Phasers in TOS and then the later generations.

[Roundabout]

I don't know if it would be an advantage in terms of aiming at a target.

The standard Starfleet phaser, that we have seen on the shows, shoots out a continuous beam, as long as the trigger is pulled. So I suppose the person firing the phaser could aim the beam as he/she is shooting. Just move the beam to the exact target if you missed at first, assuming no one is shooting back.

I remember in DS9 "Nor the Battle to the Strong", there was the scene where Jake was shooting aimlessly, apparently he kept his finger pulling the trigger or pushing the button. It looked like a laser light show, like the movement of the light beams of the kind of searchlights used in movie premieres.

I noticed that with some of the non Starfleet weapons, like the ones used by the Cardassians, the ammo or energy pulse, comes out in bursts, more like bullets, and not a continuous beam. It seems like those weapons might be more energy efficient. But, visually, I guess the continuous beam might look more impressive and dazzling.

 

[Timo]

It is remarkably seldom that anybody sweeps a beam in Trek; the Klingon guards do it in ST6:TUC, and Jake does in "Nor the Battle", but it's decidedly not a preferred combat maneuver. Is this simply because the auto-aiming function is so good (and the misses are cases even the auto-aimer can't deal with, so sweeping wouldn't help and indeed the automation would fight it)?

...Or because sweeping in fact consumes more energy, and not merely because of the greater active duration vs. pulses? Perhaps the beam always first creates a channel of sorts through spacetime, and has to create a new one if swept, wasting energy in the process.

Pulses in turn might suffer from excess energy costs associated with the onset and closing of a beam: initiating fifty pulses is expensive compared with initiating and then holding a single beam.

But the line between a beam and a pulse is thin indeed. In ST2:TWoK, both the shipboard and sidearm death rays come in rather irregular and elongated pulses, and the hand phasers can even be mistaken for shooting out constant beams unless one carefully checks with freeze-frames. Perhaps a "beam" is just sufficiently many overlapping "pulses", and there's a technological hurdle on creating a truly constant and steady phaser beam.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Roundabout]

It is remarkably seldom that anybody sweeps a beam in Trek; the Klingon guards do it in ST6:TUC, and Jake does in "Nor the Battle", but it's decidedly not a preferred combat maneuver. Is this simply because the auto-aiming function is so good (and the misses are cases even the auto-aimer can't deal with, so sweeping wouldn't help and indeed the automation would fight it)?

It didn't seem to have happened often. But there were two other instances, that I can think of, of that happening during combat.

In ST5: TFF, during Kirk and his assault team's attack on Paradise City, you can see Sulu, right after he tumbled off his horse, firing at the spot light shining on them.

Sulu was moving quickly and in a kneeling position; and he obviously didn't have time to set and to precisely aim at the light. He pointed his phaser in the general direction of the spot light and proceeded to just move the phaser beam until it hit the light and knocked it out of action.

I remember Sulu doing that because it looked cool, and kind of unusual. Keep your eye on Sulu's phaser fire or you might miss it.




The other instance occurred in ENT "North Star". The episode where ENT encounters the Old West. Good episode, btw. It happened during the big gun/phaser battle near the end of the episode.

One of the villains was shooting at Archer and his crew from a second story balcony. The dashing hero, Archer, took it upon himself to take out the sniper. He ran along the wooden plank walkway underneath the balcony and then he started shooting his phaser, with a continuous moving beam, on the underside of the balcony as he approached the sniper's position.

I guess the phaser beam cut a seam along the balcony because the balcony where the sniper was standing gave way and he fell down the hole created by Archer's phaser beam.

I happened to have watched "North Star" the other night, which is why that scene came to mind when I read your post. An interesting thing to note is that, you can see that Archer adjusted his phaser setting prior to firing on the balcony. And when the sniper fell to the ground level, Archer readjusted his phaser, before he shot the sniper who was lying on ground.

I assume Archer set his phaser back to stun before shooting the guy. I don't know what he set his phaser to in order to cut the seam on the underside the balcony.

Another interesting thing to note is that, Kirk ordered phasers on stun before Sulu fired on the spot light. How humane of Starfleet, setting phasers on stun while going to battle against foes that presumably are shooting to kill. Archer had a flesh wound after getting hit with a bullet. .

 

[Christopher]

How humane of Starfleet, setting phasers on stun while going to battle against foes that presumably are shooting to kill.

Whyever not? Phaser stun has routinely been shown to act instantaneously and to render someone totally unconscious for at least several minutes, if not hours. So unless a battle lasts a really long time, it shouldn't make any practical difference within the combat whether you stun them or kill them; either is equally effective at neutralizing them as an immediate threat.

Besides, there have been plenty of cases in real life where the police have taken active shooters alive even without reliable stun weapons, so it's hardly unrealistic for an organization to have such a policy.

 

[Trekkie27]

In Undiscovered Country, when the two Federation agents went to the Klingon vessel, they didn't vaporize anyone. And, after TOS, there were seldom one-shot vaporizations. In the end, I think it's just a better story-telling technique, to leave corpse or injured person.

 

[Kor]

I think that TUC was the first time we saw the phaser setting that pierces flesh like that.

Kor

 

[Timo]

TOS had its share of corpse-leaving settings; adding blood to those wouldn't have been possible, at a time when getting machine-gunned resulted in you falling on the floor with your good jacket intact! (See "Patterns of Force" for a Trek example of the latter.)

Sometimes there's a clear in-universe reason why the shooter would wish to leave a corpse - TUC is a good example of that, the assassination being intended as a demonstration of Starfleet vileness. Sometimes it's easy to assume that corpses are the result of the shooter being unable to afford full vaporization, due to hurry, low charge or whatnot. But then there are outliers where we need to do more intense apologizing, or then just accept that the corpses make sense dramatically but not in in-universe terms.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Delta Geminorum]

Clearly there is a difference between stun, burn, explode, and disintegrate. I remember Dexter Remmick's demise.

Does the disintegration begin with the phaser pulse and cascade, or do you have to hold down the button?

 

[Prax]

I dunno, but to put it "level 16" you have to hit a single button 16 times

 

[Timo]

...For dramatic effect, to show the adversary that you weally weally mean it? Pressing and holding might work, too: while Riker fiddles in "Frame of Mind", Worf in "Chain of Command" doesn't bother with extra keypresses.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Clearly there is a difference between stun, burn, explode, and disintegrate. I remember Dexter Remmick's demise.

Does the disintegration begin with the phaser pulse and cascade, or do you have to hold down the button?

Who knew blowing up someone's head and opening a garage door could have so much in common?

 

[Timo]

Decapitation and automated garage doors have always gone well together in horror movies and/or/aka comedies...

"Conspiracy" is a smorgasbord for phaser settings and their effects, BTW. We get all sorts, and all kinds of story logic for a specific character choosing those. Seems the evil aliens are Kirk's soul mates, using settings that do no harm to innocent decorative paintings on the walls!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Spot261]

I dunno, but to put it "level 16" you have to hit a single button 16 times

By which point the guy with the disruptor has shot you 16 times.

 

[Trekkie27]

Decapitation and automated garage doors have always gone well together in horror movies and/or/aka comedies...

"Conspiracy" is a smorgasbord for phaser settings and their effects, BTW. We get all sorts, and all kinds of story logic for a specific character choosing those. Seems the evil aliens are Kirk's soul mates, using settings that do no harm to innocent decorative paintings on the walls!

Timo Saloniemi

Good point about the Conspiracy episode. But my question then is, during the Dominion War, then, why didn't everyone just vaporize everyone? Same question for the Klingon-Federation war a season earlier.

 

[Timo]

It seems that corpse-leaving settings and a high number of corpses go hand in hand. We might (and IMHO should) deduce that large numbers of adversaries can only be killed if one "spares the ammo" by leaving corpses.

In "The Siege of AR-558", sparing the ammo was a big issue: it's just about the only time in Trek where we see soldiers checking their power clips before battle (the other being in the shuttle of ST5:TFF). The troopers would have been able to down fewer Jem'Hadar if they had chosen the make-disappear setting.

It might also be that focusing all the power into making just the heart of the enemy disappear, rather than his whole body, will make it easier to penetrate his armor. And it does seem that the Jem'Hadar, the Cardassians and the Klingons all wear armor, even though we know it does zero good against knives, sharp sticks or even fists, so it must be anti-phaser armor of some sort.

So, in wartime, leave corpses. In peacetime, you can afford to do the merciful thing and vaporize the victim. But in all cases, choose stun over kill, because that's what works best in stopping the enemy.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Duncan MacLeod]

You think it might drain more power at a higher setting? I have 500 shots at stun before my phaser's drained, but only 8 at disintegrate.

 

[publiusr]

I like the idea that vaporizing would take far more energy, so they have to conserve their ... ammo in a major firefight, so they just do chest burns.

Daleks like to use just enough for an agonizing death

It was Tuvok. He always keeps his phaser set to "professional"

Disintegration and wide field was used once or twice in Next Gen.

Tuvok used wide field after being possessed in one episode.

In TOS, a Vaal booster lightning stroke smoked one Red shirt. That bolt was well animated--evil looking.

I have heard it said that a woman in Africa may have been vaporized by a positive giant--those that might have been wick effect after the fact, if at all.

In DC comics, lightning like tracing phasers were used by Excelsior to track a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey.

An electrolaser can behave similarly, and the arc jump from a beam to the nearest metal object:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=15308 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser