A few phase questions?

[Timo]

There's an even larger gap between a Klingon and his armor, yet the almost five seconds it takes to vaporize him consumes his armor completely while leaving his gunnery console untouched.

The big air gap would be between a standing person and the wall behind him. The gap between a Klingon and his armor would be about the same as between a Klingon and the ground he's standing on - but the difference would be that the armor is made of more or less the same stuff as the Klingon. It's not iron or steel, obviously, but something you can punch a knife through.

That's pretty convenient when somebody gets vaporized while standing on grass or something.

Some of the grass may be lost - but we couldn't tell, because phasers don't scorch. No temperature change, remember?

Yeah, a rare high point in Star Trek battlefield makeup.

I'd say "a rare Star Trek battlefield" instead. We don't get those often. The last time was, what, "Battle Lines"? The next would be "AR-558". Things like "The Ship" don't really count as field battles... And others such as "To the Death" invoke special rules on firearms and rayguns.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That's pretty convenient when somebody gets vaporized while standing on grass or something.

Some of the grass may be lost - but we couldn't tell, because phasers don't scorch.

Except when they do.

Also, it suddenly occurs to me that they found what they thought were human remains in "Aquiel," so apparently it isn't that unusual to have big globs of melted victim lying around on the spot where he was vaporized. We just don't usually SEE this for FX reasons. Again, it's sort of like the horta melting people down with corrosives and yet we SEE it go through a wall leaving nothing behind but glow.

 

[Myasishchev]

If all the matter stayed here, and you hit a person with enough energy to cause he/she/it to fly to flinders in a few seconds, you've be knocked over by a big blast wave and get smeared with a fine film of body yuck.

And I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that would be awesome.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Seconded.

 

[Unicron]

While I didn't like the overall film, the remake of War of the Worlds had that neat effect of the alien ray blowing people into clouds of vapor, but one guy's jeans go flying in the wind. Yeah, it's a problem in a lot of media SF; similar to the deal with ghostly out-of-phase people who can walk through walls but the floor stays rather solid.

I tend to think that Trek at least had some potential reasoning for that, aside from the most obvious rule of convenience. It could be easily assumed that the effect in "The Next Phase" simply wasn't as total as people often assume it is, and that's why Ro and Geordi can interact with some surfaces and each other without phasing through. If they'd lost enough substance to fall through the floor and any other surface, they wouldn't be able to breathe the air either cause the molecules would just phase through their lungs.

 

[Mytran]

Ro and Geordi could touch each other because they were both at the same level of "phased". But they explicitly only became able to interact with real-world objects after Data began spraying anyon particles on Geordi's hand - it was a major plot point, since it led to them being restored in the end.

Anyway, from a phasing point of view, why should the floor be any more or less solid than a wall? And they run through walls with ease!

 

[Longinus]

Yeah. I hated that episode, it just did not make any sense.

 

[Unicron]

Ro and Geordi could touch each other because they were both at the same level of "phased". But they explicitly only became able to interact with real-world objects after Data began spraying anyon particles on Geordi's hand - it was a major plot point, since it led to them being restored in the end.

Right, but my point is that the phasing wasn't as literally complete as is often assumed, and it's not a matter of having absolutely "no substance" as Geordi puts it at one point. The cloaking/phasing effect only went so far, and the anyons undid the process so they were normal again.

Anyway, from a phasing point of view, why should the floor be any more or less solid than a wall? And they run through walls with ease!

I'd say it's just the episode's phlebotinum. It's there for story convenience, just like my breathing analogy. We know they couldn't eat while they were phased, and that's almost certainly due to not being able to touch the food.

 

[Rick Sternbach]

If all the matter stayed here, and you hit a person with enough energy to cause he/she/it to fly to flinders in a few seconds, you've be knocked over by a big blast wave and get smeared with a fine film of body yuck.

And I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that would be awesome.

Well, the best weapon to actually kill someone quickly would probably be a huge dose of neutrons, and it wouldn't result in a blast wave or explosion of body parts. I saw a film of a monkey in a test chambr that got a brief, intense neutron burst, and the poor thing just trembled for a second and fell over dead. I'm told that the cellular disruption instantly stopped brain activity, oxygen transport, heart muscle, everything. And this was years and years ago. Scary.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If all the matter stayed here, and you hit a person with enough energy to cause he/she/it to fly to flinders in a few seconds, you've be knocked over by a big blast wave and get smeared with a fine film of body yuck.

And I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that would be awesome.

Well, the best weapon to actually kill someone quickly would probably be a huge dose of neutrons, and it wouldn't result in a blast wave or explosion of body parts.

Strictly speaking, the best weapon to quickly kill someone would be a fifty-pound rock applied directly to the forehead. "Best" because it is the least expensive to purchase, has the smallest energy requirements, and can be reused an infinite number of times.

But we're not here talking strictly about lethality, though, as much as pure Sci-Fi uber coolness. The same weapon that can heat up your coffee can also render you unconscious for half an hour, can burn a hole in the middle of your chest, can blow off an arm or a leg, or can reduce you to an expanding plume of ash and gunk that makes a modern-art masterpiece of your entrails on the wall immediately behind you.

It's just a matter of visceral special effects. You watch an old war movie and you know the good guy got shot when he suddenly goes stiff and clutches his chest, then falls over and dies; newer movies render this same effect by stuffing some pyros down the guy's shirt so it looks like the bullet just blew his lungs out the beck of his neck. That may not be as effective as either a neutron blast or a freaking enormous rock, but it's alot cooler to watch, and it's probably alot more intimidating to Starfleet's potential enemies.

I'll give you a similar, more Treklike example: a phaser on stun--or even set to kill--is alot cooler when in addition to stunning its target it also picks him up and throws him across the room. So in, say, "Legacy" when Riker nales a Turkanan and the guy goes flying across the room and lands on his head, or when Kirk nails one of Kruge's men and nearly blows him off the cliff, we get a sense of "damn, them phsaers are powerful." On the other hand, when you see a phaser blast and the target just kinda lays down like he's having a fainting fit... well, it leaves one a little bit wanting.

 

[Myasishchev]

If all the matter stayed here, and you hit a person with enough energy to cause he/she/it to fly to flinders in a few seconds, you've be knocked over by a big blast wave and get smeared with a fine film of body yuck.

And I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that would be awesome.

Well, the best weapon to actually kill someone quickly would probably be a huge dose of neutrons, and it wouldn't result in a blast wave or explosion of body parts. I saw a film of a monkey in a test chambr that got a brief, intense neutron burst, and the poor thing just trembled for a second and fell over dead. I'm told that the cellular disruption instantly stopped brain activity, oxygen transport, heart muscle, everything. And this was years and years ago. Scary.

A neutron sidearm seems like it would be pretty impractical, though. The only real-life neutron gun design I know of is the David Hahn "smoke detector" gun--which would be a very impractical combat weapon, because it's made primarily of lead and is not immediately fatal or even harmful. Of course, that's what someone built in their basement. In the monkey film, did it mention how they arrived at a neutron source and controlled it? I don't know much about that branch of atomic physics.

On the other hand, if phasers are driven off of thermonuclear processes, unless it's an He-3 reaction, neutrons are going to be a big concern anyway.

 

[Timo]

Anyway, from a phasing point of view, why should the floor be any more or less solid than a wall? And they run through walls with ease!

Umm, that has always been simple to explain. Gravity nets within the decks. No gravity nets within the walls.

Since the TNG Tech Manual also describes shields as essentially the same thing (only there the "decks" are subspace fields projected outside the ship), it's awfully convenient to decide that phasing and gravitics interact strongly, and can block each other. Thus, shields block phasers and phasing transporters, and decks block phased people.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

I never heard that one before! Gets around the issue of transporting them on a shuttle too.

Shame they still can't breath the air, but you can't have everything I suppose!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ You think that's AIR you're breathing?

 

[Timo]

...Really, "phasing" in this episode looks surprisingly much like "phasing" in the two-parter "Time's Arrow". That is, things become invisible to us when they are moved a little bit forward or backward in time...

It makes a sort of weird sense. If you are completely ahead of the rest of the universe in time (whatever that means), the rest of the universe sees light (and other EM interaction) "left behind" by you (and supposedly loitering there until the Langoliers come and eat it), but you never see their light because it doesn't travel forward in time... If you are behind the universe in time, nobody sees you, but you see them. And you can breathe the air left behind by them.

Now postulate that the stuff "left behind" gradually fades away. EM interaction weakens, and you can push through walls. Gravitics die out more slowly, so you don't fall through a gravity net. And since EM weakens, the air quickly becomes too thin to breathe, that is, it refuses to chemically interact with your body. But perhaps not too quickly - and once it's inside your phased body, it ceases to deteriorate. So you feel like you were on top of a mountain, and walking through marshmallows, and nobody sees you. Complete nonsense as far as science goes, but nicely consistent as far a science fiction goes...

Could be this is what "phasing" is all about - timeshifting. Just a little bit of it turns you invisible. A bit more turns you malleable enough that you can be squirted out as a package of exotic radiation/matter, which then degrades back into you after reaching a nearby planetary surface. A lot more disperses you into the winds of the past, never to return, so it's a practical weapon. And you can use gravitics to affect phasing, or wear a phase adjustment friendship ring on your arm...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[AnyStar]

^ You think that's AIR you're breathing?

where the hell did that spoon go, it was here a moment ago...

 

[Timo]

There's no spoon. Use the fork.

Timo Saloniemi