TOS Weaponry Question

[Captain Robert April]

One might also argue that Kirk got less timid about using the high-power blue setting as he gained combat experience.

Most of the blue beams were fired in "great anger", against targets that would not have succumbed to less, but absolutely had to. The primitive missiles from "Patterns of Force" and "FtWIHaIHTtS" probably shouldn't have warranted such walloping, though, nor the Tholians in their titular ep.

Timo Saloniemi

Well, it was Spock who fired the phasers in "The Tholian Web." I'm not convinced he would have used some kind of "great anger" setting.

"Set phasers to 'really pissed off!'"

 

[BolianAuthor]

I will go with my original idea, then, and assume that generally, phasers were blue then (unless a specific setting was employed), and photons were silvery. I guess the context of my original question could be seen as "If you were to make TOS today, what color system would you use, as a standard, if you had the same VFX people throughout the series?".

 

[TOS Purist]

^^
Sounds good, man - although you could always use the green stun beams if the story calls for it.

"Paradise Syndrome" verbally establishes four separate phaser banks existing (and visually establishes at least three of them being in that location)

You might also say that the fourth phaser bank is the "rear phaser bank" mentioned in an episode.

I'd go with the good old speculation that the knobs on the dome rim are set on a rotating ring

Ah HA, I've ALWAYS felt that the bottom dome had a rotating phaser ring, as well! That would also help the phaser beams to target better and have a wider firing range. I've always assumed that the nub on the bottom of the dome was the Ion Pod; I'm not alone in that either, since I've seen fan-made blueprints that show the dome-nub as the Ion Pod, as well. Even the 11-foot filming model gave the nub a little retracting apparatus that could have been the ion sensor equipment. I know TOS-Remastered placed the Ion Pod waay in the back, but that's stupid; the place they "established" as the Ion Pod is a formation light, not an Ion Pod. And it would be stupid to put a formation light on top of your Ion Pod...

It wouldn't have been built as the phaser bank, because Matt Jefferies' original Enterprise specs placed the phasers at the same location as they fire from in "Arena" (check Schnitzer's post), which is far away from the bottom dome. I'm guessing the phaser bank located "migrated" to the dome because it was a better visual reference point for the effects people, rather than some indeterminate location halfway between the saucer rim and the ventral dome.

 

[Timo]

You might also say that the fourth phaser bank is the "rear phaser bank" mentioned in an episode.

Ah, that would probably be the sixth bank, after the fifth, "midships" one also mentioned... The four banks verbally specified in "Paradise Syndrome" all fired at the asteroid target that lay directly forward of the ship, after all (even if one of them did so when the camera was inside the ship and we couldn't see where the fire was coming from).

Or then Sulu briefly swung the ship around for a shot with "phaser three"...

Regarding the location where the beams emanate from, we can always argue that the beam doesn't always "ignite" immediately after leaving the emitter ring around the lower dome, but sometimes does so only after invisibly traveling for a few meters - especially when one uses low settings that produce red beams.

It's a bit more challenging to explain why the two beams are fired at wildly different directions when aimed at the same target, and how they converge on that target nevertheless... Perhaps the beams attract each other, and if we saw the entire transit of the beams from the ship to the distant target, we would witness them dancing around each other in a pretty plait pattern.

Timo Saloniemi