Sionnach Glic wrote:GrahamKennedy wrote:The TNG TM posits some sort of as yet unknown cascade effect which involves matter transitioning into subspace. There's not a lot of detail given though.
It kind of makes sense if the target moves into subspace as it vapourises; would explain why we don't see the vapour.
Not a bad idea. Though then I'm left with the question of "why bother"? If the phaser has some sort of ability to transfer matter to subspace, why not just skip the vapourising (which alone would take shitloads of energy, presumably) and just transfer the whole body to subspace without changing the state?
Well it may be inherent in the process. Like saying "nukes cause so much blast and fire, why bother with the radiation?"
As for how much energy... well who knows? As with much in Trek the numbers are somewhat confusing and contradictory. Ten or so megajoules to a shot in Ent, as I recall from Regeneration. Kira said Cardie disrupter rifles had "a four-point-seven megajoule power capacity... three millisecond recharge", take your pick what that means. 4.7 MJ per shot? With a three msec recharge that would equate to 1.5 GW. I can buy a 200 year advance making it 150 x more powerful than a phase pistol. Or is it 4.7 MJ for the whole rifle, making each shot a fraction of that? But Kira also said the Type 3 Federation rifle was less powerful... and even under testing one of those fired a megawatt or so, for a prolonged period. But then Voyager came across a Terawatt rifle once and didn't seem to think it was a big deal.
If it's taking GJ to phaserate people, then vapourising them along the way probably isn't a big deal at all.
But clearly the whole target doesn't just vanish into subspace in one lump. You might argue that for TOS phaser effects, but this...
...says otherwise. If the effect is leaping from molecule to molecule and "transitioning" them one at a time, then it's pretty much vapourising them by default.
As always with such things, your conclusions will depend on the biases you operate under in interpreting the evidence.
Also, and do correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the energy required to vapourise a human also cause his clothes to burst into flames? I'd imagine that the ignition temperature of fabric would be less than the vapourising temperature of flesh and bone. The fact that there are no visible effects on fabrics either being worn or being stood on (all those carpets on the E-D) leads me to believe that the "vapourise" setting doesn't actually involve all that much heat, even during the "slow" vapourisations. Thus I tend to favour some sort of technobabble sollution. The idea of the victim being tossed into subspace is a pretty interesting one, I think.
Well it's hard to say exactly how flammable 24th century fabrics are. But Lore used a phaser on Beverly in Datalore :
And her clothing DID catch fire, even though from the appearance of the beam it was a very low power shot :
Like the vapour, though; on high level shots all that would be getting sucked into subspace along with the matter and all the rest of it.
I will say, if the target does transition into subspace all in one piece... it brings to mind the possibility that when set on "vapourise",
phasers don't kill people! All those people we see vapourised might still be floating around in subspace... alive...
While it may seem like a pretty clear-cut case, I'm still somewhat unsure about the heat effects of a phaser beam. As I pointed out above, clothing is rarely (if ever?) damaged by being hit. And if a stun setting can boil water, you'd surely expect some sort of scorch marks on the clothes worn, yet we rarely see such effects.
Like I say, zapped into subspace. And we have seen heat effects on clothing. We've also heard reference to "phaser burns" if I recall correctly. For instance the stun setting to the head used in ST VI left what looked like a burn mark.
Personally, I tend to just shove the phaser beam's mechanics under the "inexplicable technobabble" heading. It solves a lot of these problems.
If it isn't a formal law that "There is always the explanation that 'it's jut a TV show, stupid!'", then it should be!
Hmm, interesting. Perhaps the disruptor effect was simply a sort of pulse-fire mode, as opposed to the continuous beam we usually see? It'd certainly save on ammo.
No, I think we see them use the phasers and it's a normal looking beam.
GrahamKennedy wrote:And that's before we even get into the idea that they can fire nanoprobes.
Who the hell did Starfleet contract to design these things? The Swiss?
I once had a long discussion on this, a lot of which ended up in the phaser article on the DITL. My theory was that phasers were built like swiss army knives, with various different weapons in one casing. But there's the possibility that the phaser "crystal" can produce all kinds of different beams if you pump energy into it in different ways. It's weird, but hey, these are weapons OF THE FUTURE! after all. I look at the last hundred years of weapon advances and hesitate to posit what they WON'T be able to do in another 400.
