While this troper's stories don't even try to appear realistic (he rather enjoys writing pulp-style sci-fi), he tries to avoid this trope (except for the cases where rules of cool take precedence over common sense). For example, he'd never have a planet-busting weapon literally blow a planet into chunks of space rocks, as the amount of energy required would be absurd. Just punching a hole in the crust would create enough flashy destruction and render the planet uninhabitable. Of course the planet-busting in the above case was done by a capital ship over a thousand miles in length, so maybe he should just be quiet (the story did acknowledge that a ship that large might not be very practical, tho).

Actually, if your story's warp engines (presuming you have warp engines) are rare and/or your warp fields hard to establish, having a huge starship would be economically better than a fleet of smaller ones. There's no gravity or friction in space, so there is no construction difficulty with large ships, or any need to have them be aerodynamically designed. A setting where FTL is difficult (or where HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace) will tend to have far larger ships, just like the cruisers which traveled from Europe to America and back in the early 20th century were much larger than the airplanes of today. The only existing interstellar spaceship design which could work without violating physics as we know it ''has to be'' over 100 kilometers in diameter at the front to scoop up interstellar hydrogen for fuel. (Of course you need the metal deposits of at least one entire planet to build a ship 1000 miles long, but strip mining is why you're an evil intergalactic empire).

This troper recently started a campaign in which the fact that reinforcements from a nearby star system won't arrive for two weeks is a major plot point. Naturally, the players who decided to come from planets several times further away all arrived in half the time. They see nothing wrong with this.

If it only took a short while according to the players' frame of reference, then that's just special relativity at work. If it wasn't, blame FTLRadio for warning them ahead of time.

While in middle school and high school, this troper took part in an "Outer Space Combat" RPG (which we simply called "The Game") involving Star Wars/Star Trek ships, plus anything else we could think of. After a little while, we were allowed to make up our own stuff. Examples include:

One of this troper's many creations was a spaceship that was big enough to be seen several lightyears away (later scrapped because it was too unwieldy to use effectively; if I'd known that Gurren Lagann would be airing close to a decade later, I would've stuck with it).

My friend took Final Fantasy VII's Sister Ray and effectively transformed it into the mother of all Wave Motion Guns, allowing it to wipe out several galaxies' worth of ships and giving it a power level of several million... and until we finally stopped the RPG when we graduated, ''the power level never stopped growing,'' hitting a billion by that point.

Operating under the assumption that the Star Trek warp engines were faster than the Star Wars hyperdrive. These are only a few examples; needless to say, we spent a lot of time trying to one-up each other and going BeyondTheImpossible, with a few other participants/commentators hanging on for the ride.

FYI They are most certainly not. In ST: Voyager they said it would take 70 years at ''best speed'' (which they can't even do all the time) to get back to the Alpha Quadrant whereas the Star Wars hyperdrive can traverse a comparably sized galaxy in only a few days. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/

Like I just got through saying, we were operating under the ''assumption'' that they were. It wasn't until a year or so after we started that I found out that the reverse was true, but by the time I got around to telling my friends about this, we decided to just leave things the way they were; under limitations like those, it simply wouldn't have been fun for us anymore. And yes, that was the site where I found out those details. About ten or eleven years late, but thanks anyway.

Given how inconsistent both series are on speeds (Han says the Millennium Falcon goes at 1.5 c, and Trek is all over the place), they're roughly equal

Han actually says the Falcon can do "Point five past lightspeed" while we assume this means 1.5c, it must be vastly faster, given that the Falcon can cross between several systems in one film.

This troper has always assumed that either the Star Wars galaxy is incredibly tiny (possibly with the Force counteracting gravity to prevent it all from collapsing in on itself) or light just moves a hell of a lot faster in the Star Wars reality.

I lost The Game because of whoever posted this.

This tropers story, DominionAndDuchy involves a ClockPunk SpaceOpera that involves artificial planets, a starship the size of the Soviet Union, a parasite that feeds off the Universe itself and five planets in the same solar system literally connected by '''''TheWorldTree'''''.

This troper is currently writing a sci-fi story that totally avoids this trope. Although to enable the story to take place across a number of solar systems there is a jump drive (although by sci-fi standards it's slow, with times between systems measured in weeks, not to mention expensive, and dangerous if not used with extream care) all other movement follows Newtonian physics and realistic scales. The same applies to communication. Whilst there is a tachyon based FTL communication system, it requires a lot of energy to transmit and is very low bandwidth, so can be used for short text messages only (it's also not at all reliable). All other communications, and all sensors, are limited to the speed of light.

This troper was writing a Marvel fan-fic where she suggested that her character might take a suborbital tourist flight at some time in a future arc. She was immediately besieged by suggestions that that character hang out with the Silver Surfer, battle interstellar empires, ect. Seriously, people, SUBORBITAL!

Lucky Bunny Bounty Show is going to suffer from this, I just know it. Oh well, it's not like I can take it seriously when I already knew that it was absurd that the main character's ship can make a journey in a week that all the other people in the 'verse need a month to make. Chaos Drive is wonderful, if hard to make work.

This troper, writing a sci-fi story, really wanted to avert this trope. FTL was handled as SubspaceOrHyperspace with a constant speed limit relative to the real universe, but still existed, and absurd energy requirements got at least a subtle HandWave. The end result was more along the lines of MagicAIsMagicA than having a sense of scale. Word to the wise: when writing a SpaceOpera, this is probably one of those AcceptableBreaksFromReality.

This troper attempts to avoid this with everything except FTL, which he doesn't use often. Of course, the majority of his characters top 3 meters. (It helps to be your own 10 foot pole)

This Troper is working on a story where a major plot point is that life on Earth evolves on a much more rapid pace than other lifeforms in the known universe. That isn't to say it's quicker than normal evolution, but that every other species is slower at it. Still this means the old races are have a higher life expectancy: Generally, a 20 something alien could conceivably have had grandparents who remember an Earth with Dinosaurs.

This troper has a setting and puts a disclaimer that it really isn't meant to be taken realistic in terms of scale. Partly because '''a)''' The Chthonian planet in the system is only a little closer to the sun than Mercury is to ours, but not as close as COROT-7b, which is even ''closer'' still. '''b)''' The two goldilocks planets are in a larger habitable zone, '''c)''' The Jovian planet is described as being puffy, but it's only because of the internal heating, and '''d)''' The Super-earth isn't as large as other super-earths, but the gravity would be a tad heavier if you landed on it.

Go on ''any'' written erotica forum. You'll find BiggusDickus taken BeyondTheImpossible.

I've got me an idea in my head that generally averts this: in-universe, interstellar travel is possible, but still can not break the scale. As such, humanity has moved across many worlds in many systems, but are so incredibly cut-off from the others that it can get pretty ridiculous. Communications from other known colonial worlds have been known to be wildly random. Sometimes info on a strong new Empire that has rested control will come at one time, and at another time it's suddenly gone and just a historical foot note. It didn't take long before people started inventing new languages, meaning some of the contact is just in unintelligible garbling. There's also a massive technology gap, regardless of the universe's all ready high level. fFor example, the main character is an advanced cyborg from one cluster who travels to another. As it turns out, in that local space he is such a technological marvel that many local scientists assume that he just ''can not exist'' by their local laws of the universe. Attempts to keep things orderly even in their solar system require several outposts on any given planet's general orbit (as well as a few averaged orbits between planets) constantly broadcasting information between each other. Even then, the lag is still quite noticeable. Still, all these problems aren't really risen to CrapSackWorld, as it just doesn't matter to your average ApatheticCitizens. This also leads to sects of SpaceAmish who decided it wasn't worth the effort.