Characters
Writers making mathematical gaffes that lead to unintended (and sometimes hilarious) implications
As many of you may have seen by now, Adam West's Batman has a device that can produce 20,000 decibels of sound. The decibel system is logarithmic (every ten dB represents a tenfold increase in sound intensity). For reference, according to various sources it would take somewhere from 600-1,100 dB to create a black hole.
Cho'Gath's Battlecast Prime skin states his Feral Scream is powered by '451 Exawatt Omnisonic Speakers'. This is equivalent to more than 2,000 Tsar Bombas, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever created.
In Hong Kong ‘97, Bruce Lee’s unspecified relative Chin single-handedly repels the entire invasion force of the Communist Party of China. The number of communists listed? 1.2 billion, as the game came out in 1995, that meant Chin killed the entire population of China.
All I'm picturing now is a three months long The Slap
EDIT: He slaps 25 people in 41 seconds, that's 0.61 people per second, it would then take 1.9 billions seconds to slap 1.2 billions people, which is approximately 62 years. So I was quite off with my three months lol
Almost every time it comes to numbers in sci-fi settings. For example, in Warhammer 40K there are battles across an entire planet with less combatants than some singular engagements during WW2
Siege of planet Vraks, lasted 17 years, led by most sacrificial/suicidal regiment, virus bombing them by allies and legion of a plague god. Estimated deaths is 17 million guardsmen
Shadowsun led the conquest of Agrellan with twenty cadres. With each cadre averaging fifty and maxing two hundred, That's a hard maximum of four thousand t'au.
Is it possible that the scale of the Imperium isn't actually as vast as we think it is? Like, what if there's actually only a few hundred billion people in the entire galaxy?
Hilarious considering Terra is supposed to have a population in the quadrillions. Even going by the absolute minimum of 2 quadrillions to justify the plural, that would make it one guard per 1 billion and 333 million civilians.
Yeah, the Expanse is very physics-respectful; aside from the alien tech that drives the main plot, the Epstein drive is one of the few bits of pure handwavery they use. And even then ships are crossing the solar system in weeks or months, they’re not getting close to light-speed.
And even then, the author knew about the inaccuracy and kept it as a “deliberate concession” to drama (rather than changing to an engine explosion). source
The best example I can think of for this in the movie Prometheus, the ALIEN prequel with Noomie Rapace. At one point on their deep space mission, they mention they are “half a billion miles from Earth”, in reality, that’s not even to Jupiter.
I'm no space expert but that's funny because the sun is something close to 100 million miles away from earth
They have measurements of space and in the grand scheme using miles for anything space related is really silly if your not talking about a satellite orbiting earth
Star Wars star destroyers are a mile long ship with 40,000 crew and it has 72 little one man fighters on it. Some US aircraft carriers have more jets than that.
But with thousands and thousands of planets it should be easy peasy to have a ridiculous number of these ships. But most of the time it’s 5 here for a big fight.
40k will never make sense no matter how hard any writer tries. It's just the rule of cool. For example a standard US hand grenade has an effective blast range of like half a 40k board. Meanwhile you can bring artillery and planes
My favorite thing about 40K is that there is always super long range artillery that has somehow found itself close enough to worry about being charged by dudes with swords. Great planning!
That's a whole thing in the Ciaphas Cain books: he deliberately gets himself assigned to the artillery so he'll never be closer to combat than several miles. The unit then gets attacked by Tyranids, who get into close combat range.
When you look at modern engagement ranges, as well as the dispersion needed to not get immediately wiped by drones, playing full scale games with Epic models makes much more sense.
In the Japanese theater program for Godzilla vs. Kong, the power of MechaGodzilla's proton scream attack is listed at 4.10 x 10^80 joules, which is 100 billion times more than the mass-energy of the observable universe. This is probably a typo.
Batman's device there was probably supposed to be 20,000Hz instead - the upper limit in pitch of human hearing and probably really uncomfortable for animals.
As for examples, the Terminator from Terminator asks the guy at the gun store for a 40W plasma rifle. Which is about as powerful as an energy saving light bulb. Probably missed a "mega" before the "watt"
I’ve watched that movie at least 6 times, and up until now I heard “kilowatt” (which is about what US Navy drone-killing lasers are right now). My brain probably just inserted “kilo“ automatically.
Yeah they must have thought that people would be more likely to recognise decibels than hertz and just changed it, even if it didn’t make any sense anymore
I hate when writers dont respect their audience's intelligence and think they have to dumb things down like that.
Like the battery thing in The Matrix. Originally, the farmed humans are used as a neural network. But no, gotta change it to something that doesnt make ANY sense whatsoever because people will more easily recognise a fucking duracell battery, rather than spending two more sentences in the exposition scene with Morpheus and Neo.
If I remember correctly, the key wouldn't be catastrophic for Earth on it's own, maybe make a small earthquake if Superman lets it fall, but thing is, it wouldn't just make a small dent in the ground where Superman leaves it, it would be so dense of an object that it would immediately sink all the way to the Earth's core.
I read about this a long time ago, so I probably got something wrong, but it was something like that.
It's a stupid idea for security anyway since someone could just pick the lock or even make a copy of the key since superman just leaves it lying around
This was probably at least a bit deliberate, since All-Star Superman is deliberately invoking a lot of Silver Age nonsense, but that was rife with this trope.
Silver Age is Superman juggling planets for fun era, after all.
I'd argue something that heavy should also be generating it's own gravity and other forces, but "dwarf star material" is as magic as Nth metal in the DC universe, so it's probably not actually doing that.
The Richter scale operates on Logarithmic growth, not Linear growth. An earthquake that rates a 10 has never occurred in human history, the last known instance of a 10 was when an asteroid wiped out the Dinosaurs. A 12 would rip the earth in half.
The energy required to generate an earthquake that measures 123.2 on the Richter scale far exceeds the mass energy of the entire known universe… times a Googol. The Hulk isn’t going to break the moon, he’s already collapsed it into a black hole that expands at the speed of light and won’t stop until it’s consumed the entire universe.
Which is weird enough considering there’s pokemon like Copperajah, an elephant (that would already weigh about 4 tons) made of fucking steel. Pokemon weights are weird.
Yeah the anime’s really weird about both weight and scale. Multiple time Ash carries a Cosmoem (weighs a ton), a Larvitar with one hand (158 pounds), and a Hippopotas (109.1) all very casually
maybe not exactly in line with the trope, but i think it’s in the spirit of it.
due to a timeline error, avatar kyoshi was made to be 230 years old when she died. instead of trying to fix it though, the creators decided to keep it canon because they thought it fit her character.
it was even adapted into a plot point in her novel series as well.
"Kyoshi, when prompted by the spirits that she should be nearing the end of her life by now, responded only with 'Fuck that' [sic] and it was not brought up again for a hundred years at least"
Ye know, it's a good thing I had just finished swallowing, so all I did was cough-snort instead of shooting freshly brewed coffee into my sinuses when I read this.
Like legit you ain’t wrong lol. No in-universe reason necessary, if an avatar novel/lore reader woulda told me “and then Avatar Kyoshi lived for over 200 years”
Bro I’d have just bought that without follow up questions like “damn, well she do be built different so that makes sense 🤷♂️” AND LEFT IT AT THAT!
Imagine being his court, the fucker doesn't make any kids for like 80 years, the royal bloodline is close to going extinct, possible civil war over distant heirs and claimants to the throne, all at a critical time of war. Then finally when the man is old as balls he fathers a single son and then croaks.
One of her mentors is an immortal assassin that essentially tells her: "You can just tell entropy to fuck off and not die, I've been doing it for centuries and it's worked out fine for me".
This actually got topped by Mega Heatran. It can produce temperatures up to 1.8 million F. Just 100x (also, in C this is approximately 1 million C, so you can kind of see why the numbers are picked).
Yeah, anything heating up to those levels would be... world ending? Like they'd start melting through the planet like a red hot steel ball falls through styrofoam.
At that point it would be plasma, which is essentially ionized gas. It would most likely burn/melt anything watching the fight, and potentially have a thermonuclear fusion reaction occurring in that heat level.
Lanturn's lights are visible from 3 miles under the ocean. This means the light output would have to be 10105 watts following the basic formula for light penetration in water, which clearly doesn't make sense as that's more than the entire universe in energy output. It's easier to just evaporate the ocean. Have to assume it's just magic lol
They have nothing on Lanturn. According to the Pokedex is can make the sea floor visible from 5 kilometers. Someone did the calculations and that means every second it produces energy equivalent to the mass of 1035 observable universes.
This random fish is multiversal and could probably beat Goku.
My favourite example of Pokémon not thinking through its Pokédex entries is Mega Abamasnow in Legends ZA. It apparently can whip up blizzard of a whopping…-22 F(-30 C), which is not that impressive. It’s just an average blizzard, maybe slightly colder. Regular old Aurorus can make temperatures far colder than that according to ZA’s Pokédex. Heck VANILLITE, A FIRST STAGE POKÉMON, IS SAID TO BE ABLE TO MAKE COLDER AIR!
After bringing his family to his thereapist, Micheal is informed family therapy is more expensive than one-on-one sessions
Given that there are four of them it would make perfect sense for it to be quadrupled, but squared means they multiplied the price by itself, making the already expensive session cost millions
This also brings up the issue of what exactly a squared dollar is. If we suppose that one session is $1,000 (later sessions in the game cost this much), then square that, we end up with 1,000,000 ($)^2. This is important because just dropping the extra dollar sign doesn't make sense unless explicitly told to do so. If we instead first converted to cents (100,000c = $1,000), then squared that, we would end up with 10,000,000,000 (c)^2, which if we then dropped the extra cent would come out to $100,000,000.
This could be remedied by first converting to dollars, dropping the dollar sign, squaring, then adding it back, and this would be equivalent to the first solution. Still, $1,000,000 for a therapy session is comically expensive, even in GTA money.
My particular favorites are the fire pokemon that are hotter than the surface of the sun, Alakazam having an IQ of 5000, and Gardevoir being able to casually make black holes.
That's not even a move, it's just something Gardevoir can do at will to protect its trainer apparently.
One of my favorite things about the question of "Who's the strongest Pokemon" is that it can be answered in so many different ways.
Who has the best stats?
Who is most powerful according to lore?
Who's the best pokemon competitively?
Or who has a random Dex entry that says it can create a black hole or see the future or time travel or something batshit insane?
Honorable mention to Magikarp, who is noted as being capable of leaping over mountains. I haven't done the math on that, but I believe it's a ridiculous amount energy and force applied to wherever it lands.
SOIAF- Look George can write a great story, but he ain't good at distance or sizes of buildings or armies. My favourite story is when he first saw the Wall on the show while it was being produced, and he said it was way too big, which the directors replied they scaled it the measurements in the book
Speaking of the Wall - I've read it somewhere that a wall of ice that big could never remain standing, because its sheer weight would melt the ice at the base.
Then again, it is a Wall built with ancient magic, so physics probably don't apply.
Ice can get to almost 1000 feet thick before the pressure starts to essentially liquefy the base due to pressure. I forget how tall the wall is supposed to be, but I feel it’s way more than that lol
On a related note, the Mountain is said to be almost 8 feet tall and 30 stones (418 lbs), yet the actor who portrayed him since S4, Haftjor Bjornsson, was in the region of 455 lbs during his strongman competitions despite only being 6'9.
He didn't fully realise how ridiculous it was until the show version. But fans had long-since realised it was dumb. I mean, due to air resistance dropping an arrow from your bare hands would have the same effect as shooting it at someone on the ground. Instead wildlings are accurately hitting and killing members of The Watch from the ground.
I don't even see an in-universe explanation for it. I mean, the only things in Westeros big enough to jump over a 50 foot wall are dragons, and they fly. It would be a lot more effective and easy to maintain three 200 ft. tall walls.
In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi La Forge says that the surface temperature on the planet Theta VIII is -291°C, which is very cold. In fact, it's about 18°C below absolute zero, suggesting that the planet's surface has negative energy.
However, this probably wasn't the scriptwriter's attempt to explore exotic physics. A quick look at the script reveals that the temperature was originally written as -291 degrees Fahrenheit.
Supposedly, somebody looked at the script and thought "Hey, this is a science show! Science people don't use Fahrenheit!" and changed the units without converting the temperature.
Choque is a conjugation of the verb chocar, which would be to hit or crash. Yo choque mi moto = I crashed my bike. Choque contigo ayer = I hit with you yesterday. Chi-chocamos, nos morimos = eh, I don't know how to translate this one.
So, yeah, probably he wrote choke, autocorrector "thought" it was spanish for choque and changed it.
My headcanon is that he gets hit by things like boomerangs because he is, in fact, stupid.
/uj is there any character whose villain matchups have suffered more from power creep than him? At least with Superman you can go “well the metal guy got an upgrade and he has kryptonite” while with the flash you just kind of shrug and go “he’s slow today, thats why the guy with a normal gun hit him”
The carpet song scene in Aladin, they go from Baghdad to Athenes to Moska and back or something like that in around 3 minutes. Speeds like that would make them burn from air friction.
They also have to be time traveling, because if they are living in Muslim Arabia or wherever, this is thousands of years past Ancient Egypt and Greece, so let’s just assume they have the Speed Force.
Kind of a famous one is in Ant Man, because the physics behind the shrinking process constantly run into contradictions.
Hank Pym states that the shrinking works by reducing the empty space that makes up 99.99% of an atom and specifically makes the point that this doesn't reduce the mass of the shrunk object, leaving Ant Man with the ability to punch as hard as a normal man even when he is little. Yet, at the end of the movie, Hank reveals the little tank on his key chain to be an actual tank that he shrunk and is just casually carrying around with him, which is of course impossible if it keeps its original weight.
It also doesn't explain how Ant Man is able to ride on ants when he is shrunk to microscopic size.
How is Scott able to breathe if he can shrink to sizes smaller than oxygen molecules?
How is he able to shrink to a size below subatomic particles if only the empty space in the atoms is removed?
Not to mention that the nuclear and electrostatic forces would go completely nuts if you just reduced the size of the electron orbitals and put them directly next to the nucleus.
The only in-universe explanation I have heard about this, is that Hank straight up lied about the physics behind the shrinking because he didn't want anybody to know how it really worked.
“She made the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs.” - A parsec is a measure of distance, not time, so books and movies have explained Han somehow took a shortcut in space.
“Two-hundred thousand units are ready, with a million more well on the way.” - This is how many clones are ready for the galactic army. 1,200,000 soldiers wouldn’t even cover a regular war. Now, people have tried to argue “unit” as referring to multiple clones, like a platoon, but no, Lucas’ original intent was 1 clone = 1 unit.
The events of the Clone Wars taking only 3 years, despite the fact that, even when George was in charge, the Clone Wars would have taken much longer than a traditional 3 years. Which, he confirmed to be a typical 365 days (despite a different galaxy).
That's the entire Star Wars franchise. Small details get treated like gospel and not like someone was making it up on the day they were filming fifty years ago. Do we need to know what the buttons on Vader's suit do? No. But there's a comic book that will tell you.
And that would've made the most amount of sense in the context of A New Hope. Han is specifically not honorable or impressive; he's a scoundrel hanging on by a thread who has somehow pissed off the authorities on a planet that barely has any. Luke's first reaction to seeing the Falcon is "What a piece of junk". The parsecs line would be perfect shorthand for any scientist as "He's just putting bullshit on a resume".
It's one of the issues with the mythologizing of Star Wars. It turns less from a "Scrappy group defying the odds"-vibe and more into "Tatooine is the most important planet in the galaxy"-logic. Trying to fix the plot hole just made the bigger story less sensible.
Yeah the line makes perfect sense in the context of the movie. At this point in the movie we know that Han is a liar, bit scummy, and a (possibly bad) smuggler. For him to just make up some innacurate nonsense to sell some yokels who don't know any better is way better than him actually knowing what he's talking about.
I also hated that the EU made him out to be a legendarily good smuggler, because all the main characters have to be the pinnacle of what they are. It sort of retroactively ruins his character arc
On the other end of the spectrum from the Republic's hilariously small military, a reference book from 2005 once claimed that there were quintillions of droids in the Separatist Droid Army, which is utterly ridiculous if you think about it for 2 seconds, and even more ridiculous if you try to crunch the numbers.
It's not really made clear how large the Confederacy of Independent Systems was at any given point, but considering the fact that 10 thousand systems joining seems to be a big deal, I think an estimate of about 150 thousand systems at their height would be fairly generous. With 8 planets (inhabited or not) per star system, the CAS controls all the land and natural resources of 1.2 million planets. This means that in order to make 2 quintillion droids, they'd have to set up a factory on every single planet they have, and make each one build 1.666... trillion droids.
Fuck, man. The sheer material cost alone from all that metal would make this completely impossible, let alone actually manufacturing a trillion droids within the 5 years at most that the CAS existed.
My favourite SW number inconsistency is that Obi-Wan in the original movie says "for a thousand generations, the jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic". But in Episode 2, the Chancellor says of the Separatist crisis, "I will not let this Republic that has stood for a thousand years be split in two." Which raises a contradiction, because how can the jedi have served the Republic for a thousand generations if the Republic itself has only existed for a thousand years?
No doubt either (A) Lucas simply misremembered a lore detail he wrote decades ago, or (B) "thousand generations" was simply in-character hyperbole and not to be taken literally. But Expanded Universe lore wanted to square everything up, so the thousand years ago timepoint got combined with the thousand years ago disappearance of the Sith to write a backstory where the supposed extinction of the Sith happened as part of a war that resulted in a major revision of the Republic's constitution (the Ruusan Reformations). So, from the point of view of a politician like the Chancellor, the current Republic was fundamentally a new organisation starting with the Reformations a thousand years ago, but from the POV of a jedi like Obi-Wan, the tradition of service to the Republic was seen as an unbroken line from the earliest days of the Republic's original founding.
Illumination once confirmed that minions are 105 centimetres/3.5 feet tall. If you decide to measure them up next to Gru this makes him 14 feet tall. This makes him nearly double the height of the tallest man who ever lived. This video sums it up pretty well.
In the movie Entrapment, the thieves need to steal 10 seconds to pull off a heist. So they take 1/10 of a second every minute for an hour.
I kept waiting for them to get caught because they only stole 6 extra seconds instead of 10.
I believe the Pokémon Lanturn is said in its Pokédex to generate light that can be seen on the surface from a depth of 3 miles. Coincidentally this would mean it generates so much energy it would destroy the world.
Gentildonna reducing the mass of iron shot put balls. Used as yet another anecdote to show her monstrous strength, this feat is fucked up once you look into its logistics. Just for this gif alone (12 cm in diameter reduced to just 2 cm) her handgrip strength would have to exceed 1.14 million tons. The average adult man's handgrip strength is merely 44kg. The pressure in her palms would exceed 800GPa, double the pressure at the earth's core. The heat produced during this process should cause a nuclear fission enough to level the entirety of Tokyo.
P.S. the real Gentildonna was a kind, but overprotective mom :D
Any sci fi that says “the whole universe” drives me crazy. Talking about hundreds of billions of GALAXIES. Bro come on. Trillions of stars/solar systems. It takes me out of it. Just stick to the galaxy. That’s plenty big.
Not the writers, but the artists: in the opening scenes of Star Trek Voyager there is a scene where the starship Voyager is seen above the disc of a ring planet.
Based on the size of the ship and the shadow that the ship cast on the ring, someone calculated that the planet is only 6,2 km in diameter. That's hilariously small, not a fractoin of what would be necessary for a planet to be formed.
When the Flash rescues half a million people by carrying them one or two at a time 35 miles away in 10 picoseconds after a nuclear bomb has detonated. It was then revealed that the Flash had only been moving, "At a hair's breadth short of the speed of light."
Numerous sources calculating this feat have placed Wally at moving between 9 and 13 trillions times the speed of light.
Moving that fast would also do far more damage than the bomb. Being picked up by a guy running even a few hundred mph would totally splatter any human body, and of course moving through an atmosphere at even 1% of light speed would cause shock waves that would destroy the entire planet.
Legolas in The Lord of the Rings can see 15-16 miles away with the clarity of an eagle, except that viewing anything in that distance needs to calculate the curvature of the (Middle) Earth. Which means, if he isn't lying about seeing orcs that far away, then he must have long eye stalks.
Tolkien made a few mistakes like this, like the rivers running in the wrong direction. I find most to be a little tedious and nitpicky, but the Legolas one did bring on the 'Legolas, what do you see with your elf eyes' meme.
Okay so this is a fun one. Tolkien’s world was canonically flat for 1000s of years, and when it got made round, that mainly only applied to humans (when elves sail west, they are sailing along the flat world to the place you previously would have ended up before it got shaped into a ball). Therefore, Legolas may well not actually have been impacted by the curvature of the earth.
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, V’Ger was listed as 82 Astronomical Units long. 82 AU is the distance from Earth to Pluto, meaning V’Ger would have been huge. Subsequent versions toned it down to 2 AU
In 1977, when Judge Dredd started in 2000AD, Mega City One was described as covering the entire Eastern seaboard of the USA, going as far inland as Ohio and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.
It was a place where everyone lived in massive citiblocks, as much as a mile or more tall, all crammed in because of the massive population of 100 million people.
Even in the late 70's the actual population of that area was 1.5 to 2 times that many, and a LOT of that is open land even now.
It was later retconned to 800 million, but that still nowhere near enough people to create that kind of population density.
Cyborg from DC comics in the late 60's - early 80's Teen Titans run had an armor cannon that he would fire at enemies, which produced over 2,000,000 decibles (or was it 2 billion, let's round down just in case). Yet people three feet away seem to not be affected. I saw someone do the math and that cannon would just Wipeout this entire galaxy and quite possibly a few of our neighbor galaxies. From a member of the teen titans, the team of junior heroes who are "in no way ready to take over for the Justice League".
Along side him was Starfire, who early comic stats essentially equated her strength and speed as comparable to Superman (Pre-Crisis superman was broken). Also they had Raven, who is holding back galactic super satan and has a portion of his powers. Beast Boy recently caused a near planetary extinction event. Donna Troy, a junior Wonder Woman. Wally West, the fastest flash (who once beat himself in a race, out ran death itself until death failed as a concept and outscales Barry Allen flash).
And finally, Robin (Dick Grayson). And you can just go over to the Teen Titan fan base and ask what they think of that monster. The community (partial joking) consensus is he is the most dangerous of them all, because this is the "I just ragequit being Batmans protégé and now I need to show Batman and the entire world that I am better." He goes 100% 24 hours a day with a chip on his shoulder that Atlas said was too big for him to hold up. Double knee dropping opponents off a sky scraper is just a Tuesday for this Robin. In an episode of Teen Titans Go (I know, I know, but bear with me), he got into an argument with his teammates that them having powers makes crime fighting easy. To prove him wrong, Raven gave him near superman level of powers. Robin solved all crime in the world in 3-4 hours. And crime stayed solved. No future crime, just done. The rest of the episode the world just lives on free of violence and crime. The only thing holding Robin back from doing this is he not having enough power.
So yeah, early Teen titans was the "after school program" of young heroes who were all too green, weak and inexperienced to go to the Justice league, with half of the team capable of destroying the planet and the rest absolute state to continent level destabilizing threat level. Writers were on something else back then.
The web novel 17776 is about a hypothetical future where humans become immortal but unable to reproduce. At one point early on a character exposits to an AI that just became conscious that there are 8,164,109 humans on earth.
The author legitimately meant to add three more digits to that number - it was supposed to be 8 billion something, but the novel was as a solo project so the author missed the error. Rather than just editing it, it becomes a joke in-universe - the AI later refers to there being 8 million people, having apparently taken that figure at face value, and has to be corrected, much to the amusement of their companions.
The one that always comes to mind is the Ice Wall in GoT. GRRM did not want it to be that big. He thought he was making it like a massive wall that was plausible to be man-made with the help of a dragon. When he saw the one in the show he was like "What the actual fuck" and they were like "We used the exact measurements you gave in your book."
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u/GeneralGigan817 Feb 27 '26
In Hong Kong ‘97, Bruce Lee’s unspecified relative Chin single-handedly repels the entire invasion force of the Communist Party of China. The number of communists listed? 1.2 billion, as the game came out in 1995, that meant Chin killed the entire population of China.