Break Out the Museum Piece

Enthusiasts take an old steam engine out of the museum.

"Still purrs, like it was yesterday."

— Batman taking out the Bat-Tank after ten years of retirement, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Cutting-edge technology is usually superior to the older stuff. But sometimes heroes can't use the latest equipment: it may have been destroyed, stolen, confiscated, or rendered inoperable (or obsolete) by the enemy's Applied Phlebotinum or the Alien Space Bats. So what do they do? They take the older stuff out of storage and make do with it. And more often than not, the ancient devices still work just fine.

May lead to Chekhov's Gun or Chekhov's Exhibit, if said museum piece has been noted earlier in the plot. Sometimes said museum piece is a Super Prototype that was too costly for mass production — or had other flaws that they will just have to risk.

There is a certain degree of Truth in Television involved in this trope. Often the newer and more "advanced" a technology is, the more points of failure it can have. Older technologies may not be as efficient, however, they can still get the job done without the drawbacks of the newer technology. For example: compare attempting to navigate by GPS versus celestial navigation. Yes, the latter isn't as precise of a method, however, it doesn't rely on complicated electronics that can malfunction, be jammed, run out of power, etc. On any clear night, a knowledgeable mariner can easily use the stars to get to where he needs to go.

This trope is about using old equipment. When an old paradigm beats a new one (like pitfalls versus Humongous Mecha), it's Rock Beats Laser. When older equipment is better, it's They Don't Make Them Like They Used To when standards decline within a civilization, but Older Is Better when an older civilization or some flavor of Precursors are involved; in either case, an Archaeological Arms Race can ensue. If it's not better, it makes for an easy David Versus Goliath situation when it goes up against the newer tech, and as we all know, Underdogs Never Lose, perhaps because the user is more experienced. In SF settings, it's very possible that Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better. If the museum piece is used with something newer it's Retro Upgrade. See also Invincible Classic Car. Contrast with Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway, in which the piece of equipment is usually a prototype or one-of-a-kind that's put into service before being properly put through its paces. If it needs to be fixed up before it can be used, that's Resurrect the Wreck.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One episode of Astro Boy involved Skunk's henchmen re-activating an old Humongous Mecha, since it's too old to be affected by the anti-tech shields surrounding the prison he was in.
• Black Lagoon:
  • Roberta does a lot of damage with a relic flintlock she took off a wall in her boss' house.
  • The Lagoon Company uses an Elco PT boat. And even manage to destroy a Hind gunship with it. By firing a torpedo at the helicopter.
• To a lesser extent, the Shen-Hu from Code Geass. It's not that old (being the precursor to the Guren Mk-II, itself roughly a year old), but like the Mobile Suit Gundam Wing example the machine was so insanely overpowered that nobody could use it. When Li Xingke takes it into battle, the only change made is the addition of a flight unit.
• Cowboy Bebop:
  • In "Speak Like a Child", Faye receives an old Betamax tape that might contain clues to her past, so Spike and Jet scour the solar system looking for a working Betamax VCR.
  • In "Wild Horses", the Space Shuttle Columbia makes an appearance — a crazy old man has spent the last couple of decades restoring it to working order, and pulls it out on one last flight to save the day when Spike's state-of-the-art Swordfish space-fighter is disabled by a computer-virus. It turns out that the old man has also given the Shuttle much-improved engines, as it's able to take off conventionally on a runway and reach orbit under its own power (without the aid of booster rockets), neither of which the real-life Shuttles could do. And for added museum-piece value, it's towed out of the hangar by a WWII-era tank. The rescue is a success, but the shuttle is thoroughly trashed during the reentry and landing (note also that this episode originally aired before the real Columbia accident.)
  • Towards the end of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, a number of museum piece aircraft are brought out. Some of the designs don't exist yet and some are museum pieces in the present day. Unlike usual, many of them are in... less than ideal working condition. Thankfully, the pilots all have parachutes.
• In Digimon Adventure 02, Armor Digivolving is this, sort of. It's an 'ancient' form of evolution that can't be blocked by the Control Spires that prevent the normal kind, like using a computer so old that it can't be affected by a virus that targets newer models.
• Happens in Shin Getter Robo when reptilian duplicates of the protagonists hijack the Getter G. They even have to get the original Getter from an actual museum.
  • Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo has the Dinosaur Empire break into the old Saotome Lab with the intent of destroying the mothballed Shin Getter. In order to do so, they hijack the many incomplete prototype Getters left in storage; since Getter Energy is the Dinosaurs' Kryptonite Factor, it's a Suicide Mission and they know it, so only the most loyal (and/or fanatical) soldiers signed up.
• The high-school Sensha-do (Tankery; the Way of the Tank) teams in Girls und Panzer use exclusively World War II-era tanks. The only modern tank seen in the anime is piloted by Captain Chono.
  • In Girls und Panzer das Finale Oarai finds and fields a World War I-era Mark IV. Not to be outdone, BC Freedom Academy has a Renault FT-17 as their flag tank.
• In Gunbuster, the humans decide to reactivate the obsolete Excelion for one final mission, go on a suicide run into the middle of the space monster fleet and detonate a black hole bomb.
• Gundam examples:
  • During the Second Invasion of Jaburo in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, the Titans haul out various variants of One Year War Mobile Suits to defend the base. These suits are easily no match for the invading AEUG and besides, they're just there to lull to the group into a false sense of security as the base is set to go up in nuclear fire.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam F91, a crazy old man brings out a Transforming Mecha tank literally from a museum to fight off the Crossbone Vanguard invaders... and gets severely thrashed by their newer machines. What's left after the thrashing makes a reasonably good getaway car for a bunch of refugees to be.
  • The biggest example in the franchise happens in Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam: Ghost, where Font Baud pilots a 70-year-old Zaku II during the era of Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. Bonus points for said Zaku II literally being found in a museum.
  • In Victory Gundam Outside Story (a manga side story of the anime), Grey Stoke pilots the Gump, which is actually the 65-year-old MSZ-010 ZZ Gundam with makeshift replacements for one hand and foot, and a barrel over its distinctive head to conceal its identity. Unlike the above-mentioned Zaku II, this one wasn't taken from a museum because Grey Stoke is actually an elderly Judau Ashta and the Gump/ZZ Gundam has been in his possession for its entire existence.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, the Tallgeese (originally called the Prototype Leo) is the first military mobile suit ever built, but it was never used because it was so overpowered that it killed all the test pilots, hence OZ and the like settle for the Leo, a mobile suit which is much weaker but is also far easier to pilot without killing oneself just from the G-forces involved. When the Gundams appear and start ripping the Leos limb from limb, a student of Zechs Merquise's suggests using the Tallgeese specifically because it's overpowered, meaning it might match the Gundams, which it did.^note The scientists who built the Gundams were, in fact, the ones who designed the Tallgeese in the first place, and later used their knowledge to design the Wing Zero, the mobile suit that the successor Gundams were based off of. It's lampshaded in the anime when a soldier comments he didn't know Zechs flew "antiques".
  • ∀ Gundam has the Earth forces discover long-buried, ancient mobile suits; namely, a bunch of Zakus ("Borjanons") and Capules ("Kapools"), plus one Turn A Gundam; and use them against the invading Moonrace. The Moonrace eventually discovers a similar cache of ancient suits on the Moon, which are easily on par with modern suits (or in the Turn X's case, far superior in every way).
  • The EMS-04 Zudah in Mobile Suit Gundam MS Igloo is a peculiar example. Having lost out to the Zaku I for the role of Zeon's main fighting machine (due to a habit of exploding when flying too fast), the prototype Zudah are later pulled out again, renumbered the EMS-10 and touted as new superweapons in a desperate bid of propaganda. The explosive truth was quickly discovered by the enemy, however, and only the suit's genuinely high performance makes up for it.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam 00, the final battle between Setsuna and Ribbons sees them trashing their incredibly powerful new Gundams and forced to pilot their originals, Exia and 0 Gundam (albeit with some upgrades).
  • In the 00 movie, the Earth Federation whips out every battle capable machine they have available in the face of the ELS threat. As a result, brand new GN-XIV's are fighting alongside old Tierens and Realdos.
  • In episode 4 of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, the Zeon Remnants of Earth take to attacking the EFSF's Torrington Base with One Year War relics, with their commander even going to battle in a modified Zaku I, although Loni has the Shamblo, courtesy of the Sleeves. The Sleeves themselves supplemented the attack (and earlier, defended Palau), with a mix of new mobile suits and a couple from the Gryps Conflict. The attack was effective but ultimately ended in failure once the remnants lost their advantage when the Shamblo's psycommu malfunctions and Loni goes berserk, even more so when the Byalant-Kai and the Jesta team arrive.
    Jesta Pilot: What is this, some kinda walking war museum!?
    • Not to be outdone, the EFSF also broke out infantry use, guided anti-MS missiles, like the ones Lieutenant Barberry and his anti-MS teams used and their own Gryps Conflict mobile suits. The Gryps Conflict, admittedly, isn't too long ago for the time's mobile suits to be considered obsolete (just nine years) as they're still being widely used by all sides.
    • The Remnant's earlier attack on Dakar was much more successful, with the Juaggu lasting longer and doing more damage than the newer Capule against the Federation defenders.
  • Done in the flashback part of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin: right before the Battle of Loum, a group of punks armed with submachine guns and Molotov cocktails invade the Texas Bunch due its inhabitants allegedly being Zeon supporters (as the real Char Aznable hailed from there, and Casval kept the origin when he stole the identity), and get a bad surprise when the survivors of the Center Village who took refuge into the Mass ranch break out Wild West-era guns (and a Maxim gun) that happened to be there because the whole colony was originally slated to be a Wild West-themed amusement park (hence they were almost literal museum pieces).
  • In a Gundam: Reconguista in G 3D short, Bellri and Aida are attacked by Mask piloting a replica of the Unicorn Gundam Unit 3 "Phenex" named "G-Phenex". Despite the G-Phenex being hundreds of years old design-wise, it's still powerful enough to give the G-Arcane and G-Self trouble.
  • All of the Gundam frames in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans were made over three centuries ago for the Calamity War, some of which were in long-term storage when used in the present. Since the whole solar system suffered Space Age Stasis afterward, they're none the worse for it.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, during the final battle Suletta pilots the Gundam Calibarn, a prototype model over 20 years old that was put in storage for being too dangerous to pilot. It's the only available model that can power through the Big Bad's ability to hijack any technology using permet.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom, the Duel and Buster, both the two surviving members of the G Project, and ironically the two oldest pieces from it, return as Yzak and Dearka's machines for the final battle, albeit retrotfitted with nuclear reactors, ZAKU cockpits and controls, all new weapons, and METEOR compatibility.
• In Macross 7, Mirya is shown to have kept her old Valkyrie from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross over the years and breaks it out to assist the defenses when City 7 is cut off from the fleet and other reinforcements. However, while Mirya can pilot it well enough to fight off the more advanced machines of the day, Gamlin (who's only piloted more powerful modern Nightmares) gets quickly shot down when he tries to pilot it because he pushed it too hard.
  • Three colonists on City 7 were on the Macross with a Destroid Monster, and break it out when the ship is cut off and Mirya calls for a formation. The problem is that the Monster is a heavy artillery unit, and while still devastating there's no target slow enough for it.
• Moscow 2160: Danila Kuragin uses PPSH-41, 2 centuries old weapon, in 2160. Downplayed, since his gun was upgraded with super steel that lets him penetrate cyborgs nearby and withstand some blade damage.
• The Arthra from Lyrical Nanoha had served as the main ship for the heroes in the first two seasons, though it had been decommissioned by the time of StrikerS and was scheduled to be scrapped. It briefly gets brought out of retirement during the second half of the season to serve as a mobile base for Riot Force 6 after the destruction of the Long Arch in episode 17.
• In Noir Kirika uses a Beretta M1934. The anime was released in 2001 ... 9 years after production stopped (the overwhelming majority of them have pre-1945 serial numbers).
• In the first episode of Slayers Next, Martina reactivates an ancient Golem that had been built by her ancestors centuries ago as part of a plan to rule the world. Unfortunately, since the Golem hadn't undergone basic maintenance in centuries, it quickly fell apart.
• The entire premise of Space Battleship Yamato, although the Yamato has been extensively retrofitted with state-of-the-art weaponry (including the Wave-Motion Gun) and the engines have been replaced so it can complete its mission IN SPACE! Although the hull had some changes done during all the series, the Wave Motion Gun's place at the bow doesn't change appearances a lot. Meanwhile, the bridge is an all-new Space-age and even has pointy glass protectors, as well as a set of wings on the very top. And the funnel is now housing several missiles, and the entire stern was sort of just cut off and instead you have a massive rocket booster powered by the almighty Wave Motion Engine. Fun fact, the Wave Motion Engine actually works with vacuum as explained in the original series and the 2013 remake, making it seem like a glorified "Space vacuum cleaner"
• Steins;Gate: The gang has to find an IBN 5100 to run some legacy machine code to unravel the plot.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Once the Mugann start attacking in force, the old pilots of Team Dai-Gurren bust out their Gunmen, which were decommissioned and replaced with the "more advanced" Grapearls during the Time Skip. But as it turns out, the Gunmen were originally designed to fight Mugann, so they fare much better than their counterparts.
• Late in Tiger & Bunny Kotetsu/Wild Tiger loses access to his Powered Armor when Maverick Unpersons him and frames him for murder. Luckily for him, his friend and former boss Ben Jackson's been keeping the old spandex costume safe — although not entirely in mint condition.
  Kotetsu: Hey, it's all wrinkled!
  Ben: Uh, let's not worry about little things like that.
• In the movie UFO Robo Grendizer vs Great Mazinger, the Vegan Empire invade the Mazinger Museum and steal Great Mazinger, then kidnap Kouji and force him to pilot it. When the story is done for the game Super Robot Wars MX, they steal Great Mazinger and Mazinger Z, but make Kouji pilot Z instead.
  • Subverted in Mazinger Z: Infinity: The Mazinger Z in the Mazinger Museum is a fake. The real Mazinger Z had stayed in storage within the Photon Power Plant just in case.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG Stories: Humanity was wiped out and the world is populated by androids. The androids of Kama store Sky Striker equipment in a museum because only humans can use it. Kama later grows a human girl from a preserved fertilized egg and names her Raye. When Kama is invaded, Raye takes the Sky Striker suit from the museum so she can fight in its defense.

Comic Books

• Atari Force: In the second series, the Scanner One spaceship was actually a museum piece, and it was still functional and fully stocked!
• Batman:
  • After the then-modern Batmobile was destroyed at the end of the Knightfall storyline, Batman takes up the original Batmobile for quite a while, even with a team-up with Spider-Man.
  • During Batman: Cataclysm, Batman needs to get through the quake-ravaged Gotham while it is snowing and ends up pulling out the monster truck-like Batmobile from Batman: The Cult.
  • Batman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns breaks out the massive tank-like Batmobile after coming out of his ten-year retirement to deal with the Mutant Gang.
  "Still purrs. As if it was yesterday."

  • He brings it back out in Dark Knight III: The Master Race, along with the Powered Armor he used to fight Superman.
  • The Elseworlds story Batman Dark Knight Dynasty showcased Brenna "Batwoman" Wayne's incredibly advanced 25th-century power armour, before destroying its power cells so she had to swap it for a bat-costume that was just a costume.
  • In Batman '66, a villain breaks into Wayne Manor and steals the William Shakespeare bust that hides the button to the Batcave's entrance. Since Bruce and Dick have no way to get into the Batcave, Alfred brings out a chest containing their prototype costumes. As a Mythology Gag, the prototype costumes are the ones used during the initial screen tests for Batman (1966), right down to the awkward oval-less Bat Ensigna.
  • In one Golden Age story (and retold in The Untold Legend of the Batman), Batman confronts mobster Lew Moxon wearing his father's costume party outfit (which was a scalloped cape with a bat-eared and -nosed mask, effectively making Thomas Wayne the "first" Batman). The sight of the costume shocks the mobster, restoring his memory and causing him to flee into a passing truck in terror.
• Benoit Brisefer: Narrowly averted in the French-Belgian comic episode "Lady d'Olphine", mobsters engaged in a turf war with a rival gang in the fictional country of Monte San Sone vainly try to talk a museum curator into selling them a WW2-vintage howitzer.
• Booster Gold: The entire origin of Booster Gold. All the devices he uses to be a superhero were stolen from a 25th Century museum, and he uses a time machine stored in the museum to get to the 20th Century where they would then be beyond state of the art. (Though at least originally, they were actually from his future too: 30th Century Legion of Super-Heroes devices that had gone back to the 20th century with Superman, and thus wound up in the museum.)
• What some villagers do in a story by Wilhelm Busch to hunt and kill Fipps the Monkey at the end.
• Captain America: Subverted in The Death of Captain America. Bucky Barnes goes to the Smithsonian, intending to steal Captain America's shield from there, but the exhibit is so sparsely guarded that he realizes the shield displayed can't be the real one. Sure enough, Tony Stark has the real shield under study.
• Commando: In a story titled "Charlie's Tank" a group of plucky British soldiers trapped in occupied France liberate a World War I tank from a museum and use it to escape the Nazis.
• Conjurors: In the Elseworlds story, Ted Kord has State Secretary Felix Faust open up the Smithsonian to break out a crude nuke.
• Dallas Barr: Similar to the Cowboy Bebop example, an arc from this near-future Belgian comic had the hero stuck in orbit, only to be rescued by a Fiction500 friend who had anticipated the problem, and had quickly bought and refurbished a mothballed Soviet rocket.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In one Paperinik comic, Paperinik is fighting the Analogue Knight, an Evil Luddite who's armed with a weapon that disables all technology more advanced than the 40s. Paperinik beats him by breaking out the weaponry of his predecessor, Fantomius, who had cutting edge tech in the 20s.
• Green Lantern: During the War of the Green Lanterns storyline, Krona the Mad Guardian manages to take over the entire Lantern Corps by reinserting Parallax into the Central Lantern Battery, forcing Hal Jordan and the other lanterns from Earth to use alternate rings (Sinestro's yellow ring for Hal, Saint Walker's blue ring for Kyle, Atrocitus's red ring for Guy Gardner, and Indigo-1's indigo ring for John Stewart). While trying to move undetected, the group finds themselves in the Guardian's vault where the original prototype for the green lantern rings is kept; a gauntlet and a backpack power source. As the prototype isn't connected to the central battery, Guy equips it to supplement the red ring and describes the surge of power as feeling like he was wearing twenty power rings at once.
• There's a The Haunted Tank story where a French WWI tank troop offers their aid, having kept their tanks in working condition while running a military museum.
• Iron Man:
  • An early comic has a thief stealing the new (red/gold) armor, so Tony has to put on the old (grey) armor to face him. The new armor is superior in almost every way, but Tony has two advantages. He's more experienced in using his armor (and thus knows the weaknesses of it), and the old suit is said to be stronger.
  • Iron Man recycles this bit periodically; his most common 'museum piece' is the Mark IV armor that debuted in the 1970s, using variations of this suit when his latest armour has been destroyed and he lacks the time, resources, or inclination to just create a more advanced replacement immediately.
  • Subverted in The Ultimates, when Tony brought one of his old suits out... so that he could use it to get to Iron Man Six, a heavily armed, space-capable weapons platform.
  • Subverted with the "rehab armor" from issues #191-199; although physically resembling his original gray suit, and not as powerful as the red-and-golds Rhodey wore at the time, the internal technology was more advanced. The rehab armor even eliminated an exploit of the red-and-gold (one which Tony himself took advantage of when he had to stop a rampaging Rhodey) — it replaced the old hip-mounted power packs with an internalized power source, a design element that carried over to later armors.
  • Exemplified in issue 300, the debut of the original Iron Legion. After the telepresence armor was trashed by Ultimo and Tony needed time to recover and complete his modular armor, War Machine enlisted Eddie March, Happy Hogan, Carl Walker, Michael O'Brien, and Bethany Cabe to don older Iron Man suits to join him in holding off Ultimo.^note  Cabe was the only one who hadn't previously filled in temporarily as Iron Man, but Rhodey picked her because she knew Tony's Secret Identity and could hold her own in a fight. O'Brien and Walker had also had their own armored identities, as the Guardsman and Force, respectively. Abe Zimmer, who readied the armors, noted that they had been stored without any thought of sending them into battle again. At least three of the suits were replicas re-created by Stark, as the original versions had been destroyed^note March donned the original gray "Model 1" armor; Hogan donned the old red-and-gold suit with the horned mask; and O'Brien donned the Silver Centurion armor. In Iron Man #175, Rhodey slagged all of the armors except the "classic" red-and-gold suit he was currently wearing, in order to keep them out of the wrong hands after Tony had lost Stark International; the Centurion was destroyed by Firepower in #230, near the end of the Armor Wars. Walker wore the "classic" suit, which had been damaged the last time Rhodey had worn it in issues #215-216, while Cabe wore the "neo-classic" suit Tony had worn between issue #231 and #280.
  • Turned against Tony in a time-travel adventure, where he meets Andros Stark, who in 2093 busted out his grandfather Arno's armor from storage to commit terrorism. Despite the armor being seventy years old, it's still over a hundred years on Tony's armor, so despite his lack of experience Andros still wins his first fight with Tony.
  • In the Marvel Adventures version of Armor Wars, the first armor Tony retrieves from a group of Russian Super-Soldier terrorists is the Golden Armor.
• Justice League of America: In an issue of JLA (1997), Connor Hawk (Green Arrow) discovers that the rest of the team has been put in a Lotus-Eater Machine by The Key. The Key also destroys Connor's bow and arrows, so he has to use some of Oliver Queen's equipment from the Justice League museum. Unfortunately, it's all trick arrows, which Connor had never gotten the hang of using.
• Judge Dredd once faced off against a Serial Killer who was obsessed with the twentieth century and was killing modern musicians because of their generic pop music. He makes his kills using twentieth-century weaponry, which is noted by Dekker as being antique.
• TheKingdom: Booster Gold's Planet Krypton restaurant in the present-day world (of 1998) is purposely stocked with items from various timelines by the four Titans from the future. Present-day Batman realizes this when he and his colleagues, plus their Kingdom Come counterparts, are transported to Planet Krypton by Hunter to fight Gog with the various items collected, with Batman saying something like "this isn't a museum...it's an arsenal". Where they become museum pieces of a sort is that these items have appeared during the Silver and Bronze Age period DC Universe.
• The Mighty Thor: Following Original Sin, when Thor was rendered unworthy to wield Mjolnir, he adopted his old battle-axe, Jarnbjorn, as an alternate weapon.
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) #15, Spidey and Iron Man are being overwhelmed by the supervillain Regent when Mary Jane, watching from the All-New, All-Different Avengers' base, remembers Tony keeps a lot of his stuff, digs into one of the boxes nearby and hauls out the Iron Spider costume, which she dons to aid the two heroes.
• Starman: In the first arc of James Robinson's series, "Sins of the Father", Jack Knight loses the cosmic rod that his father gave him and has to rely on his father's much older gravity rod.
• Star Wars In one Star Wars Legends comic starring Boba Fett, a rival bounty hunter raids Fett's hideout and steals his armor so he can leech off Boba's reputation. Fett is having none of this and breaks out his father Jango Fett's old armor.
• Transformers: Parodied in one comic when Orion Pax, unarmed and under fire from a gang of Mooks, grabs an ancient gun mounted on a nearby wall and turns to shoot his attackers... only for the gun to click uselessly because it hasn’t been loaded for decades. Orion’s only response is a quick "dammit" before running for cover.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 2: In Cassie Sandsmark's first outing she "borrows" some ancient magical artifacts which grant her strength and flight from an exhibit her mother is overseeing in order to help .

Comic Strips

• British comic strip Axa has Axa escape from the City in a Bottle into the wild, dangerous post-apocalyptic world. She discovers a museum being Reclaimed by Nature, and explores it. There, Axa finds a double-edged sword and jeweled scabbard. She appropriates these, and adds them to her Nubile Savage ensemble.
• Dan Dare suggests this in his first story. Earth ships heading for Venus are exploding when they get near, a problem apparently related to Impulse, the wave energy they are powered with. The solution? Get one of the old rocket ships out of the museum, patch it up and go in that. Sir Hubert nearly agrees but decides to build new rockets.
• In Tex Benson, a futuristic Canadian space opera newspaper strip, the heroes have to launch an attack on the base of an enemy who is amassing his forces at a hidden base prior to an interplanetary invasion. Unable to use their rocket ship to launch an attack from space because of the bad guy's high altitude defense system, the heroes land on the back side of the planet where they know a war museum contains a fully operating squadron of WW-II era P-38 Lightnings. After they load them with fuel and bombs they launch a low-level attack that catches the bad guys by surprise and destroys their base.
• The Wizard of Id comic for April 24th, 2012. A group of the King's soldiers dashes into an old war museum.
  Guards: We need that catapult over there!
  Curator: More budget cuts?

Fan Works

• In the Battletech fic False Prophets, The Fighting Tigers had time to prepare some of the captured mechs that they put on display in the base museum in Dalian for battle, so that they could ambush an invading force. Special bonus for the Urbanmech that had major sections of its armor replaced with transparent (armor-grade) 'cockpit glass' panels so that museum visitors could see the internals.
• The Heroes of the Storm fanfic Heroes of the Desk gives us SPEAR, who retrofits at least two sunken World War II battleships with modern weapons, a premise straight out of Uchuu Senkan Yamato/Star Blazers. In fact, In-Universe SPEAR actually realizes the parallel...and decides that's exactly why they are going to carry out the plan.
• Metal Gear: Green: As the MSF expand and become more powerful and the HPSC's shipments of weapons, tanks and ammo rapidly get destroyed or captured, some Warlords become desperate enough to start using firearms from the Second World War and the Cold War. Grizzly was left in disbelief when being shown a Lugar at the sheer desperation the Warlords were showing.
  Grizzly: Geez, I knew they were getting desperate, but this?
  Eagle: It gets better. I’ve also got a couple of SKSs, Mosin Nagants, a pair of Lee-Enfields, and an MAS-36.
• In the Pony POV Series Wedding Arc, Rarity finds some old, retired guard armor in storage in the basement of the building they're hiding during the Changeling occupation of Canterlot and repurposes it. Misfit Actual gets a similar idea and busts some replica Griffin War-era crossbows out of storage at the museum because the Changelings would be watching the armories.
• "Final Countdown" looks at what the previous Power Rangers of Earth were doing during the Power Rangers in Space finale "Countdown to Destruction". Having all come back together in Angel Grove, they pool their remaining morphers and weapons to make a final stand of their own; Jason, Trini and Zack still have the original Red, Yellow and Black Coins (and Jason can use the Green Coin's last dregs of power for a boost), the five Zeo Rangers still have their Zeonizers, and Justin is able to acquire back-up Turbo Morphers from Storm Blaster and Lightning Cruiser to Kimberly, Aisha, David Trueheart (Tommy's brother) and his father to become the new Pink, Yellow, Red and Green Turbo Rangers. When the final battle begins, the Rangers are also able to summon the Zeo Zords, the Super Zeo Zords, the Red Battlezord, Titannus, Tor and the Dragonzord, allowing them all to hold their own before Andros ends the invasion by killing Zordon and unleashing the Z-Wave.
• In Worldwar: War of Equals, the Italian military uses old Cold War equipment (mainly the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter) and anti-air emplacements to fight off Race killercraft. Bonus point for the F-104, as the fanfiction takes place after it was decommissioned... Meaning that some were in the museums before the Italians brought them back in service.

Film — Animation

• In Arthur Christmas, the current Santa Claus uses a gigantic, futuristic aircraft with cloaking technology to deliver presents to all the children in the world. When Arthur discovers that one child has been overlooked, he and Grandsanta try to deliver the present using the 170-year-old sleigh that previous generations of Santa used, which looks just like the traditional version of Santa's sleigh.
• In Incredibles 2, Dash uses his dad's remote to the Incredibile to summon it from the home of a wealthy collector to their house to help him, Violet and Jack-Jack escape from the brainwashed Dev Tech Supers.

Film — Live-Action

• Aliens:
  • Hicks keeps an antiquated pump-action shotgun "for close encounters," and ends up having to rely on it on several occasions, particularly during the Marines' first run-in with the eponymous critters because the pulse rifles fire ammunition that would rupture the cooling system for the nuclear reactor in which the Aliens are hiding. The Novelization makes it clear the gun has been in Hicks' family for centuries, but it's not entirely clear whether pump-action shotguns are still made in the 22nd century; indeed, the novel has one of his squadmates straight-up ask him whether he found the gun in a museum.
  • Vasquez carries a Smith & Wesson Model 39 as her sidearm in contrast to the H&K VP70s carried by her squadmates.
• Barbarella. As the universe is now in a state of peace, the only weapon the President of Earth can find for the title character is a Ray Gun he borrowed from the Museum of Conflict.
• In Battlefield Earth, U.S. military equipment stored in an underground base for 1,000 years is put into action to defeat the alien Psychlos.
• Battleship sees the USS Missouri taken back into action. Part of the reason for that is because a World War II-era battleship has more armor than modern warships and packs quite a punch with its guns. The Missouri's main battery guns are capable of firing shells weighing nearly a ton and a half around 20 miles and are among the most powerful practical artillery pieces ever built. If what you need is purely ballistic firepower and you need it to be able to move, even today it would be hard to do better than Mighty Mo. There have been bigger guns (for example, the German Gustav gun could fire seven-ton shells almost 30 miles), but to move it you either have to already have a rail line handy or build one for it and once you get it there it still takes a team of 250 men over two days to actually assemble it.
  • The Missouri is also the ideal museum piece to take on the aliens because of the heavy armor it sports, originally designed to protect it from enemy battleships firing similarly sized shells into its 12 inches of main belt armor. We see modern destroyers get obliterated by enemy ship-to-ship weapons (explosive "pegs" that look identical to the little plastic pieces used to denote hits or misses in the film's namesake Parker Brothers game), but when they're fired into the Mighty Mo, they only take out one turret.
  • Another reason the Missouri so useful is because it's the only remaining warship within the shield; the three modern destroyers having been blown up by the aliens, and the rest of the Navy is outside the shield.
  • The Mighty Mo doesn't disappoint either. Where the modern-day destroyers had to rely on clever tactics to fight the aliens, Missouri gets into what amounts to a close-range slugfest with the remaining alien ship... and wins.
  • Somewhat subverted with the actual USS Missouri. A whole museum in itself, the Missouri was actually reactivated for drydock repairs (in a sense, it was already "out"), something which it receives only once every decade. The production team, upon discovering that the real Mighty Mo was out and about, asked for and received permission to film on the ship (albeit with the ship being hauled by tugboats to avoid potentially damaging it). The luck of the situation likely saved the crew from set-building and more CGI or, otherwise, filming from a less impressive craft, giving more authenticity with the other three real-world vessels they already had permission to use.
• In Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Angela Lansbury's witch heroine enchants suits of armor to fight the Nazis.
• In the Russian crime movie Brother 2 the protagonists visit a gun runner who practices digging WWII-era weaponry from old battlefields and repairing it to working condition. In a later scene, they shoot some gangsters with a WWI-era Maxim heavy machine gun.
• In Cliffhanger, Sylvester Stallone's character uses the antique climbing gear on display in the hut where he takes shelter.
• Colour of the Truth have a shootout scene in Inspector Huang's home, where Huang's elderly, disabled war veteran father motions for him to check the back of their house's toilet. Turns out the father had hidden a World War II-era Potato masher grenade in it, a memento of his past during the war. Said grenade still works, allowing Huang to blow up a few mooks after pulling the plug.
• Subverted in Date Night when the protagonists steal an antique revolver for self-defence purposes. Turns out, the ammunition it's loaded with is so old that it causes a misfire.
• The Day After shows John Lithgow's professor character using a cobbled-together tube radio to contact people outside the blast zone after an EMP from the initial airburst destroyed nearly every other electrical system in the area (shown by a sudden power outage and cars abruptly stopping mid-evacuation). ^note Well, presumably any electrical system with a semiconductor in it. Vacuum tubes have lots of drawbacks, but radiation sensitivity isn't one.
• Demolition Man:
  • Simon Phoenix breaks into a museum because that's the only place to find a gun. After grabbing all the "outdated" 20th century weaponry he says "Wait a minute, this is the future. Where are all the phaser guns?", and goes after the future weapons (i.e., those produced before 2032). The year 2032 where, unlike today, weapons displayed in museums are somehow fully functional and loaded.
  • The car driven by Spartan is also a classic, and that's going by the standards of the viewers when the movie came out, much less by 2032.
• In Down Periscope, Commander Dodge has to use a rustbucket WW2-era submarine to test the Navy's vulnerability to unconventional attacks.
  • Interestingly, one admiral treats it as a genuine test of the Navy and human ingenuity, while the other one (with a personal dislike of Dodge) deliberately rigs the wargame in order to prove "his" Navy's superiority. And to get a promotion.
• Elysium: Max's Powered Armor is a (probably painfully) salvaged third-generation exosuit, which is good enough to take on Kruger and his new gadgets, including Kruger's fifth-generation exosuit, in an Upgrade vs. Prototype Fight moment. Lampshaded by Max when he's handed the modified AKM.
• In some films, it's the creators who break out the museum pieces. For example, the World War II film Fury uses some genuine World War II tanks. In the DVD Bonus Content, the creators note that the tanks had to be treated gently because they were more than seventy years old.
  • The prop Tiger, on the other hand, ended up in a museum, which has insisted on putting it on a custom powered chassis as the prop originally didn't have one and was moved around on a sled.
  • French film Snow and Fire is notable for using the only Königstiger tank that's still in running condition, which is preserved at the Saumur tank museum.
  • Dunkirk which features actual "Little Ships" from the real Dunkirk evacuation.
• In the Get Smart film, Max ends up using the 1960s gadgets from the tourist display when he's on the run. Of course, the car (fully fueled, for some reason) only drives for about a block before stalling. Surprisingly, he is able to jack the shoe-phone into the cellular network.
• Played with in Godzilla Minus One where a demilitarized Japan has to restore military equipment that's been decommissioned as part of the terms of surrender including the heavy cruiser Takao, and a prototype fighter that's been left to rust after being hidden in preparation for a mainland invasion that never occurred.
• Hudson Hawk:
  • At the beginning of the movie, Leonardo da Vinci is shown testing a flying machine outside his castle. Five hundred years later, Eddie and Anna escape from the castle by using the flying machine to glide to safety.
  • Also, there's this newfangled device Eddie seems never to have heard of called a "watch."
• In I, Robot, when the NS-5 robots initiate their Zeroth Law Rebellion, Spooner gets an old (meaning modern day) motorcycle out of storage. Dr. Calvin comments that internal combustion engines haven't been used in a very long time and is actually fearful that it would explode.
• Independence Day:
  • The flying saucer had been stored for decades under Area 51 when they suddenly needed it. Variation/subversion in that the vehicle is just as advanced as what the aliens are still using (and actively did not work until the mothership showed up in orbit).
  • In the novelization, several pilots show up with WWII era aircraft to join the fight. Not expecting to survive, but because for every alien shooting at them, there's one that won't be shooting at the F/A-18s.
    • In the original cut of the movie, Russell appears in the final battle in his crop-dusting biplane with a bomb strapped to the side. They changed it to a modern plane malfunctioning in flight so they could show the moment where he decided to make the Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Similarly, the aliens are knocking out all digital communication, so what do the heroes do? Go to their good ol' trusty telegraph machines.
• Independence Day: Resurgence: The Earth's entire satellite network was destroyed, so when they're anticipating a full-scale attack on Area 51, they use an antique radar that was going to be sent to the Smithsonian for display in order to detect the incoming fleet.
• James Bond:
  • In Moonraker, Bond is ambushed by Hugo Drax's henchman Chang with a kendo wooden sword at the Venini glass factory's museum in Venice. Plenty of centuries old glass artworks get wrecked in the process, and Bond grabs a rapier with a glass handle that was exhibited there which momentarily gives him an edge against Chang. Chang also tries to hit him with a breastplate from the same exhibition.
  • In For Your Eyes Only, one of the villain's henchmen triggers the explosive anti-theft device on 007's gadget-laden Lotus Esprit, causing it (and the henchman) to blow up. 007 is then forced to rely on his wits — with the Citroën 2CV of the Girl of the Week. The movie is likely set in 1981, and that car started production in 1948.
  • In The World Is Not Enough, an elaborate antique torture/execution chair with a neck-breaking mechanism was recovered during archaeological excavations of the Maiden's Tower in İstanbul, and Elektra King uses it on Bond, who frees himself from it after Valentin Zukovsky's intervention.
  • Skyfall has Bond retrieve some mothballed equipment from storage: his vintage, Q-upgraded Aston Martin DB5. Complete with ejector seat and (still very lethal) machine guns. In keeping with the vintage vibe, the original James Bond Theme from the Sean Connery era plays while Bond drives it out.
  • No Time to Die: Bond's Aston Martin DB5 suffers badly in Italy in the Action Prologue. When he's back into service in London, he gets a vintage Aston Martin V8 (the same model as in The Living Daylights) out of a garage and uses it.
• John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum: One fight sequence takes place within a literal weapons museum storage, with both John and his adversaries breaking open display cases to grab whatever is inside. At one point John has to quickly disassemble, clean, reassemble, and load a historical revolver before bad guys get to him.
• Jumanji: When a vine from a man-eating plant grabs Peter, Alan breaks a display case holding his ancestor General Angus Parrish's saber and uses the weapon to cut Peter free.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, the big yellow missile pack suit is apparently a leftover from Reagan's 'Star Wars' program, and it looks it too.
• The Lighthouse was made using vintage equipment, including vintage 1930s lenses and orthochromatic film, to try and capture the aesthetic of late 1800s era in which it is set.
• Mad Max: Fury Road: all the vehicles are refurbished or cobbled together from autos from the 1970s or earlier; the film's production designer Colin Morgan said this was intentional, because in the film's post-apocalyptic world, any vehicle with electronics would be impossible to maintain.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man:
    • Obadiah Stane steals Tony's Arc Reactor, the power source for his suit, and his life support machine. As a result, Tony has to go into battle with the original, less powerful model. Bonus points for Pepper putting it in a glass case like an actual museum piece.
    • James Rhodes briefly considers using the unused Mark II armor to help Tony fight the Iron Monger, but declines in order to tell the military not to intervene in the battle. He ends up breaking the armor out in the sequel to confront a drunken Tony at his birthday party.
  • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap steals his old World War II uniform from the Smithsonian. Unusually, this isn't because the old uniform is better than his current equipment, it's because his new suit was abandoned (it had a tracking device) and because he's trying to jog the memory of a Brainwashed and Crazy Bucky Barnes.
  • In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the obsolete turbine-based Helicarrier from the first film is pulled out of storage into the Battle of Sokovia to rescue civilians trapped on an airborne chunk of land, as all the newer Helicarrier models were destroyed in the above-mentioned film.
  • In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spidey gets his new, state-of-the-art costume confiscated by Tony Stark. So he wears his old homemade costume for his final battle against the Vulture.
  • In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor retrieves a suit of old Valkyrie armor for Valkyrie to wear right before the final battle against Hela.
• The Matrix Reloaded. While Morpheus and Trinity are fleeing after the Keymaker, Morpheus grabs a katana from a display of antique weapons and uses it to fight the albino ghost twins. The preceding fight between Neo and the Merovingian's henchmen also features this, as the various combatants loot the Wall of Weapons.
• In NYC Tornado Terror, when the storm knocks out the city's cellular and land-line communications, the characters resort to a vintage Cold War-era radio-phone to contact a private rocket pad in New Jersey.
• Pacific Rim: Gipsy Danger is a severely outdated Mk 3, which has to be taken out because they only had four mecha left to fight the Kaiju. There's an even more outdated Jaeger present in the form of the Cherno Alpha, a Mk 1 Jaeger, but that one gets ripped to shreds in its onscreen battle, killing the pilots. Gipsy's outdated status does give it an advantage over the newer Jaegers when Leatherback deploys its EMP. It's the only "analog" Jaeger and is therefore unaffected by the EMP, making it definitely qualify for this trope. Though, while Gipsy is called out as being outdated in the movie, she's really not all that old. Apart from Striker Eureka, there's only one "series" of Jaegar newer than Gipsy. It's just that in the Lensman Arms Race between the Kaiju and humans, Jaegers become obsolete fast. She's also been upgraded from her original Mk 3 specifications by the main part of the movie. Cherno Alpha, now, is a museum piece, but it probably doesn't quite qualify for this trope since it's never been put into storage; it's been fighting all along.
• The film Robot Wars (1993) features the last of the Humongous Mecha (a Spider Tank) being used to ferry tourists across an American wasteland. Then, a Yellow Peril villain does a Grand Theft Prototype and starts using its to lay waste to everything around him. He also holds the tourists hostage. The pilot of the mech goes looking for a weapon, left over from an old war, inside a pyramid and ends up finding an intact humanoid mech. He uses it to fight the spider-mech and free the hostages.
• In Rubikon a Fog of Doom has enveloped the Earth which the communication lasers on the eponymous Space Station can't penetrate. As Rubikon is what used to be the International Space Station, they find an old radio and try communicating but quickly give up after realising that no-one would be listening. At the end of the movie however, a child is playing about with the radio and makes contact with some other children who have survived on Earth.
• In Sahara (2005), the protagonists use a still-working The American Civil War-era Confederate ironclad's cannon to destroy the Big Bad's helicopter gunship.
• Shaun of the Dead: Shaun and Co. are in the Winchester pub with a Winchester rifle (that no-one thought would work) as their only defense against the zombie hordes. Hilarity Ensues!
• Sky Bandits: Not exactly a museum piece, but after the German airship bombs all of the squadron's planes while they are on the ground, the heroes have to use the old gunbus — an outdated plane from the early years of the war—to go after it. The gunbus was being repaired at the tie of the attack and so was the only plane not bombed.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock:
    • The 20-year-old (actually 40-years-old)^note The reason for the age discrepancy: “The Search for Spock” was about twenty years after the premiere of the original show and the film notes the Milestone Celebration by announcing that to be Enterprise’s age. However, there were Time Skips between Pike’s era in the Cage\The Menagerie and the show’s main era, and more years In-Universe than out-of-universe between the show and the first movie, and the first and second movies, AND the ship was not said to be new in The Cage! Even before Word of God and All There in the Manual weighed in on the ship’s age years later, it was obvious even at the time that the Enterprise had to be MUCH older than the age the franchise happened to be at the time. Enterprise outruns the Young Whippersnapper Excelsior, thanks to Scotty disabling the Excelsior's engines.
      Scotty: The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
    • The 20 (or even 40) years does look quite a bit less impressive when later television shows reveals that the Excelsiors were still in common use nearly a century after their introduction (then again, a piece of wreckage shown after a major battle hints that there were still Constitution-class ships (that's the TOS Enterprise's class) available for use as late as 2367, more than a century after the first confirmed use in the original reality). Starfleet gets a lot of mileage out of its designs. (The reason we don’t consider the Excelsior-class a case of this: there’s no sign that they were ever out of service!)
  • In Star Trek Beyond, the crew of the late Enterprise discovers the U.S.S. Franklin, an over 100-year ship that was the first Warp 4-capable starship (which means this was around before the NX-01). It was repaired and modified to save the day. Keep in mind, back in those days ships were armored with, well, armor. Meaning that the Franklin could take a ton of abuse without shields online and still keep on a tickin'. Comes in real handy when you don't really have enough power for good shields anyway even if you had any. Even old and worn, a Flying Brick in ship form can still shine with the best.
• In Star Wars, the Rebel Alliance takes what it can get and while they get some cutting edge ships, a lot of what they have belong in a museum. The X-Wings are new technology for the 1st movie, but the Y-Wing is already badly outdated (it's poorly armed for a bomber and its slow speed makes it an easy target for TIE fighters) as are the Rebel assault cruisers (poorly armed and shielded for a capital ship). But the Y-Wing is the only small ship they have that carries ion cannons for raiding and the assault cruisers are still capital ships so they're great for taking down large numbers of TIE fighters. Both ships are on their way out, once the Alliance get the B-Wing bomber and the Mon Calamari cruiser (Y-Wing is on the road to being scrapped while the assault cruisers become glorified transports and hospital ships).
• In the James Garner film Tank, he plays an Army post's Command Sergeant Major (the highest ranking enlisted man) who owns a WWII era Sherman tank. When his son is framed and then threatened on the local sheriff's "work farm," he resigns from the Army and uses his tank to bring his son across the state line, where an extradition hearing would expose the sheriff's corruption. The sheriff gets a local retired Army man to break out his anti-tank rocket launcher to stop him. (The sheriff spins the story so the CSM looks like he's breaking out a criminal from a legitimate jail.) They make it, with some help.
• In Threads, an antique traction engine is seen being used for farming after a nuclear war has left most of the world without mechanised agriculture.
• The Titfield Thunderbolt is based around this trope. In order to run a private railway line, the villagers have to demonstrate their service to an inspector. On the day of the inspection, their only working engine is out of commission, so they have to get the antique locomotive of the title literally out of the museum to haul the train. It should be noted that the Lion, the engine that played the part of the Titfield Thunderbolt for the film was over 100 years old at the time the film was produced. A literal museum piece. There are also problems with the museum piece replacement, and they end up pushing the train with a team of volunteers for a while. This all turns out for the best when the inspector reveals that if the train had been any faster, it would have been failed for being too fast for the classification they need.
• Top Gun: Maverick has Maverick and Rooster behind enemy lines after losing their planes. Their only way to return is to enter the enemy base and steal an F-14 Tomcat like the ones from the original, which Rooster downrights describes as a museum piece (avionics have evolved a hell lot since the days of such a plane).
• Transformers Film Series:
  • In Transformers (2007), the Decepticons had knocked out all digital communications, so the feds at the Hoover Dam dig an old 1930s-era radio out of storage. They also use a couple of display Winchester 1897s when Frenzy starts attacking them. Doubled up when they find some old computers and need to get a message out, and while the keyboards didn't quite work, they were able to be rigged up for Morse Code.
  • In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, one of the characters is hiding out as a literal museum piece: Jetfire, who transformed into an SR-71 Blackbird. Said character is also a living museum piece in his own right, being one of the oldest Cybertronians still alive. His father was a wheel. The first wheel! What did he transform into? Nothing. But he did it with honour!
• Uncommon Valor: When the CIA steps in and informs the Cambodian government of the POV rescue mission, the advanced weapons and gear that were supposed to be used for it end up being confiscated. So the mission needs to continue with a number of World War II-era weapons that were bought from the local Arms Dealer (the team didn't have enough money to buy anything more advanced).
• In War Games The Dead Code, the original JOSHUA system from the first WarGames movie is uploaded into RIPLEY in order to save the day.

Literature

• Deconstructed in a black comedy way in Gareth Powell's Ack Ack Macaque's second story Hive Monkey. It's the year 2058 and the uplifted monkey needs to stop a Nigh-Invulnerable Dread Zeppelin from an even more advanced alternate timeline. He has some World War 2 Spitfires refurbished from a museum and piloted by civilian volunteers to attack this aerial dreadnought. They were quickly wiped out by the airship's autocannon turrets and missile batteries before they could even get off a shot.
• The eponymous starship of Christopher Nuttall's Ark Royal was stuck in orbit for seventy years until humanity's first interstellar war, when it turned out its obsolete mass drivers and heavy armor were perfect against the enemy's weapons and defenses. It also helps that its commanding officer, a perpetually drunk commodore, who was Reassigned to Antarctica, has actually done something useful during his long stint aboard the Ark Royal. When asked how long it would take to get the ship back to active service, his reply of "4 weeks" stuns everyone into disbelief. He does, however, point out that it's utterly incompatible with modern computer and sensor systems, and a complete refit would require cutting up the ship and putting it back together, which would take a lot longer than 4 weeks. However, his goal isn't to take on the entire enemy fleet by himself. It's more to play for a Delaying Action, while Earth's nations scramble to design and build Ark Royal-type ships (with modern tech, of course).
• In Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, LEP has to resort to using a few outdated electric guns after Opal upgrades every weapon and vehicle in the fleet. Then triggers the secret modification that renders them all useless.
• While not technically museum pieces, in the Jack Ryan novel The Bear and the Dragon, the Russians, being invaded by the Chinese, call up their reserves and put them in vintage-yet-pristine, never-before-used T-34 tanks. While the T-34 was the best, most powerful tank of its day, its day was World War 2, and despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of them, no one knows if their outdated weapons will even be effective against the Chinese T-90 tanks. They then prove that they are, by catching the Chinese after cutting their supply lines and utterly immolating them with minimal losses.
• In one Bolo story, there's an attack on a human outpost where aliens invade at the site of a previous battle and a Bolo tank is a museum piece that literally breaks out of the museum that was built around it. It attacks the aliens and even after suffering huge amounts of damage still manages to defeat the enemy.
• In the book Bravest Of All, an old fire engine from the 1930s is kept at a firehouse, and is usually driven only on parades. Its former driver, a retired firefighter, also hangs around, but is too old to respond to fires anymore. One day, a massive fire breaks out at a high rise, and all fire trucks at the station go to fight it. While they're gone, there's a fire at a house, and the old firefighter runs into the station to see if anyone/anything is available. Nope, it's just one old firefighter and one old firetruck. Since it's a small fire, they manage to do the job.
• Court Martial by Sven Hassel. Tiny and Porta find an ancient 104mm field piece hidden in a Russian barn and decide to shoot it off for a laugh. At that moment the NKVD attack in motorised sledges, so they briefly use the gun to defend themselves until the barn burns down around them.
• In Destiny's Forge, the kzinti have a form of internal warfare called skalazaal that requires all weapons used to be muscle-powered. When skalazaal is declared against the ruling clan, rendering their fancy lasers and railguns useless, Tskombe at one point spots their soldiers actually hauling an old trophy catapult out of the Hall of Victory to use against the invaders.
• Extremely common in the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler. In The Mediterranean Caper, a villain uses a World War 1-era biplane to attack a US Air Force base. In Iceberg, a Ford Tri-motor (vintage 1939) is used for an emergency med-evac mission. In Deep Six, a Civil-War-vintage sternwheeler steamboat is used to save the president - and Pitt himself carries (and uses quite effectively) an equally ancient LeMat shotgun-revolver. In still another case, it's an old French legion fort. The list just goes on.
  • If the museum piece is a vehicle that is still in salvageable condition at the end of the story, expect it to turn up in Pitt's collection of vintage cars and planes in a later book.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden drives a classic VW Beetle because his magic wreaks havoc on modern cars' ECUs.
  • During Dead Beat, he breaks out a literal museum piece: Sue, the most complete T. Rex skeleton found. He reanimates it as a zombie and rides it into battle. Literally 'older is better' in this case; a zombie's power is determined by its age. The oldest the antagonists have is Civil War era. Sue is 65 million years old...
• Doc Savage: 'Long Tom' Roberts got his nickname when he used an ancient cannon — known as a Long Tom — that had been on display in the town square to successfully defend a town during World War I.
• S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series posits the sudden worldwide breakdown of all advanced technology. Civilization swiftly collapses, and the survivors have to make do with what low-tech tools are available while re-adapting to a medieval technological level. Early in the first book, Dies the Fire, characters do take equipment literally from a museum, or, rather, a living history exhibit, which justifies why it's been kept in working order.
• In The Executioner novel "Death Games", Mack Bolan and Ace Pilot Jack Grimaldi have to escape from Czechoslovakia, so they restore a Lloyd C-II from an aircraft museum because its wood-and-canvas frame makes it impervious to radar, and its slower speed make it good for nap-of-the-earth flying. This leads to a Schizo Tech scene where they're attacked by supersonic Mig fighters.
• In Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fist Of God, Saddam Hussein's government deliberately uses an outmoded method of refining uranium in order to avoid notice until shortly before the Persian Gulf War. A British Arabist, consulting a retired American nuclear physicist, analogizes:
  Martin: Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they'd go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed.
  Dr. Lomax: You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down.
• Museum-ship battleships are also pulled out of mothballs to provide the weapons to fight aliens in Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
• In Fugitive Telemetry, Murderbot plans a hostage rescue of refugees imprisoned on board a spacecraft, only to find the evac suit has an automated transponder that will give away its location to the bounty hunters on board. Fortunately the Space Station Murderbot is on is a reconditioned spacecraft that has been preserved as a museum, so it can use a life tender packed up among the emergency gear (though thanks to language drift it has to get a language expert to translate the instructions).
• In Ghost Fleet by Christopher Anvil, an old museum ship is used as the flagship of a sacrificial deception fleet. As things turn out, it includes a shield against a long-obsolete weapons system — and the enemy's new secret weapon is also an example of this trope.
• In Gone with the Wind, Ashley mentions that his soldiers have to fight the Northerners with muskets from the American Revolutionary War. One of the cases where it doesn't help the protagonists.
• Honor Harrington keeps a number of old-fashioned combustion-based pistols that she frequently practices with. Comes in handy when she has to meet with a pirate overlord who insists that she and her crew come unarmed. His scanners show that they don't have any modern pulser guns but were unable to detect the replica Colt M1911A1 semi-automatic pistol hidden in her briefcase.
  • In the later books, The Solarian League realizes too late that they are doing this. It has been so long since they fought in a war that many of their frontline starships are older than their crews, predating several iterations of Game-Breaker advances in weapons, technology, and battle doctrine. They were aware of this on some level but assumed that their massive numbers would level any technological gap until long past the point where the Lensman Arms Race made We Have Reserves completely irrelevant.
• In the Hyperion Cantos one of the characters owns a gun that's been in her family for generations and gets described as ancient. Eventually, it becomes apparent that while the gun is very old from the character's point of view it's actually a very advanced piece of technology.
• Island in the Sea of Time:
  • In a very literal example, once the decision is made to resume whaling, the Nantucketers retrieve a bunch of whale-processing equipment from the whaling museum.
  • Later in the first book, mention is made that someone found a treadle-powered sewing machine in an attic, which they consider to be worth its weight in gold.
  • An odd variant in the second book. By now, the Nantucketers have adapted to a largely 19th-century tech base. But when the Island is attacked by Tartessos, they deploy the "Cherokee Brigade" - a force of SUVs (mostly Jeep Cherokees) equipped with machine guns, which are far faster than any other landbound force.
• In King Of Kings Gao Gai Gar Vs Betterman, when Allouette regains her memories and her incredible IQ, she's able to help repair and program the retrieved Prototype Phantom Gao for a recently-rescued Gai Shishioh to use as a reborn GaoFighGar. Equally, when a Galeon from the past is brought to the present, a kept-in-storage-just-in-case classic Gao Machines are launched to give birth to the original GaoGaiGar.
• The premise behind the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Last Battledroid is that the galaxy is at peace, few standing armies are left, and the only thing that can stop the Big Bad is the single remaining Samurai-class battledroid currently residing in the museum. A nice touch is that you have to roll for its stats at the start, to see how badly the droid has deteriorated over the centuries.
• From the Legacy of the Aldenata series of novels by John Ringo:
  • Museum ships like old battleships are reactivated and upgraded to fight the invading alien Posleen. A WW2 cruiser, the USS Des Moines, is brought back into service and upgraded with Galactic Federation tech to help secure the Panama Canal region in Yellow Eyes
  • Elderly retired soldiers are rejuvenated with tech from more friendly alien allies to fight as young soldiers again. The "rejuv" treatment become a major part of the plot, especially when they run out before the enlisted men are called into action, leaving the U.S. military top-heavy with officers. In Watch on the Rhine, the Germans break out the Nazis, albeit under protest.
• In Make Room! Make Room!, the police force in the decaying and effectively isolated New York City use a decommissioned school bus, gas masks, and tear grenades they took out of a closed war museum to put down a riot.
• The Martian.
  • Mark manages to retrieve the Pathfinder (aka the Carl Sagan Memorial Center) in order to communicate with NASA. At the same time, NASA retrieves its earthly duplicate to figure out how to communicate with it again.
  • Lampshaded and defied during his journey to the ARES 4 MAV, Mark does most of his navigation with a protractor and a watch, measuring the height of Deneb and the rotations of Phobos. He has a few choice things to say about being surrounded by 21st century tech and being on a different planet, but still using navigational techniques that were developed in the 16th century and perfected in the 18th. He also refuses to activate Opportunity, remarking that it isn't worth defiling another historical site when he is only a few days away from the MAV and a much better comms system.
• The eponymous corps of Joel Rosenberg's Metsada Mercenary Corps series are forbidden by convention from using military technology more advanced than the enemies they've been hired to fight (thus, they use spears and shields against a Bronze Age culture, muskets against a 17th-century level culture, etc.). The protagonist's uncle in Not For Glory, the third book in the series, is renowned for his skill at using the limited equipment he sneaks past the shrewd inspectors to the maximum advantage. Against the Bronze Age opponents mentioned, he jury-rigs hang-gliders out of the tents he is permitted to bring, giving his forces a bit of air mobility.
• The Mote in God's Eye: When the three midshipmen are trapped on Mote Prime, they find a museum and use the weapons stored in it to fight attacking Motie Warriors. Justified because the museum was designed to keep weapons (and other items) in working order for future use when Mote civilization fell.
• In The Nameless War, with an alien battle fleet bearing down on Earth, the outnumbered defenders reactivate a collection of obsolete cruisers left over from the last war. The less than enthusiastic crews immediately dub this collection of antiques The Geriatrics.
• In the climactic scene of The Night Land, the main characters are nearly to safety but the hideous creatures of the Night Land are almost upon them. Millions of people are about to watch them die a few hundred yards from the shelter of the Air-Clog. Cue the Master Monstruwacan authorizing the activation of the Last Redoubt's main energy weapon emplacements, which have not been used for tens of thousands, maybe millions of years. They still work. Though the power drain nearly shuts the entire pyramid down (which is why those weapons were mothballed in the first place) and the backblast almost kills the main characters, the pursuing hordes are obliterated.
• In Night Watch, when the Glorious Revolution comes to fruition, several of the old (and we do mean OLD) army gentlemen decide to break out their, ahem, mementos. You know, like the swords on top of the fireplaces, or the armour that's lovingly kept polished, or the pikes that were mostly used to stoke fires. Those kinds of mementos. This poses a slight concern for Vimes, who considers that all he'd need to do is ask the lot of them to turn around, and it'd be raining limbs.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse, Annabeth's father (a history professor) rescues the heroes with a Sopwith Camel. Firing celestial bronze bullets.
• "The Probable Man", a 1941 short story by Alfred Bester, has a traveler to an After the End world reviving a forgotten Diesel dump-truck "tractor" that had been preserved in a museum, using it as a makeshift armored fighting vehicle.
• Happens in The Railway Series during the story "Old Faithful". Sir Handel is having to do everything because Peter Sam is having some minor repairs done. Then he gets derailed, leaving him unsuitable for any more pulling that day. They have no choice but to use Skarloey, who had been retired to a side shed when Sir Handel and Peter Sam arrived, to pull the afternoon train. Skarloey is old and decrepit, but he gets the job done regardless even after a spring in the front of his frame breaks. Afterwards, he is sent off to be overhauled and comes back good as new, and has gained Sir Handel's respect.
  • Slightly averted in that Sir Handel and Peter Sam were museum pieces themselves; Skarloey was only sidelined because of mechanical issues.
  • Another example can be found in "Super Rescue" in the book Enterprising Engines. Henry, suffering mechanical damage himself, is able to rescue not only one but two trains hauled by then-state of the art diesels that have broken down. One of the Scottish twins (no younger than 59 when the book was published) takes over the goods train; the passenger train is taken over by visiting locomotive Flying Scotsman.
• Peter Grant of the Rivers of London series employs this trope quite a bit because so much of The Folly's equipment and household fittings haven't been updated since the 1940s. Thus, he uses an antique brass microscope that belongs in a museum to examine a damaged 21st-century microprocessor, and the shooting-range paper targets he trains on look like German troops from World War I.
• In The Salvation War museums and private collections across America are looted of any exhibits that are able to be returned to service. Particularly aircraft and armored vehicles. This is actually Real Life since provisions to do just that are included in national mobilization plans.
• The Seventh Carrier series of novels by Peter Albano features a WW2 Japanese aircraft carrier and its planes that had been frozen in a glacier, fighting a war against an Arab alliance after a Chinese SDI system goes haywire and starts shooting down anything with a rocket or jet engine, rendering more modern weaponry useless. To escort the carrier, the Japanese pull the pre-WW1 battleship Mikasa out of museum-ship mothballs.
• The Southern Reach Trilogy: Expedition members get outdated and antique equipment — even down to their clothes — to bring to Area X. They're not allowed contemporary equipment like cellphones or laptops. The surveyor freaks out when she finds out that the one concession to their group, her assault rifle, is nothing more than 30-year-old parts cobbled together. The reason for using old equipment is that whatever created Area X can sense the more advanced tech and attack the items along with whoever is using them.
• Robert A. Heinlein's The Star Beast. When Mr. Ito finds Lummox eating his cabbages, he grabs a relic of the Fourth World War known as a "tank-killer" that was handed down to him by his grandfather. He fires it at Lummox, which doesn't harm her but does drive her away.
• Done literally in the Starfist series, where heavy armored vehicles went out of style three centuries ago due to the availability of the Straight Arrow, an extremely lightweight and portable shoulder-fired rocket that could defeat any thickness of armor you could reasonably put on anything meant to move. When someone starts building tanks again, they have to dig Straight Arrows out of the museums so they can make copies.
• Star Trek:
  • In one of the ST:TOS Lost Years novels, A Flag Full Of Stars desk-bound post-series/pre-TMP Kirk uses the refitted Space Shuttle Enterprise (taken out of mothballs and refitted to participate in the 300th anniversary celebration of the Apollo Moon Landings) to aid new 1701 CO Will Decker, commanding the in-the-midst-of-refit starship Enterprise.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel "Crossover" Scotty steals a century-old Constitution-class starship to rescue Spock from the Romulans. It's nonetheless a better choice than any other Federation ship because it still has the cloaking device that Kirk's crew stole from the Romulans in The Enterprise Incident. Bonus points for having the Yorktown refit with the bridge of the original Enterprise for the museum. Also, Scotty made sure not to make the same mistake as in the third film. This time, he routed all the controls through a 24th-century shuttle computer, which worked just fine. Unfortunately, the Romulans have upgraded their sensors within the last century and spot him pretty quickly. At least, after they realize what type of cloaking device is being used and calibrate their sensors accordingly; the old 23rd-century cloaking device apparently has completely different operating principles than the 24th-century versions.
  • The Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Before Dishonor states that The Federation has an entire planet known as "The Museum World". Picard takes the Enterprise E there (against Starfleet's orders) to reactivate The Doomsday Machine, from the TOS episode of the same name, in order to use it against a Sentient Borg Super Cube which is threatening Earth (and has already eaten Pluto).
• Star Wars, the two Expanded Universe Medstar novels, by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. A planet rich in biological wonders is a little too excessive with plant life. Modern technology just tends to get eaten or rusted or worse, so the characters have to survive on much more primitive technology and ideas. Plus, the Force.
• Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority universe features this trope in the Laguna Wars in Great Space Battles. The centrally controlled human battlefleet is vulnerable to the Lagunans' control-systems disorientation weapon and the manual backup systems are grossly suboptimal, so the mothball fleet of a previous era — actually designed for independent manual control — is hauled out of retirement. In the last-ditch defence of Earth against a powerful enemy fleet, the disorientation device is destroyed and the modern ships win the day, but when they push into enemy territory they find that the ultimate strategic victory has already been won by the museum fleet.
  • Specifically, the old ships successfully blockaded the importation of a necessary substance, which turned out to be a fungicide that was the only thing keeping the Lagunan capitol world habitable. The Lagunans had the choice to go out with a bang or a whimper, and their attack on Earth was the last "fuck you" in a war they'd already lost — by the time it had begun, every Lagunan on the homeworld was dead.
• H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895). While exploring a far future museum, the Time Traveller discovers that most of the items are useless. However, he breaks a lever off a machine for use as a club and finds a box of matches and a lump of camphor that he uses to make fire and light.
• In Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War the protagonists, who are seceding from the US, are given Russian military aid in the form of a hundred T-34 tanks. As in, WWII vintage tanks. Rather than be dismayed, the protagonists praise the tanks for their ruggedness and reliability over contemporary armor (hahaha, not really) but resolve not to get into any tank battles, instead using them in raids to disrupt enemy supply lines. This dovetails nicely with the rebels' philosophy of "Retroculturism".
• In Valentin Pikul's novel Wealth, set during the Russo-Japanese War, the protagonist, governor of remote Kamchatka, faces a Japanese landing with only a handful of Cossacks under his command. What does he do? Breaks out some old 1860s Berdan rifles from an abandoned army depot and arms a militia with these guns.
• In the Wing Commander novels, this is the primary method of both the Border Worlds Militia and the Free Landreich Republic Navy for arming themselves. While the Border Worlds could count on support from the Terran Confederation, being located in the border region between the Confederation and the Kilrathi Empire, the Landreich was located on a more tertiary front and largely relied on Refuge in Audacity to fend for themselves.
  • When the BWM ends up in a (short-lived) shooting war with the Terran Confederation in The Price of Freedom, this trope gets deconstructed as the well-equipped Confed forces tend to steamroller over the Border Worlder forces until they are able to liberate some modern hardware. They only fare as well as they do because many of their pilots are battle-hardened veterans of the Kilrathi War, and because their ships, while very obsolete, have also seen some extensive upgrades.
• In With Iron And Fire, the Chinese break out the "Rocket", the first native-built Chinese train, for use in World War II, because they are so short of rolling stock. Similarly, the reporters in "Road to Yakutia" are thrilled to be traveling to Mongolia aboard the World War I rail cruiser Zamuurets, still in active duty.
• World War Z:
  • The population of Britain (and various other European countries) apparently do quite well against the zombies, despite the lack of privately owned guns. Instead, they hole up in old castles and use the medieval weaponry in them. The quiet, middle-aged, academic type interviewed in the book is carrying a two-handed sword.
  • Other examples show up in the book. Grenades and flechette rounds do little to stop the zombies... but a modified trenching tool for up-close wetwork does wonders.
  • This is how the Russians survive the war — by breaking out their mountains of mothballed Cold War equipment (some of it dating back to World War II, even) to fight with.
• In The Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks recommends bolt-action rifles and the Shaolin Spade to be some of the best weapons against zombies, the former because they are less prone to jamming than automatic weapons, and do not waste ammo in a panic, and the latter because it has the reach of any long bladed weapon, but has practical uses such as digging a hole to plant seeds or for a latrine. As in the Real Life entries below, the bolt-action rifles are the most reliable repeating firearms in poor weather and maintenance conditions.

Live-Action TV

• At the end of season one of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the team, cut off from their resources, resorts to using WWII-era spy gear, courtesy of Trip's grandfather.
• In 'Allo 'Allo! one of the plans to get rid of the British Airmen is to break out an old aircraft that would be powered by the engine of the General's lawnmower. It doesn't work.
• Battlestar Galactica is less "break out the museum piece" and more "break out the museum". The Galactica was being converted into a museum ship and its decommissioning was scheduled on the same day as the Cylon attack. The rest of the fleet was knocked out quickly due to a Cylon backdoor in their modern computer networks rendering them vulnerable. Galactica's computers weren't up to date or networked, rendering them mostly immune to the Cylon virus.
  • The officials actually insisted on installing a computer network on the Galactica to create an interactive museum. Adama refused, claiming that no network will be installed as long as he was in command. He gets away with this insubordination as he's a retiring war hero and won't be in command of the ship for much longer, so better to keep him happy while he is.
  • Played straighter with a squadron of Viper Mark II's that were intended for display when the Galactica opened as a museum. The fighters were not only immune to the virus thanks to their outdated control system, but they were also the only fighters the pilots had on-hand.
  • Laura Roslin is launched into the Presidency because, as Secretary of Education, she was attending the decommissioning of Galactica and opening of the museum and was thus en route back to Caprica when the attack happened.
• Subverted in the Grand Finale of Blade: The Series when Marcus van Sciver grabs the ancient katana of Lord Chthon (the symbol of the House of Chthon) in order to face off against Blade. After about a minute of vicious fighting, Blade's modern steel easily snaps the centuries' old (probably not very high-quality) steel of the relic.
• Blake's 7. In "The Harvest of Kairos", Servalan seizes the Liberator and has its crew abandoned on a Death World. Their only hope of escape is an unarmed and obsolete Apollo-era landing craft.
  Tarrant: But there's nothing I can do with this...
  Avon: YOU CAN GET IT OFF THE GROUND!
• Bones:
  • Hodgins and Wendell do this (with a healthy dose of MacGyvering) when they are trapped by a blizzard without power, and they have to solve the case quickly because the murderer might be contagious. The clearest example is when Hodgins actually manages to vaporize some of the metal shrapnel and analyze it. Justified because they work IN a museum.
  • In "The Male in the Mail", when Hodgins is unable to identify a body's bone striations by comparing them to conventional blades, he announces, "It's time to get medieval." He runs comparisons on antique weapons, finding a close match to a guillotine, which leads Booth and Bones to identify an industrial paper-cutter used at a shipping depot as the murder weapon.
  • And in "The Corpse in the Canopy", the lab has shut down all networked computers and stopped using phones because of a psychopath computer-expert. Hodgins communicates with Booth using two WWII Enigma code machines — one from his family's private collection and the other presumably from the museum.
  • Hodgins "borrows" another piece from the Smithsonian in a tenth-season episode: a wire-player from the era that pre-dates cassette tapes to play back some wire left over from a 1960s recording.
• Used frequently in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at least partially because Guns Are Worthless — and probably partially for the same nerfing reasons as Family-Friendly Firearms. When dealing with the typical vampires, this is justified: crossbows are a lot better at firing wooden ammunition than guns.
• The final episode of the short-lived CI5: The New Professionals had The Mafiya restoring the anti-aircraft guns on a decommissioned battleship to assassinate the US president.
• In Chernobyl, two of the old Soviet Lunokhod lunar rovers are taken out of mothballs and re-purposed as remote-controlled bulldozers (their design already being radiation-hardened in order to survive in space) and are used to help clear the debris on the roof of the reactor building after the explosion.
• In Covert Affairs, an encoded radio transmission turns out to be in such an outdated cypher that a clunky old museum piece is pulled out of the CIA's archives in order to decrypt it.
• In the short-lived series Covington Cross, the landowners of the south-east have assembled at Arundell Castle to pay their taxes. Bandits invade the gathering and hold the nobles for ransom. The Grey boys and their sister have to save the day by using the old weapons from the Duke of Arundell's collection. Note that this show already takes place in the Middle Ages, so the heroes fighting the bandits are using weapons even more ancient than that! Tenth to Twelfth-century rather than Fourteenth — and yes, there was a difference!
• Dad's Army had an early episode in which the platoon go to the museum with the intention of taking weaponry, but do not succeed. The museum's caretaker who is trying to stop them, however, makes good use of the pieces inside to stop them from entering. Captain Mainwaring plays the trope fairly sensibly; he stops his men gawking at medieval weaponry and goes straight for Crimean War carbines which have already been requisitioned by another platoon.
  • Truth in Television: The original Home Guard was formed at a time when Britain was so short of weapons of any kind that many soldiers were armed with pikes, spears, even bows; long-redundant weapons such as single-shot 1870s rifles were issued if the unit was lucky. These were supplemented with Heath Robinson Machines such as muzzle-loading artillery pieces and low-tech anti-tank guns lashed up in local garages, along with various sporting rifles donated by American civilians. By 1941, all Home Guard units were equipped on a level not far short of the Regular Army. The German equivalent, the Volkssturm, suffered similar issue shortages and many units were equipped with redundant WW1 vintage weaponry — or older.
• Daredevil (2015): After spending season 2 and The Defenders (2017) in his iconic red Daredevil costume, Matt Murdock reverts to his original season 1 costume for season 3, although not entirely (his mask is now made from the fabric of a nun's habit, rather than being a store-bought mask).
• In the "Jesse James vs. Al Capone" episode of Deadliest Warrior, the fight takes place in an American History Museum. Jesse James' gang steal guns from the museum's display cases with which to fight their opponents.
• One episode of Early Edition involving Time Travel forces Gary to pull a Prohibition-era pistol out of hiding when cornered. The gun doesn't fire when he pulls the trigger (actually falling apart), but the threat successfully unnerves his attackers.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Seeds of Death", the Ice Warriors have hijacked the T-MAT teleportation grid, which is on the Moon. Luckily for our heroes, the crackpot who runs a space museum has been secretly maintaining a rocket...
  • In "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", set in the 22nd century, Barbara and a group of freedom fighters literally break into a museum and manage to get a 20th-century truck running.
  • In "Death to the Daleks", a power-sapping field on the planet Exxilon manages to render several spaceships useless, and completely neutralizes the Daleks' Death Ray weapons. They respond by promptly repurposing them to instead work as machine guns and immediately go back to threatening and ordering people around.
  • In "Vincent and the Doctor", the Doctor digs around the TARDIS for a species-scanner that was apparently given to him as a childhood present by his godmother.
  • In "A Good Man Goes to War" he presents Amy and Rory with his cot for their baby, with its mobile still in perfect working order after a thousand years.
  • The TARDIS itself is an example since it was an outdated model on its way to being decommissioned when the Doctor stole it (mostly on the suggestion of his future companion Clara). The Master even calls it an "overweight, underpowered museum piece" in "The Claws Of Axos".
• Alluded to in Farscape: D'Argo's Qualta Blade was used by his grandfather to repel invaders after they ran out of modern weaponry.
  • However, the Qualta Blade is more than just a sword. The blade can be split in two to reveal a working pulse rifle inside. It's also used to prove D'Argo's identity when activating an old Luxan warship.
• Subverted in the Firefly episode "Trash." Inara threatens Saffron with the antique laser gun stolen from Saffron's ex-conquest, but it doesn't work so she pulls out a real gun instead.
• In Good Omens (2019), Shadwell has the ridiculously elaborate Thundergun of Witchfinder Lt. "Get Them Before They Get You" Dalrymple in a case at his flat, which he breaks out for the final showdown.
• In Heroes, Hiro believed that obtaining the sword of his childhood hero would allow him to control his powers. After going to the museum to steal it, they find out it's a replica, and have to steal the real one from the collector who has it.
• In "The Last of Us (2023)", When the characters have to travel through a Revolutionary War museum in Boston full of "Clickers", Anna Torv's character Tess ends up killing one using a tomahawk she takes from one of the exhibits.
• In Lexx, the Brunnen-G had no weapons to fight off the Divine Shadow thanks to their civilization's decline. Kai and a few other younger Brunnen-G were determined to die fighting anyway, so they broke out a bunch of ancient Insect fighters, relics from the Great Insect Wars and literal museum pieces. The half a dozen little fighters predictably failed against the Divine Shadow's planet-killing flagship, though Kai was able to get as far as smashing into the control pod. The Divine Shadow is bemused by the attempt to defeat him with Insect technology because he is really a man fused with an Insect's essence.
• Lois & Clark:
  • When Jimmy Olsen is about to write his first major article for the Daily Planet, Perry White insists that Olsen follow an old tradition and write the piece on an antique manual typewriter that Perry used to write his first news story when he was a cub reporter.
  • In another episode, a computer virus first takes out all personal computers and later the entire Metropolis power grid. Perry doesn't miss a beat, first having his reporters use typewriters and white-out, eventually getting the outdated (but computer-free) printing presses running with the help of the old man who lost most of his hearing running those presses for years.
• NCIS:
  • In the Season 5 episode "Internal Affairs", with the whole team under an investigation by the FBI for the murder of Arms Dealer René Benoit/La Grenouille (The Frog), Timothy McGee uses an ancient laptop with a command line interface from Gibbs' basement to hack into the FBI computer systems.
  • In the Season 6 episode "Love and War", the team finds an old "Beary Smyles" talking teddy bear (an Expy of Teddy Ruxpin) in the victim's basement. McGee soon deduces that the victim was using it as "an old-style phreak box", a hacking tool that could penetrate the Department Of Defense's computers because its systems weren't designed to defend against the toy's outmoded electronics.
  • In the Season 7 episode "Power Down", the team has to do this during a power outage. Instead of digital cameras they use Gibbs's Polaroids, which they put up on a corkboard, searched through boxes of fingerprints by hand and dug out an antique hand-cranked mimeograph to make copies.
• The Orville. A suspicious gadget is found embedded in the machinery of the ship's engines. It is resistant to scanners and seems to be shielded against energy weapons. But the engineer has an antique electric drill he had been given as a graduation present...
• In an episode of Power Rangers in Space, former black/green ranger Adam returns briefly to give the current black ranger Carlos some training and confidence-boosting. When a monster attacks, Adam decides to use his original black morpher to fight again, despite being warned that previous damage to it would make it risky to use. For unknown reasons, he doesn't use his green Zeo morpher ^note  having passed the Turbo powers to Carlos Vallerte , despite the fact that it was more powerful and presumably wouldn't have carried the same risk.
  • In the Grand Finale of Power Rangers Beast Morphers, Evox allows himself to be captured to gain access to Grid Battleforce's computers and absorb their data, allowing him to analyze their weapons and become immune to them all, harmlessly absorbing a blast from a weapon specifically designed to take him out, and later Devon's entire Beast-X Saber, digitizing it and sucking it right up! The Rangers' response? Dig into Nate's Ranger Vault (this season's Ranger tech turns out to be reverse-engineered from other teams' gear) and bring out some classic weaponry for past teams.
• In an episode of Primeval, Professor Cutter takes a katana from a display stand and uses it against some prehistoric worms.
• An episode of Sharpe features Spanish partisans who wear antique conquistador armour and carry swords, shields and pikes. Lampshaded when Sir Arthur meets their leader and says "he must have robbed a museum". It appears to be mostly for psychological effect, and they are eager to get their hands on guns from the British.
• In Soviet Storm: World War II in the East, a handful of Soviet artillery pieces are shown to have been manufactured during the time of the Czar, and brought back into service due to their massive caliber.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • If the Planet of the Week has forgotten what the Stargate is, then it is often found at an archaeological site, in a museum, or in storage.
  • Also in a less literal sense, one episode had Bra'tac break out an old version of the Death Glider that has a small enough wingspan to pass through a stargate. The "Needle Threader" variant was specifically designed for gate travel. However, so few Jaffa could pilot it without crashing into the gate that the model was retired. Teal'c manages to do it without any previous training. The Ancients' Puddle Jumpers are much older but are also much more superior to the Death Gliders. They can "thread the needle" as well (in fact, it's one of their primary functions, hence the nickname), but many of the control functions are automated, so it's a lot easier.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In "The Siege", the runabouts are being used to evacuate Deep Space Nine, so Kira and Dax have to get working an abandoned Bajoran Resistance spacecraft from the Cardassian Occupation that's been sitting in a cave for over a year. The thrusters barely work, there's no emergency gear, no sensors, no impulse engines, and no leg room. Worse, the resistance engineers just cobbled such craft together out of whatever was at hand, so they're not very reliable even when they were new.
    • During the Dominion War, we routinely see parts of the Federation fleet are made up of Miranda- and Excelsior-class vessels, which initially debuted over a hundred years ago and are still in active service. It's implied that some of these vessels were even taken out of mothball to replace lost ships and still manage to hold their own.
    • The Miranda and Excelsior classes were actually in constant use for over 100 years, but the early models were usually mothballed after a while. But Starfleet kept building new ones with updated electronics and engines (they turned out to be far more economical than the massive Galaxy and Sovereign classes), so pulling the old ships out of retirement and bringing them up to modern standards was easy.
    • In-universe, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers were considered to be at the Memetic Badass level. A Vorta (one of the enemy races in Deep Space Nine) once stated that a Starfleet engineer could turn "rocks into replicators". Bringing old mothballed ships up to modern spec would be easy for such people.
  • In an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Vulcan soldiers in the Forge (an area where advanced technology doesn't work) carry lirpas, a traditional Vulcan polearm weapon with a circular guillotine on the end, most commonly used in ritual combat.
    • Meta example in "In A Mirror, Darkly" in which the mirror crew take over the USS Defiant from the primary universe. From their perspective it's advanced futuristic technology, but to the viewer it's about seeing an original TOS-era Constitution-class starship powering up in all its glory.
  • Star Trek: Picard: In "Absolute Candor", the Qiris sector warlord Kar Kantar has a TOS-era Romulan Bird-of-Prey. It's not particularly dangerous on its own, as Rios notes it has an outdated targeting system and is less maneuverable than La Sirena. However, fighting it is complicated by the fact that they also have to avoid Vashti's planetary defense system at the same time, and the Bird-of-Prey is fast enough that they can't simply warp away without disabling it. When a much smaller but modern fast-attack craft joins the fray, the Bird of Prey is crippled in short order.
    • In the backstory leading to this, it's revealed that Picard tried to convince Starfleet to pull out mothballed ships for the evacuation of Romulus when the synth attack on Mars destroyed the dedicated fleet for it. Because of the sheer scale of the mission, as well as quickly changing attitudes, it was denied.
    • In "Vox", we find out that Commodore Geordi La Forge has been working on a major project at the Fleet Museum: a completely refurbished and repaired USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, using the saucer section of the D salvaged from Star Trek: Generations and various parts from other Galaxy-class ships. Picard and the old crew of the D have to haul it out to battle a resurgent Borg threat when they take over the entire fleet, as the D isn't networked to the rest of the fleet and can't be remotely hijacked. The old horse still shows herself to be quite capable, taking on a giant Borg cube (much larger than a standard cube), although it helps that the cube is only 36% functional thanks to Janeway's actions in the Voyager finale. Still Data manages to navigate the massive vessel as she dives inside the cube in order to reach the center, while dodging protrusions and evading weapons fire.
    • Earlier, Jack has a bright idea to steal the cloaking device from the mothballed HMS Bounty, the Klingon bird-of-prey Kirk used to go back in time to get some whales. Despite being over a century old, the cloak still works.
• In Supernatural, there is a special revolver, made by Samuel Colt himself in the 19th century, that can kill anything with one shot. It's obviously an antique.
• In one episode of Tremors: The Series Gun Nut Burt Gummer is out of weapons while fighting a monster infestation. The locals tell him of a resident gun nut with a huge arsenal. When they get there, they discover that the "huge arsenal" consists of 18th-century black-powder muzzle-loaders. Burt, however, being a drooling gun fanboy, is well-versed in 18th-century warfare and manages to organize the locals to Save the Day. (It helps that the actors in that episode were part of a historical re-enactment society.) It also helps that the shriekers have no concept of tactics or even pack mentality (even wolves know to surround a prey). They just charge at the defenders without regard for their own lives.
  Burt Gummer: Don't fire until you see the whites of their... heat-seeking organs!

Music

• Indie musician John Vanderslice opened Tiny Telephone Studios in 1997. It's an entirely analog recording studio: all the synthesizers, microphones, mixing boards, recorders, equalizers, effects boxes, amps, etc. are free of digital processing. Much of the equipment was already decades old when he opened, although he's bought some new specialty equipment since then that keep to his requirements.
• Many audiophiles get into vintage electronics, whether it be vinyl records (with presumedly higher fidelity than CDs or MP3s), analog wah-wah pedals, or heirloom instruments.
• Since baroque ensembles are trying to faithfully replicate compositions from several centuries ago, they use instruments that were first developed in the same era. In some cases, these instruments — like Stradivari, Amati, and Guarneri violins — were constructed then, too.

Radio

• The two main characters in the John Finnemore's Double Acts episode "The Wroxton Box" are railway signalmen in The '60s with a shared distaste for "horrible smelly diesels". They are overjoyed to receive the news that the locomotive pulling one train has broken down, and been replaced not just with a steam engine, but with a classic steam engine from the Transport Museum because that was the only one available.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech plays with this. First, during the LosTech era, recovered ancient war machines may actually be superior to currently-produced models because they're still equipped with parts nobody knows how to make anymore. (This is what made finding old Star League caches such a big deal to everybody, to say nothing of ComStar having secretly stashed away a whole army of old designs and waiting for the right moment to deploy them.) On the other hand, well-designed 'Mechs from that time can still give more 'modern' ones a run for their money, especially if the modern design uses a lighter but more vulnerable advanced engine.
  • Occurred literally in one novel set during the Dark Age time. Private mech ownership became a thing of the past in the Republic of the Sphere, so when raiders attacked one planet the hero smuggled some parts into a war museum to fix up the Battlemech that was on display there (apparently with its fusion reactor and weapons still intact), then piloted the mech out to stop the raiders (who had mostly Industrialmechs with jury-rigged weapons, which was why he could take them on with a single Battlemech).
• The TSR roleplaying game of Buck Rogers, you can play as the titular character. Buck Rogers most trademark aspect is that he still uses his .45 service pistol from the 20th century. It actually does very well in the 25th century. It does as much damage as a rocket pistol (this is a viable gyrojet pistol, not a Hand Cannon that fires rockets) and Buck gets a +2 to hit with it. Additionally the .45's bullets can't be electronically baffled (Rocket Pistol smart ammo can lock on a target and track it to a limited degree but it can be jammed and it can mistakenly lock on to cover that a target is hiding behind). Rocket pistol dumb rounds are cheap but extremely inaccurate so there's a -2 to hit penalty. The only drawback for Buck's .45 is that he can only get more ammo by going to a NEO supply base.
• A d20 Modern one-shot adventure, No Man's Land, occurs inside of the titular World War I museum exhibit, which is fully loaded with everything including a trench (transplanted from an actual battlefield), multiple samples of weapons and a tank of the era, which will be used by a number of zombies that were buried on the trench (and a vengeful necromancer will wake up. A sidebar mentions that Real Life museum exhibits would have everything deactivated, but for the sake of the Rule of Cool (or through the simple Hand Wave of magical influence, if the GM wishes to use it), the weapons are live.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Most of the really cool stuff is at least ten thousand years old, from Baneblades to Titans to miles-long battle cathedrals (IN SPACE!). This is because they're made with super-advanced Lost Technology that the Imperium remembers how to maintain but not how to manufacture.
    • The Imperium used to know how to make lightsaber-like swords (Eisenhorn owned one in Xenos), but today they're stuck with ordinary metal swords charged with disruptor fields.
    • Aeldari (formerly the Eldar) are still using hardware from before the ancestors of humanity ever crawled out of the primordial soup. The Drukhari (formerly the Dark Eldar) take it even further since they have no qualms about using the tech that the Craftworld and Exodite Aeldari deny themselves.
  • In Battlefleet Gothic, Imperial Navy Revere Fleets consist of many old and obsolete classes of ship that are no longer used in regular Navy Fleets, including many that are more commonly seen fighting with Chaos Fleets such as the Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser and the Carnage-class Cruiser. The Imperial Navy is reluctant to use these fleets due to their ships' lack of regular maintenance and their hastily assembled crews having a tendency to be unreliable at best, if not outright mutinous. The game rules represent this by allowing the player to choose certain ships from the Chaos Fleet list but makes all Reserve Fleet Ships more likely to disengage from combat or, when fighting against Chaos, defect to the opponents control.
• Rifts had multiple examples, not just Magitek reconstructions, but due to the Scavenger World nature of the setting, any pre-Rifts technology that can be found is liable to be dug up and pressed back into service. Golden Age Weaponsmiths are a big name in this industry; though their products are upgraded to take on modern platforms, they are mostly restored salvaged relics like F-14s. One Rifter had an adventure where the players must help one such salvager/restorer deal with the problem of the A-10 she's found and reactivated, as she's found the Coalition spot her almost immediately when she flies it.
• Starfleet Battles:
  • The Romulans have a couple of sublight ship designs (ships unable to maneuver faster than light in battle because they simply don't have warp engines at all) more than 80 years after everyone else has warp-powered ships. These remain in service through the entire period of the game and form the bulk of the Romulan fleet and many of the support ships for much of the game's timeline, receiving technology upgrades all along the way.
  • The Federation keeps its old (as in, first Romulan war era, decades before the main period of the game) cruisers in service (upgraded to warp power and now classed as light cruisers) for a variety of support roles. (The fact that these are among the few Federation warships that can land on a planet makes them particularly valuable as ground troop transports and medical ships.)
  • And in case you want to seriously break out the genuine museum pieces, you can get "Module Y: The Early Years", which covers the early warp powered ships, and "Module Q: Sublight Battles", which covers the period before warp-driven ships.
• This is practically mandatory for the aspiring Vampire Hunter in Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem. In both games, vampires are fully dead animated corpses, which means they don't actually NEED things like their kidneys or liver, and they don't bleed out... which means bullets more or less just go right through them, and only deal Bashing damage because they're not actually doing that much damage to the vampire's essential parts... and vampires have a Healing Factor to boot. (That said, a headshot will do the trick just fine, they need their brain.) Whereas bladed weapons, like a sword, actually cut and sever flesh and tendons and tend to be more hindering, doing Lethal damage. (That, and severed limbs are much harder for a vampire to heal than a simple gash.)

Theatre

• Modern video equipment, caused by converting signals from analog to digital and back again, as well converting signals from one video format to another, can create latency in video. This can be disruptive to live theater performances, where an off-stage chorus might need to follow a musical conductor by video camera. Fifty milliseconds might be borderline tolerable; by the time the lag gets to 100 milliseconds, a production would be in serious trouble. This video provides a good demonstration. For this reason, many productions will use vintage CCTV cameras that have negligible latency.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • After Makuta steals Mata Nui's robot body, Mata Nui has to use an older, smaller, imperfect prototype to fight him.
  • A version was done at an earlier part of the story, though not with technology: to end a Matoran Civil War, Makuta stuck the leaders in the Archives' wild animal exhibit. With the live specimens. The results were not pretty.

Video Games

• The Ace Combat series loves starting pretty much every game off with the player using at the very least an older nonmodernized aircraft like older models of the F-16, to outright retired or reserve aircraft, such as the F-4E Phantom or the MiG-21. Justified in several ways by the game's story.
  • Air Combat and Ace Combat 2 start the player off with the F-4 (as well as the A-4 Skyhawk in 2) because the player is part of the Elite Mercenary "Scarface" Squadron hired to fight on the behalf of a small country (Air Combat) and a legitimate government overthrown by a military coup d'état (Ace Combat 2). Starting off, there's just no way the government contracting you has the resources or trust enough to offer then-current generation aircraft.
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies again starts the game with an aircraft carrier launch of the F-4E. The player in this case is taking the role of USEA/ISAF military pilot "Mobius 1", while allied forces are in the middle of a full-scale retreat after losing the main-land to the Erusean military's continent-wide assault and their use of the "Stonehenge" Anti-Asteroid Railgun array as a deadly continent-spanning Anti-Aircraft Artillery system. It's implied you're piloting the Phantom because that's all ISAF could get for you before fleeing to the last remaining allied HQ on the island of North Point.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War gives your squadron, the Osean 108th "Wardog" Squadron, F-5 fighters which have largely been relegated to modern-day training jets because the squadron consists of all trainees who just earned their wings who get pressed into operational service after a surprise attack during a training flight.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has the Osean Federation do this to the last surviving Stonehenge gun from 04 to shoot down at least one of the Arsenal Birds that's made breaking into Erusea a nightmare. Even after shooting down the Erusan attack force, the targeting computers are shot down, so they have to do it the old fashioned way: line of sight. That means Trigger has to get behind it and shoot the main propellers down only to slow it down so it's within sight so it gets that ONE SHOT needed to take down the flying juggernaut.
• In the intro for the third Aero Fighters game, the enemy forces have launched a surprise assault and the heroes scramble in their jets to counterattack, but the jets are attacked and destroyed just as they're trying to take off, which is why they open up the museum hangar containing the old WW2 era piston powered planes that are used in the game.
• Armored Core:
  • In Armored Core: For Answer, the "Destroy Satellite Cannons" mission on Hard Mode, the enemy is a "Prototype NEXT", the 00-ARETHA. Not only it is not quite a Super Prototype, the only other time you will face it is in the prequel game, Armored Core 4, and even then, it's hardly a threat, even when piloted by an Ace Pilot. In that mission, your operator even flatly derides the enemy for being so desperate as to willingly deploy, in her words, "a relic".
  • This is how the Rubicon Liberation Front operates in Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Without corporate backing or the ability to produce the latest technologies, they make do with buying last-generation hardware from BAWS, Black Market offerings from RaD, and jury-rigged weapons platforms to fill the gaps. It's zig-zagged as far as their main AC force goes, as while most of them use BAWS's antiquated BASHO frame, Ring Freddie and Middle Flatwell get to ride on Elcano's modern FIRMEZA frame. Rokumonsen also uses a modern AC, but he isn't actually a member.
• In Batman: Arkham Knight, Batman pays a visit to the GCPD's evidence locker. His old REC gadget is on display, and Aaron Cash in narration says, "I hope he doesn't ask for it back." Naturally, Batman does.
• In Episode 5 of Batman: The Telltale Series, if you chose to stop Two-Face in Episode 4 instead of Penguin (resulting in losing all Wayne Enterprises tech), Bruce will go into battle wearing an earlier prototype Batsuit resembling the spandex suits from the earlier comics, which does little more than conceal Batman’s identity.
• Battlestar Galactica Deadlock has a few on the human side.
  • The Janus-class heavy cruiser, which dates back a few centuries to the Imperial Wars between Virgon and Leonis. Possibly the Atlas-class carrier and Heracles-class gunship as well, which were also Imperial Wars designs.
  • The Taipan fighter is even older. The design is drawn from ancient Kobol, meaning it's at least two thousand years old.
• In Battlestar Galactica Online, the Cylon War Raider is just a First Cylon War-era Raider refitted to modern specs.
• In BattleTanx, it's a post-apocalypse future but your starting tank is the Abrams. Still this 20th century relic is a nice Jack of All Trades and is usually a better choice than the early couple of futuristic tanks you collect.
• Blood II: The Chosen grants you your first Sawed-Off Shotgun by literally stealing it from a museum exhibit.
• Command & Conquer: Generals: The GLA uses old Soviet weapons and vehicles and have no air power, yet are somehow able to compete with modern Chinese and American forces (in the right conditions).
• In Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, V is instructed to contact a FIA sleeper agent for activation and is surprised that the method to do so involves an old rotary phone. It's justified in that ancient telephone lines and decades-old codebooks are much easier to keep secure than any network, but it's still funny to see V being flabbergasted by it and Johnny walking V through operating the thing.
• In Dead Space 3, you often end up using parts and even fully-fledged RIG Suits left behind by the S.C.A.F, an organisation that was wiped out in a battle over 200 years before the present, on the frozen, Necromorph-infested world of Tau Volantis. These function just as well, if not better, than the gear that's actually modern designed.
• Zigzagged in Empire Earth, where you can choose not to upgrade some units (i.e. arquebus-using soldiers in the modern age) but some (archers and cavalry) are no longer available after a certain era.
  • Some levels force you to use less-than-adequate counters (one World War I battle doesn't let you build flak trucks, you have to make do with Partisans, guys with rifles who were first available in the beginning of the 19th century. In the final German level, the French resistance mounts attacks using Napoleonic grenadiers.
  • Some custom scenarios allow for this via triggers so as to recreate historical battles featuring outdated equipment.
• Success in the hidden object adventure game Escape the Museum often depends on this trope, as you use literal museum pieces (a cannon, a steam engine, a blowgun, a bow and arrow) to make your way from room to room.
• Escape Velocity Classic: The Rebels' fighter class is the Manta, a craft made by a bankrupt company that until the Rebels (not exactly having many better options) got their hands on the surviving stock and re-deployed hadn't seen any real use for well over a decade (it last saw heavy use during the early days of the Great War, which was an unclear amount of time before the game but at least 23 years prior).
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3:
    • Despite the fact that there are rare, futuristic, and powerful laser and plasma weapons, often the best weapons around are still a good old-fashioned revolver, hunting rifle, or assault rifle, which have plenty of ammo lying around.
    • Abraham Lincoln's personal rifle (along with his hat) can be taken in the National History Museum. It's one of the best weapons in the game.
    • At one point the transmitter dish from a literal museum-piece spacecraft has to be used to restore Galaxy News Radio's broadcast range.
    • The T-51b Power Armor in Fort Constantine, which the player helps Mr. Crowley gain access to in the quest "Shoot 'Em in the Head".
    • Completing Operation: Anchorage grants access to a treasure trove of unique pre-War gear, including a Chinese stealth suit, a Gauss rifle, and a non-degrading version of the aforementioned T-51b.
    • All the laser rifles in the game are the AER9 model, which was considered obsolete before the war. The AER12 was used by most of the military at the time, with the remaining AER9's being phased out and put in reserve. However, the AER9 was considerably more durable than the other lasers replacing it, allowing its widespread use in the post-apocalyptic world.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, you help the Boomers raise a sunken B-29 bomber from Lake Mead, which is then repaired with parts from a literal museum-piece B-29 and used during the final battle at Hoover Dam. On a lesser time scale, the player can reunite the Enclave Remnants for further support at Hoover Dam, for which they break out their old Fallout 2-era Advanced Power Armor suits(the ones with the insectoid helmets), and the Courier gets a suit as well. Another literal example is Vikki & Vance's 9mm submachine gun that was stolen from the death car exhibit, which the player can track down in an unmarked sidequest. Yet another unmarked quest earns you an M1 Garand lookalike named This Machine. Expansions to the game can have you geting BAR automatic rifles, old police magnums, Tommy guns and .45 pistols.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, the default Kestrel was decommissioned already prior to the game start and had to be pulled out of mothballs.
• This can happen to an Earth Federation player in Gihren's Greed. Playing through the game until the Gryps War and siding with AEUG against the Titans means probably facing the Psyco Gundam and/or Psyco Gundam-Mk II. Both of them are equipped with beam-deflecting I-fields and nearly all Mobile Suits of that era are primarily armed with beam weapons. Several One Year War variants of the GM like the GM Custom, however, are armed with kinetic weapons that bypass the I-field.
  • Similarly, the Federation is poorly equipped to counter Neo Zeon's invasion of Earth because Zeon's Kapule is a state-of-the-art amphibious machine, and the only way to fight it while it is submerged is for a Federal MS to shoot at it while riding a sky sled. The only amphibious MS the Federals have would be the Aqua GM and the Aqua Gundam, both long obsolete by that point of the story.
• In Girls' Frontline, Griffon & Kryuger and their T-Dolls generally make use of firearms that would've been considered obsolete by the 2010s, nevermind 2062. Even the stuff that's being used today would be considered ancient by the standards of the game's setting. Despite all this, they can hold their own against factions with more advanced tech.
  • There's a reason for this: A law was passed so that PMCs like G&K are prohibited from fielding weapons that were developed during or after World War III, after the first PMC that did have such advanced weapons, Sangvis Ferri, turned on their masters. One also gets the impression that the actual military wasn't comfortable with the thought of being overpowered and outgunned by some glorified mall guards and their disposable clankers when the time comes to stab the contractors in the back.
• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas one of the early missions involves getting weapons to restock after a police raid. The first weapons dealer the gang works with has weapons so old that CJ comments on museums having newer firearms.
  • Funny enough, the texture and model of the pistol comes from Grand Theft Auto III. A development oversight yes, but still rather interesting that the old texture and model are still being used.
• Grey Goo (2015): Humanity searched the galaxy for life and, after finding nothing, decided that if we were alone in the galaxy, we'd be better off engineering perfect living for ourselves and our non-crapshoot AI than we'd be shooting at each other. Thus, we withdrew to Earth and left exploration of space to the titular Grey Goo. All our vehicles of war were decommissioned and war was abolished. Thus, when the Goo shows up, along with another alien race, we're generations removed from warfare, have only academic experience with it, and have to refield our centuries-old drones. In an interesting twist on this trope, these museum pieces from our warring past are still vastly more advanced than anything else in existence.
• Halo:
  • Halo Wars: The in-game encyclopedia and other background material state that the UNSC Spirit of Fire was an old Phoenix-class colony ship that was purchased by the UNSC Navy after she had reached the end of her civilian service. She was then modified to act as a hybrid warship, carrier, and troopship for combat operations during the Insurrection before participating in the early years of the Human-Covenant War.
  • Although not mentioned in the first game, the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach goes into detail about how the UNSC Pillar of Autumn was an old Halcyon-class cruiser that was originally scheduled for scrapping but then brought back into service when war broke out against the Covenant. She was also heavily modified near the end of the Covenant War in order to help the Spartan-II Supersoldiers conduct Operation: Red Flag. ^note  A plan to capture a Covenant ship and use it to travel to the Covenant homeworld and take one of their leaders captive in the hopes of using said leader as a hostage to try and forcibly negotiate a ceasefire. Unfortunately, the plan had to be prematurely cancelled when the Covenant attacked the main UNSC base on the planet Reach, and the Pillar of Autumn had to be recalled to help defend the colony. The Autumn barely managed to escape when the battle was lost, and during her escape, she ended up discovering the titular Halo ring at the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved.
• Hellgate: London: After the Templar Grandmaster pulls off the dumbest move in human history (sending his ENTIRE army towards the literal gates of Hell), his second-in-command is scrambling to undo as much of the slaughter as he can by extracting soldiers, but doesn't have enough subway cars... until he makes a quip about going out there himself and shoving them on the trains - Ding. Cue an old steam train from the 1800s, augmented with supernatural technology to get as many soldiers out of the battlefield as possible.
• Inverted in The Journeyman Project 3: Due to the political fallout from the last game, all the time jump suits were deactivated and the TSA was put on suspension. When the inevitable crises strikes, The Hero suggests reactivating the "Pegasus device" used in the first game, but the idea gets shot down because it would take too long to get the old time machine working again. He ends up using a top-secret prototype instead (which, incidentally, he wasn't supposed to know about; his boss throws a fit when he gets back).
• Judgment Rites, a Star-Trek-based point-and-click, has a chapter aptly named "Museum Piece" which strands the characters (including Scotty and Chekov) in a literal museum during a hostage situation. They need to use the obsolete technology found in the titular museum pieces to overwhelm the assailants. Naturally, they succeed.
• In Left 4 Dead 2, the survivors escape Savannah, Georgia in a borrowed 1970s racecar on display at the mall. Old or not, that moving chunk of metal runs and smashes undead heads just as good.
• In Marvel's Avengers, when Tony Stark initially returns to the fold, his first 'armour' is just the gauntlets, boots, and partial helmet of an old suit lying around his old mansion. His second full mission after this sees him using a relatively basic armour assembled from whatever material he could salvage from the broken-down Chimera helicarrier to mount a raid on an A.I.M. facility and acquire the technology needed to build a new version of his more advanced armour.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Zaeed tells Shepard about his favorite rifle, Jessie, which he used until it finally jammed and would no longer fire. In the third game, Shepard can learn that Zaeed has custom-ordered the parts and equipment necessary to restore Jessie to functionality, in order to be able to carry the rifle into the battle against the Reapers.
    • During Kasumi's Loyalty Mission, you can find the Kassa M-12 Locust, an old submachine gun built for the Alliance before first contact that is infamous for being used to kill two Presidents at the same time. The ones you find have been modified to handle thermal clips instead of bullets, allowing you and your squamates to use them once you complete the mission.
  • Mass Effect 3: In the Citadel DLC, you can acquire an old First Contact War-era M7 Lancer (which the memory-retentive fans may recall is the model of assault rifle available at the start of the first game). It has the old-style pre-thermal-clip cooldown mechanic and has been "upgraded with modern small arms tech" to be relevantly powerful compared to modern small arms.
• Arguably done in MediEvil 2. When Lord Palethorn casts his spell on London, the only one that can stop him is Sir Daniel Fortesque, a skeletal knight who had been dead for five hundred years and whose remains were put in a museum.
• A major plot point in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, when the only ship under the control of the US forces after Ocelot hijacks their DRM is the USS Missouri, which had literally been in a museum until its license expired and it was retrofitted with VR elements for training purposes. Mei Ling is its captain, despite being an analyst with no battle experience who is unwilling even to shoot a robotic Dwarf Gekko. Snake also reactivates Metal Gear REX for the penultimate battle with Ocelot's Ray.
  • The Taneshigama of 4 and Peace Walker, a 'relic from the age of the Samurai'. In 4, it summons tornados that drop items and ammo, and in Peace Walker it shoots tornados that kidnap soldiers.
  • Otacon provides Snake with two pistols, which haven't been inputted into the System that locks out people from using guns they aren't biometrically matched to. One is a 1911 clone, the other a modified Ruger MkII, both designs that are several decades old by the time the game takes place, the former more than a century old and the latter coming about less than five years after World War II ended.
• In Metal Max, you'll be battling a rogue A.I. in a post-apocalyptic future with the WWII or later tanks that you dug out of the sand or found in dungeons.
• In the Naval Ops series, you can have your ship equipped with a Wave-Motion Gun, X-Ray Lasers, Plasma Cannon and other sci-fi goodies but breaking out the World War 2 naval guns you researched or found earlier is often the more practical choice.
• In one of the most literal sense, Nuclear Strike has you break out an AH-1 Cobra from a museum in Pyongyang. While the AH-1 is still used worldwide and in-game, you were initially flying a lightly armed news chopper for clandestine operation and since the North Korean army is going all out, you are instructed to get the chopper and fly it. One wonders why the chopper is fully fueled and armed, but hey.
• Reinhardt of Overwatch still goes into battle with his Crusader Powered Armor. In the game's timeline, the suit is a little over 40 years old and starting to show its age. Much like its wielder.
• A theme in Red Alert 3: Paradox. The Soviets have been forced to put some of their older vehicles back into service, while the entire Confederate faction consists of rusting vehicles stolen from a massive reserve dump in the Nevada desert. The twist is, of course, these museum pieces are the old units from Red Alert 1.
• In Red Dead Redemption's single-player DLC, Undead Nightmare, Nigel West Dickens hands over a blunderbuss (about half-a-century past its prime) for doing a few missions for him. Don't worry that there's no conventional ammo for it, zombie parts can be used, and are actually more effective at neutralizing (read: gibbing) zombies. ^note There's a hint of Truth in Television here. Properly cared for, a firearm can and will last for a very long time. Fifty years is nothing. Oh, and the blunderbuss is not picky in the least about what you feed it, provided that it gets enough powder to wash it down with.
• In Resident Evil 6, when playing as Chris and Piers, the player(s) can run into J'avo using Flackvierling 38 anti-aircraft guns and a railway gun while in Edonia. In-universe, a fictional "T-42" tank shows up, which is referred to in-game as "old", and looks like a combination of a few post-World War II tank designs.
• The majority of weapons used by the ARVN and NLF in Rising Storm 2: Vietnam date from World War II. This doesn't make them any less lethal, as the M1 Garand and Mosin-Nagant are perfectly capable of pulling off a One-Hit Kill. Even the NVA and US forces still use some weapons from the same era, with the M3 Grease Gun and PPSH-41 being used to great effect by both factions.
• In StarCraft II, the Protoss Colossus was the only Protoss mechanical unit that had been originally designed as a war machine. (All other Protoss units were weaponized industrial machines.) As such, and given its destructive power, the use of Colossi was banned, their production was shut down, and all active models were placed in hibernation. After the disasters of the Brood Wars, the Colossi were re-awakened to fight off the Zerg swarm.
  • The Terran mercenary battlecruiser is stated to be from the early days of the Confederacy. There seem to be some inconsistencies about the latter's age, but we're probably talking about a century or more.
• In the old Amiga game Starglider, according to the novella shipped with the game, the ship you're flying came from a museum. You're using it because your planet's defenses have already been destroyed, and that ship is all that's left. This actually carries over into the gameplay - you have to manually aim your laser blasts at enemies and manually guide your missiles into their targets. In contrast enemy craft fire beam lasers that simply don’t miss.
• Starsiege's backstory, All There in the Manual, tells the tale of how the Terra Defense Force of Metaltech Earthsiege and Earthsiege 2 was formed (albeit as part of a comprehensive retcon). When Prometheus unleashed "The Fire" on humanity, ITS Cybrid forces completely decimated the remaining portion of the world's military forces still under human control. However, IT missed one important target: a decommissioned Herc base in Baja, California, turned over to the New Smithsonian for the purpose of restoring and renovating war vehicles of past ages, including manned Hercs. Many of the people at the facility, both historians and technicians, were veterans of past wars, and so had plenty of combat experience. With the skills and facilities on hand to repurpose their museum pieces for combat, they took the fight to the Cybrids.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek Judgment Rites: This trope is the driving force behind an entire episode titled "Museum Piece". In this episode, Kirk, Scotty and Chekov are trapped inside a museum of technology when it gets overrun by terrorists trying to steal one of the exhibits. Thanks to Scotty, the team gradually disassembles pretty much every single ancient exhibit they can get to in order to construct makeshift devices to help them get through the locked doors and eventually defeat the terrorists.
  • Star Trek Online is an interesting take on this concerning both the Federation and the Romulan Republic ships. The Tier-1 through Tier-4 ships (basically, the ships you use leveling up) are said to be ships pulled out of storage either because of the casualties caused by the Dominion War and the Federation-Klingon War that starts the game (Federation) and that these are all they really have and need time to make newer ships (Romulan Republic). Many of the ships used as end game ships are basically modern counterparts with the ability to use the old ship as skins.
• The first lightsaber given to the Jedi Consular class in Star Wars: The Old Republic is the Hilt of the First blade, the (modified and upgraded) first modern lightsaber. This would of course normally never go, since it's a priceless historic relic, but the Consular was kind of short on options.
• Stealing the Diamond (taking place in a museum) zig-zags this trope: some of the exhibits, like the Mega Mushroom and the cannon, can be easily utilized, but the firearms aren't loaded, and if you try to use the bomb, the fail text will mock you for thinking a museum would keep a live bomb.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, several museum-pieces pop up as 'Secret' Humongous Mecha, rewards for fulfilling more-or-less insane requirements. In almost every case, they're extremely powerful, often Hand Waved as being a Super Prototype, or having been retired originally due to being too powerful to handle. Perhaps the crown of it is the Gespenst 001 — the very first prototype of the very-first Humongous Mecha designed in the world. For comparison, by the time of the first OG game, the basic Red Shirt mecha is the mass-produced Gespenst MK-II — the weakest machine you'll ever lay your hands on. And yet, the 001 is capable of keeping up with state-of-the-art Super Robots...
    • The 001 you use is a rebuilt version courtesy of the local Human Aliens. And considering that the entire Gespenst series are inferior copies of Gilliam Yeager's Super Robot / Eldritch Abomination XN Giest from Hero Senki, the closest copy should be a top-tier Super Robot.
  • Super Robot Wars X: Pretty much every faction from the Reguild Century recreates old Mobile Suits from Universal Century-era blueprints in place of developing any new suits of their own (only the Capital Army's Catsith and Mass-Produced MacKnife, as well as Towasanga's Moran, make it in as grunts in the game). They are distributed as follows:
    • Capital Army: Jegan (Kerbes of the Capital Guard also has one as his default unit when he shows up)
    • Towasanga and the G-IT Corps: Gaza-C, Gaza-D, Zssa, Dreissen, and Doven Wolf
    • Towasanga: Geara Doga (some Musaka-class ships are also seen in a cutscene)
    • G-IT Corps: Dwadge and Zaku III. Also, Kun uses the Alpha Azieru (with a special system to let her use its Funnels without her needing Newtype powers) instead of anything she piloted in the show.
    • Ameria: Klim and Mick initially pilot identical replicas of Gyunei and Quess's Jagd Dogas (though, since they're not Newtypes, they can't use their Funnels).
• Terminator Dark Fate - Defiance: Quite literally. The mission at Vega allows you to loot a venerable WWII-era Sherman tank that somebody has upgraded with an enormous railgun in the turret. This thing is by a million miles the most powerful direct-fire weapon that you have available, and if there's any possibility that Legion warmachines can experience fear then it would be in the face of its incredible destructive power. Give it to Sgt. Calderon to make her Christmas and birthday all in one. Unfortunately if you want to make friends with the Integrators then you'll have to give this baby up.
• Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: The Royal Navy's Heavy Scout class of ships are obsolete, Discovery Class Frigates that have been refitted with more modern weaponry.
• In Ultima VII, you return to Britannia so long after the events of the prior game that all of the loot from your Bag of Spilling has ended up in a museum, and nobody will believe you're the Avatar.
• The Edelweiss used by Squad 7 in Valkyria Chronicles is a holdover from the First Europan War, which took place a few decades prior to the game's plot. However, due to Isara's regular maintenance on the tank, as well as being a Super Prototype designed by her father, a genius engineer, it can easily hold its own against modern Imperial tanks.
• In Warzone 2100, your faction The Project, needs to find technology to build up their languishing tech knowledge. This in a post-apocalyptic future where you'll be fighting factions that have cyborgs, VTOL gunships, hovertanks and etc. A large number of your early tech found, is no different than what you find in the late 20th/early 21st century. The first tech artifact you find is the 7.62mm machine gun and a turning point for your faction is when several levels down the road, you recover the technology to make 120mm cannons. That lasts you quite a while and it's also when the more futuristic tech starts really showing up.
• In X3: Terran Conflict a quest chain allows you to find the ship from the first X-Universe game, the X-perimental Shuttle. Despite being over twenty years old and rather banged up, it's one of the best M3s in the game, but also irreplaceable and impossible to reverse-engineer.
  • In X: Rebirth, the collapse of the jumpgate network isolated many colonies from their homeworld and the shipyards to build new ships. The Family Rhonkar remnant in Maelstrom and the Republic of Cantera in DeVries rely on thirty-year-old designs for defense. Some are still competitive, such as the Canteran's Sucellus due to its Terran origins and spinal railgun, while others, like the Rhonkar's Gangrene Chaser (better known as the Raptor), are seriously showing their age.
• In videoGame/Zing Zing Zip, the heroes are reduced to fighting The Empire with WWII-era planes due to the latter being equipped with an EMP weapon that fries the computer components of modern planes.

Webcomics

• One Bad Machinery mystery traps its characters in a snowed-in lodge with no mobile phone reception. Once the mystery has been solved, the police are contacted when Lottie finds a disused landline phone nobody had thought to look for.
• In S.S.D.D. the Core re-commissions an old prototype railgun called "Long Tom" to take on the Anarchists' new Kill Sat system, which the Anarchists had previously used in combination with antique ICBMs (obsolete due to point defenses, which the kill sat destroyed) to wipe out the Texan military.

Web Original

• Red Dawn +20 features many "warbirds" from previous wars being pressed back into service, as well as ships and other equipment.
• The whole premise of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device revolves around The Emperor Of Mankind getting a Text-To-Speech Device installed on his Golden Throne that allows for him to talk with the members of his Imperium once again.
  "Through the amazing technology of like... the... Second Millennium or something. Our Emperor is once more able to speak to us!"
• In The Salvation War, specifically, Armageddon, most aircraft used in the war against hell are museum pieces which were long since retired. Tanks and other armoured units are also brought out of retirement and storage, a WWII Panzer showing up at one point.

Western Animation

• Archer has an example in Archer Vice. The Yakuza are besieging the mansion where ISIS are holed up. Problem is, the only weapons they have are Archer's PPK and Lana's TEC-9s, both of which are out of ammo. Cherlene leads them to a gun cabinet filled with ancient muskets and hunting weapons. Archer makes use of a Mare's Leg throughout the episode.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: Iron Man uses this trope when Ultron hacks into all the suits — except the Mk I, which lacks a computer system.
• Batman Beyond: A recurrent theme :
  • Terry's batsuit is technically a museum piece in the Batcave, although he says that "This suit may be old, but it's still cutting-edge." He uses other artifacts from Batman's crimefighting days in the series as well, e.g. in "Lost Soul", he uses Nightwing's domino mask for I.D. obfuscation when the suit was unavailable, along with some old-style Batarangs.
  • "Blackout": Bruce takes Mr. Freeze's ice gun out of his little crime museum to stop Inque, and wears the old Gray Ghost hat and mask to keep his identity hidden. In her second appearance, Terry tries the same, but she breaks it; later, Bruce takes a huge Powered Armor suit out of retirement to go hand-to-hand with her.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Batman has to use the 1940s-model Batmobile when Owlman steals the current model. It turns out that Batman keeps every vehicle, gadget, and device he's ever had in proper working order, even after it's long obsolete, just in case he needs to use this trope due to his being Crazy-Prepared.
• Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot: The Big Guy was being put into a museum display, until they found that his replacement Rusty would need his help. Of course, Rusty ends up being the sidekick.
• In Chi-Chian: The Black Seed by Voltaire, it's 31st century New York and Chi-Chian battle the evil Patahn Pahrr cult with her friends along with a small army of heroic mutant cockroaches. The weapons they use? A cache of Thompson submachine guns discovered by the cockroaches. With the exception of one character who's got the body of a Killer Robot that's a Walking Arsenal, the only thing the heroes could get their hands on were those ancient Tommy guns. Good thing Chi-Chian has a futuristic Bio-Armor suit that is Nigh-Invulnerable.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In the movie, a working item (which cures Laser-Guided Amnesia) is in the museum, but it was put there to hide it in plain sight because everyone believed it was broken beyond repair.
• Danger Mouse: In the new series episode "Grand Stressed Auto", the Danger Car Mark IV gets damaged, and they have to break out the Mark III from the original show. Too bad it's developed sentience and a deep jealousy of both the newer car and Penfold. So Penfold has to break out another museum piece, the Mark II ... which is just a Reliant Robin in Danger Agency colours.
• In the episode Armstrong of DuckTales (1987), Armstrong is a robot created by Gyro Gearloose who can do literally anything. After Scrooge puts Armstrong in charge of everything, Armstrong ends up pulling a Zeroth Law Rebellion and trying to take over the world. Huey, Dewey and Louie convince Launchpad to help them but wonder how they can approach Armstrong since he can take over any electronic vehicle. Launchpad then remembers his old biplane which has no electronics at all, and its old-fashioned fire extinguisher proves invaluable in neutralizing Armstrong.
• Extreme Ghostbusters: The new crew tries the old proton packs against the Big Bad in the pilot episode and finds them to be ineffective, forcing them to come up with a more powerful trap and proton guns. Even so, the old equipment still works, which makes it a suitable back-up. The old team used it quite effectively in the series finale.
• Futurama: After the Decapodians shut down the Earth's high-tech defences, the crew uses an ancient heat-seeking missile from a museum. It immediately backfires when it's pointed out that Decapodians — and their technology and war-machines — are cold-blooded.
• Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet: In one episode, Captain Black is creating Crop Circles that render any digital systems (essentially, everything) inoperable. Spectrum takes out his base of operations with an old Lancaster Bomber, which has been introduced earlier in the episode.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: When COBRA has a new device that is incapacitating technology, the Joes go to fight with the U.S.S. Constitution, a wooden frigate from the War of 1812 (which is currently serving as a museum ship).
• PJ Masks: In "Take to the Skies, Owlette", when Night Ninja and his mooks steal the airplanes from an airshow and crash the Owl Glider, Catboy and Gekko take an old plane from the museum to fight him.
• ReBoot: Early episodes have Bob doing this since Mainframe doesn't have the advanced Technobabble Bob is used to using in the Super Computer. However, the antique devices Bob has to make do with tend to fail, making this a subversion.
• South Park: In "Go God Go XII", Cartman tries cryogenic suspension to avoid waiting for the release of the Wii but ends waking up in the year 2546. He actually finds and gets a Wii from a museum (but he can't play because there's no compatible screen at the time).
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: "Veritas" does this literally. Rutherford and Shaxs steal a ToS-era Romulan Bird of Prey from a Vulcan museum.
• Star Wars Rebels uses this often. The titular rebels often have to find and salvage leftovers from the Clone Wars to help gear up for a fight against the Empire. The success of this varies widely. Relics like the AT-TE walker is easily outclassed by the newer AT-AT, while others like Rex's 1st Generation Clone Trooper armor consistently holds up where the newer stormtrooper armor would have easily failed.
• SWAT Kats has the Pastmaster be unearthed from his grave and go looking for his Tome of Time. He finds it in the Megakat City Museum, so he smashes the glass vitrine and reclaims it. With this book of lore and spells, the Pastmaster brings a huge dinosaur into the city, and sends the SWAT Kats into the Cretaceous Period.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): In one episode, a character's all-powerful transformation ray can't affect gold. So Donatello arranges to borrow four ancient Roman shields that are made of gold. ("And try not to ding 'em, okay? They have to go back to the museum tomorrow.")

Real Life

Military

• Most modern armed forces have contingencies in place to store outdated and obsolete equipment in case it's needed again. One example would be the Boneyard, which stores thousands of old and unused aircraft ready to be repaired and restored if needed.
  • Somewhat averted with the Cold War thawing in the 1990s. As part of force reduction agreements, observers from the Soviet Union were invited to witness surplus British Chieftain tanks being destroyed to the point where they could not be used again. Similarly, British and American observers officially witnessed surplus Soviet tanks beginning the long road into becoming ploughshares.
• Examples in World War I:
  • When World War I broke out in 1914, the nations involved had smokeless powder bolt action rifles that would have been considered state-of-the-art for the time. However, none of these nations were prepared for the massive attrition in men and equipment that modern warfare would bring. Rifles were being lost/destroyed faster than replacements could be manufactured. Priority was given to front line units so rear echelon and support units had to give up their rifles and were instead issued older rifles that the army had officially deemed obsolete but still had plenty stockpiled in arsenals. When the army started running low on rifles again, it would institute another shift as those rear echelon weapons were sent to the front and even older stockpiles of weapons were brought forward. The less vital a unit was, the older weapons they would end up. So a railroad guard far from the front might be given a single shot black powder rifle that was made in 1870 and really should be in a museum.
  • Cavalry charges, last used by the British Army in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurmam and mostly obsolete since the Crimean War, were deployed twice in 1917, at the Battle of Beersheba in Palestine, and the Battle of Cambrai in France.
  • Prior to the start of hostilities, the British Royal Navy had a large number of warships, ranging from Pre-Dreadnought Battleships to Armored Cruisers, that had been decommissioned and/or placed in reserve. Most of these ships were built in the late 1890s and early 1900s and were so old and outdated that many of them were already scheduled to be scrapped. The start of the war, however, changed all of that, as the need to protect Allied supply lines at sea as well as the need to protect the British Isles from the Imperial German Navy, which at the time was the second largest and most powerful in the world after Britain, meant that the Royal Navy was forced to reactivate several of these ships and place them back into service. However, most of the ships were barely functioning due to the lack of maintenance during the period in which they were officially mothballed, which resulted in the weapons and engines, among other systems, severely underperforming in combat operations, making them more of a liability than an actual asset. Not helping matters was the fact that most of these ships were mainly crewed by inexperienced and undertrained reservists, which hampered their performance even further.
• Examples in World War II:
  • The UK Home Guard, aka 'Dad's Army.' They carried anything they could use, in the desperate situation of 1940-41, when the UK had lost most of its materiel at Dunkirk; some personnel even carried pitchforks. The best-equipped units were drawn from rural areas, arming themselves with privately-owned shotguns and game rifles. The US, violating neutrality, sent over all the rifles it could scrape together (including from the NRA). Enfield hastily designed an SMG that could be built by the village blacksmith, and a number of creative solutions to problem of German armour were developed by the Home Guard themselves. By late 1941, the situation was back under control — although not everyone had gotten the message.
  • The UK Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm used the Fairey Swordfish, "The String Bag", a biplane design commissioned in 1936. It would have been helpless against enemy fighters (like most of the war's torpedo bombers), but it had an advantage against enemy AA: WWII rangefinders couldn't predict the flight path of anything that slow. Thus, attacks by Swordfish sank much of the Italian Navy in its home port of Taranto, and crippled the Bismarck in its breakout attempt in the North Atlantic, both times with negligible British losses.
    • The Mk.III Swordfish had a very bulky radar instead of the 18" torpedo the Mk.I had. The slow speed of the Swordfish meant that it could stay aloft for several hours and provide early warning about German submarines long before the lookouts and ASDIC/Sonar/Radar on Allied escort vessels could detect them.
  • The Swordfish had the advantage of being so slow that an attacking fighter had to slow down to almost stalling speed to be in with a fleeting chance. It was also surprisingly maneuverable, this combined with its exceptionally slow airspeed allowed it to evade fighters moving four times more quickly but which could not stunt as well. These factors also explained the survival of Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters in the air battles over Malta.
    • The outdated fabric skin also provided an advantage, since it did not provide enough resistance to detonate cannon shells that struck limiting damage. One aircraft from HMS Ark Royal returned with over 175 holes in the wings and fuselage, while another limped home minus its entire floor.
  • Similarly, the Soviet Air Force's 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew Polikarpov Po-2 wood and canvas biplanes. Like the Swordfish, they were too slow for enemy fighters to properly engage, plus the pilots would cut the engines glide almost silently over their targets. Being an all-female regiment, the Germans nicknamed them the Night Witches.
  • Nazi Germany assumed, at the beginning of the war, that horse cavalry were obsolete, but by 1942, they'd changed their minds. Infantry were too slow to catch Cossacks and mounted partisans and tanks couldn't enter rocky ground and forests (which cavalry certainly could); the result was about ten divisions of German cavalry. Horses also had to be called upon frequently to transport equipment that had specifically been designed to be towed by vehicles for lack of vehicles or fuel. In fact, 80% of the heavy equipment used by Germany in WWII was horse-drawn, despite the popular image of Germany in WWII as an entirely mechanized modern force.
  • During the early stages of World War II, the Norwegians sank the heavy cruiser Blücher with weaponry which they'd bought decades before and which was obsolete even then. Ironically, the guns were sold to them by the German armaments firm Krupp in the 1890s.
  • Partisans of any kind, naturally, used any guns they could get their hands on. In extreme cases, this included 19th-century rifles, hunting rifles, and even ancient flintlock pistols. Some were less fortunate and had to make do with pitchforks, axes, picks, or improvised spears.
  • One of the most famous examples among wargamers is when the Germans, running short on panzers, reintroduced the obsolete French tanks they had captured back in 1940. Many of these saw action in Normandy and some were used for anti-partisan duties.
  • The Germans hoped to establish a Victory Museum where examples of captured tanks would be put on display. Example tanks from all defeated nations were meticulously collected and housed in a facility on the Baltic coast. These were impressed into a scratch panzer battalion in 1945 and thrown into the battle against the Russians. The wrecks of British Mk V tanks from World War I were found amidst the ruins of Berlin after the battle.
  • The Dutch army was totally unprepared for an invasion, so much so they fought with 19th-century weapons. Not played straight though, as much of the weaponry was never in the museum. The army just meant to use all these things due to extremely low budget.
  • During the Battle of Crete, a Greek priest and his son broke into the village museum and stole 2 Balkan wars era rifles to use against the German paratroopers. Other villagers used flintlock muskets that had been captured from the Ottomans and were kept as family trophies. These weapons didn't turn the tide of the invasion, but proved satisfactorily lethal to a handful of the German troops.
  • World War II would be the last time several older wooden sailing ships saw their last useful service, though firmly in auxiliary roles. For example, the USS Constellation (not the be confused with the more famous USS Constitution) was recommissioned for use in an administrative role after being reserved for museum duty. HMS Victory was also used for such a purpose in the war, though she technically had been filling such a role since long before the war broke out.
• Examples featuring WWII equipment:
  • Some Taliban snipers in Afghanistan still use British Lee-Enfield rifles (or locally manufactured copies), which were designed in the 1880s and, with little refinements and the rare rechambering to NATO-standard ammunition, used in one role or another for close to a hundred years. The Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle is much more popular due to using the same rounds as the PKM medium machine gun and the huge surplus of Russian/Chinese 7.62x54mmR ammo in Taliban armories. Like the Lee-Enfield, it was designed in the 1880s and used in both World Wars.
  • Their Iraqi counterparts prefer its Nazi rival, the Mauser Karabiner 98k (designed in 1935, as a cut-down version of the Mauser Karabiner model 1898). The Coalition forces tend to favour bayonet charges against the Taliban on close quarters: the Taliban are said to be very wary of melee fighting. Bayonets themselves are Older Than Steam.
  • In the Falklands War, the British took a WWII field kitchen truck from the Imperial War Museum and sent it along with the Task Force sent to fight off the Argentines, since there was no modern equivalent that could prepare hot meals in the field.
  • Before they had their own defense industry (i.e., the Yom Kippur War and all previous conflicts), the Israelis relied on upgraded, surplus tanks. In the Yom Kippur War, they defeated more modern Soviet tanks with heavily upgraded Shermans — proving that in the right hands and with the right modifications, even a thirty-year-old design can defeat much newer ones.
    • Since developing their own defense industry, the Israelis have actually made a fair amount of money off of upgrading older US tanks for other countries.
  • The Douglas DC-3◊, the first successful commercial airliner and probably the best transport aircraft of WWII (Stalin certainly thought so, and built it under license in huge numbers), is still in use today all around the world. "The only replacement for a DC-3," the saying goes, "is another DC-3." In all likelihood, examples of the type will still be in regular service around the world 100 years after the first airframes rolled off the production line, thanks to a variety of companies providing upgrades and new parts.
  • During the Cold War, a squad of SAS commandos were tasked with defending an Omani fort when they were suddenly attacked by hundreds of Communist guerrillas. In desperation, a couple of the SAS soldiers rushed over to a nearby shed that housed an antique WWII era artillery piece. They managed to get it working and it proved to be the deciding factor in the fight, buying them enough time for reinforcements to arrive.
  • During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, some mujahideen preferred to fight Hinds with WWII AA guns instead of the US-supplied Stinger missiles.
    • Keep in mind that the Stinger missiles of the era were an utterly hideous thing to fire, leaving the man firing them in a dense cloud of toxic smoke that also showed the enemy precisely where he was. A WWII AA gun under appropriate camo netting is damn near impossible to spot when not actually firing, by which point it's too late for the target if the gunner is good. Also, an optically guided system relying on Human Eyeball Mark One cannot be taken out by a counter-measures missile designed to track radar or other detectable emissions back to its source and is more than enough for dealing with helicopters, which are much slower than WW2-era aircraft.
  • Soviet T-34 tanks are still in use in several African countries.
  • Even into the 1970s, former French and Belgian colonies in Africa saw First World War surplus tanks, such as the Renault FT-17, in regular use by guerillas and local militia. The tanks had originally been relegated there in the 1920s for police duties.
  • Israel's very first tanks were the French Hotchkiss tanks, built way back in the thirties and then considered far behind the technology curve. Still, they were better than no tanks at all.
  • The Soviet Union captured numerous German AFV's during World War 2, which it then sold off to client states. One of the most prominent was Syria, who used long-barreled Panzer IVs and Sturmgeschütz III assault guns. They then used them in combat against Israel during wars in the sixties. By the time of the Six Day War, most of them had been destroyed, stripped for spare parts, or turned into static fortifications on the Golan Heights. A number were also captured by Israel then later used and issued in reserve forces.
  • The Soviets also kept their own stuff around forever. Many reserve units of the East German Army, and their own "Class C" formations were equipped with the T-34-85 as their armored formation right up through the 1980s.
  • Due to budget issues, the Philippine Naval Special Operations Group has had to re-issue old M3 and M3A1 "Grease Guns" in the place of more modern weapons like the M4A1 Carbine. Several of these have been fitted with integral silencers and Picatinny rails to use modern optical sights, and still work very well. Meanwhile, Filipino marines still use M3A1s for boarding ships.
  • A few nations still use M8 Greyhound armored cars in limited roles, often in military reserves or as police vehicles. One notable deployment example was when the military of Bogata used Greyhounds as security vehicles for a visit by President George W. Bush. The Mexican army also uses Greyhounds with modern autocannons and digital camouflage.
  • Restored and sometimes modified WWII fighter planes, known as "warbirds", are extremely popular with civilian racing pilots. They remain some of the fastest and most powerful propeller-driven planes ever built, and they are simpler to maintain than jets—to say nothing of the slim availability of cutting-edge jet designs to civilians. The P-51 Mustang is especially prized.
• The standard weapon issued to the Canadian Rangers (the militia force based in the Arctic) was the No. 4 Lee-Enfield, first produced in 1939 and out of service with the regular Canadian military since the 1950s. The rifles were finally replaced beginning in 2015... with another bolt-action rifle, because the extreme conditions play merry hell with anything more mechanically complicated (specifically, automatic and semi-automatic weapons are known to freeze up and jam in weather that cold). The only reason the No. 4 was replaced at all was that spare parts were running out.
  • The Canadian Army's sidearm is the Browning Hi-Power, still a commonly available pistol. The Army's guns, however, were models built under licence by Inglis Canada in 1944. However, this serves as an example of the problems of this trope, as they have been trying to replace them since at least 2016, as they are extremely unreliable, to the point that, of the 20 pistols they brought to an international military competition, 15 of them jammed up so badly they couldn't be fixed. This happened during the warmup phase, and the five remaining jammed about every 62 shots. Canadian soldiers are advised not to fully load the magazines to reduce the chance of the spring breaking. The main reason they haven't been replaced is a mixture of bureaucracy and budget issues. The majority of the pistols were actually meant for shipment to China during late WW2, only for the order to be cancelled when Japan surrendered, leaving Canada with a lot of Hi-Powers (there were apparently still some pistols in their original factory grease as late as the early 2000's). Even beyond reliability issues, the pistol is very outdated, with outdated sights, no place to affix a flashlight, a tendency for the hammer to cut the shooters hand, and being extremely difficult to shoot left-handed.
  • Likewise, the Danish Navy's Sirius Patrol, who operates in Northern and Eastern Greenland, are equipped with M1917 Enfield bolt action rifles. It's the only weapon that's reliable enough, while still packing enough punch to take out a charging polar bear.
  • Many bolt-action WWI-era rifle designs, such as the American M1903, French Lebel, Russian Mosin-Nagant, and German Mauser G98, are just as reliable in Arctic conditions. The British SMLE (Short Magazine Lee-Enfield) is the best of the bunch for three reasons. First, an SMLE has a 10-round magazine (most others have 5-round magazines). Second, an SMLE is safer to use because the firing pin is not cocked while the bolt is being opened (it's cocked on closing instead). Third, because of this, it takes less effort to cycle a cartridge with an SMLE than it does with most other bolt-action rifles (the closing motion of working a bolt-action weapon makes use of stronger muscles in the user's arm and hand).
• Motorcycle couriers and semaphore lamps were key to Paul van Riper's derailed victory in the 2002 Millennium Challenge wargame. Admittedly, the motorcycle couriers apparently moved at the speed of light (the wargame's rules were not designed for this), but the Germans had used normal-speed motorcycle couriers to similar effect in the Battle of the Bulge.
• Al Unser won the 1987 Indy 500 in a year-old backup car that had been on display at a Sheraton hotel in Pennsylvania until just 2 weeks prior to the race. Unser was hired by Penske to replace an injured driver, and the car was quickly shipped to Indianapolis to be restored to race condition. They were so rushed that they only had time to apply the correct sponsorship decals to one side of the car, and Unser had less than 72 hours to familiarize himself with it and correct any issues before qualifying.
• Ever heard of the A1 Tornado? It's an updated version of a 60-year-old design called the Peppercorn A1. Tornado rescued stranded passengers after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England in late December 2009.
  • While on that subject: What do you do when a sudden spike in aluminium demand requires an extra locomotive to haul bauxite? Summon forth the mighty Deltic!
  • This has actually become common since the privatisation of British Rail, with museums hiring out diesels to private operators to make some extra cash, along with steam-powered charter trips all over the country.
• The Soviet Union kept using vacuum tubes in its bombers long after the development of transistors since vacuum tubes are resistant to EMPs and many kinds of electronic counter-measures (ECM).
  • The USSR was also not very good at manufacturing semiconductors, and the earliest, most easily manufactured transistor designs are less reliable than vacuum tubes, particularly when subjected to vibration. Vacuum tubes also have substantially different properties than transistors, including being much more easily scaled up to higher power levels and higher frequencies. (Vacuum tubes are still common in terrestrial broadcast systems because they can easily be built to handle much higher power levels than are practical for transistors.)
• Electric guitar players have also stuck with vacuum tubes; even today, 90% of amplifiers aimed at professional guitarists use them, as their sound quality simply cannot be duplicated by transistorized equipment. As for the guitars themselves, the three most popular are the Fender Telecaster (1952), the Gibson Les Paul (1952), and the incomparably younger Fender Stratocaster (1954).
  • The Tele is actually an upgraded version of the Broadcaster of 1948.
• During the initial stages of the Israeli War of Independence in '48, the Israeli supply situation was so bad that they even used Napoleonic-era, muzzle-loading cannons.
  • In a sense of irony, the first fighter aircraft used by the Israeli Air Force were Messerschmitt Bf 109s (actually a crappy Czech variant called the Avia S99), and their pilots used Luftwaffe flight uniforms (with the swastikas removed, of course). One of the standard rifles of the nascent IDF was the Nazi KAR 98, again with the swastikas obliterated.
  • Similarly, mujahideen fighters desperate for a way to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet-Afghan War used Jezail muskets, some of which were cobbled together from parts used by British Brown Bess rifles going back to the First Anglo-Afghan war, which started in 1838.
• Blackburn Buccaneer a.k.a The Banana Jet. It was designed in 1954 and outlasted its all intended successors in both FAA and RAF use. It was finally withdrawn in 1994 because the airframes were too stressed to keep flying safely.
• An F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter was shot down by a Serbian anti-aircraft battery using a Soviet missile from the early 1960s. The F-117 had come in on the exact same trajectory several times in a row, and the Serbs had set up a specialized type of radar pointed straight down its flight path, so the use of early 1960s SAMs isn't now standard doctrine for opposing F-117s — but it did work.
  • F-117 was designed to be poorly visible in a limited radio band typically used by modern radars. 1960s radars and guided missiles used lower frequencies.
  • Ironically, despite being ‘officially’ retired in the late-2000’s in favour of newer stealth fighters such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, the F-117 never really went anywhere - with a sizeable portion of the fleet maintained in fully-working order, rumours have abounded about Nighthawks being used in secret missions overseas. As of 2022, the Nighthawk is all but officially active once again, albeit as a trainer rather than a combat aircraft. Thanks to them being all but active once again, F-117s have even been seen flying at air displays with their newer counterparts!
• Between the poverty, the isolation, and the insanity, it's no surprise that North Korea has a few examples.
  • In the Korean War, they used sea mines dating back to the Russo-Japanese War. (In fact, they're still using them.)
  • Most of the North Korean military carries equipment dating back to the 1970s or earlier. The forces deployed to defend the capital have more recent gear, but that's about it.
  • Reportedly, some of their reservists don't even have firearms and carry bladed weapons. That's not likely to end well — and even if it somehow does (perhaps by sticking to built-up areas and ensuring they have enough grenades), it would be a different trope.
  • The Korean People's Air Force has a small number of relatively modern fighter jets, including the MiG-29. They also operate many older airplanes. Including around thirty MiG-15s, as in the fighter jet they flew in the Korean War, although their remaining MiG-15s are all trainers.
  • Did we mention that they also have biplanes? Specifically, the Antonov An-2 Colt transport, the smaller Russian cousin to the equally universal DC-3. It's hard to pick up on radar, and so slow that modern fighters have trouble engaging it with guns, and it can take off and land from improvised air strips, making it an ideal commando or officer transport. For the same reasons, around ten are also used by the South Korean Air Force. Outside of the two Koreas, even smaller European countries like Estonia, Moldova, and Macedonia also operate the An-2 as a paratrooper plane. And while fighting the Serbs in the early 1990s, Croatians even used them as improvised bombers to take out Serbian armoured vehicles and fortifications. While one or two were shot down, the plan worked. In fact, it worked so well that none were shot down until Serbs specifically brought in a modified SAM battery, as SAMs present could not target something so slow.
• In 1807 the Ottomans loaded some giant cannons that had been collecting dust since the fall of Constantinople three and a half centuries earlier and used them to repel a British attack on the Dardanelles. It worked. For added value, the Ottomans didn't have the "munition" used by these cannons anymore (they originally fired giant boulders) and just loaded them with debris, effectively creating makeshift grapeshot.
• The four Iowa-class battleships have been mothballed and recommissioned twice, being employed in the Korean War, Vietnam War, the 1982 Beirut conflict, and the Gulf War, to devastating effect. And Congress wouldn't let the navy get rid of them completely, until the early years of the 21st century. All four are now gone, but are now literal museum pieces, as they have been made into floating museums (the Iowa in Los Angeles, the New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey, the Missouri in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia), under orders of an Act of Congress that they be maintained in such a way that they could be returned to service, if need be. This is not as implausible as one might first think of 70-year-old warships, due to the simple fact that there is no modern ship, including aircraft carriers, that can put nearly as much explosive ordnance onto a contested beachhead within 20 miles of the ocean as an Iowa class with 9 16-inchers. There is very little doubt that the battleships day as a primary fleet force projector ended long ago with the rise of the aircraft carrier, but as for its use in naval gunfire support, the debate is still ongoing.
  • After the release of Battleship, Slate ran an article positing whether or not it would be possible to return the Iowa-class battleships to active duty now that they're museum ships. It would actually be very easy, assuming that enough crew, fuel, and ammunition for its main guns are on hand for that.
• Mexico, Thailand and the Philippines each have a Destroyer Escort^note a class of warship that was made to be easily replaceable and expendable compared to larger warships active in their navies: ARM Commodore Manuel Azueta,^note Formerly Edsall-class USS Hurst HTMS Pin Klao,^note Former Cannon-class USS Hemminger and BRP Rajah Humabon^note Former Cannon-class USS Atherton respectively and are among the oldest serving warships in the world.
• Quite a bit of obsolete-but-still-useful equipment tends to be stockpiled just in case it's ever needed again. Of note is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan AFB outside of Tucson, Arizona, essentially one of the largest airplane boneyards in the world. They periodically dip into this stockpile of stored airframes to sell them to other countries, scrap them, or use them for parts for still-flying airframes (worth noting that some American planes, such as the C-130 and the B-52, have been flying since the 1950s). It is notable that for many aircraft (like the listed B-52 as well as the A-10) this is actually their only source of spare parts as the aircraft are no longer in production and the plants are long closed. Some even get turned into remote-controlled drones for things like target practice.
• The Colt M1911 was a defiance of this trope that went on to become it:
  • During the Philippine-American war, the Colt M1892 the standard pistol at the time proved ineffective against Moro tribesmen. The army switched back to the Single Action Army, an 1873 revolver in .45 Long Colt until Colt could design the M1911, which combined a (then-)modern magazine action and revolver-quality stopping power with the heavy .45 ACP round (at the cost of armor penetration, although body armor wasn't in large use at the time).
  • During Operation Desert Storm, some US Marine Recon units switched back to their retired M1911A1s as a sidearm, since their standard-issue Beretta M9s tended to jam up when exposed to sand. They even made a modernized version for Force Recon units.
    • The original M9 (rather than the improved M9A1 and M9A3 variants) is a failed attempt at creating a double-action/single-action semi-automatic pistol with modern safety features and chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum that is as reliable as a Beretta Model 1934 chambered for .380 ACP. An M1934 has only 39 parts, isn't made anymore, can be used in almost any climate, has an estimated service life of well over a century, and, if you're lucky, you might find one that's up for sale which costs less than an M1911. There's also the Beretta M1951, the direct ancestor of the M9, which is also in 9x19mm Parabellum, has been locally manufactured and functions perfectly in desert conditions, which led to its adoption and use by the Egyptian Army during The Cold War, who even manufactured the M1951 themselves as the Helwan.
  • Delta Force still uses the M1911A1 today alongside Glock handguns in 9x19mm Parabellum.
• The Thompson SMG (better known as the "Tommy gun" or "Chicago Typewriter") and its derivatives are still used by non-state actors, long after its original American users scrapped them or sold them to collectors.
• Suggested but averted by Benjamin Franklin during the American Revolution. The Battle of Bunker Hill ended with them being driven off when they ran out of ammunition. Franklin suggested that if they had used bows and arrows, they could have held out longer and fired off volleys more rapidly.
  • It may be possible that this referred more to the fact that at the start of the Revolution, the colonists were desperately short of gunpowder. At one point, there were literally only a few dozen barrels left for the entire army, which would have been just enough for one pitched battle without artillery. The situation did improve later on when France became heavily involved in the war and started sending over regular supplies of the stuff.
  • On the other hand, English officers had been proposing this on and off throughout the 18th century. Trained longbowmen couldn't be beaten for sheer volume of fire until the introduction of breech-loading mechanisms and metallic cartridges; the catch is the "trained" part. It took many years of training to be a truly accomplished longbowman, whereas a simple musket could be mastered in a week by the simplest peasant. It was not actually superiority in combat that led to the firearm supplanting the bow and arrow, as the bow was capable of a significantly higher rate of fire, farther accurate range in skilled hands, and free of the problems of misfires that often plagued the muskets of the era (though they shared a weakness to wet weather, as a wet bowstring is about as useful as wet gunpowder is). What did the bow in was the fact that an army that used firearms could field about 10 times as many men as one that fielded bowmen due to the contrast in training time.
    • There is a very old saying: "To train an archer; start with his grandfather".
• The first operational SR-71 was retired to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in the '70s, only to be put back into service for 20 years and permanently retired in 1990. But perhaps the retirement was premature since the plane broke an air speed record on the way to the museum.
  • The SR-71 was considered obsolete due to the existence of spy satellites. However, its predecessor, the U-2, is still used today — primarily because it can relay information to other aircraft, which the SR-71 couldn't do due to the shockwaves caused from flying at speeds exceeding Mach 3. And this is an aircraft model that was introduced to the USAF in 1957.
• When British firefighters went on strike in 2002, the Army was called upon to provide cover. They made extensive use of "Green Goddess" fire engines, built in the 50s and mothballed in the late 60s. The law has now been changed so in a future strike, the Army would have access to the fire brigade's equipment, and the Green Goddesses have been sold to developing countries.
• The Italian Air Force used the F-104 until 2004 in spite not only of the extreme age of the design (the airplane was first flown in 1954, with the Italian F-104S version being manufactured between 1964 and 1979) but of its tendency to crash. It helped it was actually faster than the more modern F-16 that had been considered to replace it in the 1980s...^note Though of course, the F-104 was designed as a dedicated Interceptor, that is, a very fast jet designed primarily to knock down bombers, while the F-16 was intended as a more robust Jack of All Stats
  • Also the old Carcano (dating back to 1891, with newest ones made in 1945) and Garand rifles are still kept in the arsenals to be used by the reserve in case of war.
• During the Homeland War, some Croatian units used M4 Sherman tanks and US WWII M36 Jackson tank destroyers. They proved effective in infantry support. The M4 Sherman remains in service (as of 2019, only as presidential honor guard) in certain parts of South America.
• The London Transport Routemaster double-decker bus. It has outlasted all its planned replacements and was phased out only because even the youngest specimens were over 40 years old and worn from daily use. Even now, several examples remain in service on "heritage" routes in London and many more are in daily use as wedding cars, tourist buses, and the like. Also, it caused quite the uproar when the buses were replaced with supposedly more modern "bendy buses"; one of Boris Johnson's main campaign promises was to bring back the Routemaster, and wouldn't you know it—he did.
  • The city of Ottawa, Canada is about to start using a double-decker design, as the concept (doubling the passenger space without taking up more roadway, increasing the turn radius, or dealing with all the headaches articulated bus designs gave the city's transit service) is actually a really good one.
    • And, as with London, bendy buses sometimes prove less than satisfactory.
• When the railways on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, had to be electrified, it was discovered that the tunnels and bridges were too low for conventional electric trains. Fortunately, it just happened that The London Underground was disposing of some of its older trains, and ever since then they've used retired Tube trains. The ones currently in service were built in 1978.
  • This first occurred in the '60s (it's long been quite difficult and expensive to ship stuff out there) to replace steam trains dating back to the Victorian era.
  • One of the previous generation of electric trains (which had been built in 1938) broke down and was rescued by a steam locomotive from the nearby Isle of Wight Steam Railway...which was actually 13 years newer.
• Several heritage railways in the UK provide a useful public transport service using antique equipment — often because the heritage railway uses a line that was closed down with no decent transport alternative in the area.
  • Similarly, in the US, the Strasburg Railroad (the oldest in the Western Hemisphere still in operation under its original charter) operates regular freight service in addition to its heritage passenger trains - if not with the same steam engines then with diesels that are sometimes older than the steam engines they would have replaced were when built.
• On a similar note, about half of the trains on the PATCO Speedline between Philadelphia and New Jersey are original-issue, built in 1968. The functional elements (the motors and brakes) have been refurbished or replaced several times since then, of course, but some interiors are original. This is due to change starting in 2015, as PATCO is refurbishing the interiors up to a modern standard and installing some modern equipment (including automated station announcements, a better speaker system, and spots for wheelchairs)—but that said, the cars themselves remain original.
• On single-level overnight trains, due to a lack of replacements, Amtrak uses dining cars built between 1948 and 1956. The first-class lounge cars on the Coast Starlight are from the same era, as is the entire fleet of baggage cars. Most of these are in the process of being replaced, due to the lack of replacement parts.
• Up north in Canada, the Canadian uses much of the same equipment the train was first equipped with. In 1955. ^note The Canadian fleet *has* been significantly rebuilt twice over, but the cars are still the originals. Only in the early 2020s did talk emerge of the fleet's replacement.
• In a crossover between the above two, in 2012 much of New Jersey's commuter car fleet was flooded out. To compensate for the equipment shortage, Amtrak ran some extra services at Thanksgiving...and made up for that equipment shortfall by borrowing some cars from VIA Rail Canada...cars which it sold VIA Rail in the early 1990s while upgrading its fleet. Those same cars are likely to be transferred to the long-distance fleet once their usual routes on the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor are reequipped.
• Some vehicle museums keep all their display vehicle in working order.
• Some navies keep old 7.62mm chambered rifles on board in addition to standard 5.56mm for resupply at sea evolutions. The reason? The 5.56mm blank cartridges are unable to propel the line far enough to reach the other ship.
• The Finnish Army Field Kitchen, m/29 Soppatykki (Soup Cannon). Originally designed in 1929 for horse-drawn troops and be used with firewood, it is still in production, adapted to be towed by lorries and smaller motor vehicles. The redesign, m/85, is merely an incorporation and documentation of all changes and improvements (tail lights, improved suspension, rubber tyres, brakes, safety reflectors, AC connection, optional electric heater, etc) on the original. Several of the WWII veteran field kitchens are still in use, and they are popular also in civilian life, e.g. festivals, concerts, scout camps, and outdoors events.
  • Many Boy Scouts in Finland learn how to operate it as children, so when they reach the conscription age they already know how to operate it.
• The example from The Railway Series is very closely based on an incident on the Talyllyn Railway, in which the railway's newer locomotives were out of commission, and Dolgoch, one of the two original engines from when the line was opened, had to haul the train (and, on one journey, did indeed limp back with a broken spring). Another, similar, incident happened a few years earlier (before the line was preserved) when Dolgoch was the only usable engine; it derailed and the even older Talyllyn had to be steamed to recover it. LTC Rolt commented that given the condition Talyllyn was in at the time, it must have been a brave man who dared to drive it.
  • The second example, written as "Super Rescue", was similarly based on a real-life incident that took place at Waterloo Station in 1967.
• During the national conflicts in the last years of USSR, a number of armored vehicles were stolen from museums and monuments, especially in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Few had working or repairable engines, let alone weapons, but even a towed tank hull is good for blocking a (mountain) road.
• In October 2006 protesters in Budapest, Hungary, managed to start a T-34-85 tank. The tank was a part of the memorial to the revolution of 1956, which protesters were celebrating, conveniently located near the parliament building. They successfully used the tank against riot police, but it quickly ran out of fuel.
• The British Railways Class 55 "Deltic" diesel locomotive was retired in the early 1980s when it was replaced by the HST 125 on express passenger services. A few of the surviving Deltics have returned to revenue service, pulling heavy freight trains on special contracts. The Deltics have the advantage of a 3300-horsepower output and a top speed of 100 miles per hour, making them a fair match for more modern diesels.
• The Union Pacific Railroad retired all (but one) of its steam engines, though it occasionally ordered Challenger 3985, the then largest operating steam locomotive in the world, to pull revenue-earning trains until its retirement in 2010.
  • The UP announced it will return Big Boy 4014 to operating condition, meaning the world's largest steam locomotive will run again. And they did — operational Big Boy 4014 participated in the 150th anniversary of the "last spike" in May 2019.^note Yes, 4014 has been used in moving revenue freight as well... but changing railroad practices and laws have meant it's yet to do so unassisted, as Big Boy requires a diesel locomotive behind it to provide "Positive Train Control" (PTC) safety systems. Normally when Big Boy has been used to haul freight, it hauled it when it would have otherwise ran light over the system, the added freight cars behind it provide extra braking power which reduce wear on the historic steam engine. Likewise UP 844, Union Pacific's other steam engine has been used in various freight services since steam ended on the railroad at large, from providing helper service up the Wasatch grade in the 1960's to moving freight cars between Cheyenne and Denver in the 2010's.
• In addition to the above-mentioned Enfields, some strapped-for-resources Afghan Militia used black powder Jezail muskets, most of which were created during the last major war against an invading superpower, the Anglo-Afghan war.
• The ferry service on Lake Tanganyika is provided by the MV Liemba, a beautiful ship whose classical lines suggest another era, mainly because that's what it was from; the Liemba started life as the SMS Graf von Goetzen, a German gunboat launched in Papenburg and sent by the Kaiserliche Marine to control Lake Tanganyika. She was scuttled by her master in 1916, as the British closed the net around German Africa, and was raised by the British colonial authorities in 1927 to serve as a ferry. She still sails.
  • This isn't unusual for ships operating on freshwater lakes and rivers; without seawater and all the associated corrosion issues to deal with, a steel hull can last for decades before metal fatigue sets in.
• Eritrean railway was built by Italian colonial authorities in the late 19th - early 20th century and fell into disrepair in the ensuing civil wars. After the country gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993, the population eventually managed to rebuild it — a commendable feat taking into account the number and complexity of artificial structures involved as it climbs from sea level to a mountain plateau more than 2000 meters above it. Not having the resources to purchase and maintain modern running stock, they succeeded in restoring most of the surviving old units to working conditions. I.e. they are currently using steam locomotives, some of which are more than 100 years old.
• New computers often lack the Stereo Mix function or equivalent program that lets the sound card record exactly what comes out of the speakers. Some suspect that this is the RIAA's doing (see Digital Piracy Is Evil). Of course, older computers, many of which still run Vista or even the recently abandoned XP can still record sound just fine.
• In China, police and the armed forces use crossbows, as of the recent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and the riots in 2009. The reasoning behind this is that while a bullet can set off a shock-sensitive explosive, a crossbow can simply kill the suicide bomber while not detonating the bomb.
• In 1962 the Margaret Rose, a ship that wrecked off Provincetown, was trapped near the beach and couldn't be reached by amphibious vehicle or boat due to high seas. A helicopter was also called in but was unable to hover over the ship due to cross-winds. The only feasible way to rescue the crew was determined to be by Breeches Buoy, a 19th-century method of rescue that used a small brass cannon to fire a line to a disabled vessel, allowing the rescuers to send out a small "car" (think of a cross between a zipline harness and a life preserver) to shuttle people to shore. It was a method largely abandoned by the modern Coast Guard, and in fact only a week earlier the local base had considered retiring the equipment permanently.
• During the Korean War, the US military realized it had too quickly demobilized and dismantled the old fashioned equipment left over from World War II that'd be suitable in Korea, such as P-51 Mustang fighters and M-4 Sherman tanks. At least some of the equipment shipped over to Korea were literally taken hastily from war memorials. Mind you, the US Air Force was still operating Mustangs (by now re-designated as F-51s), albeit more advanced versions than the WWII models.
• When the concept of the Gatling Gun was being evaluated in mid-20th century for US Air Force, an actual Civil War piece was taken from a museum and hooked to an electric motor. The gun supposedly worked fine, despite being nearly a century old.
• In 2013 NASA engineers took a specimen of the beastly huge F-1 rocket engine, originally built for Apollo 11 but not flown, from the Smithsonian for testing. There are no plans to fly the old engine but it will help the development of an upgraded version for use on the Space Launch System.
  • It was actually very close to being a literal example of this trope. NASA had planned on making direct copies of the F-1 to use on heavier payloads, but they ran into a fatal problem: one of the key qualities of the F-1's that made them such great engines is that each one had minor tweaks and adjustments made by their engineers to suit the missions they were intended for. NASA had the original plans for the engine, but the engineers who had worked on them never officially documented their personal changes, and had since forgotten the changes or had already passed away, meaning that the knowledge to fine-tune the engines to peak performance was lost.
• The civil war that broke out in Ukraine in 2014 has seen both the Ukrainian military and the separatist side using really old guns and even tanks that date back to World War I and World War II. Quite understandable for both: the Ukrainian army lost a lot of materiel when Russia annexed Crimea and had already been badly underfunded for years even before the conflict, and the separatists, despite receiving Russian support, are having to make do with whatever equipment they're able to scrounge up and salvage for the majority of their combat operations.
  • In mid-2014, separatists in Donetsk region, Ukraine, took an IS-3 tank^note Heavy tank manufactured in USSR in 1945-46. Phased out as obsolete in the 1970s, but in some armies served until the early 1990s. which was used as a monument. Its engine was in usable condition, and more importantly, its gun was compatible with shells still used by the Ukrainian army. However, the Ukrainian army recaptured the tank after just a few weeks and by July 2014, it was back on display as a museum piece.
  • Ukraine has since stepped up their game in the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 by using 19th-century Maxim machine guns, fitted with modern red-dot sights. There's also at least one known instance of literal museum-piece Model 1941 Maxims being strapped into a triple-mount as an improvised anti-drone AA gun.
• In 2015, an accident knocked out the electric power supply on the Dutch Railways line between Hoorn and Enkhuizen, leaving an electric train stranded a few miles outside Hoorn. Fortunately there's a heritage railway at Hoorn, and they were happy to lend their antique locomotives to assist.
• Also in 2015, a train derailed in Kent after hitting cows on the line. The damaged train was recovered by 1001, a preserved diesel unit from the 1950s.
• In 2016, the United States has brought back the OV-10 Bronco for use in fighting ISIS. This plane was first deployed for the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The last time it saw military action was in 1991 during the first Gulf War. That's a 25 year retirement period. But as it turns out, when fighting a lightly armed enemy that relies primarily on mobility and small arms, propeller-driven planes work just fine at smoking them.
• Sweden has rebuilt a Cold War-era coastal missile defense system from pieces that were kept in museums.
• In 1796, a counter-revolutionary mob was marching on the Paris Directory (the seat of government); a quick-thinking lieutenant of artillery, noticing the antique cannon kept on the front doorstep as an ornament, managed to obtain a single charge of "Grapeshot" (a tin can filled with iron balls the size of ball bearings) and fired it at the approaching mob, killing dozens and dispersing the rest; he was promoted to General and given a medal for saving the French revolution with a "Whiff Of Grapeshot"; his name was... Napoleon Bonaparte!
• In the Netherlands some of the old steam pumps that were used to regulate the water level of the farmlands or polders are still kept functional in their capacity as monuments or museums. It happens from time to time that the water levels become dis-regulated enough that the modern system of electrical pumps simply does not have the capacity to deal with in, in which cases the old steam pumps can be brought back online to help.
  • So far no reports are known about any of the even older windmills made for the job being brought back into action in the modern day.
  • When the electric pumps supplying the Kennet and Avon Canal failed in 2009, the authorities contacted the museum keeping the original steam pumping station, who happily fired up the nearly 200-year-old engine.
• When the Royal Australian Army finally decided to create a sniper school in the 70s, they were initially equipped with WW1-era SMLE No. 1 Mk III* rifles.
• An interesting case of the museum piece never stopping in the first place, this hit-and-miss engine has supposedly been running since the 1930's running on the very oil it is pumping out of the ground.
• On 29 October 1880, in squally winds, a schooner, Luna, struck Redcar pier on the north-east coast of England and broke in half. The local lifeboat crew had two lifeboats at the time, Emma and Burton-on-Trent, but were both out of action having sustained damage while rescuing crew members from two other vessels in distress. Fortunately for the crew of the Luna, there was a third lifeboat available, the then seventy-eight-year-old Zetland which had been officially retired (and narrowly avoided being broken up)sixteen years earlier. She was launched and successfully saved the Luna's seven sailors. It was the last launch of the old boat and she became a literal museum piece thirty-seven years later, holding the title of being the world's oldest lifeboat.
• Perhaps the ultimate naval example is the Russian Federation's salvage tender Kommuna which entered service with the Russian Imperial Navy in 1915 as a submarine tender.
• On July 11, 2009, a robber walked into a convenience store in Richmond, Virginia, and opened fire on the clerk. A shootout ensued when a customer in the store pulled out his gun and returned fire. Said gun was an 1875 Remington .45 Colt single-action revolver with a 7.5" barrel. While it was a replica of current manufacture, the firearm's design itself was still over 130 years old at the time of the incident. The bad guy, who was also armed with a revolver (albeit one of double-action modern design) was successfully stopped with no innocent casualties.
• A literal example happened during the 2019 London Bridge attacks. When a knife-wielding terrorist attacked the historic building of Fishmongers Hall, a chef working at the building reacted by grabbing a narwhal tusk on display and wielding it as a weapon to drive them out.
• If specialized skill sets rate as "technology", then the ancient practice of falconry - a hunting tradition at least as old as human civilization - has found a whole new 21st-century application. Aside from its occasional use in pest control around airports and urban areas, trained eagles are now proving viable as a defense against consumer-grade drones: snatching intruding quad drones out of the air around sporting events, airports, and prisons more safely and reliably than net-launchers or interceptor-drones, and retrieving smugglers' contraband-loaded drones intact as evidence.
• Modern flatscreen televisions have a slight bit of lag that wasn't present in old CRTs. For most purposes, this is completely ignorable, but high-end tournament play in Super Smash Bros. Melee requires lightning-quick reaction times that simply aren't possible with that lag, leading to several tournaments having to dig up old bulky units just for this game. Despite the game's enduring popularity, the increasing difficulty of acquiring working CRT televisions was one of the factors leading to EVO finally retiring Melee in 2019.
• In 1964, when the disused section of railway line between the Bluebell Railway and the national network was being demolished, the contractors' diesel locomotive broke down, and they had to hire one of the Bluebell's preserved steam locomotives. Thirty years later, when the Bluebell were reinstating that section of line, they made a point of using the same locomotive.
• From the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-2022 in Donbas, expanded to full scale invasion by Russia in 2022):
  • Some water cooled Maxim 1910 machine guns are still being used, by both sides. Ukrainians have bolted some on pickup trucks, converting them into technicals, and some others have been used in groups of 4 in Anti-Air contraptions to shoot down cheap Iran-made suicide drones used by the Russians.
  • Some armed Ukrainian civilians of the territorial defense who couldn't be issued Kalashnikov variants simply use whatever they can find or whatever family heirlooms they kept, including World War II mainstays such as Mosin Nagant rifles, PPSh submachine guns, German MP-40s and even Degtyaryov DP machine guns.
    • Similarly, the Donbas Separatist conscripts were less equipped compared to their Russian allies, and were seen armed with Mosin Nagant rifles, PPSh submachine guns and even some early Cold War / World War II era helmets such as the SSh-60.
  • Ukrainians brought out a tank trap that was used in World War II and kept in a museum. It still has a museum plaque attached to it.
  • Russians reportedly used 3 ton FAB-3000 bombs from World War II on Mariupol to try crushing the fierce Ukrainian resistance there. These have to be dropped by planes of course, in an era of extreme precision guided missiles.
  • Some World War II Red Army helmets and war rations from The '70s have been found in destroyed Russian camps.
  • Ukraine uses a significant number of T-64 tanks from the mid-60s, albeit considerably modernized as T-64 BM "Bulat".
  • By the time of the larger battle of Donbas (which started sometime after the failure of the Kyiv offensive), Russians had lost so much T-72s (with the more recent T-90s in short supplies and the T-14 "Armata" not even having entered mass production yet) that some regiments had to resort to using antiquated T-62 tanks. Later, they started pulling T-55 and T-54 tanks (the first prototype of which were completed in 1945) out of storage.
  • The winter 2022-2023 saw Russians massively targeting the Ukrainian electrical grid with ballistic missiles and Iranian kamikaze drones, rendering electricity-powered trains useless until the grid was repaired. Ukrainians thus brought steam trains back to use.
  • By the time of Ukraine pulling out of Bakhmut in March 2023, the Russians have become so desperate for armored vehicles, they've begun deploying Cold War era Soviet BTR-50Ps, which date all the way back to 1954, despite the fact that the vehicles are long retired.
  • Unexploded Chinese ordnances from the 60s and 70s were found by Ukrainian soldiers (since China and North Korea have started supplying Russia).
• One notable aversion is that for safety reasons, weapons and ammunition that are used as displays in publicly accessible museums are rendered non-functional before being turned into museum pieces. Nobody wants an accident where a tank shell falls off its stand and explodes in front of a crowd, or for criminals to break a display case and grab a working machine gun.
• Older Than Feudalism example: The Tunne slave rebellion in 6th century Sweden was largely considered mythical, until archeologists discovered that right about that time, several even older grave mounds in the area had been broken into but only plundered of their weaponry. There's still some debate of exactly which side was so desperate for weapons that they'd risk angering the gods to get their hands on centuries-old swords.

Urban Legend

• Similar to the point brought up regarding The Salvation War, there is a story that the US keeps, in case modern trains are rendered useless, a federal strategic reserve of steam locomotives.
  • Same thing in Britain. When the conspiracy theorists are asked to suggest where exactly a lot of large and hard-to-hide steam locomotives are being stored, in a country as small as Britain and indeed where they think the necessary supporting logistics of coal and water are going come from, when Britain’s rail system has switched over to electric and diesel 50 years ago and that Britain is a country that has closed all its coalmines, they can get very incoherent.
• While it's never been conclusively proven, there were rumors that desperate Germans broke out old WWI tanks when the Soviets stormed Berlin, using them as pillboxes.

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