What happened to phasers that vaporize?

A science ship like Discovery probably doesn’t have the most deadly phasers lying around anyway. Not all weapons are created equal.

 

Um...they went >Poof<

It could be the ST: D model Phasers they currently have don't have the ability to vaporize, but the Rifes might.

It was actually very rare across the 80 episodes of TOS as well.

- A drunk somehow caused a phaser to self destruct itself and vaporize him with it in TOS S1 - "City On The Edge Of Forever"

- A Klingon used a Fed phaser to vaporize a Cappellian in TOS S2 - "Friday's Child"

- Kirk vaporized a Mugato in TOS S2 - "A Private Little War"

- Captain Ron Tracey vaporized a Redshirt and a barrel in TOS S2 - "The Omega Glory"

And I think that's about it.

 

Surprising indeed..

As for the heroes having a substandard gun type, so far, we have seen two of each: the hero Type 2 (with the tri-barrel) vs. the S31 Type 2 (with just one barrel with a hood over it, much as in the "Search of Spock" guns), plus the hero Type 3 (with the tri-chamber) vs. the S31 Type 3 (without). The hero Type 2 is already available to the semi-civilian parents of Mike Burnham some 20 years before the events of the show, so we might well argue it's inferior to the S31 stock that also looks more modern (TOS movie rather than "Where No Man" style).

Beyond that, I'd plead different manufacturers. One modernizes its DSC-style tri-barrel pistols to feature a single barrel and thus we get the TOS sidearm, while its competitor doesn't develop a direct successor to the parallel tri-barrel gun we see in the two TOS pilots. Another manufacturer moves on from the S31 starting point and ends up with the ST3:TSfS guns, while yet another may be responsible for the four-barrel TMP/TWoK guns. Some models are simply parallel, rather than predecessors or successors.

Timo Saloniemi

 

If a phaser is going to vape a body shouldn't it in rapid order rapidly boil all the fluids in the body while at the same time incinerating all solid matter? if the blood, water, urine, lymphatic fluid, mucous etc boils to steam before the body is gone that would cause steam explosions every time a body is vaporized (rather like the Conspiracy smackdown on Remmick) which would almost be as deadly to the shooter at close range as the victim.

I think we can pretty much give up phaser kills making sense. Some times it pokes holes, sometimes it makes things disappear. Sometimes it makes things disappear all at once, sometimes it's gruesomely slo-mo a la Captain Terrell. They've shown Starfleet tactical typess wearing body armor of some sort since TMP. It clearly must do SOMETHING. Maybe Leland-a-tron had some kind of plainclothes version of that one. or a TAS forcefield suit. I dunno.

 

If they’re primarily considered to be stun guns, a more civilized future might not give a “vaporize” setting to all weapons. Same as tasers not having a kill feature, since they’re meant to stun and incapacitate. But fortune cookies still don’t stand a chance.

 

A taser can kill if used improperly. It happens far too often.
A "Smart" phaser would have to somehow scan the bowl of cookies, the minute it was triggered, sense whether the cookies had some sort of life sign (respiration? heart activity?) while at the same time differentiating that from, say, the life processes on the cookies such as mold and bacteria AND choose whether to honor the kill request of the user in time to actually still hit the target.
I can't see anyone wanting a weapon like that.

 

Right, but there’s not a kill setting on them. I would assume the admiral’s personal weapon didn’t come out of Discovery’s armory when she let the cookies have it.

 

After what she went through, I'd be carrying on "red" the rest of my life.

 

If it weren't for the vaporised fortune cookies, I might suggest that the base/ship's computers are auto-limiting phasers to prevent use of the vaporize setting in case a missed shot blows a hole in the side of the ship and depressurizes it. Could possibly still apply if the energy needed for the cookies was known to be well below that needed to vaporize a bulkhead or human.

Bit like the PPGs on Babylon 5 - the plasma had little penetrative effect on superstructures like the station, but was lethal to humanoids.

 

Even stun setting could kill if done right.

 

Not forwarding this thread to ATF and FBI. Nope, not at all

 

I'm pretty sure the so-called vaporizing setting has absolutely nothing to do with the generating or releasing of heat. I mean, there aren't any heat effects associated - no hot blasts, no charring around the immediate impact point, little or no damage to the microscopic amounts of stuff that seem to be left behind for forensics investigators to find.

Which only sounds natural if the phaser is a weaponized transporter. The victim isn't boiled out of existence, but merely beamed to a better place without a return ticket. And beaming appears to be a low-energy process overall, or at least directly comparable to making disappear with a phaser - heck, Dana Rogar specifically uses the power pack of a phaser for beaming himself in "The Hunted".

That the thing would be capable of heating rocks and whatnot may rather be an overkill mode of the separate stun mechanism. Or then it's a matter of transporting half the stuff just a smidgen to the left and then back to the right, as rapidly as needed to generate queasiness, death or significant amounts of in-target heat...

Can the guns be remotely controlled at this time and age? Burnham wasn't aboard her own ship when failing to vaporize the deadly threat to herself - the S31 ship should either have been okay with super-lethal settings or then refusing weapons action altogether.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Don't forget the movies:

STII: Tyrell vaporizes himself. Kirk then vaporizes the Ceti Eel after it emerges from Chekov's ear (though it looks more like it's just burned to a crisp).

STVI: Chekov asks why the assassins weren't "waporized", so Valeris does so to a pot on the stove (because it would set off the alarm).

 

In contrast, the ST6 phaser doesn't vaporize Gorkon, say. But more remarkable is its failure to vaporize the contents of the kettle, which is consistent with the idea that the phasing effect, once triggered inside substance A, is unlikely to jump to a substance B with radically different density...

When Lorca and Tyler holo-fight a bunch of Klingons, their rifles mainly punch those small surface holes on the holo-Klingons, but Tyler's final shot before the two go through the door into the side chamber is a vaporizing one... Selecting between the two settings doesn't appear too complicated. So if Harry Mudd can make Lorca disappear with a pistol (and yes, he could mess with shipwide settings, but he never does stop our heroes from having working phasers, so...), supposedly everybody can.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'd say that killing someone is the exact opposite of doing the stun setting right!

 

It's a permanent stun...sent him to live with the rocks.

There's a joke in there somewhere.

 

"Phaser on stun at close range," per TUC.

Kor

 

Also known as the Starfleet punch out.

 

In "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad", Mudd vaporized Lorca with a hand phaser at one time.

The effect in that episode looked even similar to how it was in TNG, contrary to later episodes, and it was a beam instead of the now mostly used bolts.

 

I thought he used one of the Weapons from Lorca's collection; and not a standard Federation Phaser in that scene.