I remember somewhere on the transporter weapons thread someone mentioned the possibility of rebuilding a transporter as a weapon (basically a disintegrator). Actually, given the way they behave I have a theory that phasers are actually just that.
Think about it. When a phaser fires at a man the man just disappears. He couldn't have actually been vaporized because the heat would kill everyone in the room. I suspect a phaser is actually a very small portable transporter-type mechanism. When the beam hits somebody it disintegrates him without scanning or preserving his transporter pattern. It also explains how they could be modified to shoot anti-8472 nanoprobes in their beams.

I have no scientific background what-so-ever beyond my high-school qualifications, but doesn't the disassembled matter still have to go somewhere?

This will be addressed in Berman & Braga's next exciting installment in the film franchise, "Honey, I Shrunk The Klingons" .....

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[img=right]http://www.tallguyz.com/imagelib/chmeesig.jpg[/img]My guess might be excellent or it might be crummy, but
Mrs. Spade didn't raise any children dippy enough to
make guesses in front of a district attorney,
an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.
Sam Spade, "The Maltese Falcon"
Operation Freedom Fry

My theory was that a phaser beam is something like a transporter beam set to maximum dispersal. You get turned into gas (w/out the heating effects necessary to do it by DET).

Interesting approach. I see the following problems:
-explains phaserisation, and ONLY for phaserisation. Completely fails to explain stun, non-DET kill, thermal effects, range-dependent lethal stun...
-clearly visible beam. Never witnessed in transporters
-ludicrously low propagation speed for hand phasers. Never witnessed in transporters
-highly variable propagation speed. Never witnessed in transporters
-material dependent efficiency. I don't recall any material that couldn't be transported, and I DEFINITELY don't recall beaming being harder for denser materials.
NTM that whenever they explain phaser principles, no matter how little sense they make, Trek characters never mention transporters.

Maybe it combines a transporter and a low power energy beam? Or maybe at low settings the effect is similar to an energy beam. For instance, for thermal effects, if you randomly break molecular bonds in a rock (as a very low power disintegrator would) wouldn't it release heat? As for stun, maybe the it disrupts the neurotransmitters in your nervous system enough to cause unconsciousness but not permanent damage.

The phaser probably isn't a transporter in the conventional sense. It doesn't choose objects to transport, it just creates this disintegration effect in front of it (the beam) and any solid mass that the disintegration effect touches gets disintegrated.

If the phaser beam is some sort of disintegration effect it would be basically the same phenomenon as the "sparkles" in a normal transport. Normal transporter effects have never been seen to propogate at all because normal transporters choose a discrete object to disintegrate and reintegrate instead of traveling in a straight line randomly until they hit something.

See above.

The disintegration effect probably burns itself out faster in dense materials. Transporting matter has to take energy, after all, and there's only so much energy in the beam.

True. Although we've never really heard any detailed explanation of how phasers works as far as I know of.

Never witnessed in transporters. Combines two different operating mechanisms into one weapon. Occam's razor...

Would it? I admit I'm not all that hot in physics but I think it'd be the other way round...

How pray tell does removing part of said neurotransmitters do that? And how does the phaser know to only affect neurotransmitters and where to find them? It's not like stun needs a CNS hit...

Either it's functionally a transporter or it is not. If it IS, you need to explain why it's the only one in Trek with a visible beam.

Applicable to the speed of the phaserisation effect, NOT beam propagation.

I think I get where you're going but you're still wrong. Transporter beams are routinely seen to propagate much faster than that because every time someone is beamed up from a planet to a ship in orbit, the transporter beam needs to traverse this distance to initiate transport in the first place. Meaning initiating transport from orbit at hand phaser propagation speeds would take hours.

Likewise.

No such problem ever witnessed in transporters. A ton of steel does not seem to be any harder to transport than a ton of water.

Depends on what you consider 'detailed'. If you mean 'not involving lots of incomprehensible and/or factually wrong technobabble' I'm forced to agree

Transporter doesn't work on any kind of chain reaction. The transporting device must be working during the whole process, with a phaser you just need to hit someone at maximum power for a fraction of a second and he will slowly disintegrate, long after the phaser beam is off.

Thanks. I understand what you mean more clearly now.

Well, molecular bonds are energy after all, and if you break the molecular bond you get released energy, a lot of which would probably be in the form of heat.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about biochemistry, but I think the nervous system is most sensitive to damage. If you start randomly beaming away pieces of long biomolecules you mess up a lot of the metabolic processes. I'd think the nervous system would be particularly sensitive to that. Downside would be that it would be very easy to do lasting damage to the brain that way (that might explain the lethal stun to the head from ST:VI).

My theory is that the phaser beam is basically the same phenomenon as the sparkle effect you see when a person gets beamed up. The sparkle effect is the transporter first locking onto a discrete object and then disintegrating it. The phaser beam is an uncontrolled disintegration effect already going on, with no discrete target.

But there's a difference there. A phaser beam isn't actually being targeted in the same way a transporter is. A phaser beam is just disintegrating the air as it goes, and you're hoping while it's at it it'll also reach far enough to hit that Jem Hadar/Romulan/Klingon in front of you. Unlike a transporter there's no lock on the target.

Because a transporter uses the ship's power for disintegration/reintegration, and they can increase power as necessary. Once a phaser has been fired the only disintegration energy is what was put in the beam, which is nonrenewable and being continuously used up as the target disintegrates.

Destructionator XIII seems to disagree. I suggest you take it up with him.

Absolutely. Yet somehow stun almost exclusively results in stun as opposed to the serious nervous system damage that should accur. And that still doesn't explain how a stun hit anywhere will affect the nervous system but nothing else.

Which was explicitely stated to be range dependent. Explain this with transporter phasers.

At that point, the transporter beam has already 'hit'. Different phenomenon.

Explaining phaserisation visuals, not the beam.

Phaserisation of air in the path of the beam, if I get you right?

So you're claiming the beam is slowed down by having to disintegrate the air in its way, did I get this right?
One then wonders why it does so at a large variety of different speeds, and is STILL clearly visible in vacuum...

And there's no evidence whatsoever that they do so. Never ever mentioned throughout 24 seasons and 10 movies worth of Trek.

Which, as Slartibartfast pointed out, never happens with transporters. Once the transporter beam stops, so does the disintegration.

I would guess stun is extremely low power, just high enough to mess up ongoing chemical reactions but not high enough to irreversably damage the structure of the cells.

Not exactly. You're right that the transporter hitting an object and then disintegrating it is a different phenomenon. The phaser beam is just the disintegration element itself, without the part that actually hits the target and begins the disintegration (presumably this function is replicated by a device inside the phaser itself).

Partially. The beam probably phaserizes the air it passes through, but that's not responsible for the beam effect. My point was that unlike a transporter disintegration it isn't controlled; the disintegration effect is generated inside the phaser and then goes on its merry way until it hits a solid object.

No. Let's look at transporter disintegration again.
In transporter disintegration something hits the target, the target disintegrates, and then the disintegrated target is carried back to the ship and reintegrated. In a phaser the disintegration effect is generated probably by something similar, but it's projected outward into a beam. So the phaser disintegration beam is a somewhat different phenomenon from a transporter disintegration beam.

In a transporter disintegration it takes power from a renewable source (the ship's reactor). The power difference between transporting rock and organic matter is probably so small it's not worth remarking upon. But that small difference means a lot more in terms of the phaser disintegration reaction, because the power level is much lower and nonrenewable after a shot has been fired.

Transporters and phasers are somewhat different phenomenon, as I said already. I never said phasers were transporters, I said they looked like they were derived from transporters.

Completely distrupting the electrochemical exchanges in the CNS even for a short time is a "VERY BAD THING TM." That would very likely result in the death of the target. Brain damage would occure at the very least.



Is this supposed to mean something? Because it sounds like jibberish.

So this "disintegration element" is what scatters the poor guy and everything else inbetween the phaser and the target, but there is this "other disintegtration thing" which hits the target and... begins the disintegration?

That doesn't make any sense.



Which is why transported objects are showered in an orange-red beam of energy. Oh wait, it's a blue beam.



And how is this phenomena not explained by NDF chain reactions?



Micro transporters are mounted on small shuttle craft and can even be powered by portable power sources.

Also if phasers were related to transporter tech, then wouldn't transporter inhibiters prevent proper functioning in a phaser? Since that has never happened as far as I recall, I feel this is the Death-blow for this theory.

Sorry but that doesn't cut it.



Everything that has been observed shows that they are not related in any way. Your theory is overly complicated and makes several assumptions that cannot be proved, meshed with extreme difference in the observed effects of phasers and transporters on targets pretty much sinks this idea.

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Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

Yet what he creates tends to be total shit. Example: Ode to Spot.
Purely subjective. Believe it or not, there are people who like that poem.
There are people who like to eat shit too. Those people are idiots.- Darth Servo and Bounty.

And what about DET weapon working in or into subspace??. Then it would explain all effects (heating, cutting, phasorisation (desintegration IN subspace or INTO subspace).

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[quote:c986e33691]Comparing and basing weapons strengths based on movie special effects isn't an accurate way of judging firepower. Simply because those effects are the results of what the producers and directors want to see on screen.[/quote:c986e33691]

If it involves subspace (might as well BE a chain reaction) or other technobabble, chances are its NOT going to be a conventional brute force weapon.

As for how phasers "phaserize", all I know it that it some how involves "translating matter out of the space-time continoum" or some funky nonsense.

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Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

Yet what he creates tends to be total shit. Example: Ode to Spot.
Purely subjective. Believe it or not, there are people who like that poem.
There are people who like to eat shit too. Those people are idiots.- Darth Servo and Bounty.

That would not "explain" anything; it would only put a meaningless label on it which gives you an excuse to declare that we don't need an explanation. You can take every "subspace" so-called explanation in Star Trek fandom and replace "subspace" with "magicrealm" and it makes just as much sense.

DW - most things in Trek are "magick" things that are working other then we are used too.

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[quote:c986e33691]Comparing and basing weapons strengths based on movie special effects isn't an accurate way of judging firepower. Simply because those effects are the results of what the producers and directors want to see on screen.[/quote:c986e33691]

So I suppose we should ignore the basic premises behind rational debate and suspension of disbelief? I don't think so.

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Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

Yet what he creates tends to be total shit. Example: Ode to Spot.
Purely subjective. Believe it or not, there are people who like that poem.
There are people who like to eat shit too. Those people are idiots.- Darth Servo and Bounty.

No, but unlike some debaters, you should first search for in-universe explanation and then for "real" sciencs explanation.

And never forget that there is a word "fiction" in science-fiction.

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[quote:c986e33691]Comparing and basing weapons strengths based on movie special effects isn't an accurate way of judging firepower. Simply because those effects are the results of what the producers and directors want to see on screen.[/quote:c986e33691]

an in-universe situation that uses meaningless technobabble to explain away what happens isn't really an explanation if you don't at least have -some- real world frame of reference for how it works. you may as well just throw up your hands and say "it works this way because it just does".



meaningless tautology. does that mean we shouldn't try and expect any scientific accuracy whatsoever in any type of fiction? should a fictional story about criminologists completely ignore real-world criminology techniques and just make stuff up as it sees fit, while having scripts that spout off procedures and techniques that sound neat but have no basis in reality whatsoever?

I'm not saig that one should ignore "real" science. Only that in-universe explanation should be above "real" science explanation. Even if that explanation is not possible by "real" science.

Only when there is no "in-universe" explanation of something we should use "real" science

for example (and only example): there were time, when TM's were cannon. And there was that "out of continuum stuff" as exlanation for phasers. That is in-universe explanation (I think it still is in-u, but I do not care to much). And it is so, even if it's impossible with "real" science. And there is no need to search any other explanation.

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[quote:c986e33691]Comparing and basing weapons strengths based on movie special effects isn't an accurate way of judging firepower. Simply because those effects are the results of what the producers and directors want to see on screen.[/quote:c986e33691]

And what is an "in-universe" explanation? Oh yes, an "explanation" which actually explains nothing, and serves only to put a meaningless technobabble term on it. This is like saying that I can "explain" a physics concept by simply calling it "fraggle".

That would be the word that comes after the word "science". If you want fictional science rather than science fiction, feel free to visit some creationist websites.

DW, a little understanding. Explanation means explanation not technobabble.

As this is phaserr thread: - "in-universe" it says that phasers are phasing things out of universe. Thats explanation how phaser works.
Now you could only try to explain how it phase things out, but not how phaser works (that was always the funny part of your article about phasers - we know but we dont know ).

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[quote:c986e33691]Comparing and basing weapons strengths based on movie special effects isn't an accurate way of judging firepower. Simply because those effects are the results of what the producers and directors want to see on screen.[/quote:c986e33691]

Why aren't people suffocated by the gas?