Not Tropeworthy: Antimatter

Unobtanium is not restricted to materials that are literally unobtainable. It's shorthand for "something that would be perfect for the situation, but we can't get enough of it to use it practically". And given how difficult antimatter is to make it might as well be unobtainable.

edited 17th Apr '18 6:51:06 AM by BreadBull

Ok, I gotta drop in regarding the Antimatter in Star Trek thing earlier: that is most definitely not Minovsky Physics. Antimatter is consistently used as the fuel supply for the warp drive, but that's the only consistent thing about it: otherwise it's technobabble that's given New Powers as the Plot Demands (which reached its nadir in "Threshold" where the Doctor turned Janeway and Paris back into humans by bombarding them with positrons, i.e. anti-electrons).

Back on topic, I think "Antimatter as Applied Phlebotinum" is definitely tropeable and used for the above-mentioned reason that it's a real thing with commonly understood properties (even though, or perhaps because, its use in fiction typically requires considerably better production methods than we have in real life: NASA estimated a few years ago that generating a gram of antiprotons would cost somewhere around three times the total national debt of the United States).

edited 20th Apr '18 5:01:47 PM by StarSword

Clock is up; locking for inactivity/lack of consensus. No action is to be taken on the basis of this thread.