posted
I recently viewed my copies of "The Cage" (Reconstructed from "The Menagerie" and film that remained from the first pilot) and "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
I make the following observations, since these items caught my attention:
In both episodes, crew members are armed with "laser pistols". Only in the second episode is the "Phaser" introduced by name, with introduction of the phaser rifle. I can't recall seeing another phaser rifle until TNG (If anyone can cite canon references to phaser rifles in TOS other than in WNMHGB, let me know please).
In subsequent episodes, crew members use type 1 or type 2 phasers.
In "The Cage" the standard crew size for the USS Enterprise is implied to be 203.
In later episodes the crew size is given as 430, more than double the crew size given in "The Cage".
In WNMHGB, when they are about to enter the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, Captain kirk first has them "neutralize warp" and hold their position. He subsequently has them proceed to the barrier at warp factor one. The sound effects suggest that coming from a stop to WF1 takes between 10-15 seconds (at least in non-emergency conditions).
I believe items 1 and 2 are related. In "The Cage", there is no mention of phasers. I believe that Gene Roddenberry had not coined the term when that pilot was filmed, and this suggests (to me, at least) that perhaps, even if phasers had been "invented" by this point in Trek history, they had not yet been installed on the Enterprise. If (as I suspect) real lasers powerful enough to use as ship-board weapons, they would necessarily be quite bulky. When phasers (a "new-and-improved" type of beam weapon) replaced lasers, they might be sufficiently compact to allow more crew and research facilities, accounting for the more than doubled crew size given in later episodes.
This also explains, perhaps, why they brought a "laser cannon" down to the surface to try to blast open the Talosian "elevator", since weapon-strength lasers have limited range in atmosphere. The heat of the laser would tend to turn the air at the leading edge of the beam into plasma, which would dissipate the beam's energy. From orbit, the Enterprise would have to punch through several kilometers of atmosphere to reach the target, so it may have been more practical to beam (perhaps microwave) energy to the cannon, and the cannon's beam would have only have had to penetrate a few meters' worth of atmosphere to reach it's target.
Item 3 suggests that the transition to warp from "normal" speeds takes some finite amount of time. This makes sense, as one expects "older" ships to have lower performance than "newer" ones, just as we expect a model A Ford not to win many drag races or contests of speed against newer vehicles, such as a modern Frod Escort.
Comments?
--Baloo
------------------ Welcome to the museum of really dangerous things. Feel free to pick up and handle any of the displays. www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/
posted
One other thing I noticed (and forgot to mention) is the old, semi-transparent communicators used in the first 2 pilots. Have we ever seen them in any other episodes? I suspect that since they are far more bulky than modern cellphones, that they may be an early type of subspace communication device, rather than simple radio communicators.
Comments?
--Baloo
------------------ Welcome to the museum of really dangerous things. Feel free to pick up and handle any of the displays. www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/
posted
The suggestion that the Enterprise didn't have phasers in the 2250's suits the commonly accepted fact that the Enterprise was upgraded some time before Kirk assumed command. At least this is the common explanation why there were slight changes in the outer appearance of the ship and, more striking, the crew was suddenly doubled.
I don't remember the quote, since I have only the German version of this episode and the translation of TOS is usually awful. Nevertheless, I can virtually hear the sound effect you are talking of. My thoughts: The ship should drop out of warp immediately once there is no warp field anymore. This has been established since the time of TNG, no matter if it is physically correct or not. The difference to TOS could be explained in a way that the warp plasma distribution was different. TNG warp engines have plasma injectors that might shut down the current immediately and can control it much better. The TOS engines could be subject to an effect that keeps the plasma flowing just like a coil maintains an electric current.
The TOS communicator might have been converted to something else, Wah Chang was very resourceful. Maybe Spock's remote control? I have to check "The Art of Star Trek".
------------------ "When diplomacy fails, there's only one alternative - violence. Force must be applied without apology. It's the Starfleet way." A somewhat different Janeway in VOY: "Living Witness" Ex Astris Scientia
posted
The Enterprise was refitted with Phasers during Capt. Pikes command. The reason for the change I really don't know. I would assume that they felt that with all of the neat tech they made up a laser for a weapon just wasn't going to cut it.
------------------ Death before Dishonor! However Dishonor has quite a disputed defintion.
posted
Phasers were introduced for the same reason dilithium was. You can do whatever you want with them, unlike lasers, which have certain real world properties.
------------------ "Stirs a large iron pot. Casting a spell on Vermont." -- John Linnell
[This message has been edited by Sol System (edited November 04, 1999).]
posted
Perhaps, at first, phasers could only be used as ship-based weapons, since they were so big. Then, in the 2260's, some breakthrough was made that allowed them to first reduce them to rifle size (somewhere between "The Cage" and WNMHGB) and then to pistol size (sometime between WNMHGB and... uh... whatever the next ep was ("The Man Trap"?), or possibly just before WNMHGB, if we allow some time for them to be distributed to the fleet). That explains why they had phasers in WNMHGB, but were still using lasers, too.
------------------ "Agh! Save me from the wee turtles!" -Groundskeeper Willy, The Simpsons
posted
I'd like to comment on Baloo's original observations:
While it's true that both pilots feature the laser pistols, only "The Cage" actually /speaks/ of lasers, and then only in connection with the pistols. The big portable cannon gets no definite name or verbal description, save for the fact that its power comes from the ship. It could very well be an early phaser, since its firing FX matches that of Kirk's phaser rifle in the second pilot, while the laser pistol FX is a simple red line quite unlike the colorful cannon effect.
No mention is made of the weaponry used by the ship itself. Note, however, that modern Doug Drexler drawings always depict shipboard phasers as consisting of two or three silver spheres in a line - and this is EXACTLY how the "The Cage" cannon looks like!
In "WNMHGB", as you say, only the rifle is called a phaser. One might speculate that phasers were in the process of being miniaturized, but the state of the art at that point was a bulky rifle, with the first phaser pistols just coming off the production lines but not yet available for the Enterprise crew. (One might also say that the pistols were phasers, simply built inside existing laser pistol casings, but I think that is unnecessarily silly...)
Also, note that "Obsession" establishes that shipboard phasers were available back in the early 2250s, when Kirk fought the dikironium cloud aboard the Farragut. It is very, very likely that the Enterprise under Pike also carried these weapons. Whether they were present during "The Cage" or installed shortly afterwards is not clear, and the evidence of a post-"The Cage" refit makes it aesthetically pleasing to say that shipboard phasers were only added after the first pilot.
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