Something like this could have also worked better.
Now--wasn't that the one pointed at Scotty by the Vengeance guard?
New Phaser and Rifle Revealed
- Thread starter Gibberish
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Now--wasn't that the one pointed at Scotty by the Vengeance guard?
Not quite
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/intodarkness-4K/chapter10/stid-4k-blu-1668.jpg
I never realized they used different phasers, I had to go look.
Or one is for 'phaser', another for 'laser' and the third for 'taser'.
Timo Saloniemi
We'll just have to plaster in a fan-factoid that there ended up being something really wrong with Phase Pistols and they were pulled from service for a long time until the issues were fixed.
That was harder and more tedious than saying "reboot".
Why is this a problem in the first place? "The Cage" heroes use their lasers exclusively for drilling holes, an activity apparently not well suited for phasers (Scotty has real trouble phasering open the lock in "The Naked Time", Picard's team with their modern phaser sidearms spends much longer cutting through doors than Pike's men did with their lasers before giving up, and our VOY heroes use dedicated drills rather than sidearms for hole-making).
So their phaser guns may double as drilling lasers - the business end very much suggests doubling or indeed tripling of some sort. PineKirk's phaser sidearm merely doubles (kill and stun have separate barrels), while ShatnerKirk's phaser sidearm may double in another manner (the central spire may be one lens while the thing around it is another).
Add to this how visually distinct the simple rays of "The Cage" are from the light shows of "Where No Man" and beyond, or from the reuse of the three-barrel sidearms in "What Are Little Girls Made Of"...
There's no need to invent reasons for laser sidearms briefly coming into vogue and then disappearing, nor a reason to pretend this didn't happen. We could simply say it did not happen, and that lasers were just a tool bolted onto the regular sidearms in the 2250s, the way the MACO bolted flashlights to their barrels.
I mean, it's not as if we're like to be contradicted on that. An onscreen lecture on the functioning of the three barrels is unlikely as such, and if our hero sometimes wants to down her enemies with her laser barrel, she doesn't need to spell it out for us.
Timo Saloniemi
So their phaser guns may double as drilling lasers - the business end very much suggests doubling or indeed tripling of some sort. PineKirk's phaser sidearm merely doubles (kill and stun have separate barrels), while ShatnerKirk's phaser sidearm may double in another manner (the central spire may be one lens while the thing around it is another).
Add to this how visually distinct the simple rays of "The Cage" are from the light shows of "Where No Man" and beyond, or from the reuse of the three-barrel sidearms in "What Are Little Girls Made Of"...
There's no need to invent reasons for laser sidearms briefly coming into vogue and then disappearing, nor a reason to pretend this didn't happen. We could simply say it did not happen, and that lasers were just a tool bolted onto the regular sidearms in the 2250s, the way the MACO bolted flashlights to their barrels.
I mean, it's not as if we're like to be contradicted on that. An onscreen lecture on the functioning of the three barrels is unlikely as such, and if our hero sometimes wants to down her enemies with her laser barrel, she doesn't need to spell it out for us.
Timo Saloniemi
The sidearms in "The Cage" are called lasers instead of phasers. That's why it's an "issue" for some people. Doesn't matter what they were used for in that instance, as lasers were clearly what they used for guns.
Pike seemed pretty sure that his pistol would drill a nice hole in a Talosian.
Pike seemed pretty sure that his pistol would drill a nice hole in a Talosian.
Yep.
But they call the hand weapons "hand lasers", so I tend to think we are supposed to consider what they beamed to the planet a giant laser.
But my point is that they never used the things they called lasers for guns. Instead, they used the things they called lasers for drilling. Apparently their drilling tool was part of their gun - but the word "laser" is exclusively associated with the drilling function, on two separate occasions (against the elevator door and against the transparent wall of the cage) and not with any "weaponlike" use.
But his desire was to use his laser to drill a hole in the wall of his cell, very specifically. Pointing the drill at the Talosian merely helped out in pursuing that desire. (Pointing the adjoining phaser weapon at the Talosian would also do the trick, but more indirectly.)
The fun part here is associating the various barrels with the various functions. It works pretty well for all other scenes, but when threatening the Talosian in the cage, Pike leaves his barrels annoyingly "halfway"...
Here the interesting part is that the pedestal tool has a very colorful beam effect that closely matches that of Kirk's phaser rifle in the second pilot, and is distinct from the simple red beams of the hand lasers.
The other interesting part is the use of linked spheres or cylinders as the shape of a big phaser emitter in subsequent Trek art. We get graphics like this in the TNG era, but retroactively also in ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly" - and the one genuine TOS phaser graphic is famously on the same lines.
Timo Saloniemi
These were their sidearms. Guns, like every other character on American TV in the 1960s carried and seemed to think were their essential tools for resolving story conflicts.
Pike threatened to blow the Keeper's head off with his hand laser, because he seemed to think that his laser was something to be used for killing people.
You know, like a gun. Like a pistol. Because these hand lasers were their sidearms. Like Marshall Dillon's revolver. I'm sure that at least once Dillon used his revolver to shoot the lock off a barn door, or something.
This isn't complicated, and I don't find convoluted and preposterous rationalizations and logical back-flips in the service of making every tiny detail in Star Trek fit consistently into a seamless whole either productive or entertaining.
Is it possible that they were only mentioned as "lasers" in the context of Tyler, the Navigator, saying it in a heated, off the cuff moment? Just something blurted out?
Beyond that, they're mentioned that way in "The Cage". Everything else in Trek has been a phaser or phase pistol (meaning the same thing: phased energy emitted from the weapon).
Lasers are now used as pointers and to scan your groceries.
Beyond that, they're mentioned that way in "The Cage". Everything else in Trek has been a phaser or phase pistol (meaning the same thing: phased energy emitted from the weapon).
Lasers are now used as pointers and to scan your groceries.
Of course. But they were never used as guns in the episode. Appropriately for the genre and the Trek approach, they were used as drills and hand grenades instead.
No. Simply no. Dialogue establishes the opposite: Pike wanted to drill a hole in the wall, but his drill had no effect on it and seemed empty of charge, and he wanted to prove that this was not the case in reality. Pointing the drill (not the gun) at the jailor would serve the purpose directly. Pointing the adjoining gun at the jailor, or threatening to poke fingers through his eyes or to crush his head with one of 'em stools, would serve the same purpose in a less direct fashion. But Pike had no real desire to hurt the Talosian - he had to fake the desire, to fan the flames of his anger with brutality that did not come naturally, in order to thwart the telepathy.
Ah? I do. But it's not complicated the other way, either.
Timo Saloniemi
Tyler said "hand lasers" once. Pike said "laser" once. They probably meant laser both times, or else their off the cuff choices of word would have been dissimilar.
Or, far more commonly, a weapon or tool that is not verbally identified at all (say, the sidearms of the heroes in the second pilot, or the guns of various adversaries, which sometimes were the same thing). And then there's "A Private Little War" where our heroes refer to the use of hand lasers as weapons earlier in Starfleet history, although we don't learn how much earlier, nor whether the practice has ended or merely evolved from "old style" to "new style" hand lasers.
Timo Saloniemi
If background is true, Roddenberry did want phasers mentioned from the beginning, but a scripting screw up had the word "laser" used at the last minute. It was changed by WNMHGB.
According to the Whitfield book, they were considering a lot of alternatives to "laser", including a maser (microwave emissions). They decided on phaser from the beginning.
IMO, I don't feel it worth a lot of time to debate, either. Trek's terminology is now "phaser".
I'm wondering if these phasers work by the control on the back, like the TOS phasers. Then the emitter on the front will rotate into position based on setting....What I'd want to really know is whether the makers of STIS intend to train the actors to use the rotating working ends of their guns in some sort of a consistent manner.
Timo Saloniemi
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