posted
Can't let the new guy post ALL the new threads.
You know, a phaser has the ability to vaporize rocks. Why doesn't the inevitable heat bleedoff from a hand phaser emission burn off the user's hand, not to mention everything else in the area?
Mark (playing with my laser pointer today, and even IT gets warm from the battery after a long time)
posted
Probably for the same reasonm that people are able to "safely" use flame-throwers. The heat's going that way. And besides, we don't know how much heat, if any, is actually produced by phaser vapourisation. Theoretically (in terms of realistic physics) a lot, yes, but on-screen evidence has people climbing through tunnels newly-phasered through solid rock within minutes.
posted
Or, to quote Sternbach in the TNG TM, at high settings there's very little actual vaporization going on, and most of the disappearing act is due to that good old subspace magic.
That also helps with how we see objects disappear. It seems like the phaser plants a "seed" of disappearance to an object, and this then spreads until it meets a boundary (like skin-to-air or clothes-to-air). Instead of just heat-induced disassociation of matter, this would be a "dephasing" effect that does not willingly jump from one type of material to another. If it does, the second material will also disappear in its entirety, right until the next boundary (or at least until the oomph of the effect runs out); if it doesn't, the second material is not harmed at all. So no burn mark beneath Ensign X'Pired.
It seems a phaser can be used to simply pump energy to a rock, causing it to glow red-hot. Or it can be used to induce the dephasing effect, causing parts of the rock to disappear to another realm (and sometimes sending other parts flying about).
posted
Yeah... I'd like to keep the stun, burn and dephase functions quite separate, even if they are integrated into the same physical casing.
Indeed, regarding the prop that with minimal modifications serves as laser in "The Cage", then behaves like phaser in early TOS, I'd like to think that its three rotatable barrels in fact housed completely different mechanisms. If there is a door to cut through, choose the laser barrel. If there is a Starfleet officer playing god or trying to take away your favorite salt vampire, choose the stun phaser barrel. And if all is lost and Starfleet is closing in on you and your android loved one, choose the disintegrate phaser barrel, hug him, and press the trigger.
TOS phasers would then ditch the laser barrel and make the stun and disrupt ones concentric rather than parallel.
posted
That's a common theory, but I like the way you've put it. I may have to steal it (in a giving-you-full-credit kind of way). Should I ever be motivated to update my site ever again!
and for another related article from the same website (which cannot be directly linked to ) select the following link, go to 'Technology' in the left hand menu, select 'Ground Combat' and then choose the Star Trek section of the 'small arms' category (scroll down for TOS era phasers) http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/
Registered: Jul 2006
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Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
It's sort of like Lightsabers. They don't inherently generate heat, but the energy they emit has properties that cause the atoms of the contact object to get "excited" and as a result react as if it is getting hot or vapourized. There may be some heat feedback, mostly due to the power cell discharging. But it is not "anything hot" that is coming out of the phaser. It's just a beam, the beam is making things heat up.
That's my guess though.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Maybe they do generate all the heat one would think, and that is shunted as subspace radiation? This would give good reason that weapons fire is easily picked up on subspace scans.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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Da_bang80
A few sectors short of an Empire
Member # 528
posted
I'm not real big on the technobabble stuff, but doesn't a phaser work much like a laser? In that the beam is aligned so that all the energy is traveling in one direction, that would mean that there isn't enough energy dissipated into the surounding atmosphere or back into the phaser itself to cause it to get hot.
That's just my 2 cents.
-------------------- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I cannot accept. And the wisdom to hide the bodies of all the people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.
posted
No. You're basically just asking the same question that Mark did when starting this thread. And many of the answers - mine, Tahna's and Ritten's especially - make it plain that just because we would "expect" a large section of rock being vapourised to emit a hella lotta heat according to our own physical rules (or contemporary notions thereof) doesn't mean that it's what happens when someone in Trek decides to start zapping. We know that objects aren't being vapourised according to the proper definition, it's a term used to describe a similar process which actually involves matter (and energy) phasing out of our continuum (and imperfectly at that, given, say, residue is left behind like in "Gambit").
A question that's just occurred to me: has the word 'vapourisation' even been used onscreen to describe the effect of a phaser set on Kill?
posted
Yes. Picard says it to that woman who escapes from Sick Bay, ambushes him in an empty corridor and grabs his phaser. When he retrieves the phaser and examines the setting, he tells her that if she'd fired it, she would have vapourised him.
EDIT: this occurs in the film First Contact
Registered: Jul 2006
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I would think the 'kill' setting could be far less powerful than the 'vapourize' setting. Flesh being weaker than rock and all.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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) select the following link, go to 'Technology' in the left hand menu, select 'Ground Combat' and then choose the Star Trek section of the 'small arms' category (scroll down for TOS era phasers)
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