History SciFiWritersHave / NoSenseOfDistance

* In ''VideoGame/WingCommander'', some planets are 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. On the other hand, if we use planets as a rough benchmark, stars are damn ''tiny'' in this game, and the ships are ''massive''.

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 236,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth. 24.7 million times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and ten times further away than the Alpha Centauri trinary star system, the closest stars to the Sun. If you were born after 1983, the light that you can see from Earth was emitted by this nearby star before you were born.

** ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'': in the scene where Obi Wan is discovering Kamino's location, Dax says Kamino is 12 parsecs outside the Rishi Maze, which Obi Wan then points to on a map of the galaxy. Apparently the Maze is at the top-left edge of the galaxy and Kamino is at the center. From this scene you can actually eyeball the whole ''Star Wars'' "galaxy" as only being 50 to 100 parsecs, or about few hundred light-years, across. For comparison the Milky Way is 170,000 light-years across.

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* ''WebComic/DarthsAndDroids'' elaborately parodies the destruction of the Hosnian system in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'', where the explosion could be seen right away from lightyears away (fifty in the comic), by revealing that [[spoiler: the Peace Moon's beam travelled backwards in time to explode the system fifty years ago so that the explosion could be seen now. Heck, they weren't even aiming at the Hosnian system in this version; they just assumed they could shoot right through that area because there hadn't been anything there for fifty years. (The odds of aiming at one system and happening to have another in the way, given how space is almost entirely empty, is probably a straight example of this trope.) This was all because the designer of the beam had known his ignorant superiors would want to see a big explosion right away.]]

* 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."

* Music/DoctorSteel has a song called ''12,000 Miles Through Space" which is about aliens crash landing on earth and jumpstarting humanity. These aliens apparently didn't come from very far, as the Moon orbits at just under 240,000 miles from Earth. The song samples a recording about satellite transmission, and that's far more reasonable, as some satellites do actually cruise at about that altitude.
* The short narrations that precede the lyrics of Music/{{Ayreon}}'s album ''The Universal Migrator 2 - Flight of the Migrator'' have a goof putting the quasar 3C 273 in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. While 3C 273 is in the direction of the Virgo ''constellation'', [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3C_273 that quasar]] it's at nearly 2.5 billion light-years and that [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_Cluster galaxy cluster]] at ''just'' around 50 million light-years, being totally unrelated to the latter.

* Radio/JourneyIntoSpace: In ''Journey to the Moon'' / ''Operation Luna'', while under the control of the Time Travellers, Mitch claims that their ship is from hundreds of lightyears away: the other side of the universe.

* The space battle GaidenGame ''TabletopGame/BattlefleetGothic'' put some thought into scale issues, for all its joyful use of SpaceIsAnOcean and the RuleOfCool in general. The actual models are [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality completely out of scale with the rest of the game]], but distances are measured based on 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 ''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, but he also has to hit a target equivalent to headbutting a pinhead from a mile away.
* D20 Future's FTL rules fancifully claim that the first faster than light drives make humanity able to "reach distant stars in mere weeks"... and then proceeds to put up stats that make the first FTL drives 5 times the speed of light and the best 25. For reference, Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to earth) is a 9-month journey at 5 times the speed of light. A 'distant star', like for example ULAS J0074+25 which is one of the furthest stars away from us in our own galaxy, would be a 36,000 year trip at the fastest speeds available in the system.

* In ''VideoGame/StarWolves'' 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 of 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.

* ''VideoGame/RatchetAndClank'': 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 might have one too), and a fairly substantial city. Giant Clank can ''jump'' high enough to significantly reduce its size.
* ''VideoGame/WingCommander'' was never all that clear on what units to use, depending on the game, but all of them were ludicrously off, giving us distances of less than 100km between planets in a system. There are also the shenanigans it plays with measuring speed, by using a variable "klicks" (which, unlike in RealLife, [[UnitConfusion isn't slang for kilometers]]) for the distance portion of stated speeds.
* In ''VideoGame/WingCommander'', some planets are 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. On the other hand, if we use planets as a rough benchmark, stars are damn ''tiny'' in this game, and the ships are ''massive''.

* Raul in ''Videogame/FalloutNewVegas'' 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. Either he meant he could see Las Vegas from Mexico City, which isn't possible due to the curvature of Earth, or he saw the [=ICBMs=] flying towards Las Vegas, which is highly unlikely as not only do [=ICBMs=] usually fly far too high up to be seen, this would mean the missiles were for some reason being launched from the South Pacific or taking a giant detour south.
* [[VideoGame/Aurora4X Aurora 4X]] mostly averts this, with each star system being realistically sized. With Sol as an example, the Luna orbit is only a few hundred thousand kilometres wide, but the planetary orbits are hundreds of millions of kilometres wide, Pluto's orbital radius being 40 times larger than Earth's and over 8000 times larger than the Moon's. Some comets have extremely large orbits, taking decades and centuries of game time to approach the Earth.
* The ''Videogame/{{X}}-Universe'' hits this, hard. Aside from the issues where the [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfVelocity biggest ships can be outrun by a Toyota Prius]] (if you floor it, mind), the sector planets are terrifyingly close. While they seem massive up close, you can fly between them if you really want to. Argon Prime, an Earth-like world, has a moon that is closer to the planet than the distance between Florida and California. The series averts this between sectors, however - it's never explicitly stated where ''any'' of the sectors are, meaning that they could be on opposite sides of the galaxy or adjacent to each other. And if you use the [[BlindJump Unfocused jumpdrive]], you'll typically wind up in the dead space between galaxies. ''Videogame/XRebirth'' features more logical distances as it shifts to a new interplanetary travel system, though planets are smaller than they should be.
* ''VideoGame/SystemShock''
** In the original game, SHODAN wants to fire Citadel's mining laser at Earth from ''Saturn''. While this is theoretically possible, the precision needed to aim across such distances to hit an object the size of Earth would be absolutely insane... not to mention it would take about 43 minutes for the laser to even ''get'' to Earth.
** In ''VideoGame/SystemShock2'' the grove jettisoned from Citadel Station has somehow made it to Tau Ceti in the 42 years between the games. Tau Ceti is just under 12 light-years away from our solar system. The developers have admitted this doesn't make much sense, but [[ShrugOfGod haven't given a definite explanation for how it happened either]]. While not ''impossible'' the grove somehow traveled at 28.6% of the speed of light, how it was accelerated to that speed and slowed down again without being destroyed is another matter (getting up to speed in a remotely feasible manner would take longer than the journey). The most commonly accepted theory is that the grove ran into some kind of NegativeSpaceWedgie that transported it to Tau Ceti; the ''System Shock Remake'' adds an extra audio log mentioning a mysterious wormhole recently discovered near Saturn, which ties into that theory.

* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' series
** Harvest, one of the most remote Human colonies, and the site of first contact with the Covenant, orbits the star Epsilon Indi and is 12 light years away. Reach, the "Second Military Capital" of the UNSC, orbits the star Epsilon Eridani, at 10.5 light years away. Not only that, but it's closer to Harvest than it is to Earth. In addition, the UNSC has, by the time of First Contact, settled hundreds of other planets and moons, yet they had never encountered, say, the Kig-Yar, whose homeworld is only 41 light years away from Earth. WordOfGod later hand-waved some of this as being the result of Slipspace simply being weird (for example, Harvest was considered the most remote colony because it took the longest to travel to, not because it was the furthest away in real space, but then it raises the qeustion why there's a very clear link between the distances in the two spaces: after all, why would the UNSC be so (relatively) densely concentrated within a few dozen light years rather than being spread around the galaxy at random?
** The Covenant failing to find Earth for 27 years... when the first planet they discovered was Harvest, less than a dozen light years away. When considering the capabilities of their technology and the size of their own territory (which spans a thousand worlds scattered throughout the Orion Arm), this is equivalent to the Mongol Empire invading Japan in 1274, landing an army in Kyushu, and then spending the next three decades wandering around that small island looking for Fukuoka, while Honshu goes on completely untouched, the invaders being unaware it exists. ''Warfleet'' attempted to explain this by noting that the Covenant can barely navigate their own territory, and that entire planets can simply go missing and not have contact reestablished for decades. Yet, even with that explanation, it defies belief that they couldn't have found Earth much earlier simply by scanning for radio waves. Note that the Jackals' home system is ''closer to Earth than some of Earth's own colonies'', and that the Jackals have been part of the Covenant for over 1,200 years by the time of the games.

* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins''. Given the size of Ferelden according to the official maps, and the time frame of events prior to the start of the game, only two of the six possible PC origin stories (City Elf and Mage) could have actually happened due to the travel times involved.

* ''[[VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyI Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl]]'' has the plot twist that [[spoiler:you are really somewhere in [[EarthAllAlong post-apocalyptic Japan]]]]. One of the characters, Raquna, is from Ontario, and the game includes skits where they get various provisions (including a cream churn) from there. If Ontario [[spoiler: [[CanadaEh is where it commonly is]], and not a FantasyCounterpartCulture or [[LondonEnglandSyndrome different type]] of Ontario]], we are looking at traveling 6000 miles at ''minimum''. And there are no known means of fast transportation between cities.
* ''Videogame/MechWarrior'', adapted from ''Tabletopgame/BattleTech'', carries over most of the source material's silliness, resulting in 200mm+ caliber guns having an effective range roughly equal to an handheld assault rifle, and in most of the games the projectiles instantly vanish at the end of their short [[ArbitraryWeaponRange maximum range]]. A long range sniping mech will usually have an absolute range of 900 meters to 1500m, while a close range brawling mech will be in the ~300m range; long for infantry, but at a HumongousMecha's scale it is more like shooting someone at 30 meters.

* In the ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}'' web serial ''Federation of Fear'', the characters make a quick getaway from a villain by boat and shortly thereafter randomly happen upon Tren Krom's island. A map of their world shows this quick random escape route was actually over a thousand miles long and spanning almost half a dozen other islands that they somehow missed.

* {{Invoked|Trope}} in ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague Unlimited'': In the second AMAZO episode, where the android, on an interstellar journey to Earth, ''destroys [[Franchise/GreenLantern Oa]]'' ([[spoiler: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 WesternAnimation/{{Superfriends}}'':
** 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 observable ''universe'' is at around 46-47 ''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 [[InertialDampening 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''.

* The beginning scene of ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}: The Legend Reborn'' 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 {{retcon}}ned it for the official storyline, so that instead of traversing who knows 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 story of the film involves the heroes traveling across the desert under what appears to be a handful of days. Looking at the official map published in a tie-in guidebook, this journey seems more or less feasible. But other measurements and comments given by the story writer throw a wrench into the calculations since according to these, the distance would actually be thousands upon thousands of miles, and the planet's relatively small and crammed settlements should be the size of countries. The movie also ends with the characters (most of them below human-size) pulling these settlements together with mere ropes, manpower and a few motorized vehicles, dragging them across the vast desert again under no time.

* ''WesternAnimation/LoonaticsUnleashed'': it is revealed that Zadavia's planet is "over 600 parsecs from your own galaxy". 600 of them are still peanuts to a typical galaxy (the Milky Way measures over 50 times that distance).
* Technically an issue of ''area'' rather than distance, but the GrandFinale of ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' was based on the Fire Nation using [[MagicMeteor Sozin's Comet]] to [[SaltTheEarth burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground]], using about five zeppelins. Although we don't know the exact size of the Earth Kingdom, it is the largest continent and country in the show's world and based on China, which has an area of about 10 '''million''' square kilometers.
* ''[[WesternAnimation/TheTransformers Transformers]]'' tended to have problems with this. One early episode has the Autobots investigating a desert to learn why it has frozen over, determine that the Decepticons are doing something to cause it in the arctic and drive there. Yes, they ''drive'' from a desert containing palm trees and cacti to the Arctic, and it doesn't seem to take them more than a couple of hours max.

* On ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddParents'', Timmy wishes that Vicky was "a million, million miles away from here." Cosmo responds by taking a measuring tape and flying into space until he counts the miles out to "one million one million and ends up on Yugopotamia, the home of Timmy's alien nemesis, Mark Chang. Assuming Cosmo counted one million + another million, ergo two million miles, that means Yugopotamia should be in viewing distance of Earth, being about 5 times the distance from Earth to the Moon. Assuming Cosmo counted a million of a million miles, meaning 1000000^2, that's still only about a sixth of a light-year, and the closest known star system is more than 4 light-years away.

* ''Manga/TheFiveStarStories'': The eponymous Five Stars are most commonly referred to as "The Joker Star Cluster", even though real clusters contain thousands of 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.

* ''Anime/{{Voltron}}'s'' opening narration mentions how a Galaxy Alliance was formed "with the good planets of the solar system" to maintain "peace throughout the universe". There are (an estimated) 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy ''alone'', and only 7 billion people on earth. Then there are the other 100 billion galaxies throughout the universe . . .
** Also, at one point Voltron's top speed is given as Mach 10. For reference, under ideal orbital conditions, a ship travelling from Earth to Mars at Mach 10 would take six months to get there, yet some episodes have Voltron travel to another star system and back in a single episode.
** Some episodes have planet-based weapons firing on other star systems. The orbital mechanics make the window of time for the weapon to even be pointed in the right direction be minuscule, not counting the time it takes for the attack to reach its target.

* ''ComicBook/NewAvengers'' #19-20. ComicBook/IronMan 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 of 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.

* ''ComicBook/{{Quasar}}'':
** Subverted when Wendell Vaughn visits Uranus 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 [[{{Hyperspace}} the Quantum Zone]].
** In another issue, super-speedsters have a race to the Moon. Despite their speed, it takes them hours to arrive. Mark Gruenwald actually did quite a bit of research for Quasar.
* In ''ComicBook/{{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 that it will take in excess of 80,000 years.

* 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? In the novel version of Aliens: Female War, the heroes decide to set the bomb's timer for six months, to allow the aliens to get there from all over the planet.

* Discussed in ''ComicBook/SecretWars1984''. 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.

* In the first issue of ''ComicBook/{{Valerian}}'', he mentions Arcturus being several thousand lightyears from Earth, even though it's only 36.7 in RealLife.

* ''Fanfic/ChildOfTheStorm'' generally tries to avert this when it comes up (which it usually doesn't, thanks to portal technology and hyperspace travel), with [[Creator/NimbusLlewelyn the author]] pointing out just how vast galaxies are, especially as compared to individual solar systems (this usually in respect to people who assume that the scale goes 'planet' to 'star' to 'solar system' to 'galaxy').

* For a version that stays on a single planet, in the film version of ''Film/TheTwoTowers'', Théoden dismisses the idea of seeking aid from his nephew's army by noting that they would be "three hundred leagues from here by now." Assuming he's not being hyperbolic and he means (as we generally do) for a single league to be three miles, this is an ''absurdly'' vast distance--going by most maps of Middle-earth, it's about twice or more the width of Rohan itself. While he's certainly right that this puts them out of range to call for aid, it makes little sense when only a matter of days ago, that army was well within Rohan's borders, and it would go on to successfully ride to their rescue in the climax (for comparison, the Mongol army considered eighty miles in a day to be ''seriously'' pushing it, and they were BornInTheSaddle nomads rather than the relatively agrarian Rohirrim).

* The movie ''Film/TheDayTheEarthStoodStill1951'' features an alien emissary named Klaatu who claims to have arrived from a planet "250 million miles" from Earth. This would place his homeworld somewhere in the Sun's asteroid belt.
* Neill Blomkamp, the director of ''Film/{{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 strip-mined 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.
* In ''Film/SupermanIII'', 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''. Plus finding Krypton in the first place. It's also capable of controlling the weather, rather than just observing it. That's some satellite! In the original ''Film/SupermanTheMovie'', Krypton is stated to be ''in another galaxy.'' This weather satellite isn't merely crossing interstellar distances, it's crossing intergalactic distances.
* ''Film/MissionToMars'':
** When the second crew's spaceship gets damaged, they bail out in their spacesuits and try to make their way to an autonomous module orbiting Mars, which just happens to be a few kilometers away from their ship. This should be impossible, and not just in the sense that it's unlikely: any normal astronaut would keep their ship far ''away'' from another object while performing difficult maneuvers such as orbital insertion. The crew was also preparing to fire their engines for orbital insertion, a procedure which normally means changing your velocity on the order of thousands of miles per hour. Yet the ship they were going to rendezvous with was floating nearby, traveling at the same velocity. So either the rendezvous ship was also on a hyperbolic orbit out of the Mars system, or their ship was already orbiting Mars.
** When the Martians leaving en masse after their planet is ruined, and their ships are shown to be heading for ''another galaxy'', which is... a slight overreaction, to say the least.

* The movie version of ''Film/{{Battleship}}'' has the aliens come from Gliese 581 g after we send a radio message to them. We can buy that the aliens get here fast (they're aliens; presumably they have faster than light travel), but the beacon we set up hasn't been transmitting for more than a couple of years. Gliese 581 g is ''20.5 light-years from Earth'', so the aliens aren't going to hear our message for a while[[note]]On a related note, the existence of Gliese 581 g has turned out to be dubious but the writers [[ScienceMarchesOn aren't to be blamed for that]].[[/note]].

* George R.R. Martin's ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': Although it's set on a continent about the size of South America (to judge by the distances given), going by travel times, it's roughly the size of Great Britain. Even that seems to be a stretch, because the North, which according to GRRM is based on Scotland, is effectively administered at the top by a single Lord and Lady, one Maester, and one knight. Then there's the multi-continental spy network with an extremely flat hierarchy of all field agents reporting to one man (Varys)...
** The Wall, [[ShapedLikeItself a 700-foot tall wall]] (~215 meters) which marks the northern boundary of the Seven Kingdoms, is probably the most obvious example. Martin is said to have been shocked by the first images of it for the TV series, having never pictured it being as huge as it turned out to be. For comparison, the highest point on the Great Wall of China is only about 50 feet (15m) at its tallest, the tallest castle walls in the world are closer to 180 feet (55m), the Statue of Liberty is 305 ft or 93 m and the tip of the Eiffel Tower is 1,063 ft or 324 m. Considering the wall is supposed to also be a continuous structure, hundreds of miles in length, the end result has more in common with geographicall features than anything man-made; even if it was somehow built by people it'd be absurd as a defensive structure, as hitting targets at the bottom with any accuracy would be impossible.
* Creator/DavidEddings' ''Literature/TheTamuli'' trilogy {{justifie|dTrope}}s 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 concludes it's an issue with different calendars. The real answer is that [[AWizardDidIt the goddess traveling with them]] was cheating with space and time a bit.
* ''The Death of Sleep'', in Creator/AnneMcCaffrey's ''Literature/PlanetPirates'' series, 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 led a guy in a ship to her, she probably would never have been found.
* In another [=McCaffrey=] work, ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'', 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 ("[[WeWillUseWikiWordsInTheFuture runnerbeast]]") from point A to point B, in another, a few hours. The fan community calls this Anne's "rubber ruler".
* One of Creator/JamesWhite's ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' 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.
* ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''
** Sneakily averted by Creator/DouglasAdams, who concocted the Infinite Improbability Drive to get around the mind-boggling odds against [[ThrownOutTheAirlock 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 [[spoiler: 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.
** {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d by 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 [[GoMadFromTheRevelation annihilating their mind]] (unless [[spoiler:that person is inside an artificial universe created entirely for their benefit]]), conclusively proving that the last thing anyone living in a universe this size needs is a good sense of perspective.

* The aforementioned ''Film/StarshipTroopers'' 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 [[EpicFail 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 [[CurbStompBattle we took a terrible licking]].")

* Mostly averted by ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'', whose writers are aware of the scale of objects.
** ''Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy'':
*** When the heroes know they need to find something on an unfamiliar world, they don't act like knowing what planet it's on will make things easy. Even if most things are measured in the order of light years, planets are still ''big''.
*** When Luke's X-Wing is determined to be somewhere within a light-year of Thrawn's Star Destroyer, Thrawn hires mercenaries to find it since it would take too long to search for themselves. Just because hyperdrive allows ''traveling'' along such a distance very rapidly doesn't mean that finding a 40-foot ship in a 4.2 cubic lightyear volume is an easy prospect. Even then, Luke is only found because another Force user follows a hunch.
*** When Luke returns to Dagobah to search the old site of Yoda's hut, he finds (to his surprise) that he has absolutely no problem landing on the planet this time, and wonders if he originally crashed on Dagobah in ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' because Yoda intentionally pulled his X-Wing to the surface with the Force. For confused fans, this finally explains how Luke managed to "accidentally" stumble upon Yoda's dwelling when he had never even been to Dagobah before: Yoda sensed his presence and guided him there.
** 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 ''Literature/TheNewRebellion'', after casually lampshading the idea of TwoDSpace, Wedge takes a turbolaser cannon and shoves aside the targeting computer -- he doesn't have TheForce, but [[BadassNormal 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.
** In ''[[Literature/TheCallistaTrilogy Darksaber]]'', an Imperial fleet has come to attack the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV. One of the Jedi defending this manages to harness the energy which has been stored in the temple structures there to hurl them back across the solar system, crippling their hyperdrives while doing so and [[HeroicSacrifice dying from it himself]]. Admiral Pellaeon, who commands the fleet, states that by sublight drive it will take months until they reach Yavin IV again. However, at this point, Daala enters the system in her Super Star Destroyer anyway.
** Even so, a few errors do slip through. For example in ''Literature/NewJediOrder'' Sernpidal, a planet that orbits its star at the same distance our moon orbits Earth. While this could potentially work were [[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110330150854.htm Sernpinal's star a White Dwarf]] it is also the third (or fifth, there are conflicting accounts) planet of that star system.
** Lucas himself isn't even clear on just how big a ''[[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfMass planet]]'' is. In a conversation with Alan Dean Foster, who was writing ''Literature/SplinterOfTheMindsEye'' for him, Lucas had this exchange (Foster is noticeably polite throughout the transcript, though one gets the distinct impression he's fighting the urge to grab Lucas by the shoulders and shake him):
-->'''Lucas:''' [Princess Leia] hasn't been heard from since, so Luke wonders what's happened to her.
-->'''Foster:''' Then you don't use her as much because you can't find her.
-->'''Lucas:''' Well, he can find her instantly. I mean you've got them both there on the planet.
:: Even if Lucas meant Luke finding her with the Force (as they become aware of each other's locations in ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' by it for instance) Luke still wouldn't be able to ''get'' to her instantly.
* In the ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' books, Creator/DavidWeber 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.
* Much like in the ''Honor Harrington'' books, Creator/DavidWeber gets distances, times, and communications speeds right in the ''Literature/{{Safehold}}'' series. But he's got no sense for what makes a "confined space" for a [[WoodenShipsAndIronMen ship of the line]]. Characters routinely describe channels tens of miles across as uncomfortably narrow; here on Earth, the Strait of Gibraltar (ten miles across), the Great Belt (12 miles), and other similarly-sized passages have seen battles of maneuver.

* Several times in ''Literature/InheritanceCycle'' the distances are ridiculously skewed. One of the more egregious examples is in the first book when Eragon and Murtagh need to cross a river to escape pursuing enemies. The river is stated to be five leagues, or ''fifteen miles'', wide at the point they're trying to cross.

* In ''[[Literature/HorusHeresy The Flight of the Eisenstein]],'' James Swallow errs on the side of too ''much'' scale. Mortarion is described as an analogue of the Earthly legend of the GrimReaper despite being a billion light years away. All action in the ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' universe takes place in the Milky Way which is 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter.
* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'':
** In one book they go to another planet said to be 500 million light years away. It is implied this planet is in the Milky Way when in fact 500 million light-years would be enough to traverse the entire Milky Way 5000 times.
** In the final book, the protagonists search through an area stated to be "billions of light-years" across in a matter of a month. Even with an FTL ship, this seems far-fetched.
* One ''Literature/EncyclopediaBrown'' book averts this. A scam artist attempts to raise money for a scale model of the universe in the Grand Canyon, using an inch-wide model of the Earth to show he's legit. Encyclopedia, of course, points out that a scale model of the universe, even with an inch-wide Earth, would be too big to fit on the planet, much less the Grand Canyon.
* 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. In addition, the characters explain to a non-military person why all battles takes place in star systems: there's simply nothing in interstellar space worth fighting for. No planets, no stars, no resources, no jump points. In fact, the only time anyone ever went to interstellar space was before the jump drive was invented, so the first colonies were settled at sublight.
* In ''Literature/IAmNumberFour'', the planet Lorien is described as 300,000,000 miles away. It's so far away that their advanced spaceships took a year to traverse the distance to Earth, and they are trying to prepare Earth for when the bad aliens arrive in their less-advanced spaceships. Unfortunately, 300,000,000 miles would put Lorien between Mars and Jupiter in the Asteroid Belt, and even our 'primitive' spacecraft can make that journey in less than a year.
* The playable world in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' is drastically reduced from what it should realistically be (indeed, at one point, scaling using the height of a female Tauren, a group of players determined the entire world was roughly the size of the city of London). This is fine; [[RuleOfFun no one wants to have to travel a month before starting a new quest.]] The problem is that some writers in the [[Franchise/WarcraftExpandedUniverse expanded universe]] seem to take these distances as accurate and replicate them in their books, such as Varian crossing Ashenvale in less than a day on foot in ''Literature/{{Wolfheart}}''.
* The hybrid sci-fi/{{Wuxia}} story ''Stellar Transformations'' gives grandiose numbers that often makes it comically unbelievable instead (like having a single continent with medieval infrastructure support 10 billion people), but none of his transgressions are as insane as the ridiculous distances he quotes, such as the size of the Astral Chaotic Sea, which is between two continents on a single planet, and according to the main character's calculations, 300 '''billion''' li wide. While li is a somewhat ambiguous measurement of distance (its length was different depending on the era), the modern li is exactly 500m or 0.5km long. That means that the Astral Chaotic Sea (which is, if I may remind you again, an ''actual sea'' with water and everything) is 150 billion kilometers wide. In other words, it's a body of water ''16.5 times larger than the diameter of the solar system''!
* Averted, and wryly lampshaded, in the ''Literature/AncillaryJustice'' trilogy, where established "gates" allow ships to leap swiftly from one location to another, and some ships can even generate their own gates, but various circumstances still require them to take the slower old-fashioned route. At one point, an urgent summons from a gate to the nearest space station still results in our heroines cooling their heels in the shuttle for an entire day.
-->"We often speak casually of distances within a single solar system--of a station's being near a moon or planet, of a gate's being near a system's most prominent station--when in fact those distances are measured in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kilometers."
* In ''Literature/PerryRhodan'' spaceships have trouble using their FTL close by large masses. This trouble is also visible in areas with 'increased stellar density', like the center of the Milky Way, where stars are constantly interacting with each other and the fifth dimension because they are only light-months apart. Thus, when a messenger needs to meet up with someone in the galactic core, he travels by FTL, with a few light-weeks or light-months of relativistic travel to avoid going FTL into dangerous areas, yet he has to arrive at his destination in days. He arrives on time.

* ''Literature/TheRailwaySeries'' takes place on the fictional Island of Sodor, which is in the place of the real-life Isle of Walney. Walney is only 11 miles long and one mile wide with a population of 10,000 people and is municipally incorporated as part of the town & borough of Barrow-in-Furness. It has no rail transport of its own. The fictional Sodor is many times larger at 62 miles wide and 51 long [[note]]This gives it an area of 3162 square miles, about the same as North East England[[/note]]. This presents some headscratchers, because the island would be too large to fit comfortably between Barrow and the Isle of Man, but still far too small to have the massive railway network depicted in the books (and especially the TV series). Perhaps it's BiggerOnTheInside?
* In [[Creator/RayBradbury Ray Bradbury's]] ''Literature/TheMartianChronicles'', colonists on Mars can see the nuclear war on Earth with their naked eyes, because the planet in the night sky briefly blazes three times brighter than before. Only way this would be possible is if the nuclear blasts had produced an EarthShatteringKaboom, and since the colonists later return to a still intact and somewhat livable Earth...
* Averted in ''[[Literature/ArrivalsFromTheDark Good Will Mission]]'', where the intelligence branch wants to use an unsuspecting diplomatic graduate to help them locate something that has been hidden somewhere in the sector of space owned by the [[ProudWarriorRace Haptors]]. The head of the diplomatic academy doesn't like using the cadet this way and wonders why they don't simply use the fleet's vast resources to search the sector. He points out that the Haptors only have about two hundred inhabited planets and maybe a dozen that are in the process of being colonized. The spook counters that they also have thousands upon thousands of uninhabited systems, just like any galactic race's sector, and searching them all would take way too long.

* Brandon Sanderson's ''[[Literature/TheCosmere Cosmere]]'' was originally said to be a dwarf galaxy that contained all the worlds the various stories take place on. This trope spurred him to trim that down to a star cluster containing no more than 100 stars, because even a dwarf galaxy would be far too much to write in.
* Averted in ''Literature/{{Aniara}}''. The author consulted heavily with Niels Bohr to get the science aspects as right as possible. Instead, the author uses the size of the void between the stars for horror, drama and tragedy. ''Aniara'' is just a small speck in infinity, and the crew and passengers are powerless against the vast, all-consuming void, and doomed to travel through nothingness for eternity. Several of the passengers can't deal with the fact that Earth is within spitting distance, astronomically speaking, but beyond their grasp even if they could restore the engines.

** SubvertedWhen Wendell Vaughn visits Uranus 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 [[{{Hyperspace}} the Quantum Zone]].

* Someone forgot just how far sending reaches in ''ComicBook/ElfQuest'': [[http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics/SAS/DisplaySAS.html 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 ComicBook/{{Quasar}} (Wendell Vaughn) visits Uranus 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 [[{{Hyperspace}} the Quantum Zone]].
** In another issue of ''Quasar'', super-speedsters have a race to the Moon. Despite their speed, it takes them hours to arrive. Mark Gruenwald actually did quite a bit of research for Quasar.

* The ComicBook/GreenLantern corps divides the ''entire Milky Way Galaxy'' into 3600 sectors, each of which is patrolled by ''two'' Green Lanterns. This means each pair of Green Lanterns has to police a region of space equal to a cube 1300 light-years on a side. On average, such a region would contain about a ''million'' stars, and that's not even including red dwarfs and brown dwarfs.
** Even worse: there are some continuities where they are divided into 3600 sectors across the UNIVERSE. Take the ridiculousness of the number of star systems patrolled in the above example, and apply it to entire galaxies.
** Not quite as bad, but still pretty weird, at one time, some bright spark at DC had the idea that each sector was a circular segment (they didn't mention depth) that spanned 1/10th of a degree, centred on Oa. A simple calculation shows that this gives each GL a sector-shaped like a piece of pie, varying in width from zero at the "point" (Oa) to over 100 light-years at the "crust" end (at the edge of the galaxy); what happens about the galactic halo and distances normal to the plane of the main disc was never mentioned. If there are 3600 sectors to the ''universe'', the whole thing becomes even crazier!

* {{Subverted}} in ''ComicBook/PaperinikNewAdventures'': even going from Earth to somewhere as close as Venus is treated as next to impossible in a reasonable time, at least without an FTL drive. This also helps to underscore the technological divide between Earth and the Evronians, as the latter can move from an unspecified point in the asteroid belt to Earth in a matter of hours with vehicles as small as ''large carpets'' (even if it's hinted it was almost to the limits of that vehicle, it's still rightly impressive), and [[PhysicalGoddess just how powerful Xadhoom is]], given that she plays the CasualInterstellarTravel trope straight.

* There are many examples of ''ComicBook/{{Superman}}'' hearing something hundreds or thousands of miles away as it is happening. Even assuming the sound wave could reach his ears without interference, it should take several hours to reach him if he's in Europe and the event occurs back home in Metropolis. Even if he were as close as 50 miles away, it would take 4 minutes for the sound to reach him.
** The worst example was when he heard the sound of a gunshot (to be fair, he was actively listening for it) and managed to fly across town and catch the bullet ''before it had crossed the room''.
** There's another egregious instance in the For Tomorrow storyline. Superman, lying in bed at the time, hears Green Lantern Kyle asking Superman to save him. Green Lantern is a million miles away in space, and appears to be in a completely different planetary system. To reach Kyle, Supes is shown flying past Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Setting aside the fact that (conventional) sounds cannot travel a million miles through space, if Kyle really were a million miles away from Earth, he'd be somewhere between Earth and Mars, but relatively close to Earth [[note]](assuming the two planets are aligned nicely, Mars would be about 40 million miles away from Earth. Either way Superman would be a lot closer to Earth than he is to Mars)[[/note]], not somewhere past Saturn, and definitely not in a completely different system.
** This gets a LampshadeHanging in ''ComicBook/SupermanSecretIdentity'' (an Elseworld that's supposed to be the 'real' world), where that version of Clark Kent - who got given the name by his parents as a joke - studies his powers and wonders about how on Earth he can hear things when the sound can't possibly have reached him yet. It's implied that his powers, and those of other superhumans in the setting, are derived from a RealityWarper artefact and shaped by subconscious expectations: he's called Clark Kent, so he models his powers on Superman. Superman can hear things instantly from thousands of miles away. Therefore, so can he.
** This specific example got subverted in the backstory of the main character of ''ComicBook/{{Irredeemable}}''. The Plutonian, a Superman {{Expy}}, hears someone about to commit suicide, followed by the sound of a gunshot. He flies as fast as he can to save them, but fails to consider that the sound had already taken several seconds to travel to him; the person is already dead by the time he arrives.

* ''FanFic/AvatarsIIWhenQwaritchTakesRevenge'' has the titular Miles Qwaritch leaving Earth and returning to Pandora in the 4 minutes 35 seconds that the song ''Welcome to the Jungle'' lasts. Pandora is a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the ships in the [[Film/{{Avatar}} source material]] take six years to make the journey.
* Possibly overlapping with No Sense Of Mass, in one episode of ''WebVideo/PokemonTabletopUtopusRegion'' [[TheBigGuy Lavi]] intercepts a Donphan and soccer kicks into the air to stop it stampeding Jade. The GM says that he gets it about ten metres into the air. Given that Donphans weigh 120kg, a kick with that kind of strength would be packing 25,400-29,500 Newtons of force, depending on the angle he kicked it at. [[SuperStrength Which is over ten times the amount required to crush a human skull]]. The more likely prospect is that the GM was exaggerating.

** In ''[[VideoGame/SystemShock System Shock 2]]'' the grove jettisoned from Citadel Station has somehow made it to Tau Ceti in the 42 years between the games. Tau Ceti is just under 12 light-years away from our solar system. The developers have admitted this doesn't make much sense, but [[ShrugOfGod haven't given a definite explanation for how it happened either]]. While not ''impossible'' the grove somehow traveled at 28.6% of the speed of light, how it was accelerated to that speed and slowed down again without being destroyed is another matter (getting up to speed in a remotely feasible manner would take longer than the journey). The most commonly accepted theory is that the grove ran into some kind of NegativeSpaceWedgie that transported it to Tau Ceti; the ''System Shock Remake'' adds an extra audio log mentioning a mysterious wormhole recently discovered near Saturn, which ties into that theory.

* {{Invoked|Trope}} in ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueUnlimited'': In the second AMAZO episode, where the android, on an interstellar journey to Earth, ''destroys [[Franchise/GreenLantern Oa]]'' ([[spoiler: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''.[[note]]Which is accurate: at that sort of speed even a tiny change in direction would send you off thousands of miles off course, but of course for us humans we can't move planets so we're forced to do the latter.[[/note]]
* ''Challenge of the {{WesternAnimation/Superfriends}}'':

** In ''[[VideoGame/SystemShock System Shock 2]]'' the grove jettisoned from Citadel Station has somehow made it to Tau Ceti in the 42 years between the games. Tau Ceti is just under 12 light-years away from our solar system. The developers have admitted this doesn't make much sense, but [[ShrugOfGod haven't given a definite explanation for how it happened either]]. While not ''impossible'' the grove somehow traveled at 28.6% of the speed of light, how it was accelerated to that speed and slowed down again without being destroyed is another matter (getting up to speed in a remotely feasible manner would take longer than the journey). The most commonly accepted theory is that the grove ran into some kind of NegativeSpaceWedgie that transported it to Tau Ceti.

* For a version that stays on a single planet, in the film version of ''Film/TheTwoTowers'', Théoden dismisses the idea of seeking aid from his nephew's army by noting that they would be "three hundred leagues from here by now." Assuming he's not being hyperbolic and he means a single league to be three miles, this is an ''absurdly'' vast distance--going by most maps of Middle-earth, it's about twice or more the width of Rohan itself. While he's certainly right that this puts them out of range to call for aid, it makes little sense when only a matter of days ago, that army was well within Rohan's borders, and it will go on to successfully ride to their rescue in the climax.

* In the film version of ''Film/TheTwoTowers'', Théoden dismisses the idea of seeking aid from his exiled nephew's army by noting that they would be "three hundred leagues from here by now." Assuming he's not being hyperbolic and he means a single league to be three miles, this is an ''absurdly'' vast distance--going by most maps of Middle-earth, it's about twice or more the width of Rohan itself. While he's certainly right that this puts them out of range of communication, it makes little sense when only a matter of days ago, that army was well within Rohan's borders.

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 236,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth. 24.7 million times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

* An aversion in ''LightNovel/InvadersOfTheRokujyouma'': Theiamillis' challenge was to claim dominion over a randomly chosen set of coordinates out of the ''entire'' galaxy, which just happened to be the location of Koutarou's apartment. Ruth actually points out that this is the first time in the Empire's history that the coordinates ''weren't'' empty space: previous challengers could simply drop a beacon on the spot and call it good. Later in the series, Ruth figures that [[spoiler:Theia's mother had hacked the system specifically to send her there, having met Kotarou years before via time travel.]]
* Anime/SpaceBattleshipYamato: An inversion where the writers ''overestimate'' the size of the universe rather than underestimating it. In episode 4 "Test Warp To Mars," the eponymous ship warps from Earth to Mars and a character mentions they went 'thousands of lightyears in a matter of seconds'. Mars is only around 3 light minutes from Earth.

*** When Luke's X-Wing is determined to be somewhere within a light-year of Thrawn's Star Destroyer, Thrawn hires mercenaries to find it since it would take too long to search for themselves. Just because hyperdrive allows ''traveling'' along such a distance very rapidly doesn't mean that finding a 40-foot ship in a 4.2 cubic lightyear volume is an easy prospect.

*** 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. Expanded universe material suggests the planet to be Ilum, which was generally shown to be pretty normal; this required some further declaration that Ilum's unusual core somehow gives it enough mass to have the Earth-like gravity and ability to sustain life that it displays in most stories.

** Near the end, Creator/BradPitt's character has to cross Neptune's rings from one spaceship to another. The first time he did this in a pod, but the pod tumbled away, so he has to use his feet to push off from one spaceship and get to the other, while using a piece of hull plating as a shield. Ignoring the sheet improbability of him actually hitting his mark, the rings of Neptune are at least several kilometers thick, which would make it impossible for him to make it across in under a minute just by pushing off with his feet.

** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''

* ''Series/{{UFO}}'' episode "The Dalotek Affair" and "Ordeal". In both episodes, Commander Straker says that aliens from another solar system came from a billion miles away, which would mean that they came from ''inside'' the solar system. The nearest star system to Earth is Proxima Centauri, approximately 4.24 light years or about 25 trillion miles away. Even if he had been using "billion" in the long scale, which is 1,000,000,000,000, it still would have been wrong, because that is still much less than the necessary distance.

* ''Videogame/MechWarrior'', adapted from ''Tabletopgame/BattleTech'', carries over most of the source material's silliness, resulting in 200mm+ caliber guns having an effective range roughly equal to an handheld assault rifle, and in most of the games the projectiles instantly vanish at the end of their short ArbitraryMaximumRange. A long range sniping mech will usually have an absolute range of 900 meters to 1500m, while a close range brawling mech will be in the ~300m range; long for infantry, but at a HumongousMecha's scale it is more like shooting someone at 30 meters.

* ''Literature/WiedergeburtLegendOfTheReincarnatedWarrior'': Volume 12 states that the Demon Beast Mountain Range extends for "several million kilometers". This would be nuts even by fantasy standards, especially since the characters are exploring the place on foot, but factor in that volume 9 revealed [[spoiler:it was EarthAllAlong]] and it becomes patently absurd. [[UnitConfusion Maybe the author meant square kilometers?]]

* Averted in ''Literature/{{Aniara}}''. The author consulted heavily with Niels Bohr to get the science aspects as right as possible. Instead, the author uses the size of the void between the stars for horror, drama and tragedy. ''Aniara'' is just a small speck in infinity, and the crew and passengers are powerless against the vast, all-consuming void, and doomed to travel through nothingness for eternity.

* ''[[VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl]]'' has the plot twist that [[spoiler:you are really somewhere in [[EarthAllAlong post-apocalyptic Japan]]]]. One of the characters, Raquna, is from Ontario, and the game includes skits where they get various provisions (including a cream churn) from there. If Ontario [[spoiler: [[CanadaEh is where it commonly is]], and not a FantasyCounterpartCulture or [[LondonEnglandSyndrome different type]] of Ontario]], we are looking at traveling 6000 miles at ''minimum''. And there are no known means of fast transportation between cities.

* Averted in ''Literature/{{Aniara}}''. Instead, the author uses the size of the void between the stars for horror, drama and tragedy. ''Aniara'' is just a small speck in infinity, and the crew and passengers are powerless against the vast, all-consuming void, and doomed to travel through nothingness for eternity.

* An InUniverse example happens in the ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' entry [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1958 SCP-1958]], a microbus that, through means unknown, was able to achieve spaceflight, with the occupants' goal of reaching Alpha Centauri. They thought they would get there in maybe four weeks at most, despite the van only being able to reach 130 km/h. For reference, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. After two months, they were not even past the moon; the journal detailing the tragic journey points out that one of the crew "fucked up the math", which they did big time; at their current pace, they would've taken another ''37 million years'' to reach their destination. By the time the Foundation discovers the ghost vessel, it was near Mars at best.

*** 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]]