History Main / ImportedAlienPhlebotinum

* ''Webcomic/DriveDaveKellet'': The titular Ring Drive is this to the protagonists. The ruling family of the human empire established their economic, political, and military power by maintaining a strict monopoly on the devices and the secrets of their operation after their ancestral patriarch found and reverse-engineered a crashed alien ship. Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity, the {{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s who invented it are still around and apperently consider it something like ''blasphemy'' for ''anyone'' to mess with their tech.

* In ''WesternAnimation/MonstersVsAliens'', heroine Susan Murphy is turned into [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever a 49-foot 11-and-a-half-inch giantess]] by a meteor saturated with Quantonium, which the BigBad is after to power his evil scheme.

* ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsOriginalGeneration'' has a variation on this: The alien faction known as Inspectors gave humanity the Black Hole Engine to see if they were advanced enough to figure it out. If they could, it signaled that they likely had a good enough tech-base to justify invading and stealing it to hybridize with their own. Also, it is established that the technology to make HumongousMecha feasible was acquired from a trio of meteors that fell to Earth some time ago. These meteors ALSO contained further Phlebotinum, called Extra-Over Technology that allowed the creation of tremendous power sources that would be impossible without the Unobtanium.

** One amusing aversion -- they never get around to trying to replicate staff weapons. In ''Stargate'' KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter, so why waste the resources? ([[TheParalyzer Zatts]] would have been useful, but they ''are'' kind of busy.)

** In Praetoria the Medi-Port was created by Praetor Keyes (Anti-Matter). This is public knowledge and given in the Prateorian Tutorial. Later you also discover that he in fact stole and reverse engineered the technology from the Rikti.

** In Praetoria the Medi-Port was created by Praetor Keyes (Anti-Matter). This is public knowledge and given in the Preatorian Tutorial. Later you also discover that he in fact stole and reverse engineered the technology from the Rikti.

* ''VideoGame/MightAndMagic VII'' does an odd variant. The imported stuff is pretty much the same as the LostTechnology already on the planet (ultimately it's from the source -- [[{{Precursors}} the Ancients]] -- just from different colonies of theirs), some aesthetic differences with the robots and blasters aside, so the technology ''itself'' is not exactly the most important thing (although it does play a part, since some of the imported technology's native counterparts had long since broken) -- ''that'' is the people that imported the phlebotinum.

** One amusing aversion -- they never get around to trying to replicate staff weapons. In ''Stargate'' KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter, so why waste the resources? ([[StunGuns Zatts]] would have been useful, but they ''are'' kind of busy.)

* Ralph's superhero suit in ''Series/TheGreatestAmericanHero'' is a prime example.

* In one episode of ''Series/TheTwilightZone'', an alien comes to Earth and gives scientists plans for a free-energy device. Unfortunately, its construction requires [[{{Unobtainium}} an element]] not found locally. Fortunately, when they go to hunt him down, they find that he's accidentally left behind his comb, which is made of the stuff.

The biggest advantage of using imported phlebotinum is that it allows you to do a ScienceFiction story with characters who are more like contemporary humans without begging for too much [[WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief credulity]] from the audience. We don't need an enclave of scientists who are way smarter than anyone ought to be, we don't need to have a super-powered {{masquerade}} operating in total secrecy, and we don't need to set the show in TheFuture, speculating [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture what society will look like]] and probably date ourselves when we [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp get it wrong]]. John Q. Ordinary guy just gets some uber-technology from another world dropped in his lap.

* This sets off the main plot of ''Series/BlakesSeven'', when a group of escaped rebels and criminals gain control of an alien spacecraft abandoned after a battle that they name ''The Liberator''. It's faster than any spacecraft in the Terran Federation, insanely good firepower and shields, and technology as yet unavailable to humanity like a teleport and auto-repair systems that start repairing damage the moment it is made, making it the most fearsome ship in the galaxy.

[[quoteright:350: [[Franchise/StargateVerse https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/63_4_0.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:And so the decade of fiddling with unknown alien technology began.]]

* In Creator/CarlSagan's novel ''Contact'', the travel spheres which are the focus of the entire book are this. Unlike most examples, no materials are imported, and it's up to the earthlings to invent the metallurgical and chemical technologies required to actually create them. The plans are buried within a complex radio signal, and all nations on Earth start building them. To say the least, they are terrifically expensive.

* In science-fiction FourX strategy games, it's pretty much standard to get a bonus to your research if you find {{Precursor}} artifacts. It shows up in ''VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations'', ''VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire'', ''VideoGame/MasterOfOrion'' and probably many others.

* ''Webcomic/{{Drive}}'': The titular Ring Drive is this to the protagonists. The ruling family of the human empire established their economic, political, and military power by maintaining a strict monopoly on the devices and the secrets of their operation after their ancestral patriarch found and reverse-engineered a crashed alien ship. Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity, the {{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s who invented it are still around and apperently consider it something like ''blasphemy'' for ''anyone'' to mess with their tech.

* in ''WesternAnimation/{{Supernoobs}}'' the 4 main characters receive Battleballs from two aliens to fight an intergalagtic virus threat

* ''Fanfic/CodePrimeR1Rebellion'': In this story, Sakuradite is actually another name for energon, which also explains how Britannia knows where to find most of it - Megatron gave them the locations, in exchange for a cut of the Sakuradite.

** The ''Civilization'' spinoff ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'' (which ''is'' sci-fi) has this in three main ways (besides explicit trading for technology):

* A major recurring plot point in Creator/IDWPublishing's ''ComicBook/{{Transformers}}'' series. The Tyrest Accords explicitly prohibit any alien races from using Cybertronian tech, and prohibit Cybertronians from attempting to export such tech to other races. This was agreed to very early on in the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, and is one of the few points of agreement between the factions, because the consequences of widespread Cybertronian weaponry are too ugly to contemplate. [[spoiler: Optimus Prime recently declared ''Earth'' a colony of Cybertron, partially because Earth's governments had been scavenging Cybertronian tech and the Galactic Council would come down on them with extreme prejudice.]]

* In the {{Mockumentary}} ''The Great Martian War 1913-1917'' (where the Martians from ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'' [[WeirdHistoricalWar attack Earth and replace the historical World War I with their invasion]]), the capture of some alien war machines reveals that their advanced technology derives from a substance called victice, and once they figure out how to replicate it humanity can equip their airplanes and new [[TankGoodness landships]] with energy weapons. [[spoiler:Translation of a Martian text reveals that the invaders got it the same way, capturing samples from invaders that attacked ''their'' homeworld]].

* The ''Franchise/Ben10'' franchise has the Omnitrix. The most powerful device in the universe, it fell into the hands of ten-year old Benjamin Tennyson after it was launched towards Earth during a space battle involving [[BigBad Vilgax]]. Unlike other versions of this trope, its revealed later that the Omnitrix was intended to be sent to Earth for human use, but it was meant for Ben's ''grandfather'' rather than himself.