Not surprising. Way back in Alpha (or was it Premium Beta? it was early, anyway), when I wanted to test what would happen when I tried to "land" on a planet, I chose a smallish world as well. Since the Supercruise denial zone scales somewhat with planet size, you waste a lot less time choosing a smallish one, as opposed to one that's Earth sized, let alone a gas giant.
And of course non-landable worlds have no collision detection. If Frontier had added that, they'd be landable.
Let me show you an example.This just happened to be the world I was nearby. It's a non-landable body, so the Supercruise denial zone was about 1.3 Megameters (1300 kilometers) from the surface of the planet. It would take the Hauler I was flying at the time almost two hours to get down to the surface of this planet.
Actually, it is seamless to planets in ED. Players have managed to carry an SRV into a station, as well as flown from the surface of a moon to the planet its orbiting, in normal space. In the case of the former, it took the players eight hours to do it (after spending another six on a failed attempt), while in the case of the latter, it took the player 15 hours to fly between a moon and its planet.
There's a reason why players use Supercruise to travel between worlds. It's a lot faster.
Legs would help a lot with the sense of scale of ships in ED. I have VR, and being able to stand on the surface of a planet, outside my SRV, and look up at my ship really helps drive in how huge these ships are. The actual scale of ED is 1:1.
The reason why planets seem "small" to you, is that:
a) You're confusing "small" and "far away." Feel free to insert the obligatory Father Ted clip here.
b) Speeds in Elite: Dangerous are way outside our personal reference frame.
We may think 100 m/s (360 km/h) is fast, when the fastest speeds we regularly encounter may be around 100 km/h (30 m/s), but that's the slow docking speed in Elite: Dangerous. We scoop fuel from stars at relativistic speeds, speeds that are so mind numbingly fast in real life, that we literally can't picture what that would look like if we saw it, and even that is slow compared to normal Supercruise travel.
The scale in Space Engineers is dialed way down out of necessity. If it was realistically scaled, it would take forever to get anywhere. The largest worlds in Space Engineers are about 120 km in diameter. That's less than half the size of the smallest world in Elite: Dangerous, and about the same size as tiny Minmus in Kerbal Space Program.
I'm still stranded on the Alien World in SE, thanks to being unable to find gold, and I've been doing a lot of scouting in my current iteration of my atmospheric scout. Spending that much time flying over the surface of the planet really reinforces how tiny the world is. Everything from the curvature of the horizon at max altitude, to how thick the atmosphere looks compared to that horizon, to plotting out a new search grid (since SE doesn't provide a latitude/longitude system for planetary surfaces) emphasizes how small these worlds are.
That and when I managed to crash my first atmospheric scout in a moment of inattention. While trying to figure a way out of that mess, I noticed that my initial base, which was below the horizon, was at the edge of what I'd consider to be walking distance... in real life. Not that I walked there in the game. I ended up salvaging some of my maneuvering engines so I could get my scout back up in the air. Unfortunately, I forgot to take that into account as I approached, and took out one of my two wind turbines.
oops
(edited to correct an incorrect unit of measure)
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