Is there a diffrence in phaser colors?

[issreliant]

So the original TOS Enterprise had blue phasers, but after the refit they are red, and almost all federation ships after that have red phasers, except i think the Excelsior, any story reasons for the change, like the red phasers are more powerful, or of a diffrent design, i have allways wondered, plus i prefer the old blue ones.

 

[Deks]

The NX-01 Enterprise phase cannons were orange-ish/red in colour.
Granted, that's supposed to be pre-TOS, so it's possible that during the TOS era, phase cannons were used as a template for phasers (well, both are directed energy weapons) and the colour of the beams shifted to blue for some reason before the upgrade (for the movies) came along.

The Excelsior to my knowledge never fired it's phasers ... in the Kirk era.
In TNG era, it was seen with recent phaser colour effects, and even in Tuvok's memories (which are of the Kirk's era) from early Voyager season.

So, I'd say that phasers as they came to be known in their initial stage of implementation were blue, and then shifted the colour.

Colour change might not really be all that significant (well, it isn't from the real world viewpoint), but regarding the Trek universe, we can explain that as an initial phase of phasers.

 

[sbk1234]

In TNG, when they do whatever they do to the phasers to the Borg won't adapt, the phasers seem to shift in color. It may have something to do with settings or energy frequency or some other technobabble explanation.

 

[Sector 7]

Re: Is there a diffrence in phaser colors?

Yes, there is a difference. The blue ones are pretty.
There is no difference I am aware of, except the preference of the team creating the effect for television/movies.

 

[issreliant]

I was going off the game Star Trek legacy, where the only blue phasers came from the constitution class vessels pre-refit, and the Excelsior class pre-refit. and the blue phasers look prettier, and cooler in my opinion.

 

[Timo]

One might argue that different colors denote different "calibers" of guns. There'd be a parallel to the real world there: early ships would have an assortment of different "calibers", but TNG era ships would all have standardized on a single "caliber" for various clever reasons. (By "caliber" here, I don't mean something fixed at construction stage, but rather a setting that can be selected in the middle of a battle.)

In TOS, the hero ship's phaser color changed from episode to episode; in TOS-R, it no longer does. Before TOS-R, it was possible to develop a system of sorts for the original colors/"calibers", so that blue might be the "caliber" you choose for fighting your strongest enemies, while yellow and red indicate reduced power status or the desire to squeeze off quick shots... And green would be the stun setting, for starship guns and handguns alike.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I prefer blue phasers myself and wish that had remained the standard throughout the series. I was really hoping JJ's effects team would revert back to them.

As for purpose of colors, I don't think of them so much as "calibers" but some how analogous to the colored dye that was added to naval ammunition shells in WWII so that ships could tell which shell splashes were theirs.

 

[137th Gebirg]

What I found interesting in Enterprise was that the phasers of each ship seemed to match the blood color of the race driving it. Red on the Enterprise, green for Vulcan ships, blue for Andorian ships, etc. Don't know if that was intentional, but it certainly seemed, at the least, highly coincidental.