They were then unwieldy, unreliable, and unproved instruments of warfare, and there was much doubt whether they had any function and value at all on the battlefield.

They had expended most of their own MDMs on her destroyers, but her increasingly unreliable instruments could not tell her exactly how many they still had.

Preventive diplomacy is a very unreliable instrument, as the inability of the original peace talks to stave off the crisis in Kosovo demonstrated.

Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming.

A high-quality, well-calibrated pipette in the hand of an uninterested or untrained operator is an unreliable instrument.

One's brain can become an unreliable instrument, from fever or alcohol, but there is an ego, an id, a something, which struggles to make sane use of it.

Sulu had admitted that he was flying the shuttle on a razor-thin safety margin, with unreliable instruments and unpredictable changes in altitude caused by Tlaoli's strange power fluxes.

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments.

And all because the human imagination was a thoroughly unreliable instrument, like a rubber ruler.

The earliest periods of navigation within Portugal and Spain employed the use of crude, antiquated, and unreliable instruments.