Unobtainium: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Much [[Mad Scientist|mad science]] uses unobtainium, such as [[Chemistry Can Do Anything|imaginary chemicals]] with impossible properties or super-strong alloys that cannot be made from common earthly metals. [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|Alien]] spaceships and weapons are usually made from unobtainium as well.

 

 

Others are more fantastic "high-grade" unobtainium, such as [[Antimatter]], which would be a revolutionary way of storing huge amounts of energy, if it didn't violently<ref>as in, 1-10 grams = tactical nuclear weapon yield</ref> undergo mutual annihilation with ''any'' conventional matter it came into contact with, [[Disaster Dominoes|including the walls of antimatter storage containers]].

 

 

 

 

 

The term originally comes from aerospace engineering, where it was used to refer to materials that would be perfect for a particular design if not for the inconvenient fact that they were unavailable -- either because they were too expensive, or did not actually exist.

* Vizorium is both the [[Unobtainium]] that makes warp-drive possible, and the central plot driver of the [[Dirty Pair (Light Novel)|Dirty Pair]] Movie ''Project Eden''.

* GEMs in ''[[Mai-Otome]]'' give Otome their robes (and thus, most of their powers). The Coral and Pearl GEMs used by students are artificially created, but the knowledge of how to create Meister GEMs was lost, making them extremely valuable.

* [[Bleach]] has Sekkiseki.

* Goemon Ishikawa from ''[[Lupin III]]'' has a katana with a blade made either from a meteor (the manga series) or from a rare alloy that only his clan knows the secrets to making (''Dragon of Doom'', ''First Contact'').

== Film ==

* Central to the plot of ''Black Lighting'' (Chernaya Molniya) is a mystery space element that powers the flying car. The [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]] spends the entire movie trying to get his hands on it.

** According to [[All There in the Manual|the guide]], it's called "unobtainium" because this is a tongue-in-cheek designation for all high-temperature semiconductor materials, called so by Earth scientists when they gave up on reliably synthesizing them.

* ''[[The Core]]'' lampshaded this, calling their Unobtainium ''Unobtainium'', which turned heat and pressure into electrical energy. Perfect for a journey through the Earth's molten core. Extremely practical, as all you had to do was to randomly cut supply wires and casually weld them to the substance in question, and you had an energy source that rivaled a nuclear reactor. There are actually [[Real Life]] substances that turn pressure into electricity, known as Piezoelectric substances, although they wouldn't work on such a large scale. One example is quartz crystals (including the one that goes "tick" in your wristwatch). Piezoelectric materials work by ''flexing'', seeing as how the energy has to come from somewhere. This means your core-ship would generate lots of lovely electricity in the process of crumpling into a ball. If a [[Real Life]] metallurgist with a sense of humor actually managed to make something that worked as in the movie, they might be sorely tempted to call it "unobtainium" or "impossibilium" or something like that.

* Wells also had a previously undiscovered element present in the titular comet in The Day Of The Comet.

* [[Harry Harrison]]'s 1973 Golden Age SF spoof novel, ''Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers'' features Cheddite (a fuel created from cheese). In another scene the heroes' 747 jet is turned into a spacecraft by means of windows armored with ''armolite'', vacuum insulation with ''insulite'', fuel tanks filled with ''combustite'', guns firing pellets of ''destructite'', batteries replaced with ''capacitite'' and a space-warp drive powered by ''warpite''.

* Iridium, a natural element that is extremely rare on Earth, is often used in more dramatic [[Sci Fi]] stories.

* The German SF/pulp series ''[[Perry Rhodan]]'' has over the course of its history collected a fair bit of unobtainium in various forms. Classic examples are Ynkelonium, a metallic element that does not react with antimatter and can to an extent prevent such reactions from occurring in its immediate vicinity, and Luurs-Metal, which always maintains a constant temperature of about 3.4 degrees Celsius. Both materials occur naturally in the universe and cannot be synthesized.

 

== Live Action TV ==

** Dalekanium is often called 'bonded polycarbide' when they want it to sound less silly.

*** Which basically means plastic. Specifically Kevlar.

** Naquadah is also a powerful source of energy (naquadah reactors). Also ZPMs could be seen as a sort of unobtainium given that no one knows how to make them and they're needed to run all the Ancient technology in the series (as well as providing a convenient bit of [[Tim Taylor Technology]] to the human ships)

** Naquadriah also indirectly plays the Unobtainium role in ''[[Stargate Universe (TV)|Stargate Universe]]'' as the only known power source that can support a wormhole between the Milky Way and ''Destiny''. Only problem is that it takes a planet full of the stuff to do it, and that planet tends to blow up in the process.

** Corbomite, which doesn't actually exist; it was an [[Ass Pull]] by James T. Kirk to bluff an enemy -- which means that Trek pulled a [[Lampshade Hanging]] on their own tendency to invoke unobtainium in one of its ''earliest episodes''.

** Neutronium. This is a real substance: a type of "degenerate matter" composed entirely of neutrons, thought to be what neutron stars are made of -- but since even a thimbleful would weigh millions of tons, its usefulness as a material is rather limited.

** Latinum, a valuable liquid metal, used as a form of hard currency due to its rarity and the fact that replicator technology cannot recreate it.

** Trilithium, less stable than dilithium, but equally magical.

** Vertenium-Cortenide, a compound of ''two'' non-existent substances, used in the warp coils themselves.

** Archerite, another Ass Pull, this time by the Andorian Shran when explaining to another alien commander what he was doing in their territory.

** Transparent aluminum. which gets bonus points, given that a normal modern chemist could apparently figure out what it was ''just by looking at the atomic structure''. Naturally, [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup|he would still be helpless to reproduce it without a diagram of said structure]].

*** Aluminum Oxynitride is a ceramic, however. Transparent aluminum metal remains unobtainium.

** Cortenide, which comprises Data's skull with duranium, as he describes to a Klingon warrior who almost knocked himself out headbutting him.

** Trellium-D formed a major [[Mineral MacGuffin]] for the third season of ''[[Star Trek Enterprise]]'', which has the ability to negate the random [[Negative Space Wedgie|anomalies]] that existed in the Expanse. Interestingly, there appeared to be a sub-science developed around the item, with a method of synthesizing the stuff.

** At one point in ''[[Star Trek Voyager]]'' when aliens try to kidnap Paris for the {{spoiler|weapons research}} that has been implanted in his brain, Janeway mentions that they packed the shuttle he was captured in with fulmorite explosives.

** And an episode of ''[[Star Trek Voyager]]'' had an alien species using the same exact fuel by name!

* In ''[[Power Rangers Time Force]]'', Trizirium Crystals are an very powerful energy source that originally won't be discovered about 200 years from 2001, because of the battles between the Time Force Rangers and Ransik, as well as Bio-Lab trying to reverse-engineer the future tech the early discovery {{spoiler|nearly sucked the world into time vortices in the "End of Time" three-part finale}}.

* ''[[Shadowrun]]'', true to its fantasy-scifi-blend form, borrows from myths for its [[Unobtainium]], such as orichalcum, an alloy of copper, gold, silver, and mercury that couldn't even ''begin'' to exist if there wasn't magic in the world.

* In ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'', almost every race has a form of this, from the psychic wraith bone to the ubiquitous armour plate the humans use on tanks, adamantium. Adamantium's properties are never really explained, though, in the books, it seems to suffer from a mineral variation of [[The Worf Effect]] ("How could they cut through X many feet of adamantium that easily?!"); another worf effect example is the material used in Space Marine power armour, Ceramite (often such examples involve either cutting blades, or melta/heat weapons as ceramite is reckoned to be extremely resistant to heat). This also happens a lot with human building materials in that universe, all of which have odd but recognizable names and are supposedly better than what we have now, but which can be reduced to rubble in the first bombardment.

* In ''[[Warhammer (Tabletop Game)|Warhammer]]'' (fantasy setting of 40000), glowing green 'warpstone' is used to create mutations, enhance magical powers, bring the dead to life, and as an energy source for powerful technology. In the Skaven rat-men society, it is even used as currency. Warpstone is considered rare, and is mined and collected by nearly all factions in the Warhammer setting.

** That's not quite right. Warp energy spewing out of the Old Ones' polar gates blows across the world, refracting into the eight colours (winds) of magic. The unrefracted leftovers (dark magic) settle in areas of evil and death, congealing into warpstone over time. The Warhammer world also has a moon composed entirely of warpstone, Morrslieb, which rains warpstone meteor showers on occasion. Warpstone is also not collected by any faction except the evil ones, most notably the Skaven.

** Red steel, cinnabril, and related substances from the "Red Steel" region of [[Mystara]].

** Bloodsilver from the [[Birthright (Tabletop Game)|Birthright]] setting.

** With the release of the Alchemical sourcebook, there now exists a sixth basic magical material as well: Adamant. It is extremely rare in the main world of Creation, and only slightly more commonly found in the machine-body world of the Primordial Autochthon. To quote the sourcebook, "Adamant is composed of super-dense, electric-blue diamonds that form in yard-long rod-like masses with smaller crystals growing off larger ones. They can be found in areas that are under enormous pressure and are scorchingly hot. Mining for adamant is impossible without protective gear, even for Exalts, and special tools must be used to cut the crystalline rods free so that they can be taken back to a city and refined into useable forms." Though it is a crystal, rather than a metal or stone like the other materials, it is used in the forging of magic weapons and armor in an identical way to the others.

** Solars. One of the reasons that Solar technology is unsustainable by anybody else is due to their Wyld Shaping powers. When Solars need a material with properties relevent to the artifact or [[Magitech]] they are building, they just go out into the Wyld and conjure it up, regardless of how impossible its existence would otherwise be.

* The "Perfected Metals" of ''[[Mage: The Awakening (Tabletop Game)|Mage: The Awakening]]''. They have numerous extremely useful properties (perfected iron, for example, is practically indestructible, capable of cutting through ''diamond'' when properly sharpened, and can bend like rubber before returning to its original shape, with absolutely no metal fatigue), and can be used to create all manner of useful alloys (such as the anti-magic "thaumium"). There are only seven of them (only alchemical metals can be perfected), and it takes powerful magic to perfect them and alloy them. Perfecting is also a ''very'' expensive process, since it requires only naturally formed samples of metal (rather than transmuted or conjured) and only 10% of the mass yields perfected metal, with the rest being completely lost (hence, you perfect 100 grams of metal and only get 10 grams of perfected metal, with the remainder destroyed).

* Ghost Rock, which burns twice as long and twice as hot as coal, is used for all the weird high tech stuff from ''[[Deadlands]]'' and somehow stopped the collapse of the Confederacy. Oh, and it looks like coal that has had tortured human faces into it, and it moans faintly when burned.

* The various essential elements from ''[[GURPS]]: Magic'' as well as orichalcum and adamantium in ''Fantasy'' and hyperdense matter in ''Ultra-Tech''.

* The ''[[Crusader (Video Game)|Crusader]]'' games had two.

** Di-corellium, a mineral that is apparently better for use in nuclear reactors than plutonium--to the point that it almost became a metaphor for petroleum, and at the very least for energy crises in general, what with the increasing scarcity of it and power shortages on Earth because of it--and of which vast quantities, about half of all known reserves, are on the moon.

* The ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' games feature Phazon, which is a highly-mutagenic, violently unstable, sentient mineral. Being a bit more specific, there is an incredibly resistant metal made from it known as Phazite.

** In addition, visor scans can identify the chemical properties of certain structures. When you see names such as "Talloric Alloy" and "Bendenzium" in the description of a destructible obstacle, it is usually an indication as to which weapon you will need to use to proceed.

 

== Web Original ==

* A beautiful example is the wonderflonium of ''[[Dr. Horribles Sing Along Blog|Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog]]'', so salient it's essentially a [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshade]].

* The ''[[League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions]]'' had Plotonium as a generic whatever-the-plot-required supermetal. Also a building block of the universe that allowed people to have superpowers was Nevesytrof (much more stable then the Sub-Reality or Super-Reality of other universes.)

* Wootz steel is a very specific historic case of this. It's made out of crucible-fired sand consisting of iron and tungsten carbide, which only naturally occurs in a very few places, almost all of them in central Asia. The process for making it was lost for centuries after the ore ran out, and was only rediscovered very recently through chemical analysis (the ore contained trace amounts of vanadium that created an unusual spiky crystal structure in the solidifying ingots). By all accounts, wootz steel is both stronger and more flexible than ordinary steel; back when swords were still used as weapons, Indo-Persian swords were highly valued throughout India and the Middle East because of this.

* Pandemonium Chloride is the evil, HAZMAT twin of unobtainium, a material of unspecified composition that greatly endangers human life with the smallest spills or leaks.

** Incidentally, the classical bucket of sand will not save you from it either: it'll just ''[[Beyond the Impossible|burn through the sand]]''.

** Judging from its description, it probably had a lot in common with napalm.

** Not really. Napalm isn't really liquid (it's more sticky, like slime) nor is it ignited by contact with water. Water can put out napalm, as can covering the area of fire with a blanket, neither of which was supposedly possible with Greek fire.

* Mountain biker slang for a bike made of a rare or expensive material is also 'unobtainium'.

* In the late 70's Silicon Valley, there were two popular materials for solving otherwise intractable engineering problems, very specifically: Unobtainium-12 and Expensium-6. Neither was in the Grainger's or Thomas catalog.

* [[NASCAR]] racer Junior Johnson had a friend in the aerospace industry who wanted him to try out a brand new material they'd cooked up: carbon fiber. Johnson sent him a pair of control arms to be copied in the material, and was astounded that they weighed less than a single steel arm. Since he was the only person with access to it, [[Loophole Abuse|there were no rules preventing him from replacing as many parts as he liked with CF.]] The racing body only took notice of these parts when they were worried that his carbon brakes, visibly glowing from heat, might cause a tire fire.

* Nuclear physics has created Exotic Matter in exceedingly minute quantities. Synthetic baryons (baryons are particles such as protons and neutrons) contain configurations other than the standard two up/one down, one up/two down, quark arrangements. Theoretically such femtotechnology could lead to a dazzling array of alternate chemistries. Thousands of alternate periodic tables may be possible, maybe more.

[[Category:Applied Phlebotinum]]

[[Category:Unobtainium]]