus, in a single episode we get Warp 4.5 representing two different speeds, one of them being nearly ''a thousand times'' faster than the other.
* In the ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'' episode "The War Without, The War Within", the ''Discovery'' needs to reach Starbase One and we're told this will be difficult because the sector is crawling with Klingon ships. There are two problems with this scenario. The first is that ''Discovery'' is stated to be only one light year away from Starbase One which, in interstellar terms, would mean they're practically there already. Secondly, Starbase One is said to be 100 [=AUs=] from Earth, which would put it on the outer edge of the solar system, and basically means the Klingons are at our doorstep. Yet Starfleet Command acts as if this was just another unfortunate defeat, not an immediate existential threat.
* ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'': In "[[Recap/StarTrekStrangeNewWorldsS1E01StrangeNewWorlds Strange New Worlds]]", Kiley 279 is stated to be less than 1 light-year from the Xahea system, allowing the Kileans to have observed the battle in "[[Recap/StarTrekDiscoveryS2E14SuchSweetSorrowPartTwo Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2]]" without faster-than-light technology. While this isn't as bad an example as some in ''Franchise/StarTrek'' (the math at least works this time), it's still practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliosphere, and [[http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/WideBinaryStars/ theoretically]] they could even be a [[BinarySuns binary pair]].

* In the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' two-part episode "Redemption", the Federation needs to prevent the Romulans from using their [[InvisibilityCloak cloaked]] ships to deliver supplies to one of the factions in a Klingon civil war. To do this, ''twenty-three'' Federation starships create a "tachyon detection grid" that somehow covers the entire Klingon-Romulan border without leaving a gap of a few hundred square meters that a ship could sneak through. The border would have to be ridiculously small for something like that to work, even though on most maps it was on the order of thousands of square light years.

** [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS01E01E02Emissary In the first episode]] the station is physically moved from a near orbit of Bajor to the mouth of the wormhole in the Denorios belt, a "charged plasma field" some 116 million kilometres from Bajor (expanded universe sources suggest that the Denorios belt is the Bajoran system's equivalent of our own asteroid belt, which is around 330 million kilometres beyond Earth's orbit). With only six working thrusters on the station, even miracle worker O'Brien believes this would take at least a month; but they manage to make this trip in less than a day by using the station's deflector shields to generate a low-level warp field and "lower the inertial mass of the station", which nearly tears the station apart in the process. Even O'Brien's original estimate suggests the station's sub-starship thrusters are ''very'' powerful, since it would need to achieve an average speed of ~47km/sec to do that journey in a month; for comparison, Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 15km/sec.
** The series, however, did get better with distances. In several episodes, the cast gets stuck without warp drives. It was noted that planets that had taken a few hours to get to at warp speed would now take years if not DECADES to get back with impulse engines (in "A Time to Stand" this was a real problem since the ship they were on only had several weeks worth of field rations). Only the intervention of friendly, warp capable ships, saved the crew from a long trip back home.
** "By Inferno's Light" has a trilithium weapon like ''Film/StarTrekGenerations'', only this time fired from space. This should solve the problem of depicting distance to the sun, but here the Bajoran sun appears to be no more than the same scale as its own model relative to the ships flying close to it, instead of the model successfully conveying a far off distance with perspective. That means the sun is really, really small.
** An episode featured a [[SpaceMines mine field]] around a solar system. Even ignoring that the characters seemed to be operating under [[TwoDSpace 2-D space]] logic so that anyone trying to avoid this minefield could simply fly over or under it, they were building it at a rate that would have taken them hundreds of years to complete. A later episode tackled the issue a bit more sensibly with a space minefield around a very small area (the opening of a wormhole), as well as using matter replicators to let it lay itself.

** In the episode "Renaissance Man", the Doctor complies when aliens capture Captain Janeway and demand Voyager's warp core in exchange for her release. His justification: "Voyager can survive without its warp core... but not without its captain." Though heartwarming and poetic, the ship was in interstellar space and without it the ship can only travel at sublight speed using its impulse engines, meaning that in this case it literally ''cannot''. Losing Janeway, while tragic, is the more sensible option.

** In the series finale, the Borg transwarp conduit that Voyager emerges through is stated to be "less than one light-year from Earth". However, the ship appears to emerge closer to Earth than the Moon is; approximately one light-SECOND away from Earth. [[ExactWords Which that is technically less than one light-year from Earth.]]

** In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E4TheSwarm]]", Voyager's initial phaser shot against the Swarm doesn't work, and Lt. Paris says that the Swarm is only "7,000 kilometers away". At that distance, the Swarm wouldn't be visible to Voyager's crew except by using long-range scanners. Yet during the chase, multiple shots show the Swarm literally on Voyager's tail. Judging by Voyager's length of 345 meters, the Swarm is less than 700 '''''meters''''' behind them for most of the chase.[[note]]The change in on-screen distance is likely a post-production visual effects decision [[RealityIsUnrealistic to heighten the tension of the scene]]. There probably wasn't time for [[Creator/RobertDuncanMcNeill Robert Duncan McNeill]] to loop a corrected version of his off-screen dialogue.[[/note]]

* ''Series/EarthFinalConflict'' often mentions how the war between the Taelons and the Jaridians is millions of years old and has spanned galaxies, yet one episode mentions that the Jaridian homeworld is in orbit around Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars to Earth.

* ''Series/TheExpanse'': The series is ''[[MeaningfulName called]]'' "The Expanse", so this is generally {{averted}} or at least {{downplayed}}. In "Dulcinea" for instance, two days is considered, "Not far out of our way," and that only gets ''Canterbury'' within 50,000 kilometers, a distance easily within reach of their "leaky lifeboat." Inter-planetary communication also consists of sending video messages back and forth rather than real-time conversation due to the immense distances. That said, visuals are sometimes configured so that several objects travelling together that could easily be many, ''many'' miles apart are shown tightly grouped to fit on the screen together.

* ''TabletopGame/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 gone on record saying that [=BattleTech=] Weapons are ''not'' that short-ranged, though unfortunately there's also 20 years' worth of novels have various plots and tactics that more or less hinge on this fact to work. On the other hand, Battletech's sense of interstellar scale is, barring a few errors, fairly good. Even going faster than light, it can take months to cross the Inner Sphere and it's clear that even after a thousand years, explored space is little more than a rounding error compared to the entire Milky Way.

* ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'': In "[[Recap/StarTrekStrangeNewWorldsS1E01StrangeNewWorlds Strange New Worlds]]", Kiley 279 is stated to be less than 1 light-year from the Xahea system, allowing the Kileans to have observed the battle in "[[Recap/StarTrekDiscoveryS2E14SuchSweetSorrowPartTwo Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2]]" without faster-than-light technology. While this isn't as bad an example as some in ''Franchise/StarTrek'' (the math at least works this time), to have observed the Battle of Xahea without faster-than-light technology. This is practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliosphere, and [[http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/WideBinaryStars/ theoretically]] they could even be a [[BinarySuns binary pair]].

* ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'': Based on the stated dates of "[[Recap/StarTrekStrangeNewWorldsS1E01StrangeNewWorlds Strange New Worlds]]" and "[[Recap/StarTrekDiscoveryS2E14SuchSweetSorrowPartTwo Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2]]", Kiley 279 in the SNW pilot would have to be around 1 light-year from the Xahea System (give or take a few light-months) to have observed the Battle of Xahea without faster-than-light technology. This is practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliosphere, and [[http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/WideBinaryStars/ theoretically]] they could even be a [[BinarySuns binary pair]].

** 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.

For example, in 2017 a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 "nearby star"]] was found to have at least 3 Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of that star. The "nearby star" is 40 light-years from Earth; that's only about 23,500,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth. 24.7 million times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

* The key plot point of ''Film/AntMan1'' is that the shrinking ability of the Ant-Man suit can be turned UpToEleven, making the user "go subatomic". Two characters use this technique to pass through a hermetically sealed metal plate. Disregarding the myriad other ways this concept screws physics, for a molecule-sized hero, passing through an iron plate should be tantamount to traversing the ''Earth's crust''.

** ''Film/TheForceAwakens'': Starkiller Base has two infractions:
*** First, it is built on a snow-covered planet that is [[AllThereInTheManual said in supplemental material]] to be 660 km in diameter. This is about half the diameter of Pluto. Yet it has an atmosphere, gravity, and even native life (if those trees weren't planted for the decor, anyway) that suggest it's similar to Earth, barring the snow.

** The destruction of the Hosnian System:

*** Furthermore, the Hosnian System is said to house the entire New Republic Starfleet. Now consider the US Navy, which "only" has to account for 360 million square kilometers of water on a single planet, has around 500 ships. The Republic has on the order of 6.35*10^10 ''cubic lightyears''. Unless the Republic is stretching their forces ''really' thin, they should require tens of thousands of ships of to be able to patrol their entire territory properly, and thus inconceivable that the Republic could park their entire fleet in one system, not to mention the sheer logistics of maintaining the fleet all in one place. Even from a common sense POV this means the fleet would be unable to respond within a reasonable time frame to problems halfway across the galaxy.
** According to [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Starkiller_Base Wookiepedia,]] the leftover energy of the Starkiller Base planet being destroyed was enough to create a brand new star, which would make a pretty small star.

** In the series finale, the Borg transwarp conduit that Voyager emerges through is stated to be "less than one light-year from Earth". However, the ship appears to emerge closer to Earth than the Moon is; approximately one light-SECOND away from Earth.

** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E15IShotAnArrowIntoTheAir I Shot an Arrow into the Air]]". A rocket that had planned to visit an asteroid crash lands. The location of the landing, while unpleasantly hot, has Earth-normal gravity and an Earth-normal atmosphere... so normal that, in fact, the astronauts are still on Earth and never made it anywhere. That's realistic, but any astronauts who would believe that they actually made it to an asteroid despite having a very short journey and the landing place not requiring space suits or the like should not have passed the mental examination, even given 1959 levels of space knowledge!

** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E118OnThursdayWeLeaveForHome On Thursday We Leave For Home]]". An Earth colony is stranded on a hellish asteroid orbiting two suns, which means it's in another solar system. The asteroid is described as being either ten billion miles from Earth (in the previous episode's preview) or one billion (repeatedly, in the episode itself). In either case, it's much closer to the sun than it is to another star (or stars), and in the second case it's closer to the Earth than Saturn.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* The "HowCanSantaDeliverAllThoseToys" question might seem to run into this trope, however it's more due to a combination of globalization and TimeMarchesOn. In the original stories, written in the 1500s Netherlands, Sinterklaas only [[CreatorProvincialism delivered presents to kids in its home country]], meaning he only had around 200,000 kids to visit. Still quite a lot, but far less than millions of children around the world.
* This went the other way the week of 8 November 2011, when the asteroid [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_YU55 2005 YU55]] came past Earth. While 201,700 miles is indeed close on a solar system scale, it's still a good distance away and of no threat to Earth.
* To a certain extent, this applies to even near-future and modern stories. As number 3 of this Website/{{Cracked}} [[http://www.cracked.com/article_20052_5-weapon-myths-you-probably-believe-thanks-to-movies.html article]] notes, even the modern dogfight takes place well outside of visual range.
[[/folder]]

* Averted in ''Literature/TheLostFleet'' series. Once proper fleet tactics are re-introduced, battles consist of hours or even days of maneuver punctuated by tenths of seconds of combat as the fleets finally get within firing range before going out of range again. And in multiple cases, there are concerns over whether events are happening elsewhere in the solar system they don't know about (such as enemy reinforcements arriving) because the light won't reach them for hours.

* Discussed in ''ComicBook/SecretWars.'' When the villains are leaving Battleworld with the Colorado town taken from Earth, they're confident that the Molecule Man would be able to fly them home, while Dr. Octopus is the only one who seems to understand the vast distances involved: "An ant in the middle of the Sahara has a better chance of reaching Hawaii! Even in the off chance that we're going in the right direction, we're still millions of light years from Earth. We've only gone a few million miles so far; we're not even out of sight of Battleworld yet! [...] I'd rather take my chances on Battleworld than die of old age floating aimlessly through space!" Fortunately, after Otto's rant, the Molecule Man figures out how to teleport and gets them home shortly.

* Creator/DavidWeber practically averts this: ships in his books routinely battle at ranges of millions of kilometers or more, battles take hours or even days before anyone is in range of anyone else, and until the Manticorans finally invent a workable FTL communication system, everyone deals with long delays between sending a message and getting a reply due to the distances involved.

* ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'': Based on the stated dates of "[[Recap/StarTrekStrangeNewWorldsS1E01StrangeNewWorlds Strange New Worlds]]" and "[[Recap/StarTrekDiscoveryS2E14SuchSweetSorrowPartTwo Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2]]", Kiley 279 in the SNW pilot would have to be around 1 light-year from the Xahea System (give or take a few light-months) to have observed the Battle of Xahea without faster-than-light technology. This is practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliopause, and [[http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/WideBinaryStars/ theoretically]] they could even be a [[BinarySuns binary pair]].

* ''Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds'': Based on the stated dates of "[[Recap/StarTrekStrangeNewWorldsS1E01StrangeNewWorlds]]" and "[[Recap/StarTrekDiscoveryS2E14SuchSweetSorrowPartTwo Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2]]", Kiley 279 in the SNW pilot would have to be around 1 light-year from the Xahea System (give or take a few light-months) to have observed the Battle of Xahea without faster-than-light technology. This is practically spitting distance by astronomical standards: some of the two stars' outer satellites would probably be orbiting inside the other star's heliopause, and [[http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/WideBinaryStars/ theoretically]] they could even be a [[BinarySuns binary pair]].