Awesome but Impractical/Film

"A flashy feature that has limited usability for victory."

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• Star Wars:
  • This philsophy is the basis of the Galactic Empire's military. While the Galactic Republic and the First Order adhered to it to a degree, the Empire embodied it. A lot of their military hardware, like the Imperial-class Star Destroyer or the AT-ATs, are designed mainly to be intimidating against poorly-armed Space Pirates or smugglers. Against hardware that can stand up to them, they're a lot less dangerous. It's why there are dozens of YouTube videos detailing how even Earth could match the Imperial army.
    • The Imperial Walkers from The Empire Strikes Back are pretty impressive to look at, but when you think hard about it they're just huge sitting ducks for enemy weapons, and the Rebels manage to disable them just by wrapping cords around their legs and tripping them. What happens when the Rebels decide to arm themselves with some serious firepower, like the proton torpedoes they use to kill starships with? This article from Cracked.com points out some of its Egregious design flaws.
    • The Imperial-class Star Destroyer is a really impractical ship. Its exposed shield generators only protect the command deck, said command deck is a very obvious coning tower than can be easily targeted, it has only one hangar door that's very vulnerable, it has no point defence weapons or any armaments on its underbelly and its turbolaser batteries are all stacked behind each other which means 3/4 of its guns can't be brought to bear on anything directly in front of the Star Destroyer. The Resurgent-class In-Universe and out was designed to address and correct all of these flaws.
    • Though the Resurgent-class is also guilty of this. Given the smaller resource base of the First Order compared to the Galactic Empire, the Resurgent is simply too large a ship for the First Order to properly mass-produce, limiting both the scope of territory they can hold onto and how much manpower they can staff the ships with. It's also an incredibly fast ship for its size, so fast that its hard to stop. The First Order fleet didn't jump to hyperspace in front of the Resistance in The Last Jedi because it would have massively overshot.
    • The Death Star and its successor Starkiller Base. Sure they're very intimidating but both planet killers are such massive resource sinks and so impractical to enforcing rule that firing them galvanized rebellion against the Empire and the First Order. And when they blew up, both states lost massive amounts of resources and some of their most elite forces. Even high ranking admirals in both states have commented that they could have built a larger fleet out of all the money and metal they used for their planet killers.
  • Lightsabers. Absurdly Sharp Blades sure, but as Han Solo once said, they're not, unless being wielded by trained Force user, very useful. A novice lightsaber wielder can be easily overwhelmed by blaster fire. Variations on the standard blade style aren't much better. Darth Maul's Double-Bladed Lightsaber from The Phantom Menace halves his attack and striking power, he can't effectively use it as a staff without chopping off his own limbs, etc. At several times, his saber grazes his shoulders when he's doing his attacks on Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. Kylo Ren's crossguard saber is also pretty risky as he risks cutting his fingers off if he reaches too high.
  • That droid missile from the beginning of Revenge of the Sith that targets Obi-Wan's craft. They fire a missile at a ship. It overtakes his ship and opens. Then droids comes out of the missile and start dismantling the ship. This process takes several minutes, and gives him time to tell someone what's happened and that person to try two different strategies to successfully save him. The droids end up variously shot, knocked off the ship, and taken out by R-2. If it had just hit him and exploded like any sane design would have had it do, he'd be dead.
  • See also the Star Wars Expanded Universe under Literature.
• The 'Noisy Cricket' from Men in Black is about 2 inches long at most, but packs more of a punch than your average brick of C4, being able to tear through steel like a hot knife through butter. One problem; It has insane recoil, capable of propelling the wielder a good several feet backwards with every shot. Because of this, there's absolutely no way anyone could use one of them in a combat situation without inflicting injuries to themselves or anyone around them, if not outright killing them due to landing on something hazardous or a retaliatory attack from the person/thing they were attacking.
  • In the background information for the weapons the Noisy Cricket has an adjustable power level ranging from an equivalent to a 9mm handgun right up to an anti-armor capability. Veteran agents often issued the Cricket to inattentive rookies as a joke. In the animated series, Agent L reveals that there's a way to fire it at full power without experiencing the recoil. Problem is, it requires getting into an insanely complicated and uncomfortable-looking stance. And while you're doing that the enemy can probably just kill you.
• In Cowboys and Aliens a cowboy stabs his bowie knife through a bundle of dynamite and then through the back of an alien, igniting it and then dropping off to watch it explode. Doing so would destroy his knife, which any outdoorsman can tell you is an essential tool of their trades.
• Believe it or not Iron Man‍'‍s armor was like this for a while in the first film. One montage shows Tony Stark repeatedly testing the armor and correcting various design flaws that crop up. Among these problems are the fact that the suit tends to freeze up when Tony flies too high into the sky. This serves as Foreshadowing for the final battle, when Tony--who has already experienced and solved the problem of his armor freezing--lures Obadiah Stane to that very same height. Its biggest impracticality was ultimately that it was very cumbersome to don and remove. Tony's primary goal with the suits throughout Phase 1 was that each successive one be easier to don.
• Batman has the Batwing. Looks like another cool addition to Batman's arsenal; a modified stealth jet complete with Gatling guns, missiles and a price tag that had to be somewhere north of $2 billion back in 1989. Has an utterly god-awful targeting system (it's completely unable to hit a man-sized target under ideal conditions) and goes down in one shot from a pistol.
• The killer in The Jackhammer Massacre awkwardly lugs around a jackhammer, which needs a ludicrously long extension cord to even work. He's beaten when it's unplugged.
• Enforcement Droid (ED) 209 from RoboCop. It's a badass-looking walking mech with machine guns for hands, and one of the most awesome-looking things in the movie. But it was rushed out and unfinished, leaving it with a lot of design flaws, including the inability use stairs, the inability to right itself when it's fallen down, and a programming flaw that keeps it from realizing when a suspect has surrendered. ED-209's impracticality was what led to the creation of Robocop, who was Awesome but Practical.
• Shin Godzilla sports what is the most powerful atomic breath of all incarnations of the franchise. It takes the form of a purple laser-like beam that he can fire not only out of his mouth but his back plates and the tip of his tail and can cut a swath of destruction unlike any seen before. Problem is using it completely drains Godzilla of his energy and leaves him immobile until he can recharge. Which can take weeks.