TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

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Graham Kennedy
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TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

I've tried modelling guns in blender before, but it's never worked well. Here's a stab at a Type 3 rifle from TOS which I think came out quite well. Click for larger images...

For this one I wanted to do a phaser rifle in the same style as the Type 1 and Type 2 phasers from the original series. I love the phaser rifle that appeared in Where No Man Has Gone Before, but I love it in a kitschy kind of way, because it's just got that goofy 50s retro future aesthetic going on to such an absurd degree. Whereas the weapons we saw in the series had a real practical look and feel to them. I always felt sad that we never saw a personal weapon bigger than a hand phaser in TOS - it would have been fantastic to see the redshirts carrying rifles around when they were going into danger spots.

I have taken a few liberties with the design, though. More on that in the other images!

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Two things that always bothered me about the original series weapon designs are addressed here. One... TOS phasers have no safety that we know of. So I fitted my rifle with a three position safety switch. S is Safe, P is Pulse fire, and B is Beam fire. And yes, it is ambidextrous, with another identical switch on the other side.

The other addition is a trigger guard. I always thought the Type 2 should have had one of these. Gun safety is your friend, especially when your weapon can demolish a building!

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Power selector dial. Another minor tweak here - a coloured band differentiating stun settings in green from kill in yellow and vapourise/disintegrate in red.

Behind it is the beam width slider, which lets you vary your beam to fire tight pinpoint beams or a wide field. Original series weapons tended to be a little light on controls, given how many settings you could apparently change on them! It always amused me when Kirk would order people to set phasers on wide beam or something, and they'd pretend to fiddle with the controls when there was no control on the weapon to do that.

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The business end! Effectively just a set of nested cylinders, this whole thing took like 60 seconds to make! That said, I didn't do quite enough faces here to give it a smooth surface in close up. Making any model in blender is a compromise - the more faces you have, the smoother and better the shapes look. But when you run over a certain number - around 15 - 20 million - the program gets slow and somewhat buggy.

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The stock. One thing that always bothered me about the Type 3 rifle used in The Next Generation was the lack of any kind of stock. And yes, there's (presumably) no recoil from a phaser weapon, so you don't need to brace it as such. But holding a rifle to your shoulder allows for better aiming accuracy!

Anyway, it just looks right for a rifle to have a stock.

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One cool feature of the Type 2 is the hand grip, which is a power pack. I figured a rifle would need more power reserves, so I put a foregrip on the weapons which allows it to double up on power packs. I'm not sure I like this idea, however. One thought I had was to make the grip a normal one, no power pack there, and then make that entire forward handgrip a huge detachable power pack. Another was to go with a bullpup style configuration, with multiple power packs at the rear of the weapon. Or perhaps something like the P-90 setup, with a horizontal power pack. You should have more flexibility with power pack location, after all, since there is no mechanical bullet feed to worry about.

Maybe I'll try out some of these other ideas in future. They could be variants of the Starfleet design, or rifles from other races or something.

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FIRE!!!!!!

I still such at making energy beams in blender. *Sigh* You'd think there would be a straightforward setting to say something like "Put a light halo around this object", but there isn't.

I always preferred the blue-white phaser beams of TOS (though there were times TOS did red ones) over the orange/red beams of TNG and beyond. I guess they thought orange beams stood out better or something, but the blue-white just looks more powerful to me. Hmmm, I wonder if Discovery will use a blue-white beam? Too much to hope that they'll have laser cannon, I suppose.

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So that's my TOS phaser rifle. Hope you like it.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Captain Seafort »

Graham Kennedy wrote:Power selector dial. Another minor tweak here - a coloured band differentiating stun settings in green from kill in yellow and vapourise/disintegrate in red.

Behind it is the beam width slider, which lets you vary your beam to fire tight pinpoint beams or a wide field. Original series weapons tended to be a little light on controls, given how many settings you could apparently change on them! It always amused me when Kirk would order people to set phasers on wide beam or something, and they'd pretend to fiddle with the controls when there was no control on the weapon to do that.
Image

Looking at this image I can see three control dials - two on the type 1, one on the type 2 section.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

I love the idea that there should be more aesthetic references in the rifle to the Type II - which references you have accomplished wonderfully. I think a simple grip safety, a la our RL classic M1911 style handgun, might be more appropriate... especially since there is a shit-load of adjustment/operation to be done before an operator can shoot the damn thing. It's true that one of the great things about phaser sidearms in 'Trek is their adjustability and versatility - in fact, the availability of "stun" weapons was one of the things that made the philosophy of 'Trek possible to coincide with the way a TV show gets written - but the downside is that it leads to a gi-friggin-normous manual of arms.

The stock is nice, and it should be a fairly skeletal one as you've shown. I'd make it adjustable for LoP a/o folding, and swappable (in the model) for different applications - e.g., you could have a more solid or thumbhole stock with an adjustable cheekpiece, along with a :Q-tech sighting system for sniper applications.

As for the forward power pack... I'm torn. It's easy to say that the greater range/effect/whatever requires the second pack; by the same token, the "disintegrate" effect from a type II and from a rifle are necessarily the same - a target can't get "more disintegrated" because the weapon has more power available. Of course, if you chose to remove it the forward pack could be easily replaced with either a simple vertical fore-end pistol grip, or with nothing at all - Lord knows, there are plenty of RL examples of rifles that have the operator adopt a simple horizontal support grip along the forearm.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

Upon a second look, I'm thinking: since there is no mechanical action of which to speak, what's your thought on moving the rear grip and trigger group forward, more like a bullpup design?
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Captain Seafort wrote:
Graham Kennedy wrote:Power selector dial. Another minor tweak here - a coloured band differentiating stun settings in green from kill in yellow and vapourise/disintegrate in red.

Behind it is the beam width slider, which lets you vary your beam to fire tight pinpoint beams or a wide field. Original series weapons tended to be a little light on controls, given how many settings you could apparently change on them! It always amused me when Kirk would order people to set phasers on wide beam or something, and they'd pretend to fiddle with the controls when there was no control on the weapon to do that.
Image

Looking at this image I can see three control dials - two on the type 1, one on the type 2 section.
Actually the two controls on the Type 1 are the same control - one is a little wheel to vary the power setting, whilst the other is a little dial with a number in it to indicate which setting you're on. Like so :

Image

You also have the panel on the front of the Type 1 which opens up, but if there's a reason why it does I've never heard it. There don't appear to be any controls under there.

And then the dial on the Type 2 is also a power setting.

Image

So two ways to alter the power setting, but no way to alter the beam spread despite Kirk ordering wide beam stun from time to time. We know they can be set to disintegrate, too, though that may just be a case of winding the power setting up high enough for that.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Mikey wrote:I love the idea that there should be more aesthetic references in the rifle to the Type II - which references you have accomplished wonderfully. I think a simple grip safety, a la our RL classic M1911 style handgun, might be more appropriate... especially since there is a shit-load of adjustment/operation to be done before an operator can shoot the damn thing. It's true that one of the great things about phaser sidearms in 'Trek is their adjustability and versatility - in fact, the availability of "stun" weapons was one of the things that made the philosophy of 'Trek possible to coincide with the way a TV show gets written - but the downside is that it leads to a gi-friggin-normous manual of arms.

The stock is nice, and it should be a fairly skeletal one as you've shown. I'd make it adjustable for LoP a/o folding, and swappable (in the model) for different applications - e.g., you could have a more solid or thumbhole stock with an adjustable cheekpiece, along with a :Q-tech sighting system for sniper applications.

As for the forward power pack... I'm torn. It's easy to say that the greater range/effect/whatever requires the second pack; by the same token, the "disintegrate" effect from a type II and from a rifle are necessarily the same - a target can't get "more disintegrated" because the weapon has more power available.
True, but one could speculate that larger weapons can disintegrate larger targets. A Type 1 was occasionally described as being able to take out a chunk of a building. Perhaps a Type 2/3 could take out larger structures. Though you have to wonder just how powerful you want your hand weapons to be. How practical is it to have guys running around with a weapon that can take out a city block in a shot, even if you have the technology to build it?

FWIW, the TNG Tech manual claims that the Type 3 rifle we see in that show is no more powerful than the Type 2. It does have twice the battery life, though.

Of course, if you chose to remove it the forward pack could be easily replaced with either a simple vertical fore-end pistol grip, or with nothing at all - Lord knows, there are plenty of RL examples of rifles that have the operator adopt a simple horizontal support grip along the forearm.
Yeah, that's one option.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

Graham Kennedy wrote:but no way to alter the beam spread despite Kirk ordering wide beam stun from time to time.
IDK the canonicity of that diagram; that said, the bit of the type-II labeled as the "pre-fire chamber" seems to be machined polygonally, rather than round - the main (if not only) reason for so doing would be to afford purchase for fingers. Considering this, and its position on the weapon, it seems like an ideal control for beam width.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Okay, a first pass on a bullpup layout. Still sticking with twin power packs, though you could do one big one easily enough. Switched the handgrip to a proper grip rather than a power pack itself. Click for larger.

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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

A thing of beauty. Honestly, with part of this thing's utility being shipboard, a bullpup layout only makes sense.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

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Graham Kennedy wrote:Actually the two controls on the Type 1 are the same control - one is a little wheel to vary the power setting, whilst the other is a little dial with a number in it to indicate which setting you're on.
Fair enough. Might be worth adding that, or similar, to the main site if possible - there don't seem to be any good images of the controls.
You also have the panel on the front of the Type 1 which opens up, but if there's a reason why it does I've never heard it. There don't appear to be any controls under there.
Maintenance/repairs would be my guess, opening the hatch being the phaser equivalent of field-stripping the weapon.
And then the dial on the Type 2 is also a power setting.

So two ways to alter the power setting, but no way to alter the beam spread despite Kirk ordering wide beam stun from time to time. We know they can be set to disintegrate, too, though that may just be a case of winding the power setting up high enough for that.
Like Mikey, I'm dubious about the canon status of that diagram. Do you know if we've ever heard of or seen distinctly different beam width settings for the TOS type-1?
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

I can't cite the occasion offhand, but I'd swear that I've heard Kirk order a wide-beam setting. However, that so-called "pre-fire chamber" looks, as I mentioned, custom made for a beam adjustment knob.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

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Mikey wrote:I can't cite the occasion offhand, but I'd swear that I've heard Kirk order a wide-beam setting.
Same here - my point was that if we've heard of such orders given for the type-2, but not the type-1, it suggests that beam width adjustment may be a capability unique to the type-2. If we've heard beam width orders for the type-1 then it's back to the drawing board.
However, that so-called "pre-fire chamber" looks, as I mentioned, custom made for a beam adjustment knob.
Good point.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Mikey »

Which would, again as you mentioned, limit that adjustment to the type-II.
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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

There are times when we see what could be called a wide beam without it being referenced as such. Sometimes they just lit up the whole screen instead of animating an actual beam. Presumably it's cheaper on the effects?

But Kirk orders wide beam in Return of the Archons.

KIRK: I don't want to hurt them. Warn them back.
REGER: They're in the Body. It's Landru.
KIRK: Phasers on stun, wide field. Fire!

Another possible configuration... no underslung power cell at all, a larger one mounted horizontally in a P-90 style.

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Re: TOS Type 3 phaser rifle

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Same variant, different angle

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