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Author: MazeMaker

Jun 8th 2017 at 8:21:11 PM

I have an example but I'm not sure if it counts.  In the short story ''The Gun Without a Bang'' by Robert Sheckley, the protagonist is on maintenance job on some backwoods communications equipment on an alien planet, and for his protection he's armed with a prototype disintegration gun.  The protagonist's ship gets destroyed in a battle with some wild dog-like aliens, and he's forced to survive in the wild for weeks or months.  His prototype gun works, but it doesn't serve as a very good deterrent against the dog creatures (since it [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin doesn't make a bang]] to scare them off).  When the protagonist is finally found, his rescuers ask how the gun worked.  He says he couldn't have survived without it, revealing that he had been using it as a hammer to drive sharp stakes into the ground to keep the dogs out.

So this isn't so much a military technology being re-purposed for civilian use as a self defense weapon being used as a mundane tool in extenuating circumstances.  Does that fit the essence of this trope, or no?