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The link's been switched with a revised one... I snapped a few more shots of the Andorians just so you slobs could verify that they were indeed present without resorting to the old "looks like an Andorian hairstyle" bit.
Interestingly, I had been reading in a magazine interview somewhere that the VFX folks on Enterprise were rather proud of the fact that they went back and developed a brand new Phase Pistol Beam visual effect that looked more primitive than a 24th century phaser, with a "rougher" beam. To be honest, I've only been able to notice a difference so slight you've got to be looking for it to see it. But the phase cannons here do indeed have a nifty sloppier beam effect. The beam's reds also appear to be tinted more towards salmon than the red-to-increasingly orange of 24th-century phasers. As you can see, there do appear to be discrete emitters halfway between each pair of torpedo tube and further down.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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I would have preferred if they fired something closer to the opaque bluish beams from TOS. I also find it strange that that other pulse energy makes one apparence in Enterprise, and is (relatively) soon replaced by a phaser-look alike.
And yes, that CG alien does look a Pak'Mara with a bad shave, or maybe E.T. with its eyes poked out.
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Registered: Apr 2001
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Perhaps the TOS phasers are more hotter (and more powerful) than the Ent "phasers". While the TNG and post TNG phasers are even more powerful, but given new advances in phaser technology were able to lower the temperature of the phasers.
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Registered: Feb 2000
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You can't really assume the TOS animations are "accurate." How many times did we see hand phasers shooting at weird angles, and goofy sparklies flying away from the target? Look at the cannon in "The Cage." Or the planet-killer in "The Doomsday Machine." The Enterprise's phasers were red and fired from the bottom of the lower dome in that one, to say nothing of the planet-killer itself! Even if one accepts the argument that Enterprise could have been designed more primitively than the original, it's hard to imagine anything remotely resembling the TOS phaser effect on a modern series. There's not really any reason for them to resemble it anyway, since Enterprise doesn't have phasers.
Personally, though, I wanted them to be blue.
Oh, and re: the red pulse weapon. Those were probably the "plasma artillery" mentioned in the series bible. They seemed to have been a pretty weak point-defense type system only used since the torpedoes weren't online yet. The phase cannon don't replace them, they supplement them.
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