Phaser banks on the Constitution class

[blssdwlf]

Timo wrote:

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That said, I'm not opposed or supportive of the way the "The Cage" phaser mount was executed. I just feel the mounting rules out the idea that the phaser would be a weapon. We have seen phaser drills elsewhere in Trek, in their more compact 24th century form, and they are fine and useful engineering tools. But heavy battlefield phasers aren't very useful if hobbled by a clumsy surface mount, and might predominantly exist in vehicle-mounted applications. (Not as add-ons to vehicles, but rather as vehicles themselves - an uncrewed cannon hovering a few meters above and ahead of Sarge, slaved to her remote control, sounds like the most reasonable application.)

I think on looking again at the device in "The Cage", it does look more like a drilling apparatus than a laser or phaser cannon. The mount does NOT seem to allow it much freedom to swivel and the device seems to be pretty long relative to the ball turret design we're use to seeing in diagram or TMP.

[Timo]

We get some very enjoyable if purely accidental continuity there, yes - the "twin-ball" gun and the later "pressure vessel" diagram share a look that later gets perpetuated by the TMP ball turrets and then by Doug Drexler's cutaway drawings that depict starship phasers as a series of spherical chambers.

The pedestal raygun of "The Cage" did not much resemble the sidearms of the episode, but that's only for the better - we can now claim that multi-bubble design is typical of phasers while laser sidearms might be unrelated technologically... Too bad the design of the ENT phase cannon in turn matched the sidearms of the show, rather than tying thematically to the multi-bubbles.

Timo Saloniemi

[Robert Comsol]

Of course we have now known for a long time what the primary phaser of a "Constitution Class" starship looks like: http://www.startrekhistory.com/article4.html

Bob