I don't know if I am the only person confused by this but why all of a sudden the lame phasers? It's hard for me to believe they are an improvement over the phasers of the show. The weapon goes from a continious beam to a pulsed and back again in TNG. Also in TOS, a photon torpedeo can't destroy an entire vessel but in TNG they can.
My additional comment - why barely any phasers at ALL? In the TOS movies the Enterprise only ever fired her shipboard phasers in one of the movies; in ALL the other ones she only used torpedoes. Mark
I have more feelings about phasers only being used once in the TOS movies. As for why the continuous beam to a pulsed to continuous again, maybe the change for some reason made the phasers stronger, or used less energy or something. At least in my Trek universe, that's how it's explained.
I had just assumed that the continuous beam was for strafing and that the "pulsed" beam was for when you were targeting a specific location and wanted every shot to hit there. Another possibility is that the continuous beam is better for punching through shields, compared to going just after the hull.
Really, I always thought they were a precursor to the pulse phasers used later on on the Defiant and Sovereign class.
The "pulse phasers" are simply an example of cross-pollinization from STAR WARS courtesy of ILM. This was a common occurence especially in the earlier trek films. It was almost as if they were doing it on purpose to promote their own franchise.
At first I thought you meant the ever changing hand phasers...why couldn't they run with one design??? I always justified the change to the running it through the warp drive comment from TMP - obviously 80 years later the technology will change again hence the continuous phasers in the TNG era.
Umm, since it has already been pointed out that ship phasers were only seen in one of the movies, it should probably be considered that the situation in that movie was somewhat exceptional as well. Note that Kirk's ship is crippled and starved of power before she has the chance to fire a shot. All subsequent firings could thus be argued to be what a TOS era ship phaser looks like when it's not getting enough power! Granted that Khan's ship also fires phasers once, and that those phasers also pulse. But Khan has the intent to damage, not to destroy - so he, too, would have every incentive to run the phasers at low power. Also, he might not know how to do that properly... The cinematographic reasons for the use of "pulsing" have already been mentioned. Apart from that, though, the ST2 beams look sufficiently like the narrow TOS beams to my tastes. And the power issue could explain/excuse the pulsing without requiring any sort of a "generation change" in the hardware. Timo Saloniemi
But the BOP disruptors in TSFS, which also pulse in the exact same way (and IIRC with the same sound effect), destroy a ship.
So? The logic only need apply on Federation phasers, not Klingon disruptors (which have always fired bolts of some sort, rather than continuous beams) or Jem'Hadar phased polaron beams or whatever. In the most general terms, a pulsed beam would be less destructive than an otherwise identical continuous one because there are no pauses in the punishment being dished out. But pulsing might help a delicate beam generator recover, shed excess heat and so forth, allowing for higher momentary power levels. In industrial lasers, pulsing is also used to allow the vapors from the target to dissipate so that they don't interfere with the incoming beam. And Starfleet might want to pulse the phasers of the Defiant so that each pulse is tuned a bit differently from the previous one - the perfect counter to Borg adaptability. But since Starfleet doesn't seem to believe in pulsed beams anywhere else besides the Defiant, I think it might be worth the while to declare the strange, uneven ST2 pulses a "malfunction" of some sort... Timo Saloniemi
To me, I just chalked it up that shipboard phasers in style changed during the TOS movies then changed again afterwards. Personally, I liked the pulse-style phasers in TWOK and wished they could have kept it afterward.
Actually, ILM farmed out the phaser animation to VCE for TWOK. VCE handled the transporters as well as the phaser shots and some enhancements to the enginer room flask that Spock unscrews. Now the main guy at VCE did work on the first couple SW movies too, but his stuff in TWOK doesn't look anything like his SW stuff. More examples of VCE trek work ... the hand phasers and beamups in TFF and the mining lasers in TUC. I don't think the bop disruptor shot looks all that much like the TWOK stuff at all either, but I guess if you figure all the rest of the ext ship shots in the tos features used torps, it looks closer than those do obviously.