In the 2150s, mankind was using phase pistols and rifles. On a kill cycle they burn you, go through you and you die. On stun cycle you get charred and the energy knocks up your nervous system so you go sleep.

By the 2250s, beam weapons are being used. They are called 'lasers' but obviously do more than lasers as we know them today, indicating it was just a catchall name for beam weapons. The lasers stun, or kill and have a variety of settings for disintegrating things. Since the term 'laser' is misleading, they begin to be referred to as phasers since the energy is not light, but instead some type of phased beam, similar to the phase pulse that we used to shoot before we had the beam version.

In the hundred years since ENT, they apparently learned to collimate a beam of phased energy and also how to use it to disintegrate things and better control how it dissipates (i.e. vaporizing things instead of blowing holes in them, and variations like light stun, heavy stum) Also developed will be wide beam technology.

Worf could have meant that phasers came to be in the 22nd century, since the question concerned "the most significant advance after the 22nd century". According to ENT, phasers were an advance that was in existence after the 22nd century...

In "The Cage", the handguns were specifically identified as lasers, whereas the pedestal-mounted weapon was not. In "Where No Man...", the rifle was specifically identified as a phaser, while the pistols were not. The pistols were nearly identical to the "The Cage" lasers, though.

I suspect it was traditional in pre-TOS times to carry a mixture of weapon types: lasers for some roles, phasers for others. Bullet-throwers and plasma guns might have represented an older mix of technologies that was now out of the vogue, while phasers were a relatively modern technology, and handheld lasers were the promising brand-new superweapon, outperforming the hand phasers in some ways.

It just so happened that hand lasers did not pan out. Instead, hand phasers were improved to match the performance of the hand lasers, and were then chosen as the sole handheld weapon type for starship crews.

It seems so natural for us to assume that phasers would be more advanced than lasers, but there is not canonical reason to do so in the Trek context (some references concerning *shipboard* weaponry notwithstanding). Perhaps it was hellishly difficult to create a compact handheld laser, and the feat was not achieved until the 23rd century - whereas more primitive technologies like plasma and phaser weapons were compacted into handheld form far earlier, and then gradually evolved into more versatile forms than the theoretically better lasers.

Personally, I don't have a problem with some sort of rudimentary beam weapon, called a phase pistol (itself preceded by some sort of pulse-plasma gun), preceding another weapon called a "laser" (but which obviously wasn't a LASER) which was then in turn replaced by the phaser as we know it.

If they keep calling them "phase pistols" then fine. If it becomes shortened to just "phaser" then we're edging into continuity violation. There are already too many things just getting explained away by saying "they changed, then changed back again."

Despite that, I think that since we don't know

a) what the composition of the phase pistol beam is (yet!), and

b) what the composition of the laser beam was,

In the case of Star Trek, though, we may just want to retcon laser out of "The Cage" entirely. Remember: unlike later series, that episode was a true pilot, and it never actually aired. If it weren't for the fan following, it would never have been seen at all. The producers changed the name laser to phaser before series production, even though as of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" they were still using the same prop. This, as we all know, was done because lasers can't do what the Trek weapons were intended to do. Had the terminology change never been made, we would see lasers clear through to Voyager, disintegrating things, stunning people, and being visible in space.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't have a big problem with tweaking a few things from early Star Trek. I assume that every time Kirk said "Earth Command" or "Space Central" or even "UESPA," he really said "Starfleet." I assume that when Kirk told Khan he had been frozen for two hundred years, he really said "two hundred and seventy." I assume that when they found Gothos, it was 450 light years away -- not 900 -- so that Trelane could view Napoleon with an optical telescope. It is, after all, fictional. So replacing an L with a PH for one word of "The Cage" doesn't bother me too much.

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Originally posted by Vogon Poet:
Why should one line of dialogue in "Space Seed" - the two-hundred year one - be retconned in preference to the other line of dialogue which says the Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990's?

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It all goes back to what I always say: producer intent. The Eugenics Wars were supposed to be in the 1990s, period. These dates were given explicitly, which demonstrates this intent. All other figures (from "Space Seed," Wrath of Khan, and "Dr. Bashir, I Presume?") are the results of the series era not being set, and mistakes. Since the intent was for the 1990s, I'll stick with that.

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The "laser pistols" were seen in "WNMHGB" but went unnamed; the only reason Spock asked for a Phaser Rifle was for extra firepower. . .

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Originally posted by Vogon Poet:
That's an interesting idea about the laser pistols, and I'll have to add your suppositions to my "laser pistol" page (which might need to have a rename!). Credit given of course. . .

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By all means.

I try to be careful not to give people the idea that I think producer intent is canon because it isn't. But I think there are more resources than canon available when you're dealing with constructed reality.

Incidentally, one intent-related area that I'm thinking about is Kirk's retirement with Antonia. I remember reading that Ron Moore wrote it intending it to be during the gap after the original series, but the years that found their way into the script clearly don't indicate that. I'd like to rediscover that interview (I think it was in an AOL chat) and see for sure.