Awesome but Impractical/Literature

"A flashy feature that has limited usability for victory."


 * Discworld: used to ride a fiery steed, but it set fire to the stable. Then he got a skeletal horse, but bits kept falling off. Then he got a Badass Normal White Stallion, and called it.
 * Bryn's Wolverine Gauntlets from Raised by Wolves. The claws are silver, and extend and retract via a quick twist of the wrist. The only time they're used in combat,  Made more annoying by the fact that Bryn was already carrying around two perfectly good silver knives when she got the gauntlets.
 * In Dark Heavens, Emma is unexpectedly able to generate an ultra-rare black chi that can instantly annihilate demons, or turn them human... sometimes. Other times, it does nothing at all. Emma eventually decides that it's too unpredictable to be useful, and stops using it... for now.
 * In On Basilisk Station, Honor's ship was refitted with a shiny new weapon that could destroy the protective force fields on other ships. Unfortunately, it had a relatively miniscule range of about a hundred thousand kilometers, and required the removal of most of the ship's conventional missile and beam armament, making it incredibly ineffective at typical combat distances of up to a few million kilometers. She manages to make use of it, but would have been much better off with the original Boring but Practical armanent.
 * Admiral Sonja "horrible" Hemphill was notorious for turning out this kind of military advances. Undeservedly, as it turns out, since any of her advances that weren't in this category were classified so all most people saw were her failures.
 * To be fair to Admiral Hemphill, the problem in OBS is that Honor's ship was not the production model, or even the field prototype, but the initial proof-of-concept alpha test. The idiot is the person who assigned a vessel that should never have left the testing track to a frontline combat position. Admiral Hemphill's bureau did only what it was supposed to do -- invent a new weapons concept, test it out under controlled conditions, and then decide if it was workable enough or could be made workable to actually try under field conditions. (Their eventual verdict was "it could not".)
 * In The Elenium, the undead soldiers created by Otha. While they look like an undefeatable regiment of unkillable warriors in Scary Impractical Armor, there turn out to be two crippling problems with them: 1. Their armor really is impractical. The guys making it didn't understand armor had a purpose beyond looking scary, so they made armor that looked really scary but was restrictive, didn't deflect blades properly, and was too thin. 2. Otha is a moron. He has the power to raise the dead, but no idea what to do with it. The soldiers are set to guard the stone they're standing on, and that's all. The heroes win by just walking around them. Then because it didn't occur to Otha that his soldiers should be selective in their targets, they chuck a rock at one soldier causing it to enter the square of another, and the Disaster Dominoes set the entire regiment fighting each other.
 * The Aeyrie, batlike winged humanoids in Laurie J. Marks's Children of Triad trilogy, are described as such—by one of their own, no less—in the second book: Between the weight of the musculature required to get something roughly human-sized aloft, and the hollow bones and general frailty required to compensate for said weight, they're "too heavy to fly easily, yet too light to do anything else."
 * In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace explains how awesome the Peoria REC looks as you approach its parking lot...except that the design of its road and structuring makes for horrendous afternoon traffic.
 * In essence, the baronial splendor of the REC’s grass was a testament to the idiocy and hassle of the whole thing’s planning.
 * Callandor in the Wheel of Time is an extremely powerful Amplifier Artifact, but it was built without the normal safeguards in place on artifacts of it's type..
 * Arthur C. Clarke's short story Superiority is about Awesome but Impractical means of warfare hillariously turning almost inevitable victory into utter chaos and failure.
 * World War Z
 * Discusses how one man strapped roller blades on his feet and lunged himself at zombies with a meat cleaver attached to a hockey stick. It didn't end well...
 * The whole in-universe basis of the Battle of Yonkers. All this awesome firepower wasn't practical in-universe against the zombies.
 * The LIGHT annihilation device in The History of the Galaxy series. Originally developed as part of a project to build an Antimatter drive, it was adapted into a projector that fires a stream of anti-particles at the target. The problem? They never figured out how to control the yield. The first battlefield use resulted in the loss of both fleets, as well as the weapon itself. Oh, and the enemy had more fleets at their disposal, while the side with the device was left with a grand total of 8 warships out of hundreds. The weapon is later placed on their flagship-class cruisers, taking up a good fifth of the size (a flagship cruiser is about 7 kilometers in length). It's almost never used in battle due to unpredictable results and is mostly there as a show of force. Think Death Star, but even less useful.
 * The Iron Throne in A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a throne for the King of the Seven Kingdoms to sit in...but it's made entirely out of swords and is reportedly extremely uncomfortable to sit on. And dangerous!
 * Star Wars Expanded Universe
 * Han Solo at Star's End's Corporate Sector Riot Gun. It can fire a constant stream of energy (used for mowing down a crowd as "crowd control") that can clear a room of combatants in a hurry. However, it has very poor aiming characteristics as Han Solo found out when trying to shoot at ESP Os using its single shot mode. It can only hit effectively on "constant fire" which dramatically increases the chances of friendly casualties in a pitched battle. Contrast with the obsolete blaster carbine (no designation mentioned) in the same book that was "rugged and extremely durable", "with simple telescopic sights", with "no moving parts" and "if left against a tree in the jungle, would still be fully operable ten years from now."
 * The Espo riot gun is intended for use by armored troops (who can pretty much ignore its damage, as it has low penetrating power vs. armor) vs. multiple unarmored opponents -- which, given that the Corporate Sector Security Police largely spends its time doing things like strike-breaking and 'supervising' large masses of laborers, means its functioning as designed. It is a pretty crappy thing to bring to an actual battle, admittedly.
 * Although this could actually be a practical concern; given that the Corporate Sector enforces a strict 'no private ownership of weapons' policy, unless they're lucky enough to find some smuggling gun-runner (and somehow be able to pay him) the only real way in which rebellious laborers could arm themselves is to steal guns from the Espos. Which means the Espos actually have a valid reason to carry an issue weapon that's good enough to slaughter mine workers with but is pretty much worthless for fighting battle-armored enforcers like the Espos themselves.
 * In Destiny's Way, Han uses this argument as a Take That against the Empire (and the author uses it as a Take That against the Bantam books, sometimes called the "Superweapon-of-the-Month Club"). An Imperial Navy officer claims that, were Palpatine still around, the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn't stand a chance. Han argues that the Empire would try to beat the Yuuzhan Vong by building some Awesome but Impractical superweapon to scare them into backing down. It didn't work on the Rebellion, and it wouldn't work on the Yuuzhan Vong.
 * The Lancer-class frigate (seen in Dark Force Rising and Rogue Squadron) is a 250-meter warship bristling with quad laser batteries designed as a counter to the starfighter-heavy Rebel/New Republic fleets. Unfortunately it required too many crew and proved too expensive for wide deployment, and didn't have any way to defend against capital ships, so most admirals scorned it.