Awesome but Impractical/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


It's not only impressive, it's irresponsible.
Panther of The Protomen
That's smoke, yes yes, see? It's a proper supercar! It didn't just come to the track and do a lap like a robot and be boring, it came to the track and exploded, immediately! That's what, it's what supercars do! It's proper!
Richard Hammond, Top Gear, on a Pagani Zonda
Again Alfred, it's a STEALTH FIGHTER JET shaped like a BAT and I use it to fight common STREET CRIME. WHAT ABOUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE?!
Give me a gun that never fires! Give me a sword that is ever blunt! Give me a weapon that deals no wound, so long as it always strikes fear!
That's not what The Empire would have done, Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done.

There are, still, some lessons here. One is that, contrary to the U.S. Navy's fervent belief, the aircraft carrier is no longer the capital ship. It ceded that role long ago to the submarine. In one naval exercise after another, the sub sinks the carriers. The carriers just pretend it didn't happen and carry on with the rest of the exercise.
About thirty years ago, my first boss, Senator Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, asked Admiral Hyman Rickover how long he thought the U.S. aircraft carriers would last in the war with the Soviet navy, which was largely a submarine navy. Rickover's answer, on the record in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was, "About two days." The Committee, needless to say, went on to approve buying more carriers.

Davy Jones's Locker by William S. Lind
Larry was still out, but Earl patted him down just in case. This time he found a .50 Desert Eagle, which was probably the single most unwieldy pistol ever manufactured, and to make matters worse, this one was actually gold plated.