Discussion Main / ForgottenPhlebotinum

• The Grav Lance in the Honor Harrington series is a key plot point in the first book, and is then never mentioned again. Considering how much other technology advances over the course of the books (about 20 years in universe), you'd think they could have worked out the glitches of a weapon that can one hit the shields of any size of ship, up to and including a superdreadnought. Its sponsor lost favour, and its debut performance generated massive bad feeling amongst the other powers-that-be, so it could be deliberately kept out of action.
  • The Grav Lance required the ship using it to be at extremely close range to its opponent, it couldn't work at all except when mounted on a cruiser-sized or bigger vessel, and the energy requirements meant that the ship's usual defensive weaponry had to be gutted. While it did work as advertised, the ship was nearly destroyed in the process. Still, it was only a prototype, and could have been refined to be less dangerous to its own crew.
  • From a Doylist point of view: once the writer realized how big an impact could it have on his vision of space warfare, he proceeded to close every loophole he could find in the setting's internal logic to make sure the weapon will never come back.

This is equivalent of saying that swords are forgotten phlebotinum because modern armies don't use them anymore. Grav Lance was Awesome, but Impractical experimental weapon from the start and it's very situational usefulness combined with huge size and low reliability made it simply ineffective in Weberian space combat. Granted, Grav Lance / Plasma torpedo combo was deadly but grav lance has a range of 0,1 gigameters, Lasers can pass the sidewalls from four times that range, and missle combat is fought at over ten times that distance, and that was before multistage missles were introduces with range going up to around 60 gigameters. Using grav lance would be space equivalent to trying to atack sniper in open field with a knife, it's no suprise that it was never used again.

Edited by NNinja

• Ace Attorney
  • When Phoenix first meets Maya and finds out she's a spirit medium, he comes up with the obvious idea - why not just summon the victim and ask them who did it? Maya replies that she's just in training and can't do that. In the next two games, not only is Maya more experienced, but Phoenix also meets an even more talented medium, Pearl, yet he never thinks of that idea again. The one recorded time that was actually tried before, the answer the spirit gave turned out to be wrong, and the summoning was used to frame Maya for a murder.
    • This tactic was used by the police to find Gregory Edgeworth's killer and it ended up botched (becoming the infamous DL-6 Incident). This may also explain why Phoenix doesn't do it (may make people suspicious on the reliability and hurt his case). Also there's just not going there because it hits too close to home for Maya (whose mother was the unfortunate medium in said incident, something Phoenix didn't really gain a lot of appreciation for until the end of the first game).

Two problems with that. First of all this would give him a hint where to look, but that's it as ghost's testimmonies are most of the time inadmissible as court evidence. And secondly by the time Maya's abilities are reliable enough to consider using such tricks he'd already found out about DL-6 where this exact practice lead innocent man to be accused of murder, so it's rather obvious that he'd be reluctant to use such tactics.

• Phoenix is in possession of what is effectively a magic lie detector. Given that Phoenix never chooses to defend guilty clients, you'd think he'd use it to help pick which cases to take. He did use it for this purpose once, but it misled him due to a contrived case of Exact Words, and he was forced to take said case either way. Still, you'd think it would be relatively reliable.

And what exactly makes you think he DON'T use it? Aside from openly using it on Iris he generally asks his a lot questions about the crime involving "what happened", and i'm pretty sure that if client was hiding what he was doing at the time of crime he'd drop the case.

• Rory and Amy supposedly broke up for a while because they couldn't have children. Given the existence of advanced future medical technology, this should have been no problem whatsoever. Likewise, the revelation that Sarah Jane was in love with the Doctor and grew old alone could have been met with an apology and a trip to the future for a rejuvenation treatment considering that technology lets future people live hundreds of years.

Which episode directly refers to such technology, especially as it seems Amy's infertility was CAUSED by advanced technology as well.

Also, I seem to recall School Reunion and other episodes have a very "anti-living-forever" message.

Edited by OldManHoOh

From this:

• The Allspark shard from Transformers Revenge Of The Fallen. The take one to resurrect Megatron. Sam carries the shard with him on a quest to find a way to resurrect a dead Cybertronian, even USING THE SHARD TO RESURRECT A DEAD CYBERTRONIAN to find information on how to find a different artifact that he suspects MAY do the same thing as the item he carries.
  • This troper thinks a N00b wrote this. Jetfire was comatose but had an active spark: Prime was flat out DEAD.

The Natter + insult + 'this troper' should be removed. Haven't seen the movie, so IDK if the example is right or not.

Why was my Lord of the Rings entry removed?

Under Stargate SG-1:

• They were very careful to destroy every sarcophagus that they ever actually got their hands on. Only having one was a recipe for disaster, as the various nations who knew about the Stargate would go to war in order to have access to it.

Not that that excuses it, but which episode was that?

Edited by DocumentN

Removed this:

• Over in Marvel, Kitty Pryde sacrifices herself by phasing an asteroid to save the Earth from impact, but she herself is trapped inside it as it moves on through deep space. The X-Men, her supposed friends, never think to get Reed Richards, who owns several starships, to go save her. For that matter, the X-Men are allies with any number of alien races with FTL drives that regularly defy physics, but none of them gets a phone call. Bye, Kitty, we'll miss you until you inevitably show up again at some random moment in the future!

Because (1) it wasn't an asteroid, it was a giant, planet-killer, hollow-tipped bullet! (2) Reed Richards (and Doctor Strange) did try to save Kitty but weren't able to because she had "fused" with the bullet. S.W.O.R.D. (the equivalent of S.H.I.E.L.D. that focuses on outer space) also tried to save her but couldn't find a way to stop the bullet or cut it open (3) the X-Men only have connections with one alien race (the Shi'ar), and only because they're friends with Empress Lilandra, who was either deposed or dead at the time Kitty went missing (the book Kitty went missing in, Astonishing X-Men, is notorious for how difficult it is to reconcile with the time frame of the other books) and (4) it's probably worth noting that the bullet travelled from a planet in another solar system to Earth in a matter of minutes - just because your ship can go faster than light doesn't mean you can overtake something else going faster than light. The situation is practically the opposite of this trope: they didn't forget their phlebotinum, the writers handwaved the possibility of Kitty being rescued by saying "they tried everything, nothing worked. That thing you just thought of that we didn't? The X-Men tried that. Didn't work." Which, of course, makes her ultimate rescue all the more ludicrous: Magneto uses his powers to pull the bullet back and pop Kitty out of it.

Edited by LoserTakesAll