Awesome but Impractical/Film
"A flashy feature that has limited usability for victory."
- Star Wars:
- The Imperial Walkers from The Empire Strikes Back are pretty impressive to look at, but when you think hard about it they're just huge sitting ducks for enemy weapons, and the Rebels manage to disable them just by wrapping cords around their legs and tripping them. What happens when the Rebels decide to arm themselves with some serious firepower, like the proton torpedoes they use to kill starships with? This article from Cracked.com points out some of its Egregious design flaws.
- Darth Maul's Double-Bladed Lightsaber from The Phantom Menace. It halves his attack and striking power, he can't effectively use it as a staff without chopping off his own limbs, etc. At several times, his saber DOES graze his shoulders when he's doing his attacks on Obi-wan and Qui-gon. Looks cool, but very impractical.
- Satele Shan in The Old Republic MMO wields a more practical version, with a long handle in the middle and short lightsaber blades on either end. Which allows her to shift her grip as needed and wield it like an actual quarterstaff or spear-staff should be wielded. So Maul's problem isn't that the concept is inherently unworkable, its that he was doing it wrong.
- However, the 'Hope' cinematic trailer demonstrates to Satele Shan that a saber-staff configuration is vulnerable to having the hilt destroyed by an attack to the center of your 'staff', the natural parrying location, as Darth Malgus proves when fighting her. While lightsaber-resistant materials (such as cortosis weave) exist, she'd apparently forgotten to reinforce her lightsaber hilt with one.
- Satele Shan in The Old Republic MMO wields a more practical version, with a long handle in the middle and short lightsaber blades on either end. Which allows her to shift her grip as needed and wield it like an actual quarterstaff or spear-staff should be wielded. So Maul's problem isn't that the concept is inherently unworkable, its that he was doing it wrong.
- That droid missile from the beginning of Revenge of the Sith that targets Obi-Wan's craft. They fire a missile at a ship. It overtakes his ship and opens. Then droids comes out of the missile and start dismantling the ship. This process takes several minutes, and gives him time to tell someone what's happened and that person to try two different strategies to successfully save him. The droids end up variously shot, knocked off the ship, and taken out by R-2. If it had just hit him and exploded like any sane design would have had it do, he'd be dead.
- Han Solo pointed out that the lightsabers are completely useless for fight compared to blasters. That's true unless the wielder is a Jedi.
- See also the Star Wars Expanded Universe under Literature.
- The 'Noisy Cricket' from Men in Black is about 2 inches long at most, but packs more of a punch than your average brick of C4, being able to tear through steel like a hot knife through butter. One problem; It has insane recoil, capable of propelling the wielder a good several feet backwards with every shot. Because of this, there's absolutely no way anyone could use one of them in a combat situation without inflicting injuries to themselves or anyone around them, if not outright killing them due to landing on something hazardous or a retaliatory attack from the person/thing they were attacking.
- In the background information for the weapons the Noisy Cricket has an adjustable power level ranging from an equivalent to a 9mm handgun right up to an anti-armor capability. Veteran agents often issued the Cricket to inattentive rookies as a joke. In the animated series, Agent L reveals that there's a way to fire it at full power without experiencing the recoil. Problem is, it requires getting into an insanely complicated and uncomfortable-looking stance. And while you're doing that the enemy can probably just kill you.
- You think that they'd just mount the active element of the Noisy Cricket in a larger, perhaps rifle-sized, housing, and fill the rest of the volume with recoil compensation. They already have inertialess cars, so why not an inertial-damping muzzle brake?
- Believe it or not Iron Man's armor was like this for a while in the first film. One montage shows Tony Stark repeatedly testing the armor and correcting various design flaws that crop up. Among these problems are the fact that the suit tends to freeze up when Tony flies too high into the sky. This serves as Foreshadowing for the final battle, when Tony--who has already experienced and solved the problem of his armor freezing--lures Obadiah Stane to that very same height.
- Batman has the Batwing. Looks like another cool addition to Batman's arsenal; a modified stealth jet complete with Gatling guns, missiles and a price tag that had to be somewhere north of $2 billion back in 1989. Has an utterly god-awful targeting system (it's completely unable to hit a man-sized target under ideal conditions) and goes down in one shot from a pistol.
- The killer in The Jackhammer Massacre awkwardly lugs around a jackhammer, which needs a ludicrously long extension cord to even work. He's beaten when it's unplugged.
- Enforcement Droid (ED) 209 from RoboCop. It's a badass-looking walking mech with machine guns for hands, and one of the most awesome-looking things in the movie. But it was rushed out and unfinished, leaving it with a lot of design flaws, including the inability use stairs, the inability to right itself when it's fallen down, and a programming flaw that keeps it from realizing when a suspect has surrendered. ED-209's impracticality was what led to the creation of Robocop, who was Awesome but Practical.