posted
I think I mentioned this in another thread, but given that the phasers in "Balance of Terror" acted like torpedoes, I've always wondered if there was some confusion somewhere along the script development stage. Like, they handed some version of the story over to the FX people and it read "The Enterprise shoots futuristic space torpedoes, hoping to catch the Romulan ship within the blast radius," and it was later when they were sitting around thinking "What are we going to call their weapons anyway?" that 'phaser' was introduced and inserted into the script without maybe much thought about what it would look like. And then further down the road the phaser guy writes one with beam weapons and people were like "Dude, I thought phasers were the torpedoes?"
I don't know. When does the word phaser first get applied to the sidearms?
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
In "Where no man has gone before". At least, I remember Kirk or Spock recommending they get a "phaser rifle" for use against Mitchell. So that shoots that one down.
I've also wondered about the "phasers" in BOT. I suspect it might have something to do with the whole "submarine warfare" thing going on in that episode. Subs use torpedoes, the Enterprise uses phasers, but lets make the phasers look like torpedoes (and depth charges to a degree). From a language perspective it doesn't make much sense for "phasers" to look like torpedoes. The name is clearly derived from lasers, and people in the 60s had an idea of what a laser should look like (ie, "The Cage"). Having a laser like weapon fire a projectile would have confused their little minds.
When did we first see the Enterprise firing proper phasers and torpedoes? I recall both in "Arena", but I'm not sure if that was before or after "BOT" in production order.
(I also always wondered why the Enterprise fired both red and blue phasers. Did one come before the other, or were they intermixed? I recall the blue ones looking a bit more "expensive".)
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
quote: Subs use torpedoes, the Enterprise uses phasers, but lets make the phasers look like torpedoes (and depth charges to a degree).
If we take the analogy to its logical limits, people expecting to see a WWII destroyer-vs-sub fight would not expect the destroyer to fire torpedoes. Submarines would be shelled by guns, or bombed by depth charges, or peppered by hedgehog spreads. And by the story logic, the "destroyer" didn't even know that "submarines" existed prior to the battle, so she shouldn't have either "depth charges" or "hedgehogs" aboard - but she could and would use her cannon.
Some of this may have affected how the episode was written. A weapon like depth charges was needed in the story, but it would make no sense for such a weapon to already be aboard the Enterprise. The second best choice was to use some kind of existing or plausibly introduced new Trek weapon, and "phaser" conflicted less with the WWII analogy than anything containing the recognizable words "torpedo" or "missile" or "rocket" or "bomb" or "mine".
posted
Forgive my ignorance of treknology, but I thought that phasers were plasma streams more than they were light-energy beams. So where they could not incorporate fuses and guidance systems like torpedoes, I imagine the emitters could produce blobs of charged plasma energy (instead of streams) that would act sort of like contact charges.
All of which is moot since they were called torpedoes in the second episode.
For those who didn't know already, the audio commentary for part two is now available.
posted
The things fired in BoT were 'phasers configured for proximity blast', as per dialogue. I imagine they're basically the same as a single phaser pulse (as described in DS9TM), but it's forcefield is 'designed' to decay after exactly x seconds, releasing the energy and creating a depth charge.
posted
The interpretation of phaser beams as "containers" or "firehoses" of some sort is a practical one, since VOY gives us the weird ability to squirt nanoprobes through a phaser beam, and DS9 suggests the Jem'Hadar send poisons across the same way. A proximity blast would then merely mean a controlled puncturing of the "firehose" or "water balloon", allowing the destructive contents to spill out all at once.
The odd hesistancy of our heroes to swing their phaser beams for greater effect could also be explained by the "hose" theory of phasers. A "hose" is first established between emitter and target point, and destruction is then pumped through it. If you try to move the target end of the "hose", it's just like using a water jet cutting machine: sideways movement of the cutting point along target metal surface works just fine, but if you cut a deep hole and stick the hose in there and then try moving it sideways, you get no results since the *hose* doesn't cut metal, only the *jet* at the tip does!
It might indeed be that the "hose" is harmless if you run into it from the side, and that only the endpoint kills. Thus, the lack of safeguards in the "Mind's Eye" phaser rifle test rig is acceptable - even if LaForge had accidentally walked through the beam, he'd have suffered little damage. Another analogy would be a taser with insulated wires: you can save your captain by throwing yourself at the incoming darts, but no longer by throwing yourself at the wires once the darts have already made contact.
Whatever the exact nature of phasers, we've seen them do so many weird things that "proximity blast" shouldn't really raise eyebrows.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
