Who doesn’t like a nice big spaceship? The Alliance in World of Warcraft, apparently. A recent article on Polygon points out that in Battle for Azeroth, the Alliance has a gigantic spaceship just floating there, fully functional, a spaceship we know is completely capable of raining orbital destruction on anything it so wants. The Vindicaar is just floating there, your Lightforged Draenei can just pop by to say hello (again, functional spaceship), and yet it resolutely continues floating there during all of the expansion events wherein a giant spaceship with orbital cannons may have been useful.
These situations include: fighting a war in Kalimdor, fighting a naval battle against the Horde, fighting in Zuldazar, the Battle of Dazar’Alor, fighting a literal Old God, and… well, look, basically any time a conflict is going to be decided with military might. Instead of helping to evacuate civilians from a burning world-tree, the Vindicaar stayed put. (Remember, it can teleport people.) Instead of opening fire on Horde ships? Same difference. And by all indications the Vindicaar is remaining in place even when, you know, a giant rift to the afterlife opens up in the sky.
Of course, the problem isn’t actually the Vindicaar. There’s plenty of good reasons why your orbital death cannon spaceship isn’t available, ranging from explaining that it has only minimal power left to people are currently using it for something else vital that requires a spaceship to it holding a portal open… the list goes on. The problem is that none of these explanations are offered. The Vindicaar never comes up. When the Alliance has a problem that a spaceship would solve, no one remembers that the spaceship is just hovering there.
So the real problem is that like the villains on a Saturday morning cartoon, the exceedingly useful fully powered spaceship with teleporters and orbital death cannons isn’t being used because that’s not the plot right now. Which means that yes, the spaceship problem ultimately comes down to draping a blanket over something and hoping you don’t have any sense of object permanence.
