How does a phaser work star trek

The original was made with tape feedback of an electric guitar and a harp. My sounds were added to those that had already been supplied by Mark P.

Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin ". Stoeckinger stated that " Harry Cohen made tonal sounds with a concussive element that served what the phaser was doing along with adding a version of that neo classical space phone-like element that Ben Burtt provided to give the phaser roots in the franchise along with adapting it for the current film. During The Original Series , the mechanics of phasers were never explained on screen.

However, as early as the release of The Making of Star Trek in , the technology behind phasers was explained. Phasers are, according to the book, basically lasers , but they have the beam set on a pulsating frequency that can be specifically set to interfere and interact with the wave pattern of any molecular form.

This is called " phasing " the beam frequency, hence the name phaser. According to Gene Roddenberry in The Making of Star Trek , two days into filming of the second pilot, they realized that three years later, people were going to say, " Oh, come on, lasers can't do that. Apparently, Roddenberry was talking of using higher phase velocities aka frequencies of light that, in turn, consist of higher energy photons.

These accounts suggest that the laser weapons seen in " The Cage " and phasers of the rest of the show were possibly just two different terms for the same thing. Released in , the Spaceflight Chronology p. It states that phaser weapons were in fact developed by Starfleet to combine the benefits of two previously used weapon technologies: particle-beam cannons and laser banks.

While particle weapons delivered a big punch, they had trouble penetrating shields, whereas lasers penetrated shielding easily, but had very little impact force to do damage. Two years after the events of "The Cage", when the problem with frequency aligning the two systems to work simultaneously in ship-mounted phasers was solved, the development of hand phasers began.

This timeline for phaser development would, however, not be compatible with canonical accounts, as we saw ship-mounted phasers used by the USS Kelvin in the film Star Trek , over twenty years before the events of "The Cage". Energetic plasma is pumped to a prefire chamber made out of a superconducting lithium-copper. There, it undergoes a rapid nadion effect in which strong nuclear forces are liberated.

A protonic charge forms and is released in pulses to the emitter made out of the same superconductive crystal. A beam of electromagnetic energy is released from it, at the speed of light.

On starships, energy for phasers originates from the EPS, while on hand units, the charge of energetic plasma is stored into sarium-krellide. This material is used because it can't accidentally release the charge of plasma. Dialogue in the episode TNG : " The Mind's Eye " concerning the internal mechanics of a type 3 phaser rifle confirm, canonically, all the elements as they were established in the Manual. However, in Star Trek , phasers have been regularly used while starships travel at warp speeds, so the beam must also be traveling at faster-than-light velocities.

Beginning with the episode TNG : " Inheritance ", instead of being labeled as EM weapons, as the reference works have stated, phasers have been consistently referred to as particle beam weapons on screen. Even though the phaser beam was canonically established as not a beam of pure EM energy but a particle beam of nadions, the reference book Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual still goes on to describe the phaser beam as an EM energy beam.

According to page 84 of the Manual , a phaser beam can be delivered at warp speeds due to an annular confinement beam jacket and other advances in subspace technology. These are stated to be new inventions in the lateth century.

However, considering that first on-screen uses of phasers at warp occurred as early as the first season of The Original Series , this timeline for the invention would be inconsistent with canon.

Furthermore, according to page 92 of the Manual , when phasers are fired by a ship with deflector shields active, the beam is frequency locked to the second-order harmonics of the shield emissions. This prevents the beam impacting on the shields and overloading them, or rebounding back at the firing ship. It is not known what class of Federation starships was the first to use phaser array strips instead of banks, but " Yesterday's Enterprise " establishes the Ambassador -class to be the earliest known ship design to employ them in the s.

Recalling how the phasers in Star Trek: Discovery were designed, Aaron Harberts described them as "super-important [ A type 2 phaser at settings one through sixteen. Type 1 phasers had the first eight settings; type 2 and 3 phasers had all sixteen settings. The Star Fleet Technical Manual gives the effective ranges for different settings. On the type 1 phaser they were: stun — thirty meters, heat — two meters, disrupt — twenty meters, dematerialization — ten meters.

On the type 2 phaser the ranges were: stun — ninety meters, heat — six meters, disrupt — sixty meters, dematerialization — thirty meters.

Setting dials on the hand phasers indicated nine settings on the type 1 phaser and fifteen on the type 2 phaser, of which all above ten were labeled by the letters A through E. The letters might be a reference to the disruptor-B setting mentioned in "Obsession", which would make it setting 10B.

According to Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise , the hand phasers used during the first four movies had only three preset levels: stun, disrupt, and dematerialize. Commenting on phaser firepower, Ronald D. Moore said: " The weapons are way too powerful to present them in any realistic kind of way. Given the real power of a hand phaser, we shouldn't be able to show ANY firefights on camera where the opponents are even in sight of each other, much less around the corner!

It's annoying, but just one of those things that we tend to slide by in order to concentrate on telling a dramatic and interesting story. The relative power of phasers was also referenced on screen in TOS : " Bread and Circuses ", when Proconsul Claudius Marcus of the planet IV stated that it was his understanding that one hundred men armed with phasers could probably defeat the combined armies of his entire empire. The natives on IV were at the time armed with machine guns and early 20th century level technology.

Memory Alpha Explore. Christopher Pike Number One. James T. Generations First Contact Insurrection Nemesis. Memory Alpha. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? View source. History Talk 2. Do you like this video? Disruptors are essentially a hand held antimatter generator. They shoot a stream of anti protons at a target, causing their material structure to implode on contact. They cannot be used for fine work such as cutting and welding like phasers, and cannot stun a target.

To recap, a disruptor is a hand held anti matter generator weapon, while a phaser is similiar, but more refined. Both of them cause the target structure to be disintegrated at the SUB atomic level.

Electromagnetic weapons such as lasers and plasma work on the electromagnetic force level. I gather phasers and disrupters are similar in action in that they both cause a targets matter to transition out of normal space, this is most noticable when a hand weapon is used, whether disruptor, or a phaser on a high setting.

There is no explosion from released binding energy. Disruptors are built to maximise the distruction of the target, whether they use the same energising crystal is never mentioned, but with similar effects it is possible.

Phasers have the same effect at maximum power setting but have the ability to use lower settings that have different effects, from heating objects, to stunning living orgasnisms. Phasers also seem less effective against heavy dense metals such as duranium used by the Cardasians and seem almost useless against monotanium used by the Hirogen.

Federation ships are built of tritanium, a lightweight metal. I get the impression that a phaser applies heat and can be used to stun, kill, or as a cutting tool. A disruptor sounds like it causes a nuclear disruption using a higher frequency beam, and is a lethal weapon only.

It was explained some time during season 1 or 2 of Enterprise, the description was given by LT. Malcolm reed i think could've been MAJ. Hayes, anywho they have two totally different designs and have only one commonality, disruptors emit a beam of visible light given off by some sort highly charged radioactive particles or wave of energy that renders the bonds between subatomic particles completely inert at the quantum level.

Fog aside, i can't see air, can you? Ships are a better application for disruptors since there's no loss of beam strength when fired in a vacuum. Dissolving air would rob energy from disruptor beams making the length of the shot limited to a specific range.

Real particles that have the exact sames properties as nadion's, known as plasmon's, were created by accident for the first time less three years Ago. A team of physicists experimenting with the how quantum entangled photons react as they pass through different mediums, fired lasers through graphene to create quantum entangled pairs of photons high energy light subatomic particles with no mass and no electrical charge then were immediately passed through a flawlessly symmetrical ionic quartz crystal, what exited the crystal was a brand new particle with the properties of both photons and electrons in perfect combination.

The only particle having radiation energy that is tunable with wave frequency, electrical charge, as well as measureable mass. Disruptors at least the ones used by Klingons are superheated plasma from the warp core accelerated, pressurised and fired.

The superheated plasma is the starship equivalent of electricity for the weapons and warp coils only, impule uses a few nuclear fusion reactors , so it's like firing your fuel. It works by exciting molecular bonds in the hull, "disrupting" its existence. Phasers are powered by the superheated plasma from the warp, but are not the superheated plasma from the warp core.

They are nadion particles a fictional subatomic particle fired in a focussed beam, which simply passes a ridiculous amount of energy into the target.

This means that an unshielded warp ship can be instantly destroyed by a single shot, as their warp core overloads and breached, destroying the ship and everything in a radius. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What is the difference between a phaser and a disruptor? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 4 months ago. But does reality fall short of our imagination, and is there really a limit to what we can achieve from technology?

Or are we stuck with this crude black sulfur- and nitrate-mixture for all eternity? If you recall one of my earlier posts about transporter technology and how it may be impossible to transport someone with all the quantum particles in the correct places at the correct energy levels, site-to-site transport offers one very interesting though impractical facet of matter-to-energy conversion. Converting a pound object completely into energy generates a beam of light with the destructive power of , atomic bombs.

I jokingly said that if all else fails in transporter technology, then we at least know how to make a deadly laser beam with the ability to not only destroy ships, but planets too the Death Star from Star Wars comes to mind. This may very well be our phaser, although I think it would be overkill to create a handheld phaser that transmutes bits of matter into electromagnetic radiation capable of vaporizing whole planets.

Instead, there may be a better idea: same concept, different mechanism. We already have high-intensity light beams that are powerful enough to vaporize small materials and leave burn marks on sheets of metal. Scientifically speaking, they are photons, or rays of electromagnetic particles, that are optically amplified i. Lasers are becoming more and more commonplace now that we are entering a Golden Age of science and technology.

Their applications range from entertainment to medicine; military applications also exist, although no handheld phasers yet. The coolest part is that nothing intricate or complex is required to generate a laser beam. All you need is a power source that emits electromagnetic radiation i.

One can create a laser using a magnifying glass to amplify sunlight into a focused beam of death that incinerates Romulans, Klingons, and ants. In this clip, the latest innovations in optical physics bring us the most powerful laser in the world, with applications in both futuristic weapon technology and energy production i. Based on this speculation, I would have to say that the concept of phaser weapons is a Science Fact. In any case, I am at least hopeful that such futuristic beam weapons could be developed in the future especially considering the rapid advancement of modern technology.

Phasers, if they are anything like lasers, are nothing more than propagated beams of light, which travels from point A to point B in one direction a straight line. The fact of the matter is they should be invisible.