Question - DSC has revealed that Starfleet is now using phasers as hand weapons, but is still mixing older starship weapons like phase cannons with the newer phaser banks.
But we never see two dissimilar beam weapon effects coming from any ship. There's no difference between Georgiou's "phase cannon" and Georgiou's "phasers". Which is all good and well - we lose nothing by assuming that the guns of Archer and the guns of Picard are one and the same, only with irrelevant drift in terminology as time passes, and that Georgiou is the in-between skipper who still struggles with them newfangled words.
Do we feel that this has superceded the use of laser weapons in The Cage or was there a period (and can we define it?) where Starfleet went from phase to laser to phaser?
We know that lasers preceded the most modern weapons in at least some applications, as per the "A Private Little War" dialogue:
Scotty: "And were the Klingons behind it, why didn't they give them breechloaders?"
Chekov: "Or machine guns?"
Uhura: "Or old-style hand lasers?"
Starfleet never used breech-loading rifles or machine guns, though, and we have no pressing reason to assume they ever used old-style hand lasers, either. What Pike's team had might have been new-style hand lasers instead, a type of tool never employed as a primary infantry weapon, and merely the third barrel in a multifunction gun that used phaser beams for fighting and laser beams only for cutting.
So no, we can't figure out the timeline here yet, or at least we can't shoot down all lines of speculation.
I'm looking at setting an RPG in the 2180ish era so curious as to what equipment the crew would have access to. I know from the Rise of the Federation novels that transporters were temporarily banned for living tissue outside emergencies due to causing genetic damage, but when was this fixed?
Transporters were banned from moving living tissue before ENT, too. Didn't stop our heroes from using them for exactly that when the show started. So your heroes could be transporting down in tight spots even though their field manuals suggest cargo-only use and have sufficiently vaguely worded recommendations even against emergency use on people.
Onscreen, we haven't heard of this transporter ban. Doesn't mean it could not have existed. Perhaps for about as long as the Warp Five Speed Limit did in TNG? That is, "Yes, it may be bad in theory, but in practice we have no reason to care". With warp, not for the next thousand years. With transporters, perhaps not unless one transports daily, which didn't really happen even with Kirk's heroes?
Shields on Starfleet ships exist as of 2163-4ish, so not a problem there.... ships capable of warp 7 but as maximum speed, so DSC having her ships with sustainable speeds of warp 7 still fits... 2180s ships likely able to cruise at warp 6 with emergency warp 7.5...
These are the real problems, I guess. Onscreen, we don't know when Starfleet got shields, as ENT doesn't tell us that any of the cultures that would soon become early members would have had them yet. Vulcan tractor beams, yes. Klingon shields, yes. But no Vulcan or Andorian or Tellarite shields IIRC.
As for "ships" being able to move at a given warp speed, I think that's a bit broad. Some ships are likely to be faster than others in every era. And in neither DSC nor TOS do we hear of the hero ship being particularly fast for her era - we later learn the TOS ship established speed records all right, but those came from alien manipulation the heroes seem to be unable to reproduce.
You could probably freely choose the speed for a 2180s vessel from anywhere between warp 2 (which is perfectly good for interstellar freighters in TOS still) and warp 10 (which Kirk's ship could do when pressed, even though Scotty thought anything beyond warp 7 was a big risk). At most, you might mind the idea from "The Cage" that "our new ships can-". That is, ships from after the 2230s-40s can reach Earth from Talos markedly faster than ships from before the 2230s-40s. Steady evolution or a sudden jump? You decide.
Timo Saloniemi
