Kill, stun, and "you would have been better off throwing it at them".
New Phaser and Rifle Revealed
- Thread starter Gibberish
- Start date
Oh, but there's more! Laser cutters are a big thing in prototyping and manufacturing. You can use them to cut wood, cardboard, leather, plastic, even metal at the hobbyist scale. I suspect the intricate patterns made for the Klingon armor and sets were done using laser cutters.
Laser surgery has been around for a few decades. "LASIK" is one such application. The intense light is capable of of being wielded as a scalpel.
And of course the military has an interest. "Sir! The enemy is training their ... telescopes on us?!" Small vehicle-mounted lasers are being tested today. Hand-held versions may be inevitable if they can be made light-weight and fire more shots than can ordinarily be carried by a soldier.
Oh, I know! I go to the Martin guitar factory a couple times a year, and the machines there now used to cut the standard model's body are laser cut, and it's amazing to watch!
I'm also into model trains, and the buildings, locomotives and rolling stock are now being molded with a lot of laser cutting and printing in the process. You can take a magnifying glass and read a locomotive's builder's plate on a scale engine and read it as clear as looking at a real builder's plate.
All of them, unfortunately, lol! I have two main layouts, one N and the other HO, but I will also set up O or G if the mood strikes me.
The technology for detailing even the N gage ones has become incredible, given the advances in the use of lasers for shaping the bodies and adding details or lettering.
[And the mutual admiration society posts continue ...]
My father had an extensive HO layout in his younger days, and I attempted a resurrection of it before he sold the whole lot off. These days I think I'm more likely to settle on N, because you can do almost as much with it as you can with HO and the detail, as you note, is really getting good. And with Digitrax and the like, you pack a tremendous amount of train operations into your layout without having to do complicated wiring.
[So anyone coming into this tangentially and moderately curious, up until the 1980s or so, model railroads were wired with each of the two rails carrying a variable DC voltage and the locomotive moved along that track depending on its orientation and the polarity of that DC current. If it was positive on one side, and negative on the other, the train moved forwards and if the polarity was the opposite, the train moved backwards. That's easy enough when your layout is a simple loop, but as soon as you add switches and cross-overs and interesting, realistic detail to your layout, you have to cut the rails between different operations sections and wire each section differently. And two trains on the same rails in the same section always moved in the same direction at the same speed.
Starting in the 1980s, people started computerizing their model railroads, and by the 90s, some interesting standards started emerging where decoders were built into the engines and they were powered by the same voltage and polarity everywhere on the track. But they were controlled by signals fed to the rails that identified the locomotive, direction, and velocity (and lights, whistle, etc.) so that the locomotives could be on the same track section and still act independently. These decoders are now small enough to fit into Z-gauge layouts now, I believe.
Oh, by the way, the word 'hacker' comes from model railroading ... particularly the MIT Model Railroading Club, which, in the 1960s, had a number of rather brilliant electrical engineers creating 'elegant hacks' (often with a hack saw) to do interesting things with their layouts. These same engineers often made their way over to the computer sciences departments.]
Anyway, every time I start thinking about making my own layout, I start with a simple switch yard and a few hidden loops, and somewhere along the way, I start thinking about implementing my own monorails and maglev trains, too, and the whole plan spins out of control. But I love the hobby.
We now return you to Star Trek: Model Railroading ... er ... Discovery.
My father had an extensive HO layout in his younger days, and I attempted a resurrection of it before he sold the whole lot off. These days I think I'm more likely to settle on N, because you can do almost as much with it as you can with HO and the detail, as you note, is really getting good. And with Digitrax and the like, you pack a tremendous amount of train operations into your layout without having to do complicated wiring.
[So anyone coming into this tangentially and moderately curious, up until the 1980s or so, model railroads were wired with each of the two rails carrying a variable DC voltage and the locomotive moved along that track depending on its orientation and the polarity of that DC current. If it was positive on one side, and negative on the other, the train moved forwards and if the polarity was the opposite, the train moved backwards. That's easy enough when your layout is a simple loop, but as soon as you add switches and cross-overs and interesting, realistic detail to your layout, you have to cut the rails between different operations sections and wire each section differently. And two trains on the same rails in the same section always moved in the same direction at the same speed.
Starting in the 1980s, people started computerizing their model railroads, and by the 90s, some interesting standards started emerging where decoders were built into the engines and they were powered by the same voltage and polarity everywhere on the track. But they were controlled by signals fed to the rails that identified the locomotive, direction, and velocity (and lights, whistle, etc.) so that the locomotives could be on the same track section and still act independently. These decoders are now small enough to fit into Z-gauge layouts now, I believe.
Oh, by the way, the word 'hacker' comes from model railroading ... particularly the MIT Model Railroading Club, which, in the 1960s, had a number of rather brilliant electrical engineers creating 'elegant hacks' (often with a hack saw) to do interesting things with their layouts. These same engineers often made their way over to the computer sciences departments.]
Anyway, every time I start thinking about making my own layout, I start with a simple switch yard and a few hidden loops, and somewhere along the way, I start thinking about implementing my own monorails and maglev trains, too, and the whole plan spins out of control. But I love the hobby.
We now return you to Star Trek: Model Railroading ... er ... Discovery.
Perfect primer for folks here, @Psion! So far as I know, there are DCC decoders that can fit into Z-gauge locomotives (for those who want to know, promotional literature for Z-gauge has a small steam locomotive sitting inside a walnut shell.)
I'm not converted to DCC yet on the N layout, but have some DCC operation on the HO, with some of my O gauge also running that way. It's just a slow process, since I love just running stuff too much!
I'm not converted to DCC yet on the N layout, but have some DCC operation on the HO, with some of my O gauge also running that way. It's just a slow process, since I love just running stuff too much!
And to bring this back to Trek, Z-gauge is 1:220 scale ... the biggest, off-the-shelf starship models you can get from Polar Lights are at 1:350 scale.
So we need bigger models or smaller train scales to fit them all into one layout. The original model of the Enterprise, now on display at the Smithsonian, works out to be almost exactly HO scale! The model from Star Trek: The Motion Picture is close to N-gauge. A Z-gauge pre-refit Enterprise should be around four feet, four inches long.
Maybe that's where the small filming model from TOS that went missing is located: Roddenberry's Z-gauge layout!
It's sci-fi, just becasue it shares the name doesn't mean it is the same thing.
I would assume the rifle's settings are more like a modern rifle's settings. That is, 'Safe', 'Semi', and 'Fill your hand you son of a Klingon'.
Then the name means nothing. Throw it away.
Why use the same name then? That makes no sense, especially in the context of Star Trek, when they moved to "phasers" because it gave them more flexibility in what the weapon could do.
Uniderth seems to feel that 'laser' already is a sci-fi word, regardless of its real-world origins, and so it's perfectly fine to use it as a sci-fi weapon. I find that approach to be sloppy and confusing to folks with engineering or sciences background, but he doesn't.
And, to a point, he's right. They were called lasers. Lasers can be used as weapons. It also suggests technological evolution, to go from bullets to lasers to phasers. So I don't think we're going to be talking him out of this.
So, we go from phase-pistols to lasers and then to phasers? Yeah, no. Let's get over the lasers.
I agree. Although part of the fault rests with Enterprise where we should have seen a range of weapons as defensive/offensive tools. From slug-throwers for most combat situations, to specialized laser rifles, to some kind of directed-energy stunner -- demonstrating the roots of the phaser and how far weapons technology came by the time the 1960s rolled around!
No. Phase-pistols never existed.
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