What I find interesting is how the game handles scale. Things are usually portrayed way out of scale/proportion.
For example, the speed at which units travel is absolutely ridiculous.
In stock BF2, the base soldier class runs at about 7 Meters per Second. That's 25 Kilometers per Hour, or almost 16 Miles per Hour. Sprinting applies a multiplier of 1.5.
So, your generic soldier dude can sprint 37.8 Kilometers per Hour, or about 23.5 Miles per Hour. In full gear.
I went out with a GPS and got about 3.2m/s for a basic jog, and about 7.5m/s for a controllable sprint.
Acceleration is also atrocious. That same generic soldier accelerates from a standstill to a full run (7m/s) at 70 m/s^2, or in about 0.1 seconds.
Sprinting happens in the similarly short time of 0.35 seconds. You are welcome to grab a stopwatch, and go see how fast you can reach a full sprint. Strap on a weight vest and grab an airsoft gun for some added realism.
Then, we have lasers, or blaster 'bolts'. In stock BF2, a basic rifle propels its 'bolts' at 300m/s, or about 985ft/s. A sniper round travels at 2000m/s, or about 6568ft/s. That is pretty feeble compared to a real 'laser' which travels at 299,792,458m/s, or about 983,571,056ft/s.
A 5.56x45mm NATO round has an average muzzle velocity of about 900m/s, and the 7.62x54 NATO round averages about 800m/s.
The common 9x19mm Parabellum round averages about 375m/s.
Missiles are another matter entirely. Your basic rocket in BF2 flies at 100m/s or about 328ft/s. In space, rockets and torpedoes alike move along at 350m/s, or about 1148ft/s, or just over Mach 1. In the real world, one of the most common Air-to-Air missiles, the AIM-9 Sidewinder, cruises along at over Mach 2.5, or 850m/s. The enormous AIM-54 Phoenix Air-to-Air missile doubles that at Mach 5, or 1701m/s. The popular AT4 launcher has a muzzle velocity of about 400m/s.
Perhaps you are getting the idea by now, but I haven't even covered distance yet. And I mean distance in-game.
When it comes to distance, anything that has to do with space in-game is portrayed terribly. Everything from the size of space maps, to where the orbital strike weapon fires from is WAY under scale.
Let's start with orbital strike. It fires from 600 meters in the sky. That's 1968 feet, 0.6 kilometers, or 0.37 miles.
For scale, Mount Everest towers at 8848 meters, 29029 feet, 5.5 miles, or 8.85 kilometers.
They typical cruising altitude for a passenger jet, like the Boeing 74, is about 10,000 meters.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird can reach over 25,000 meters.
But even that pales in comparison to the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at 408,773 meters, 254 miles, 1,341,120 feet, or 409 kilometers.
Then, there is the size of capital ships. An Imperial-Class Star Destroyer is said to be about 1600 meters long, which is just shy of 1 mile.
On the other hand, an MC80 Home One type Star Cruiser is supposed to be about 1200 meters in length, or about 0.75 miles.
The Venator-Class Cruiser comes in at 1137 meters, and the Providence-class Dreadnought is about 2177 meters.
And that is just the capital ships. The frigates are another story entirely.
The CR90 Corvette: 150 meters
The Acclamator-class Heavy Cruiser: 752 meters
The Munificent-class Star Frigate: 825 meters
The Victory-II Class Frigate: supposedly 500 meters
None of the ships mentioned above are displayed to proper scale in-game.
For scale reference, most large ships (carriers and battleships) in the modern world measure in at around 300 meters.