Awesome but Impractical/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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

  • Marvel's premier Cloak and Dagger organization, S.H.I.E.L.D., prefers to operate out of a Helicarrier. It's an Airborne Aircraft Carrier , and it's exactly as cool as it sounds. Unfortunately, it tends to crash. A lot. This typically causes about as much destruction as you'd expect from dropping something the size of an aircraft carrier from about a mile up, and usually has the inadvertent effect of releasing whatever superpowered psychopaths, alien viruses, etc. that happened to be locked up there at the time.
  • Nite Owl II was the embodiment of this trope in Watchmen, spending millions on awesome but impractical hardware. His famous quote:

"Who needs all this hardware to catch hookers and purse-snatchers?"

The most awesomely impractical invention was his exoskeleton, which did grant him super-strength but also broke his arms the first time he used it.
  • The Cosmic Cube...you can do almost anything as long as you are thinking about it. Want D.C. to be a lake of fire? It will be, until you fall asleep. Then everything's back to normal and the heroes are kicking your teeth down your throat. In fact, anything you allow yourself to think about will take on some degree of reality and if you dream, that becomes real too. Even Dr Doom couldn't handle it for very long.
  • The Ultimates for a while. A multi-billion dollar super-squad just sitting around because they caught all the bad guys? Well, rescuing people from a fire is cool but we got guys for that.
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