Plot Technology: Difference between revisions

High technology (or magic) available to characters never seems to trickle down to the populace. In particular, if a villain is in possession of a weapon which would be worth millions to the Pentagon, why would he limit himself to robbing banks with it? This especially applies to one-shot enemies on [[Speculative Fiction]] series with amazing inventions that have never been seen before -- andbefore—and are never seen again, unless that villain recurs. One suspect is the short half-life of the necessary [[Unobtanium|Plotonium-186]] required to power this type of technology.

* First [[Lampshaded]], then subverted by ''[[Starman (Comic Bookcomics)|Starman]]''. When Jack Knight agrees to take on the mantle of Starman, he castigates his father for having had this incredible technology for years, but [[Reed Richards Is Useless|never doing anything with it]] except fighting [[Super Villain|supervillains]], and only agrees to be Starman if his father works on the civilian applications. At the end of the series, he delivers. (Though these were undone to fit him into [[The DCU]].)

* In ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' there seem to be a handful of [[Mad Scientist|Mad Scientists]]s with extremely advanced technology, but at most they share their inventions with one corporation, not the entire world. Riff ''has'' tried selling his inventions on occasion, but they tend to be [https://web.archive.org/web/20110122232300/http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=021228 too dangerous] for most people to handle.

* Justified in the ''[[Wild Cards]]'' series, wherein some examples of amazingly advanced technology ''appear'' to exist (independently of things brought by genuinely more advanced aliens); however, it turns out that the ability to build such machines is among the powers granted to some by the Wild Card virus. Most such devices will only work for the Aces who build them -- theythem—they're not really working machines, but a form of [[Magic Feather]] -- while—while the exceptions can't be reproduced by engineers whose brains haven't been rewired by an alien genetic weapon.