One of the biggest problems for a spacecraft is heat management.
...And starships seem to have that down pat. When most power is lost, passive cooling quickly makes the inhabited spaces cool in "The Last Outpost", unlike one would expect of a giant Dewar flying through space with some working machinery and people inside.
Whether this is through real world means of transferring heat somewhere, or futuristic heat sinks only made possible by the different physics of the Trek universe, we can't readily tell.
Phasers deal a shit ton of heat damage
Sounds a bit unlikely, as we never observe any. That is, when phasers "vaporise" victims, there is no vapor and no heat damage to the immediate environment. Holes bored by phasers are immediately cool to the touch. And actually heating up an object with a hand phaser takes aeons compared to just "vaporising" it altogether.
The make-disappear effect of a phaser, the one that involves no delivering of heat or liberating said from de-structuring the target, need of course not be the kill mechanism of phasers in starship combat. After all, we can only confirm the absence of heat effects in the hand phaser (or occasionally orbital bombardment phaser) case, and phasers are particularly known for their many settings.
However, hurt starships in situations like those depicted above are generally literally in flames. Something is burning there, and at such low intensity that it may keep burning for hours. Supposedly, air aboard is slowly escaping and enabling the flames, and there might be plenty of it, with compressed reserves and all.
We also see it during the Battle of Chintoka, where I think a number of ships are seen being slowly vaporised by Cardassian weapons.
Hmm. I can't see any spreading destruction there. The phasers (and plasma torpedoes) did their worst, the ship is full of holes, and flames come out of the holes. But eventually the flames will go out, and the same holes will remain.
I think at some point someone in Star Trek describes how horrific phaser wounds are. We see targets having different layers of tissue being vaporised at different rates during the movies and TNG.
But not burned, as far as we can tell. Just maimed.
...By a death ray that seems to be very selective, propagating in a lump of matter it hits, but not jumping to a different sort of matter (which is how Kirk can vaporise enemies without also vaporising the ship or planet they are standing in or on). Heat damage would be hard pressed to behave that way.
The way that the stun setting supposedly works, at least in some material, is by sending a charge along the stream of particles to stun the enemy's nervous system. So it's almost like a taser, except the conducting material isn't a wire, it's the beam itself.
Quite possible. And Trek death rays explicitly deliver physical matter to the target on occasion, say, VOY "Macrocosm". Might be the phaser is just a weaponized transporter, with the same properties of making-disappear, moving-matter, being blocked by shields, and involving phasing.
Then again, perhaps not.
Timo Saloniemi
