I just saw Regeneration. I'd already heard a lot about Reed bumping up the phase pistols to ten megajoules and thus producing copious numbers of very dead Borg, but I was troubled by that. See, the whole concept of Reed simply bumping the power to ten megajoules bothered me. Where were the freqencies, modulations, nutations, EM bands, and all the other technobabble phaser fixes used to allow the later crews to kill a Borg or two before adaptation ensued?
That was when it occurred to me that the phase pistol might not take kindly to being juiced up to that extent . . . might make the pistol's signature sloppy.
(I can't really think of a decent analogy for the idea . . . the best I've come up with would be something along the lines of electricity. Electrical appliances operate along set voltage . . . around these parts, 110-120. But, if you just dump raw juice into the line (say, lightning strike) and don't "clean it up" first, bad things happen. Now, just imagine the reverse . . . dumping too much juice into the phase pistol's systems might go slightly beyond its ability to clean up, producing a frequency/modulation/nutation/band (FMNB) spread. Yeah, okay, the analogy sucks. )
Well, the concept may not be perfect, but it is not without support. As Reed and an armory officer conduct tests of the juiced-up phase pistol, we get the following image on Reed's monitor. The red-shaded output is 9 megajoules, with the other colors representing lower settings. Note the different graph shapes at the different settings. I'm not sure which of the FMNB group this would represent, but it's almost certainly one of them.
Thoughts?
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posted
Why? Is everyone in the 24th century geniuses now?
If they were so clever, you'd think they'd have come up with a way of changing the phaser frequency on the fly. But instead, they actually removed that feature (as it was in "The Arsenal of Freedom"). The only conclusion is that everyone in the 24 century is an idiot, and the sooner the lot of them are assimilated, the happier I'll sleep.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The idea would be that the 24th Century phaser systems aren't as "old-tech sloppy", and allow for greater control of everything.
(i.e. if you wanted a level 16 phaser hit at such and such frequency, you'll get it. A max-power shot of the phase pistol, however, throws out frequencies all over the board.)
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: The idea would be that the 24th Century phaser systems aren't as "old-tech sloppy", and allow for greater control of everything.
(i.e. if you wanted a level 16 phaser hit at such and such frequency, you'll get it. A max-power shot of the phase pistol, however, throws out frequencies all over the board.)
That's kind of how Kira explains the diffrences between Starfleet and Cardassian Energy rifles (I think to Ducat's daugter). Fed stuff is all control and finesse while other tech is more rugged but "sloppy". The high level of Fed tech and the tight controls it gives may be a disadvantage in fighting the Borg with personal weapons.
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Registered: Aug 2002
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I thought in that episode Kira states that the Phaser 3 had more features and was less powerful (stabilized, auto-targeting, 1 megajoule output, if i'm not mistaken). The disruptor rifle she compared it to was 3 megajoule output i think.
Registered: May 2003
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What I got out of it, is that in the 24th century, they knew exactly what was needed to get around the Borg defences (finesse) where Reed just took a guess, that if they pumped the power way up, they must defeat the shielding... The only real difference is that that small collective of a dozen or two borg took longer to analize and adapt.
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Registered: Nov 2002
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