Does it hurt to be shot by phaser?

[TheRoyalFamily]

It's probably much like gunshot: the hit may mess you up inside real bad even if the puncture wound is insignificant.
Timo Saloniemi

The Jem'Hedar carbines seem to work that way. Redshirts tend to die quick, but when we are supposed to care about the character, they go more slowly. That one redshirt in "The Ship," I think it was, died after several days of internal bleeding. Eddington didn't go down until after several shots, and Sisko acted like he could have survived if he didn't stay to be the hero. Nog had to get his leg amputated.

 

[Timo]

And Valeris, being a Vulcan, had the strength to hold them while she did it.

Umm, why would she need to hold anybody?

I mean, she's killing people by firing a phaser at them at stun setting. Surely she would start by firing a phaser at them at stun setting, making them unable to resist the subsequent sustained head shots.

The Jem'Hedar carbines seem to work that way.

They are said to transport a toxin into the victim. But for all we know, phasers are also weaponized transporters... At least we saw a phaser transport nanoprobes to the victim in VOY "Macrocosm".

Perhaps the stun setting of a phaser consists simply of a beam that transports a tranquilizing chemical into the victim?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Well if you go by the TNG tech manual, I suspect settings 4 thu 6 will sting a little.

From memory in the 24th century

settings 1-3 are the stun settings fromm light to eavy
Settings 4-6 cause thermal damage.
Setting 7 effectively kills
Setting 8 is vaporise

Settings 9-16 are only availble on Type II and Type III rifles

By which time you are getting into melting metals, destroying rock, possible penetration of shields etc...

I was under the impression that 1-8 = stun and 9-16 = kill.

 

[Timo]

Well, we saw the tiny Type 1 hand phaser vaporize targets in TNG (say, Q's "animal thing" Napoleonic soldiers), and its settings supposedly only went up to 8 (or at least there were eight indicator lights in the row).

We also saw the eight-light setting of a Type 2 phaser vaporize Yuta in "The Vengeance Factor".

Basically, then, onscreen events aren't in conflict with what the TNG Tech Manual says, as listed by MacLeod. And although we never quite witnessed setting 16 doing as much damage as the Manual promises (it just drilled a hole in rock in "Chain of Command I"), at least it was claimed to level entire buildings in "Frame of Mind", in accordance with the Tech Man.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pondwater]

It probably feels like a stun gun without the convulsing.

 

[FormerLurker]

And Valeris, being a Vulcan, had the strength to hold them while she did it.

Umm, why would she need to hold anybody?

I mean, she's killing people by firing a phaser at them at stun setting. Surely she would start by firing a phaser at them at stun setting, making them unable to resist the subsequent sustained head shots.

Timo Saloniemi

Reasonable. And it makes more sense, too. Being a Vulcan, she'd shy away from being sadistic.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Does it hurt to be shot by a phaser?

It doesn't help.

 

[Nebusj]

Reasonable. And it makes more sense, too. Being a Vulcan, she'd shy away from being sadistic.

While I'd like to think she would --- a Kantian could argue that the evidence of Mirror Spock's openness to decency indicates that she would --- I'm not sure it follows. After all, a person who's committed to murder has accepted at least some sadism. And if the point is to kill a person without being traceable, whether the person suffers along the way is irrelevant.

 

[Timo]

Why would murder equate sadism? Even in the loosest interpretation of the word, sadism involves taking pleasure in an action - but conducting an action and taking pleasure in an action are fundamentally unrelated things.

General musings: Valeris supposedly was highly positioned in the conspiracy, as she knew key facts no random hitman need know. She'd thus probably have a lot riding on it. But then comes the "Logically, you have to fire" scene - and she doesn't kill Spock.

Three ways to read that. One, she was decent to the point of illogic, and would rather see millions suffer in the distance (the thing the conspiracy supposedly wanted to avoid, by shifting all the suffering to the Klingons instead) than inflict damage on somebody she can see, hear and touch. Two, she always was in the conspiracy for reasons of pure personal benefit (what those might be, we don't know), and sacrificing herself to the cause would not be part of her agenda under any circumstances. Three, she saw immediately that Spock was wrong/lying, and that killing him and Kirk and the rest would not benefit the conspiracy at this point.

As for the phaser angle of all this... Valeris knows it's an ambush already, down at the sickbay, so firing a kill phaser at Spock and tripping the alarms should not bother her much. But perhaps it's an ambush set up by a very small cabal of trusted officers (since the very fact of setting up the ambush reveals that Kirk and his friends don't know for sure who their enemies are)? In that case, Valeris could kill them all and make it look as if some other assassin X dunnit; she might benefit from not tripping the alarms in that case. Plenty of ways to kill a victim in Sickbay if Valeris stuns him first with a phaser....

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Murder and sadism are not the same thing. Sadism is taking pleasure in inflicting pain. Some murders are strictly for personal gain, and you can't call those sadistic.

 

[Captain McBain]

It seems like some of you are equating the 'kill' setting with 'vaporize.' Sure, the vaporize setting obviously does kill, but I thought that the kill setting was specifically located between maximum stun and vaporize on the phaser. The kill setting, so I thought, killed the person, but the body remained, unlike the other settings.

 

[Solariabsg25]

We saw phaser disintegration victims in TWOK scream as they vanished. However, this is probably simply a case of the advance of special effects allowing movement during the disintegration effect (note how they were also able to move and converse during transporting). Although in TOS people just froze and disintegrated, the hapless O'Herlihy appeared to grimace just before his disintegration in Arena. IIRC though the Gorn were using disruptors rather than phasers at that point.

Kodos also appeared to be in great pain while dying, and he was only shot on the kill setting.

The likelyhood is that a phaser on kill/disintegrate does hurt, just not for long, apart from obviously if the kill setting leaves gaping wounds in the body.

 

[The Mighty Monkey of Mim]

General musings: Valeris supposedly was highly positioned in the conspiracy, as she knew key facts no random hitman need know. She'd thus probably have a lot riding on it. But then comes the "Logically, you have to fire" scene - and she doesn't kill Spock.

Three ways to read that. One, she was decent to the point of illogic, and would rather see millions suffer in the distance (the thing the conspiracy supposedly wanted to avoid, by shifting all the suffering to the Klingons instead) than inflict damage on somebody she can see, hear and touch. Two, she always was in the conspiracy for reasons of pure personal benefit (what those might be, we don't know), and sacrificing herself to the cause would not be part of her agenda under any circumstances. Three, she saw immediately that Spock was wrong/lying, and that killing him and Kirk and the rest would not benefit the conspiracy at this point.

She just couldn't bring herself to kill her mentor, even though it would have been the "logical" thing to do. She was too emotionally attached to Spock, despite being a Vulcan. She respected and admired (and I daresay loved) him too much. Remember, the character was originally supposed to be Saavik.