Tim Taylor Technology

Everything must blend! EVERYTHING.

"MORE POWER!"

— Tim Taylor, Home Improvement

If your Applied Phlebotinum is broken, you can usually fix it by increasing the power.

Can't outrun the bad guys? More power to the engines; the top speed of a vessel is totally independent of its design and mechanics, and is simply a function of how much raw power it has. Shields failing? More power. Critical pieces burning out? You'd think the solution would be to reduce the strain on that component, but no, the solution is to increase the power. The Negative Space Wedgie has nullified the physical principles on which the ship works? Turn up the power and it'll get scared and back off. Can't compute the Nth digit of pi? Increase power to the computer. Even missing or broken parts can be temporarily replaced by increased power. With the power up so high, it's no wonder there's so much Explosive Instrumentation.

Sometimes, this is subverted, and more power is a good way to destroy everything. In these cases, it may be time to Reverse the Polarities instead. If things are really bad, you do both.

Subtrope of When All You Have Is a Hammer…. You don't use different technology or configure it a different way, instead you use the same tools as ever but crank up the power input.

Oven Logic is what happens when the same logic is applied to cooking. Diverting Power may be necessary if you don't have extra power on hand and need to take it from another system. Contrast Pressure-Sensitive Interface, when pushing the interface's buttons harder makes it work better.

Named for the lead character of the sitcom Home Improvement, who constantly tried to give various appliances and tools "more power". However, this typically (and on some occasions literally) blew up in his face. Not to be confused with the occasionally-formidable Tim Brooke-Taylor Technology, or with needing more fire-power.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Gundam:
  • Averted in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, where the eponymous machine's performance was improved with a new friction-reduction system instead of increasing the power output.
  • Played straight in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, where the Freedom and Justice are able to outperform the earlier Gundams primarily because of their stronger (nuclear) power source. Having unlimited power allows them better performance (thrust comes from the same energy reserves as weapons, rather than a separate source of fuel), better armor ("Phase Shift" armor drains power), and weapons (allowing for Beam Spam without worrying about running out of power).
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 00's Trans-Am system seems to show that Gundams operate on this principle: need to make a gun more powerful? More GN Particles! Need to move faster? More GN particles! Need to read people's minds? MORE GN PARTICLES! Need to teleport to a distant alien planet? MORE GN PARTICLES!!
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the nature of Spiral Power as a manifestation of the Rule of Cool means that if you apply enough of it, the rest usually works itself out. After Kamina's mech, the Gurren, has been beaten up for a while, Simon (in his Lagann) lands on top of Gurren, and the two mechs combine. All damage is immediately repaired by Spiral Energy. However, after Lagann detaches, the damage returns, since Spiral Energy is no longer being used. The power output tends to manifest itself as enormous drills jutting out from the Gurren Lagann: More drills equal more power. Except, of course, when it's just one drill... several times larger than the mech itself. More Power indeed...
  • Indeed, the final arc of the series consisted of an exchange of one-ups with the Anti-Spiral being defeated in one form, only to simply go on a larger scale and trounce the Gurren Brigade. Simon's solution? MORE SPIRAL ENERGY!!! and the Giant Robot BIG ASS GIANT ROBOT would grow even larger to compensate and defeat the form that the Anti-Spiral took. First they were about as tall as a sky-scraper, then when that wasn't enough, they grew to a planetary scale, then to the size of a star, then to the size of the solar system. Soon they were bigger than the solar system, battling over a field of solar systems on the Milky Way. Then they out grew that too, standing and fighting on top of the Milky Way, hitting parallel, and perpendicular galaxies. By the end of the final arc, their BIG ASS GIANT ROBOT was so large that it could tear through the fabric of Space and Time. Several times over.
• Getter Robo has been doing this for approximately three decades now. Each of the small, one-man Getter Machines has a Getter Energy reactor. Whenever they combine into the titular Humongous Mecha, they're able to do just about anything because they have... MORE POWER! It's taken to its logical conclusion with the Getter Emperor, an out-of-control planet consuming monstrosity which is variously depicted as being the size of the earth, the size of Jupiter, and once an entire galaxy. Then it punched God in the face, who promptly exploded.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, Nanoha and Fate decided that the amount of magical energy they were outputting at the time wasn't enough, so they use a Cartridge system to boost their magical power by storing it in casings, which are dumped into the weapon during combat.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Nanoha takes on Vivio, and decides one gun isn't enough she needs FIVE!
  • Notable also is the scene where Nanoha puts Quattro down.
  • In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, Nanoha gets her own cannon and a suit of magical armor to support it.
• s-CRY-ed Kazuma's activation phrase for the second level of his alter goes like this: "MORE POWER! AND MORE! AND MORE! SHINE BRIGHTER!"
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, to defeat the fifth Angel, NERV hooks Japan's entire power supply into a positron cannon.

Comic Books

• In a DC Star Trek comic, the Excelsior was shown to have a working transwarp drive, capable of Warp 10. Transwarp has sometimes been defined as infinite speed, but only in later sources. Strange coincidence, considering Warp 10 is infinite speed by the rules of Star Trek: The Next Generation^note The Original Series sometimes had the Enterprise traveling upwards Warp 13. TNG tied together a lot of loose ends that the producers never thought people would obsess over. Anyway, by Scotty diverting power from the transwarp drive, the Excelsior's shields are able to absorb the impact and detonation of a planet-killer bomb.
• In the Lucky Luke episode Going Up the Mississipi, the villainous captain Lowriver tries to win the boat race by disabling the safety valve of his steam engine, against the warnings of his engineer.

Fan Works

• In The Meaning of One, spells can relate to power required in one of three ways. Some spells, like Lumos, have one specific effect and always draw the same amount of magic. Others, like levitation, draw however much power is necessary to produce the desired effect but no more. The third category, however, allow the caster to channel as much or as little magic as desired into the effect, and scale the result up or down accordingly. Charms in this category include things like the throw-dough charm (which creates a bigger and longer-lasting doughball as more power is added) and the bluebell flame charm (which creates bigger and hotter flames as more power is added). This third category become highly dangerous for Harry and Ginny, because their unprecedented magical strength means that it is very easy for them to massively overpower these charms.

Films — Live-Action

• Fantastic Four (2005) put this trope in center stage with Reed's cosmic storm simulation device for reversing their mutations. At the highest power he had available, it could do nothing but recreate or worsen their mutations. But if it had more power... once it had enough power it worked, but the character who was cured went back in and mutated again so he could face the Big Bad.
• In Batman Forever, Edward Nygma (soon to become The Riddler) straps his boss to a chair to use him as a guinea pig for his augmented reality TV system, "The Box". The man is left enraptured by the illusion, but when it starts to break down, Nygma applies "more power!" in an attempt to fix it...and ends up discovering that The Box, in addition to making people experience television in immersive 3D, depletes their IQ and adds it to his own.
• Sark yells for more power in TRON when he is trying to break down the door to the I/O Tower. Justified as this takes place in the computer world and the programs can drink energy. The fact that processing power is involved makes it more justified. Consider what Master Control Program says near the end of the movie, when Sark is taken down by Tron himself:
  MCP: Sark... All my functions are now yours...
• In The Hunt for Red October, Captain Tupolev of the Konovalov is dispatched to hunt down and sink the Red October. However, when he receives these orders, they are already seven hours old, thus the Red October has a seven-hour head start on him. In an effort to make up the lost time, he orders the reactor power increased, though not without hesitation.
  Tupolev: Inquire about the possibility of going to one hundred five percent on the reactor.
  Crewman: Captain, Engineering reports one hundred five percent on the reactor possible, but not recommended.
  Tupolev: *takes drag off cigarette*... Go to one hundred five percent.
• Inverted in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The shrink ray, if given too much power, becomes a Death Ray. It's not until Ron's baseball blocks a laser mechanism that the shrink ray's power is reduced enough to actually shrink things. This carries over to Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, where Wayne, unable to get into the primary laser drive to reduce the power, tries to diffuse the laser intensity by putting a glass bottle bottom in the filter pack, which ends up causing a power surge throughout the lab.
• Back to the Future Part III: Doc's solution to getting a steam locomotive to reach 88 mph is some pyrotechnically-treated wood that brutally overclocks the boiler. You can guess how it ends. Since he deliberately ran the engine off an unfinished bridge, he knew the overclocking wasn't going to be the worst problem.
• In A View to a Kill, after Zorin's dirigible gets snagged on the Golden Gate Bridge, he yells for "More! More power!" It doesn't break them free. "More power! Do it!" When they remain stuck in place, he yells, "Full throttle!"
• At the end of J-Men Forever, the evil Lightning Bug destroys his Moonbase by cranking up his stereo too loud.
  The Bug: Turn it up! More juice, Bruce!
  Mook: But you're mad — the Moon is being destroyed!
  The Bug: You don't know good music when you hear it!
• The movie Speed has one of these moments in the climax, when the controls for the subway are damaged from gunfire; since the emergency brake won't work Jack has another idea how to stop the runaway train. Since there is a curve up ahead, Jack figures all he needs to do is "speed it up" in order to jump the track before reaching the end of the line.
• The Black Hole: After one of the engines of the Cgynus are damaged in a meteor shower, Dr. Reinhardt orders the remaining engines to maximum power, against the advice of his robot henchmen. Predictably, he ends up pushing the ship far past her limits and she begins breaking up from the strain.

Literature

• A variant periodically shows up in the Honor Harrington series: removing the safeties on various systems. Examples include Alice Truman pushing Apollo's hyper generator to max to cut thirty hours off of a voyage to summon badly-needed reinforcements, knowing that if it blew, it would take out the ship (and prevent them from summoning said reinforcements).
• Happens in the novelization of The Black Hole. After damage to the engines of the Cygnus causes her power output to diminish, Reinhardt orders to increase the output of the working engines to compensate for it, up to override safeguards, to keep both increasing speed and the strength of the anti-gravity field. It fails, leaving the ship doomed having just half of her power available.

Live Action TV

• Home Improvement is the Trope Namer. Protagonist Tim Taylor is a handyman who's never satisfied with just fixing things. His solution to pretty much any problem is to give it more power. He's perfectly capable of building things at more sensible power levels, but he just doesn't want to. This makes him the king of Mundane Utility, hooking household objects to power at levels normally reserved for NASA. Among his accomplishments:
  • In trying to show how quickly he could light a barbecue grill, he put so much fuel into it that he launched it into geosynchronous orbit.
  • His idea of lighting his house for Christmas is always to add more power, a viewpoint exacerbated by the fact that he participates in a Christmas lighting competition in his neighborhood that he always loses. His crowning achievement here was when he had to go out of town one Christmas, and the weather was so bad that his plane home couldn't land — until his kids activated the Christmas decorations he had set up, which shone a light so bright that all of a sudden the plane could see the runway through the clouds and land.
  • In one episode, Tim meets his old college professor, who is well aware of Tim's antics and still wondering if he should have given Tim a passing grade. Tim spends the whole episode recreating his final exam to impress him, and while his assignment was to build a simple birdhouse... well, "simple" just wasn't good enough.
  • Zig-zagged in another episode, in which Tim is inspired to buy a home security system after his neighbor Wilson is robbed. Everyone at the hardware store assumed he would go down his normal route and speculated on the insane features Tim would add, joking that he'd have the first house with "first-strike capabilities". Tim surprised them by not wanting a particularly fancy system — at least until his wife Jill found out and insisted that he install as robust a system as he could. And Tim obliged her with a system that was so enthusiastic, it made the house unlivable.
• In Auction Kings, the gasoline-powered blender is fully functional, but also has no reason to be that powerful. Doesn't stop Paul and Delfino from testing it by making margaritas with it though.
• Many episodes of Quantum Leap end with Al suddenly appearing and declaring they've figured out how to solve the current plot problem with enough power to light up major city X for time period Y.
  Al: We did it, Sam! We did it! Of course it took enough power to light up St. Louis for a month, but we did it!
• Almost every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series featured Captain Kirk demanding "more power" from Scotty. This is deconstructed in "Relics", the ST:TNG episode featuring Scotty, in which he explains to Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge that he always held something back and padded time estimates to make sure he would come off as a miracle worker. Since Scotty wrote most of the engineering manuals that they use in Geordi's time, this means that most of the ships in the Star Trek universe by TNG time are running at about 33% efficiency and their engineers probably don't know it. Apparently, nobody bothered to check the math despite all the upgrades that have been made to starship engines in the intervening years.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation used this trope frequently, but also played with it.
  • Inverted in the episode "Booby Trap", where more power simply fed more energy to the titular devices which held the ship immobile and bombarded it with radiation. The solution was to shut down all the power systems and slip away on minimal life support and a single thruster pack.
  • Inverted in "Hero Worship", when one ship is destroyed (and the Enterprise nearly follows) by a Negative Space Wedgie when it keeps increasing the power to its shields - it turns out the phenomenon was an amplified echo of the shields themselves.
  • Lampshaded in "Disaster" where Ensign Ro rewires a computer to be run off of the ship's phaser power lines. O'Brien points out this shouldn't even work and could blow up in their faces.
• Star Trek: Voyager: One instance where "more power" was used to counteract the fact that most of the ship had dissolved into a cloud of deuterium. However, this was also inverted when Voyager hit a "subspace sandbank", so the more they struggled, the more stuck they got. So, they wiggled themselves free with minimal power.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this was the design philosophy of the Defiant class. It's essentially a set of guns strapped directly to an oversized engine. When the crew first acquires the prototype it takes a lot of work to keep the whole thing from shaking itself apart at maximum output, but once this is solved it's one of the most powerful ships in the quadrant despite being one of the smallest. Getting it to work properly involves breaking several Starfleet safety protocols; this may or may not be related to Scotty's entry above. It wasn't that the Defiant or her sister ships actually had more power than other Starfleet vessels, they just stripped out the majority of the systems that weren't combat related so you had the engine and weaponry of a Galaxy class ship on a hull that was about one quarter the size since you no longer needed all the equipment or crew for long-term science projects, exploration, research, or first-contact diplomacy. Or the ammenities needed to make a ship a true home for all those crewmembers and their families on a multi-year mission.
• iCarly: Spencer's magnetic Christmas tree. He could have just made a regular metallic Christmas tree. Instead he added a supercharged magnetic generator. It caught fire after he left it on during the night.
• The Stargate-verse in general. Most equipment will run off energy sources orders of magnitude greater than for what they were designed. This includes Energy Weapons, Deflector Shields, and the living hull of a Wraith hiveship. Normally, a Wraith hiveship is strong enough to withstand a single nuke and quite a few shots from Asgard beam weapons but unable to travel between galaxies due to its slow speed in hyperspace. When a ZPM was tied into the power system, the ship grew a reinforced hull that made Asgard weapons USELESS... and it crossed several million light years in a matter of hours.
  • The many troubles facing the Stargate Atlantis team would be solved if only they could locate a sufficient power source, but this is downplayed because the Ancients built the city for three ZPMs and they had all burnt out by the time the Atlantis team got there. Much of the first few seasons are spent trying to find more ZPMs or otherwise come up with a way to solve their power problems.
  • There is an episode wherein the power cables are damaged. McKay's solution? MORE POWER! This is justified, as McKay states that the damaged wires are "leaking" power, and by sending more through them, hopefully enough will get to the device to power it.
  • The trope actually got subverted at one point, where Atlantis' stargate started overloading with no way to stop it. They manage to contain the explosion by wrapping the city's shield around the gate, after which Zelenka seemingly plays this trope straight by diverting more power into the shield emitters to contain more of the radiation... except it turns out the emitters can't take that kind of power and fail just a second too soon, with explosive consequences for the gateroom.
  • The stargates themselves are pure Tim Taylor Technology. The entire structure is a power storage device. Any and all limitations of the stargate network can be overcome with MORE POWER. Need to dial a nearby galaxy? Build an ancient power booster. Need to dial a gate several galaxies away? Turn an entire planet into a nuclear reactor. Need to hold a wormhole open past the 38 minute limitation? MORE POWER!
• Several times in Sliders, "more power" was the solution to an uncooperative wormhole (and in the pilot episode, "more power" created the balky wormhole that started the entire mess).
• Automan was a hologram that had turned into Hard Light because he had been "given enough power", as was dryly stated in the opening monologue.
• When the title starship of Star Trek: Enterprise has its prototype phase cannons installed early on, their performance was initially far beyond expectations due to sabotage. A blast meant to take out a mountain on a lifeless rock cratered an area ten times larger than intended. When the ship that performed the sabotage came back and proved resistant to the base settings, they reproduced the overload to defeat it.
• 24, while more realistic than most, tends to solve many problems by getting more processing power on it. Apparently, all that you need to enhance a blurry cloud from CCTV into a detailed closeup, "track" someone with a satellite, restore an inaudible recording, and do other impossible things, is more processing power and time. It doesn't work this way in real life, where for almost a decade raw power is in excess for most tasks, and the limitations are the algorithms and the physical possibility.
• On Top Gear (UK) and The Grand Tour, this is Jeremy Clarkson's answer to just about any problem.
  Clarkson: Well, just give it more power.
  Hammond: There's a Clarkson answer to a problem.
  • The V8 blender and the V8 rocking chair are two examples that had Clarkson's philosophies applied to them. The former was used to make a "manly smoothie" that included beef with the bones still in and a brick as ingredients. The latter rocked the test dummy they placed in the seat to pieces and was so loud you couldn't rock and hear the TV at the same time.
• MythBusters. Rule of Cool applies after they've busted the possible part of the myth. A human can't actually swing that hard? Ramp it up as fast as the robot arm will go. The amount of explosives used in the myth doesn't get the stated result? Then use a few blocks of C4. If the myth gets confirmed, they still ramp it up to see how far they can push it. Burning 30,000 match heads looks exactly like that viral clip? let's see what a million match heads will do!
  Robert Lee (Narrator): If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
• Doctor Who
  • The TARDIS can perform even feats more amazing than normal (such as escaping the Big Bang, or leaving the universe entirely) if it deletes some of its own interior rooms for power. This has been seen in "Castrovalva" and "The Doctor's Wife", and referenced in "The Girl Who Waited".
  • Averted in "Logopolis" where the Master tries using "more power" in order to reverse entropy, only to be told that "more power will only increase the rate of decay", which is Truth in Television (i.e. the second law of thermodynamics applies).
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers often had this problem in a fight with the monster of the week. The solution: more power.
  • This ended up being the main cause for the destruction of the Thunderzords at the beginning of season 3. Needing the extra power to fight Rito, but the zords couldn't handle the extra load combined with the damage they were taking.
• The Red Green Show Handyman Corner segments often featured Red trying to wring extra performance out of battered and old power tools and vehicles, only to cause a variety of disasters when his projects either backfire and work too well.
• MADtv (1995) has Spishak products that sometimes require more power.
• On Good Eats, Alton rigged up a pepper mill that's operated by power drill. He also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of common kitchen appliances.

Newspaper Comics

• In a Garfield Christmas strip, Jon buys an electric rotating base for his Christmas tree because he wanted a little splash and dash. Garfield decides to give him more splash and dash by replacing the base with a blender set to liquify.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In Edition 3.5, psionics use a Mana Meter and many powers can produce a stronger effect by expending extra energy (e.g. pumping more power into psionic charm expands it to work on creatures other than humans, while damage-dealing powers just deal more damage). This is in contrast to the Vancian Magic of wizards and clerics, where damage-dealing spells get stronger with experience without requiring any additional effort, and upgraded versions of effects are entirely different spells which must be learned separately (e.g. charm person and the higher-level charm monster). To compensate for their damage-dealing powers being so inefficient, psions can alter the elemental type of these powers on each casting (allowing them to better navigate energy resistances and vulnerabilities); to compensate for the added versatility of each power, they have relatively few powers known.
    • The Overchannel feat allows a psionic character to temporarily boost their manifester level (the cap on how much mana they can pump into a power) at the cost of taking damage. The Wilder class's "Wild Surge" is effectively an Overchannel which supplies the extra energy for free and does not damage the user, but instead has a 20% chance of stunning them and draining their mana.
  • Dragonlance:
    • The tinker gnomes create large machines and devices that make a lot of noise and produce a lot of light and are often oversized for the tasks they're designed to do. In game terms, the larger a tinker gnome device, the more chance it has of working successfully.
    • In 3rd Edition, the "Reserves of Strength" feat allows a spellcaster to boost their caster level by up to 3, while also increasing the Cap on spells which scale in power by caster level. However, afterwards the character becomes stunned for an equal number of rounds (or takes damage, if they were immune to stunning).
• The Empire of Warhammer. A lot of their gunpowder / steam technology is dwarf technology with extra power; gatling cannons and rocket batteries are good examples.
• Genius: The Transgression: Geniuses can sometimes forestall Havoc (their inventions going haywire) by pouring Mania into them. Sometimes they explode, but then again, of course they sometimes explode! They were built by Mad Scientists!
• Star Fleet Battles: Players can add more power to just about everything which makes sense given its source material. Shields block more damage if they have more power. Engines move faster if they have more power. Most weapons can be overcharged to do more damage if they have more power. Not turning fast enough? Tilt your warp nacelles sideways and pour more power into a high-energy turn. Tractor beams? Longer range with more power. Resisting enemy tractor beams? Easier with more power. Want to jam your enemy's radar? More power. Want to cut through enemy jamming? More power! It seems that the only thing that can't improve with more power is the life-support system, and presumably the engineers are working on that. In this case it's more a matter of budgeting a limited resource though; there isn't enough power to keep everything maxed all the time.
  • Hydran fusion beams take this trope to the logical conclusion: They can be given so much power that they explode when fired, doing additional damage, but also destroying themselves and damaging the ship (this is less of a problem than it sounds for the ships you'd actually do this with). Orions have what's nicknamed the 'cocaine rule' that allows them to double engine power output...at the cost of burning out their own engines. Again, this is less of a problem than it sounds, as Orions are pirates and normally just raid convoys, and run away from anything else they encounter.

Video Games

• One level in Halo 4 has Cortana diverting power from Master Chief's shields into the engines of the Ghost he's driving, allowing it to perpetually drive with its boosters running. Because, you know, the reason boosters usually cannot indefinitely run has nothing to do with all Covenant technology being so prone to overheating.
• The X-Wing/Tie Fighter series of space sims allowed the player to divert power to either shields, guns, or engines, increasing the performance of one or more of them at the cost of decreasing the performance of the remaining device(s). FreeSpace and later games in the Wing Commander series also used this play mechanic. Unlike the typical applications of this trope though, it usually doesn't affect the maximum performance of these systems, but rather the rate at which they or associated systems recharged. This may have been inspired by the part of Star Wars, where Luke says "R2, try to increase the power!" and also the lines where pilots say "Switch your deflectors on double front" and "Stabilize your rear deflectors".
  • The Missile Boat, found in the Tie Fighter expansion packs, provides a more traditional example of this trope. This particular craft features the SLAM booster system, allowing the player to double the ship's speed by draining stored energy from the laser system - essentially trading laser cannon shots for seconds of speed boost. Being the Missile Boat, however, this had little effect on its firepower.
  • This also occurs in many of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, particularly the X-Wing Series. Often a pilot will find himself in a situation where he has sufficient power for N systems and needs N+1 functioning. This often turns into cursing the design flaws of that particular craft.
  • Independence War: It affects maximum performance of systems just because more weapons power means that PBCs recharge faster, do more damage, and have somewhat longer range. More engine power means both greater acceleration and less time for the LDS drive to start up. More shield power means stronger and faster-recharging shields. Underpowered systems get penalized much as you'd expect. Also note that the best way to fight in this game generally involves spending the vast majority of time with maxed engine power and only going into maxed weapon power for when you've got a good shot with your PBCs; very rarely might you divert energy toward shields, since they only tend to block PBCs (in a game where you tend to have homing missiles spammed at you, each doing about 20% hull damage with the tug), and only from two directions at that.
    • Freespace 2 also has an interesting deconstruction. It turns out to be possible to reroute more power to Colossus' beam cannons to increase firepower, but the excess power needs to come from somewhere like non-essential systems, and the radio chatter indicates that the ship's internals don't take kindly to being pushed well past red-line for extended periods and that the crew is barely preventing a catastrophic systems failure.
      Heat sinks were not made for this kind of abuse, Command! We'll melt down our cannons if we push any harder!
• Comes into play in FTL. Upgrading ship systems increases their durability but, more importantly, allows you to divert additional power into them. (And if you upgrade your ship's various systems without upgrading the ship reactor to match... you start having to choose whether to power your engines and weapons, or your life support). There is also a secondary system, the Backup Battery, which gives you a short boost of even more extra power to help mitigate that problem. Zig-Zagged by the fact that damaged ship systems cannot be brought up to full power; crew must be sent to repair them first.
  • This is also in play with the Rebel Flagship, which in its 2nd and 3rd phases undergoes 'power surges' which give it either a massive number of attack drones or a barrage of fire from every weapon it has.
• While not stated, the Mega Armoured Nobz of Dawn of War seem to perform this through the ability Power Surge: their movement speed is doubled for 15 seconds, but lose 10 hitpoints every second for that 15 also. No doubt that the damage is from the Mek Boy who built the armour in the first place having skimped a bit on electrical insulation.
• Star Trek: Starfleet Command is, of course, a Star Trek game about commanding a starship, so it naturally features this, but it also features an interesting case where Tim Taylor Technology would be justified, up to a degree: a species (the Lyrans) into More Dakka to the degree that their ships doesn't really have enough power to maintain their shields, weapons, and combat-necessary systems (like, say, life support) at the power levels they are designed for. Since you can divert power, however, at least one of those systems can work at optimal condition, so long as you are willing to pay the price for the system diverted from...
• In Star Trek Online, your ship has 4 power slides: Weapons, Shields, Engines, and Auxiliary. Notably, no matter how many Slow Lasers or photon torpedos your ship takes, just divert all power to Auxiliary and Engines to get to safety and Walk It Off. Likewise, divert all power to Weapons and Beam Spam, or just power up your Deflector Shields and go! No matter what happens, you're always barking and asking for more power. Players who choose the Engineer class eventually gain Emergency Power skills, which gives MORE POWER to MORE POWER.
• One guy you can talk to in Final Fantasy IX asks you if the engine for an airship should go in the front or the back. If you reply that it should go in the front, he throws a fit and says that it should go in the back, because "putting it in the front provides more stability, but less power!" This is lampshaded by another guy standing next to him, who sagely points out that most airship engineers are weird, and wonders why that is.
• The Flavor Text in Mass Effect 3 reveals that the weapons and shields rely at least somewhat on Tim Taylor Technology. The Hahne-Kedar armor set explicitly says that they rerouted excess suit power to weapons, which increases their damage. Also, the Codex for the first game says that the titular mass effect fields occur when electricity runs through element zero. It's not that much of a stretch to think that the strength of mass effect fields relies partly on how much of a current running through it, justifying this trope.
• In Star Control II, the crystalline Chenjesu and the robotic Mmrnmhrm have surrendered to the Ur-Quan invasion fleet and agreed to be sealed under a Slave Shield on the same planet, secretly because they had plans to merge their compatable physiologies. The Process, as it's called, runs on solar power and thus will be complete in about 35 years — which is roughly 34 years after the Kohr-Ah wipe out all other life in the galaxy. Thus, the player's character locates a device that puts out massive amounts of solar radiation and uses it at the Chenjesu homeworld, (mostly) completing The Process in a few seconds. The resulting allies remark that the result is neither what they expected to become nor is it flawless.
• In Chrono Trigger, when Lucca attempts to send Chrono back in time after Marle, she repeatedly tells Taban to increase the power. She called for "More Power!" when Marle got sent through the first wormhole so maybe she was trying to recreate the conditions.
• Fallout: This trope his horribly deconstructed in-universe; without micronization (the idea of making your technology work on a smaller scale), Tim Taylor Technology becomes some kind of worshipped technology during the Cold War, which results in less resources and less availability of advanced efficient technology for the public, while ruling bodies are given near-alien supertechnology and unquestioned power over the starving masses. Without a means to convert their nuclear stockpiles into basic living necessities (and nobody to tell them not to destroy the world and torture humanity for the lulz), the leaders of both superpowers proceed to nuke the world and experiment on the survivors to build a world that revolves around them. A few decades later, they are unceremoniously assassinated by the descendants of disgruntled survivors. Two hundred years later, the lack of clean, efficient technology has prevented most of the continental United States from rebuilding civilization to anything resembling pre-war society, even with nuclear-fission powered matter replicators and supersoldier creating biotechnology.
• EVE Online lets you, with the correct knowledge of thermodynamics, overheat just about any module of your ship that you "turn on", guns and afterburners included. Note that this is not without side effects, and you'll either need to patch up the damage overheating causes with liquid duct tape before the module shuts down completely, or pay for repairs at a station (which is the only way to reactivate a module that's been completely burned out).
• Endless Sky: Your ship's engines, shields, and weapons all consume energy, so while civilian cargo ships can get by with just a fuel cell and batteries for storage, anyone wanting to get into actual combat is going to want to upgrade their generators for, you guessed it, more power. One alien species, the Korath, take this to levels even Tim Taylor would consider excessive, as their reactors and engines have some of the highest power-to-weight ratios in the game, but at the cost of ridiculous amounts of waste heat.
• Guild Wars 2:
  • Asura Magitek can involve this. One story quest has a professor try to prove that dragons and their minions feed off magic by giving one of them an overdose; naturally it turns huge and goes on a rampage. And if you chose the Val-A Golem as your first invention, a rival will try to "improve" your design by stuffing it with too many power cells. The characters expect that this will also cause it to go nuts, but it merely explodes.
  • Another Asura wants to infuse raptor eggs with magic to make them grow, but decides that this is too slow and, predictably, increases the power. The result is a giant magic infused raptor chasing him down. The Asura are basically all over this trope.
• In Kerbal Space Program, the common fan response to a rocket design not working as intended (even if "not working as intended" means "blowing up on the launch pad") is to add more boosters. That is, to simply attach more rockets to the side and/or bottom of your existing rocket. Sometimes it works (if the problem really was insufficient thrust, or not enough total delta-v). More often, it doesn't. But at least you'll get more explosions.
• In Overwatch, Torbjörn's Overload ability is a Turns Red effect, granting him enhanced armor and attack/movement speed. This comes from "overheating his personal forge", turning him red and spewing flames from his exhaust pipes.
• In Cake Mania 5: Lights, Camera, Action! after Jack takes over running the bakery for his pregnant wife, things start breaking at random intervals. He muses on how to fix this at the start of one level.
  Jack: Another equipment malfunction! Maybe I shouldn't have installed all those automatic maintenance nanobots. Or... maybe I need to install MORE nanobots!
• Elite Dangerous allows players to route power between engines (ENG), weapons (WEP), and systems (SYS). A ship has a total of 6 power 'pips' to distribute, but each section requires 4 to work at maximum capacity. Pips to weapons increases how long they can fire for, pips to engines increases both forward and rotational speed, and pips to system increases shield strength. In the Horizons Expansion Pack, the Engineers can tune ship modules to suit the player, be it dropping performance for heat efficiency, cranking up the power to 11 at the cost of overheating at the slightest touch, or reinforcing modules with extra armor plating.
• Many machines and electronics of People Playground become more powerful by electrifying them with batteries or generators. For example, vehicles become more faster, lights become brighter, and the propulsion output of Thrusters become increased by just attaching some batteries.
• Satisfactory: Once you've researched overclocking, you can use crystal shards to boost individual machines' production rates (and power consumption) by 50% per shard, up to three shards in a given machine. The extra power won't damage your machines in any way, but they will put pressure on your power grid. Of course, you can just overclock your generators as well.
• Outer Wilds: Exploring the Orbital Probe Cannon reveals that Avens and Mallow were the Nomai in charge of its operation. In one conversation, they receieve a message from their fellow engineers warning them not to exceed a certain safe power level when they configure the cannon to fire. Avens and Mallow convince each other to ignore the recommendation and maximize the cannon's power output, reasoning that it will ensure higher probability of the mission's success (and, implicitly, will be cool). Elsewhere, you can find a conversation between Cassava and Daz just before they send the message in question. They know their sibling and friend very well, so they accurately predict that Avens and Mallow will want to increase the power, and adjust the recommended "limit" significantly lower than the calculated safe maximum as an attempt to compensate for this zeal. Thanks to Avens and Mallow the cannon launches the probe beautifully, but overloads itself and explodes anyway, accounting for its shattered state when you find it.

Webcomics

• This strip of Real Life Comics.
• After Riff in Sluggy Freelance "improved" his ex-girlfriend's life by amplifying her kitchen sink to a geyser:
  Monica: I think you're right about all guys [overpowering stuff]. The plumbers' invoice included an hour of assessing, two hours of repair and 15 minutes of "mandatory applause".
• In Schlock Mercenary:
  • Teraport area denial systems can be penetrated by a sufficiently large amount of energy, and the Fleetmind has that level of energy. Except that it needs every petawatt of it to defend planets from the Pa'anuri, and it is essentially sacrificing millions of lives each time it chooses to use it for other purposes.
  • This isn't, however, universal. Forcing a damaged annie plant to output max power is NOT a good idea, to the point that it counts as an Idiot Ball moment.
• xkcd: Implied to have been attempted with unfortunate results by this strip in which someone's location history reveals visits to sex toy shops, electronics and power tool shops, and a hospital burn ward.

Web Original

• Mentioned by name in #4 of Cracked's 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• New moon? Can't see anything? Wanna fix that? Or maybe you're just sick of the moon and want to vaporize the whole thing. Either way, in his blog What If? Randall "xkcd" Munroe tells you how, alongside quite a few more examples. In another entry he hangs a lampshade on it:
  "I've always thought that one of the the great things about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you".
• From TextsFromLastNight: "I don't care how hungry or impatient you are. the highest setting on the microwave is 100% and you better not take it apart to add power. This is not the Enterprise".
• Sarge of Red vs. Blue sees every powered bit of machinery as requiring some obscenely impratical fuel source, such as diesel or nuclear fission. Even when power cells and solar energy are far more economical and reliable, his work consistently hampers the team in battle, such as when he installed emp- er, sorry, E.M.P. tech into the Warthog's turret, completely immobilizing the vehicle whenever it fires.
• One of the defining traits of Linus Tech Tips is a tendency to water-cool and/or overclock anything and everything, whether it's a high-end gaming PC that really doesn't need the extra power, or a TI-84 graphing calculator that really shouldn't be able to generate enough heat to justify the water-cooling. One notable example was when they watercooled a PC with a loop run by a 2 horsepower gas-powered water pump, several orders of magnitude stronger than any pump that would ordinarily be used for that task.

Western Animation

• Parodied in an episode of Adventures in Odyssey when the characters watch part of an episode of a Star Trek-like show. The Kirk equivalent demands more power so they can escape the villains and the Scotty equivalent ends up resorting to using a bicycle-powered generator to give the ship a boost, which actually works.
• Averted in The Venture Bros. when the Venture family tries to make it out of Ünderland after their experimental jet is disabled; Doctor Venture frantically and repeatedly demands that they switch to auxiliary power, and when they finally land, Brock snaps back, "WE DON'T HAVE AUXILIARY POWER!"
• Parodied on The Simpsons. NASA are watching television to get an idea of what the average American is like. They turn on Home Improvement to hear Tim Taylor declare he's just finished souping up his lawnmower. Then the lawnmower goes backwards instead of forwards, knocking over the fence and eliciting this line:
  Tim: Oh no! I've killed Wilson. Oh well, looks like it's back to jail for me.
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the Flim Flam brothers pull this in "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" during the cider-making contest. Upon realizing that the titular machine isn't producing enough cider, they crank up the power, which results in it starting to suck up entire trees rather than just the apples. This actually has the effect of decreasing production at first, because their quality control mechanism begins rejecting everything due to the apples getting mangled by the tree debris, and it's only when they turn the QC off that their production actually increases. Of course, this ends about as well for them as you can expect.
• In Sym-Bionic Titan, Lance does this trying to revive Octus. He ends up causing a power outage, forcing him to leave the hotel he was staying at. He later does this in the same episode on Steel's base.
• Stu Pickles' inventions in Rugrats sometimes take more power than usual.
  • At one point in the first movie Stu invented The Reptar Wagon and tested it out, it shot fire causing these lines:
    Grandpa Lou: Con flab it! Can't a man work in his own basement without getting barbecued?
    Stu: Okay. So, maybe real fire isn't the best idea for a children's toy.
• SpongeBob SquarePants uses this, with a Converging-Stream Weapon, to get a stubborn stain off of a platter in the episode "The Krusty Plate". Only after the entire Krusty Krab blows up in a nuclear explosion does the stain finally come off.
• In one episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Professor Nimnul uses computerized flying carpets to commit robberies. When he sends a ton of them to a mansion party, the rangers nail the carpets to the floor to keep them in place. When the carpets don't come when Nimnul summons them, he decides to increase the power and the carpets end up raising the entire mansion.

Real Life

• Truth in Television: Aircraft of all kinds (be they prop planes, helicopters, or supersonic jets) do not always fly at their maximum speed. They have a 'cruise' speed at which they operate at optimum performance for distance, speed, and fuel usage. The UH-60 "Black Hawk", for example, has a cruise speed of 150 knots (173 mph, 278 km/h) and a "maximum" speed of 159 kn (183 mph, 295 km/h). Aircraft also have a "never exceed" speed, beyond which flight will become dangerous because the airframe is not designed for the stresses involved and you'll be risking either having your flight controls jam or worse, mid flight breakup.
  • Jet engines are also rarely operated at maximum power, because it will reduce their lifespan considerably (and use disproportionally more fuel). The most notorious example is the MiG-25: it is "redlined" at Mach 2.8, though the one aircraft that reached Mach 3 ended up destroying its engines during the flight.
    • MiG-25 is basically this trope embodied. Equipped with two huge Tumanski RB-15 turbojets, it creates more thrust than Concorde airliner. MiG-25 is known to have outrun air-to-air missiles in Israeli-Arab conflicts and reached speeds of 3.2 Mach (3920 km/h). The engines were ready for the scrap heap after that, but they were designed to be easily changed. MiG-25 is manufactured from stainless steel instead of aluminium, and has extremely smooth surface.^note The smooth surface reduces air drag to maximize speed, and steel is structurally stronger than aluminium: it's heavier, but better able to withstand the incredible stress of high speed.
  • Although in a rare inversion, the SR-71 wasn't limited by its engines, but by its skin getting overheated by compression heating. Its engines actually worked better the faster it went.^note The SR-71 was actually designed to work better in the air than on the ground. Engineers noted that the plane leaked fuel prodigiously on the ground, because the fuel tank was designed to expand when subjected to the high levels of heat in flight, at which point it would stop leaking (a leak on the ground is significantly less dangerous than a leak in the air)
  • This applies to the four-stroke/two-stroke engine. These engines are usually never run anywhere near maximum RPM, for the reason that going that fast will cause a lot of mechanical wear and heat on the engine. Many cars sold have the ECU effectively cap the RPM before the redline (the area in the tachometer that has a red stripe along it). Of course, if you really need that power, you can hack the ECU to not do this.
  • Combat airplanes technically can turn much tighter than they usually are made to - more often than not it's the pilot who can't take the fact that all his power (i.e. blood) is being forcibly re-routed to his feet or head. Modern flight suits help fighter pilots sustain greater amounts of G-forces than WW2 pilots, but they still have their never exceed limits... which they'll sometimes exceed anyway in life-or-death situations. It's not uncommon to have pilots literally fall unconscious for a few seconds just so they could release a potentially fatal burst or dodge one more missile.
    • Many WWII fighters had an extra range on the throttle control, sometimes limited by a wire across the throttle slot that would stop the throttle lever from moving past until the pilot pushed hard on the throttle. This was often referred to as 'War Emergency Power' or 'WEP'. On some planes, this just allowed the engine to be run beyond the normal RPM limit; on others, it might increase the turbocharger/supercharger boost; another design would inject water, a methanol-water mixture ('MW50' in Luftwaffe use), or nitrous oxide into the intake to cool and compress the incoming air. Regardless of the method, the use of WEP was limited, either by the limits of the water or MW50 tank, or by directives on how long the increased RPM or turbo boost could be used. Use of the increased RPM or turbo boost was a strain on the engine; use of WEP in these types would be reported after landing so that the engine could be inspected for damage. Water, MW50, and nitrous injection was much less likely to damage engines when used, but the tank and piping for the injection system added weight to the aircraft, a negative factor for fighters.
• Most military vehicles have governors to limit the amount of power the engines are capable of achieving; and thus limiting the vehicle's top speed. When deployed to a combat zone, one of the first things the crews do is remove, disable, or bypass the power governors.
  • American military vehicle and radio systems, generators and other non-man-portable electronics, also have special circuit breakers to protect them from power surges or over-power states. In combat there are switches or software modes that will keep it running no matter what. It's called "Battle Short" or "Combat", basically a switch or software mode that allows the operator to bypass the circuit breaker in emergency situations.
  • US Naval Nuclear Plants have a "Battle Short" switch which disables the automatic safeties (Read: SCRAM) on the reactor. Using it in any situation which doesn't involve inbound enemy missiles is an extremely easy way to experience a Court Martial.
• As seen in The Fast and the Furious, nitrous oxide injectors can briefly give an internal combustion engine a massive burst of power, although the effects in real life are less reality-blurring than in the movies. Nitrous oxide doesn't make a car go faster, since it simply increases the combustion power of the engine, making the car accelerate faster, unless your vehicle's speed is not limited by engine revs, but by engine power. If your top gear can propel the car faster at max revs than the engine has power to beat air resistance, then adding the nitrous will increase the vehicle's maximum speed.
  • Nitrous oxide (N2O) breaks in the cylinder into nitrogen and oxygen. It increases both the concentration of oxygen, making the engine running hotter, and concentration of inert, increasing the cylinder pressure. This will result in a sudden and dramatic increase of revolutions. This device was known as Haha-Gerät (Ha!-Ha! Device) in the WWII Luftwaffe. It enabled the pilot to squeeze some 60% more revolutions off the engine momentarily - enabling a troubled pilot to escape the enemy. It also worked as a psychological weapon; the Haha-Gerät spat out an enormous tongue of flame off the exhaust, giving an impression of the plane igniting. Often that was enough to convince the enemy that the plane was a kill already and give up the pursuit.
• WEP (War Emergency Power) on American turbocharged radial engines. It employed water-methanol mixture injection in the cylinder. Germans also employed it as the MW-50 ("Methanol-Wasser 50-50").
  • In practice, due to providing oxygen for combustion, nitrous oxide is a chemical supercharger, while methanol injection (which cools down the flame front via vaporization and also enriches the fuel via methanol burn) is a chemical intercooler.
• "Full throttle" in the P-51 Mustang wasn't quite full throttle; the throttle lever was held back by a wire. In an emergency the pilot could hit the throttle hard enough to break that wire. A broken wire usually meant that the engine had to be rebuilt.
• Our existing particle accelerators weren't capable of getting colliding particles to produce the Higgs boson particle. So we built the Large Hadron Collider, a 17 mile long particle accelerator, to give us more power!
  • And if that didn't work, there were plans to add EVEN MORE POWER. And potential plans for another one entirely if that failed as well.
• This is basically the whole idea behind overclocking computer components. Likewise, sometimes defective parts can be 'fixed' by adding more voltage to force enough power through the problem. In the latter case, this is mostly a short term solution as too much power will cause issues of its own and long term exposure to overvolting will reduce the life span of the device.
• Finnish Navy corvettes "Turunmaa" and "Karjala" used Rolls-Royce Olympus gas turbines (yup, the same as in Concorde), and they were equipped with special governors equipped with security seals. The normal maximum speed of those corvettes was 38 kn, but they logged regularly 43 kn speeds. But when breaking the security seals and overriding the governors, the vessels could achieve 50 kn speeds - although the engines would not stand such stress for a long time.
• Before the age of electronic fuel injection, engines designed for high-rpm (mostly Alfa-Romeos, Maseratis and Ferraris) had very rich settings in carburetor jets and also ignition timing designed for high-rpm operation, which made them nearly unworkable at low rpm (an Alfa-Romeo twin-cam engine owner described it like "it huffed and puffed until 5,000 rpm, then exploded into a mad surge to the redline"). So repeated city driving resulted in carbon deposits from unburnt fuel throughout the engine, which had to cleaned in a prolonged redline run on the highway to heat up the engine and burn them, which got the nickname "Italian tune-up".
• Modern day turbocharged engines are also designed to be driven hard, to keep the exhaust manifold and turbocharger hot enough◊ to afterburn carbon in the exhaust gases. Under-driving them will slowly coke up the turbocharger rotor and housing, lose power and fail emissions test in the near future.
• At the Battle off Samar on October 25, 1944, the captain of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts ordered his chief engineer to lock down the safety valves on the ship's boilers and run the steam pressure at above the ship's rated maximum — in effect, overclocking the Roberts' entire engineering plant — to increase speed. It worked.
• The human body often works this way. Muscles not getting enough oxygen? Crank up the heartbeat and respiration! And if that's not enough, lactic acid fermentation will provide you with the more power you need! If that's not enough, only a third of your muscles normally operate at any one time. Throw them all into gear! (Note that doing this causes massive tissue damage, so the body will save it for live-or-die situations. But this is where stories of people lifting cars unaided come from). Most primates can do this safely all the time; it's why chimps are so much stronger than a human with the same muscle mass - the trade-off is that humans have far better endurance that other apes, so we can outrun them over any long distance.
• Railguns and coilguns work this way. The higher the electric charge in the rails is, the faster the projectile travels. Since railguns rely on the kinetic energy of the projectile to do damage, more power directly equals more firepower. On the downside, the faster the projectile travels, the more friction it generates, causing the rails to heat up and warp.
• As mentioned in a couple of previous examples, nuclear power plants (and to a lesser extent conventional ones) have variable power output and "100% power" generally refers to the maximum output within acceptable parameters. So it's possible, but very dangerous, to operate above 100%.
  • The WWER 440 reactors at the NP Ps Mochovce and Dukovany are (safely) running at higher power than originally designed for. However, this required modification of several components.
• In closely matched street races, try turning off the A/C and, in the case of a 2CV race, the lights.
• The American "Big Three" car companies tend to take this approach to designing cars, often focusing on ramping up size and engine power and flaunting their MORE POWER!! in commercials. Like Tim Taylor's attempts, this blew up in their faces when the price of gas shot up, tanking demand for their powerful gas-guzzlers.
  • Russian car brand Volga used to have a ridiculously over-powered engine compared to the other properties of the car. Most importantly, the car was cheap - all the desired properties for any wannabe rally driver. The car was nicknamed "Flying Coffin" in Finland - many wannabe rally pilots simply pushed the pedal to the metal, but the steering gear, transmission and brakes (and usually the skills of the driver) weren't really up to par to handle such powers. Those who survived usually became good rally drivers.
  Jon Stewart: Business experts call that phenomenon "What the [bleep] did you think was gonna happen?"
  • Also played straight by the Bugatti Veyron Supersport. When the base model Bugatti Veyron's top speed record was beaten by the SSC Ultimate Aero, Volkswagen resorted to this trope to reclaim the speed record with the Supersport - they added around 300HP to the already powerful engine (which was already rated at over 900HP!).
  • German luxury maker Mercedes-Benz (and by extension, their AMG performance arm) used to do this, borrowing the American idea of bolting large engines in their luxury cars. They since have discontinued this trope in late 2010s to comply with Europe's emission targets.
  • Ingeniously averted by many European and Japanese car makers, who can somehow squeeze out performance from their cars without resorting to more power. An example is the 2007 Nissan GT-R, which despite being heavier and having less power, can keep up with the 2009 Chevy Corvette C6 ZR-1 on the Nürburgring Nordeschleife as shown here. And even with a bit more power, the upcoming 2012 Nissan GT-R is still less powerful and heavier than the Corvette ZR-1, but already demonstrated potential superior performance in early tests.
• Space Shuttle main engine: Thrust specifications at The Other Wiki says, "Current launches use 104.5%, with 106 or 109% available for abort contingencies". It's a convention, as they go on to explain, but sounds nice.
  • Similarly, jet engines can sustain short bursts over their maximum rated thrust to take off or abort a landing.
• The Z-Machine◊, a device with a peak power output of 290 terawatts, over 10 times the combined power flowing through all of the world's electrical grid for a few tens of nanoseconds, generating a plasma implosion, an extremely powerful X-ray blast and lightning storm, and partially destroying itself. Originally built as a nuclear bomb simulator with an output of 50 tW, it's now being used as an extreme physics experiment and fusion power testbed, with plans to upgrade it to output 1 petawatt - 1000 tW. Its working principle, the Z-pinch, essentially involves gathering as much energy as you can and releasing it one extremely powerful shot through a couple of poor thin wires, causing said wires to explode into a plasma and then causing the plasma to crush itself under its own magnetic field. This process, apart from generating huge amounts of X-rays, can generate stupendous temperatures, many times hotter than the center of the Sun. It is one of the ways of achieving inertial confinement fusion reactions - the other two ways involve having hundreds of giant laser beams simultaneously converge on a tiny ball of hydrogen as in the 500 tW National Ignition Facility or have a runaway fission chain reaction - a nuclear bomb - implode on a hydrogen target - creating a thermonuclear bomb.
• Laser pickups in CD players usually go bad either due to increasing opacity of the lens, or reduced power output of the diode. In these cases, a very Tim Taylor fix of upping the calibration trimmer (increasing the laser's power) is employed.
• Similar to the Samuel B. Robberts example above, we have a civilian example of Tim Tayloring for an emergency: RMS Carpathia had a registered top speed of only 14 knots (16 mph). When he got the Titanic's distress signal, what did Captain Rostron do? Cut off the heat to the A/C and hot water taps and redirect it all to the engines for MORE POWER! As the stokers could barely work the overheated boilers at the needed pace, he also called for the second team of stokers, then sleeping, and sent them to feed the boilers to the last possible grain of coal. Doing so scored the 500+ foot long liner a speedy (for her) 17.5 knots (20.1 mph), slicing nearly an hour off the time it took for Carpathia to reach Titanic's survivors; there's no telling how many people that hour saved. RMS Carpathia would never again achieve that much speed in her long and storied career.
  • At one point during the night, one of the engineers pointed out that the steam gauges were dangerously high. What did the chief engineer do in response? Put his hat over the gauge. If they couldn't see it, they had nothing to worry about.
• A '55 Chevy with a Rolls Royce Merlin. For reference, this is the same engine that powered the P-51 Mustang during WWII.
  • Recipients of a Rover Meteor engine (a Merlin with an iron block and no supercharger) include John Dodds' 'The Beast' (a faux Rolls Royce made of plastic that burned down at least once), A Rover SD 1 (the builder wanted to do 200mph on a budget) and a Blower Bentley.
  • YouTube has examples of aircraft engines fitted to interwar racecars, usualy to break speed records. These range from Napier Lion engines in Bentleys to the BMW Brutus, to the duck-shredding Beast of Turin, a 28.4L 4-cylinder THING which did 180mph in 1912.
• The nonlinear distortion of amplifiers increases with the quotient of output-voltage and supply-voltage. So it is possible to increase the sound-quality of audio equipment by increasing the supply-voltage. That's why some stationary low power studio equipment like microphone-amplifiers or equalizers often use fairly high voltages like 30V when powered by the grid, even when considering you could also power the circuitry with 4 mignon cells or so. But before increasing the supply voltage of existing equipment, make sure it can actually take it. The limit for voltage is usually the breakdown voltage of capacitors.
  • The distinctive growling sound of guitars in rock and roll music is an effect called "distortion". While there are many ways of creating distortion, the simplest and still the most common way to do so is to turn up the preamplification volume (or "gain") to a higher level than the main amplification ("power") stage can take advantage of, resulting in the waveform "clipping" as the amplitude of the preamp soundwave exceeds the limits of the power amp stage.
• Similar to the military example above, many electric scooters have a governor to limit their speed and make them street-legal for rider more than double its maximum speed.
• Installing a turbocharged Chevy Van 6.2 litre diesel engine on a 25 ft wooden fishing boat. The boat, designed as a displacement hull fisher with hull speed of some 6 kn, can now easily reach 25 knots.
• If your radio station is being jammed, one of the best ways to deal with this is to crank up the power on your transmitter. This works because radio jamming is literally someone else transmitting on the same frequency as you to drown out your signal; if your transmitter is powerful enough, it drowns out the jamming instead.
  • During the Cold War, the countries of the Soviet bloc heavily jammed Western shortwave stations broadcasting to Eastern Europe (such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America). The targeted stations responded by turning up the power on their transmitters to overpower the jamming; in response, the jammers upped the power on their transmitters, at which point the Western stations added even more power to compensate. This went on to the point that even legal, pro-Soviet shortwave stations experienced considerable interference from the jamming.
• Similar to a Stargate Atlantis example above, an electrical device at the end of a long cable may not receive enough voltage to operate correctly. Solution: more voltage to compensate for cable losses. It's risky, because if the load is reduced, the voltage at the end of the cable will then be too high, so this alone is not proper engineering solution.
• Within the Nerf line of blasters, one method of launching darts is to shove the dart through two electrically-spun flywheels. Within the Nerf modding community, the way to make these kinds of blasters more powerful is to put more voltage through the motors and hope it doesn't burn out the motors or strip any gearing. This is typically achieved through using double-voltage batteries (sold for security-guard flashlights), re-wiring the blaster to take more (normal) batteries at once, and/or replacing the wiring with something thicker with better current-bearing tolerances.
  • There are ways of upgunning blasters that don't use flywheels, as well. Spring-powered plunger-powered blasters can have their springs replaced with stronger springs, as the expense of wearing out the plastic (so modders use metal and polycarbon parts). Electrically-cocked spring blasters will often have their circuits overcharged as well, leading to faster rates of fire, instead of greater range or faster dart speed, also at the expense of part wear.
  • Older Nerf blasters, which use compressed air tanks, can be significantly re-tooled in a number of ways. Air compressors can be bolted on, to maintain constant pressure or increase the overall pressure. Metal tanks and tubing can replace weaker plastic components to allow for greater internal pressure without risking explosions. Bigger air tanks can replace smaller ones to give larger reservoirs of power to the blaster, and enable more shots before needing to pump up the blaster again. Some people removed the air tanks altogether, and replaced them with airsoft gun CO2 canisters, which can do all of the above at once, except prolong the operational lifetime of the blaster.
• The catenary on French High Speed Lines (LGV, linges a grande vitesse) usually provides AC at 25 kV, 50 Hz. When the TGV had to set yet another speed record not only was the train modified (the engines delivered between 40% and 68% more power and there were more engines to begin with), the Voltage was overclocked to 31.5 kV. Ultimately the train exceeded its proposed speed of 150 m/s (540 km/h) by almost 35 km/h clocking in at 574.79 km/h.
• The AC Cobra was already frisky enough in 289 form, but fitted with the Ford 427 V8 it gained a reputation for outright homicidal tendancies, despite a new spaceframe chassis and coil springs. This is especially true in the extremely rare (two built, one surviving) Super Snake variant, which had twin superchargers and 800 horsepower. One of the Super Snakes (unfortunately? The jury may literally be out) failed to kill Bill Cosby, though had better luck with its next owner, who ended up driving it off a cliff.
• In the computer world, overclocking is basically this. Sure you could find ways to organize the logical parts of the system for more efficiency, or you can bump up the clock speed. Today, the high performance CPUs and GPUs both perform self-overclocking when thermals aren't so bad to give you more performance. And some people push the limits of processors, nudging into Explosive Overclocking territory.
• A variant of this happens with amateur or hobbyist astronomers. They tend to go out of their way to maximize the magnification their telescope(s) can produce. As any professional astronomer will tell you, 90+% of astronomical observation should be done using the lowest magnification your equipment is capable of producing, especially if you're a true novice who has absolutely no working knowledge of how telescopes actually work^note For the record, the primary function of a telescope, regardless of its design, is to collect and focus light from distant objects, not magnification of said objects. Magnification is a side effect determined by the quotient of the focal lengths of the main body of the telescope and the eyepiece used with it. The diameter of the telescope's aperture is actually the important part to consider when purchasing a telescope. The wider the aperture on your telescope, the more light it can collect.. Most professionals and veterans blame the marketing teams employed by manufacturers of the equipment being used for this misconception.

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