widebeam on starships?

[Slartibartfast]

Robert: If you can fire a wide-beam at maximum setting, which is orders of magnitude stronger than a narrow-beam at maximum setting (15?), then you should be able to fire a narrow-beam at orders of magnitude more power than the maximum setting. Which would make the maximum setting far bigger.

I don't know if you get my drift. It's about the phaser's output. If you can increase to get 3 beams at setting 15, you should be able to fire one at setting "45" whatever that is.

[Eframepilot]

In "Rapture" Sisko uses a phaser on a wide conical setting to carve a tunnel through rock for himself and Kasidy Yates to get through. I assume that the same beam aimed at humanoids at distances of at least several meters would cause similar effects, i.e. total vaporization (or whatever phasers do to make matter vanish).

The reason why Starfleet never uses their wide beam settings to kill is probably the same reason they almost never use their wide beam stun settings in the dozens of instances of combat where wide beams would be far more efficient than the narrow beams they normally use. Example: the Klingon boarders in TWOTW. We know Klingons can be stunned, so why weren't Tuvok-style wide beams used to take out whole groups at once?

Another neglected ability of hand phasers is the continuous beam discharge. This seems to be usable on all beam phasers by just holding the trigger. Why aren't phasers used to rapidly sweep over their targets, as only a split second of contact is required to affect them? Certainly it would drain energy faster, but it would also guarantee hits, so it should be the preferable mode of operation on board starships where recharged power cells are easy to obtain.

Oh, on-subject: I don't think Voyager ever used a wide beam discharge from their phaser arrays, but the Enterprise-D once melted a comet off some ancient space probe in the 7th season episode "Masks", IIRC. So ship arrays are probably capable of wide beams.

[Slartibartfast]

I still think that the phasers has a power setting for a reason. Now whether it focuses that amount of power in a single point or over a wide area is up to them, but it will obviously lose effectivity.