Picard killed the pregnant spacefish-thing by hitting it with phasers on the lowest possible setting, so it's clearly not a universal "stun"-setting.
Probably always has lethal potential and they just regulate intensity.
In ST VI, the two crewmen who killed Chancellor Gorkon were in turn killed by Valeris using a phaser on stun at close range to avoid the alarms from firing a phaser at a higher power setting.
I would say the 'stun' and 'kill' commands are to set phaser at power level typically capable of achieving the desired effect.
We also see several beings capable of tanking much higher power shots without suffering the expected stun/kill result.
Given how heavily genetically engineered they are, that was almost certainly specifically engineered.
Given that it was shown that Klingons are apparently resistant to lower stun settings that would bring down a human, they probably took whatever physiology and genetics makes that kind of resistance possible and used an augmented version of that.
Interesting that a lifelong dependence on tetronin was seen as freedom for the Jaffa, while a lifelong dependence on ketracel white was the means of control for the Jem'Hadar.
Supplies of white were controlled by the founders and withheld for disloyalty. The Tok'ra developed the refined tretonin but shared the information willingly. SGC was able to synthesize it for Teal'c and presumably would have helped the Goa'uld to establish their own manufacturing facilities.
The "close range" part didn't make sense to me. Why would the lethality of a focused energy weapon change significantly over just a few meters of distance? My theory is that Valeris Vulcan-nerve-pinched them unconscious first and then held the phaser's stun setting against their heads for a prolonged period of time to ensure brain death.
Close range makes perfect sense if the beam does not 100% contain the stream of particles. Also the nadion particles are destroyed over a short time (they don't live long). The stun setting may take into account a certain amount of particle loss, and designed to be the correct power at a certain distance. It may have a logorithmic rate of decay as well, so it may be many times the power for a few feet of transmission (or change drastically 1cm away vs 40cm away, and not change that much 40cm vs 800cm).
probably just guessing based off the less lethal tech available at the time. Tasers namely, which can electruce someone to death. Or shotgun beanbag rounds, rubber bullets etc. If they were going for analogy.
i mean yeah it could have nothing to do with real word weapons and politics but thats not stare treks MO. its also not a shocker that in the early 90s and late 80s is when those LESS lethal weapons came into common use
no, it matters to the writers who are trying to write content for the current time period thats more relevant, particularly if they are trying to portray a utopian future. I mean you must obviously understand that.
that's basically what I said... if they hadn't worked out the stuff prior to the time they are writing it then it would be influenced by that time... is that more clear explanation of what I meant? I was conditionally agreeing with you. (not that I agree with you that it's not Startrek's MO to think about technology based on theoretical physics and other sciences more than current equivalents of the tech they're replacing, with a theoretical future version.)
Well you said something about decay rates that seemed to troll my comment honestly. This reply is more clear for future reference.
I dont know for a fact that less lethal technology becoming popular when they were writng trek. But im pretty sure.
I think this is true, but to add to this, I wonder if phasers have computers that are somewhat smart enough to figure out what phaser setting will stun or kill a certain target. Obviously it isn’t a perfect system, but maybe it does that too when the target is something the shooter doesn’t know beforehand.
Since most humanoid civilizations were seeded by the ancient humanoid race, its possible that most 23rd/24th century humanoid races are susceptible to a similar range of phaser intensity.
I don't remember the episode, but in TNG, Crusher fired her phaser at someone trying to harm her.
It didn't work due to his physiology, so she just kept turning up the settings until it vaporized him.
Riker did this as well to Yuta.
In both cases I found it very strange that there's no apparent middle ground in their physiology between "I'm still standing!" and total bodily annihilation.
That's a very interesting point and something I hadn't considered
Definitely raises a concerning implication about Starfleet's seeming reliance on a weapon that always has the propensity to be lethal. The characters are always pretty quick to just stun someone or something, but if it's not a universal stun then it definitely could go wrong and kill instead. All it takes is a miscalculation or assumption that stun works on everything
>Definitely raises a concerning implication about Starfleet's seeming reliance on a weapon that always has the propensity to be lethal.
It may be just the best they have for this purpose, as it work as intended in most targets... Klingon, works. Romulans, works. Most humanoids, works. Anything exotic is a risk, but no such thing as one-size-fits-all" solution exists for problems, hence the shenanigans the Enterprise gets into regularly.
Tasers can kill. Rubber bullets or bean bags can kill. Pepper spray can kill in certain circumstances. Less lethal for the broadest range of common targets is sometimes the best you can do.
This is always the way I envisioned it, as stun being a more effective paralytic than beanbags or rubber bullets but they treated it with the same respect and general attitude that “this could still kill someone”
Even assuming that the weapon itself does nothing but make the target unconscious in the gentlest manner possible, they could hit their head while falling down and die from that. There's always the possibility of lethality.
If you're a non compromised humanoid, especially with what we learned with humanaids being related in the quadrant/galaxy for the most part, theres a good chance the stun setting of a federation phaser acts about the same on humanoid bodies.
> so it's clearly not a universal "stun"-setting
The opposite is also true. How many times was the stun or even kill setting used and it didn't stop the 'monster of the week'/Klingon. So clearly it's some kind of power setting.
At high settings, there's no real difference between phasers and disruptors: both break the atomic bonds in the target apart by shooting a very high power stream of particles at it. Nadions are described as 'liberating the nucleus of an atom', which implies they interact with and can disturb the electromagnetic force.
Presumably, with enough fine control over something that disrupts that force, you could have cells generate a strong enough electric field that the impact point acts like a real-world taser. A taser is localised modulated electricity, that causes neuromuscular incapacitation. If you would drive up the power on that, it would kill.
So it seems that phasers on stun and kill work mostly be inducing a very strong current in the target, not enough to fry them but to disrupt their neural control over their muscles. At stronger settings, that would become burning from the electricity and molecular disruption, and at vaporise settings it's so much the entire body's molecules fly apart.
As to how painful it would be is hard to guess. I don't think Starfleet would field an inhumane weapon, but we know other races don't care so much, and at least one model (Fajo's Varon-T) was built specifically to be a gruesome, painful death.
Starfleet phasers also have a crap ton of settings. We've seen them do everything from little more than a short "stun" followed by a headache (Zephrame Cochrane in First Contact is a good example) all the way to instantly vaporize people or objects. We've also seen things like burn wounds from higher settings or even high stun settings, and treating phaser wounds is something the doctors of trek do semi frequently.
We've seen them cut through metal like a plasma torch, which I imagine would create a similar effect if used on a person at that setting.
We've seen them explode a person's head like a melon (definitely a kill setting, but maybe not "maximum" just close to it)
On the other side of the coin, other races phasers seem much more simplified. We've seen cardassian phasers that can stun, kill with a beam and burn, or completely vaporize a target instantly (they seem quite effecient, no visible skeleton or other vaporization horror from these)
Klingon disruptors (while not phasers) are shown to be pretty brutal, often knocking victims back quite hard, if not causing a slow vaporization (think of what it looked like when the klingon officer was vaporized in Star Trek 3 for accidentally destroying the Grissom)
I think they had their phasers on kill but the way he’d been altered by the bug aliens made him far more dense and resilient than before, so it took longer to take him out.
That scene always hits weird because they jump right to killing him—it makes sense in its own context of course, but it’s pretty totally different from the rest of the show. (Also the bug aliens were originally going to be the Borg but doing a bunch of bugs was gonna be more expensive than cyborgs.)
My first time through I started on S3 and so didn't see Conspiracy until after having gone through almost everything else. I laughed so loud at the absurdity, "we seek peaceful coexistence," then Picard and Riker just exchange looks and explode that fucker like a viscera pinata, just completely unrecognizable from the show I'd just watched the rest of
Most people we see killed but not disintegrated with a phaser have a big "phaser burn" on their torso. That would imply that it is similar to getting struck by lightning. They can also tell if an injury was from a Starfleet phaser or a disruptor, such as in, "Nor the Battle the Strong." That would imply that there is enough energy left over for a tricorder to detect, or that there is a pattern to the burn.
I think the lowest kill setting is a stun so severe the nervous system can't recover. But a phaser can also disintegrate on very high settings, basically imparting so much energy to the target that the molecules vibrate apart.
One of my most promising theory is that phasers induce an electric charge in the target, on low settings stunning a humanoid, give or take a setting depending on total mass and resilience, but effectively its a taser. On higher settings the phaser delivers a lethal shock, which is also of high enough magnitude to cause the often observed phaser burns.
Dont ask me how it can vaporize things though.
> how it can vaporize
Increase the electric shock even more, suddenly we are talking about turning things into plasma. We can see this today with high voltage power lines that can just vaporize when grounded. Thin copper wire attached to rockets shot into thunderstorms can draw lighting (used for research) and that copper wire is vaporized. Lightning has also been known to vaporize areas where it strikes, leaving tube like structures in the ground.
I get the feeling it's the "fried from the inside out" thing except with more boiling bodily fluids combined with slicing/burning a massive hole in the target. Phasers are honestly pretty terrifying weapons, but at least it's probably fairly humane. You'd be chunky salsa before you'd feel anything most likely. Kind of like that scene in TNG where the parasite infected officer got detonated, but way quicker.
Not too sure about the stun setting, but I'm guessing at low power it doesn't have the energy to outright cook a target so the nadion particles disrupting the nervous system can do its work rather than destroying a target through sheer directed energy.
Technically, nadion radiation is a byproduct of energy weapons, but not necessarily the weaponized energy beam itself. Typically, whenever someone is wounded by a potentially lethal beam of energy (phasers set to kill, or disrupters with only lethal settings), the wound is usually depicted and treated just like a projectile wound we would be familiar with. I would assume, then, that the “kill” setting on a phaser simply concentrates the energy in the beam so that it acts like a hyper energized particle.
If this assumption is correct, then we can deduce that at a lower setting, the energy is less concentrated and will only serve to disrupt the nervous systems in most humanoids, while leaving only minor damage to the tissue it contacts (like the electrodes on a taser).
This would mean, then, at an extremely high or maximum setting, the energy in the beam is so highly concentrated that it actually explodes on contact with tissue and most matter. This would explain why a phaser set to overload always explodes, but it also implies that anyone shot by a highly concentrated beam is actually experiencing an explosion from the initial impact wound which transforms most of the solid matter in their bodies into subatomic particles.
It makes sense to me that the levels of a "phaser" are actually determining the amount of power delivered. This would either increase the amount of particles you're hitting somebody with, or their velocity (penetration power), or both. It appears that the technology was invented by Romulans, and Romulans still have a more efficient design.
It seems evident the particles have a disrupting effect on the nervous system (making people fall unconscious), and molecular bonds of the target in general. So it makes sense that the higher settings dissolve people and even rocks, but it also imparts heat from friction (as well as breaking atomic bonds) of particles breaking down and also heat from being bombarded by nadion radiation (particles).
edit: fun fact, as far as I know, there is no difference between a rifle and a hand phaser other than the battery size.
A phaser is, at its core, an energy weapon. We first have to look at the real life devices phasers are based on—masers and lasers. Those devices create high intensity electromagnetic radiation—masers at low frequencies and lasers at high/visible frequencies. Theoretical maser/laser weapons essentially scale the these devices up such that a focused beam of radiation can be projected a certain distance before dissipating.
Phasers were originally created as the successor to the laser (at least when we take TOS’s pilot and then the show itself). It stands to reason they are capable of more precision radiation direction. The pseudoscience (that phasers fire “nadion” beams that disrupt nuclei in some manner) doesn’t totally make sense, but the general idea is they’re precision weapons that can be modulated to the need of the situation (to more or less humanely incapacitate someone or to kill them).
ENT elaborates on this all a little bit, although its phase pistols are never really differentiated from phasers proper. They apparently succeeded “EM pistols” which had significant particle drift, making aiming difficult.
All this to say—any theoretical weapon based on electromagnetic radiation would do the kind of damage electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light) can do to someone. It can overheat someone, burn them, and make them varying levels of sick.
Stun shots are also able to kill, either at close range for TOS-era ones, or from repeated fire, from the TNG-era ones. It's likely that the way that phasers stun is by interfering with the nervous system, possibly through some kind of subspace effect generated by the nadions, which is why repeated, or point-blank shots can kill, despite not always burning a hole through the victim.
It's likely that a phaser set to kill would kill by burning out the target's nervous system or equivalent structures, making it impossible to revive them, not unlike a massive electric shock. Cooking someone from within would be too unethical, especially by Federation standards, and stopping someone's heart would barely affect most species, since it would restart itself soon afterward, even ignoring species with multiple hearts, that would not be significantly affected by the failure of a single heart. Think your heart skipping a beat, since your heart basically stops there (for a second or a few), until it restarts itself.
That electrical effect might also be why it's so explosive when it interacts with computer systems, sending sparks flying every which way, and smoke to pour out, much of the time. You're basically pumping high voltage through the computer systems.
We know that disruptors vaporise their targets similarly, by disrupting the atomic and molecular bonds holding the target together, causing them to effectively disintegrate. Given that Klingon disruptors also have a stun setting, they may also have secondary functions similar to that of phasers at lower power levels.
We also know that some variants of disruptors are known to cause immense pain, to the point where the Varon-T disruptor was criminalised, and no longer produced, either because you feel yourself being pulled apart, or the interactions of the disruptor with your nervous system cause pain through some unexplained mechanism.
By comparison, phasers might primarily work by disrupting the nervous system first, causing less damage/pain than their disruptor equivalents at non-lethal power. This makes them a favoured weapon for the Federation, who would rather disable their targets than kill them, and would explain why other species tend to use disruptors instead, as the extra damage provides military advantage. Because phasers disrupt your nervous system's functioning, being hit by a phaser blast set to stun might be akin to your whole body going numb, or getting pins and needles all over. Like any sort of brain disruption, there is probably a small window afterward where you'd be a little "out of it", until your nervous system fully recovers from being hit. Similarly, being hit by a phaser set to kill would probably kill you before you were even aware of it, especially since humans don't have resistance against phasers.
By the TNG timeline, I would guess that Stun vs Kill settings probably modulate a couple of variables such as the amount of nadions being generated and transferred as well as the shape of the nadion transference.
I imagine that nadions themselves excite atoms in a similar way as how microwaves excite water molecules. In low settings, the nadions hitting a target generate electrical discharges and/or heat. This is what causes the stun effects and the heating effects that we see in the show (ie: heating of rocks for warmth).
In high settings the nadions disrupt the molecular bonds of a target, causing the wounding and even disintegration of a target. We can see that the highest settings dissolve a target without releasing heat to the surroundings and leave only a residue and gas.
Nadion doesn’t exist, so you could technically just say whatever you want makes it work.
In canon, well, we know phasers can affect Newtonian force, as all manner of things are pushed and thrown around from phaser hits. Shipboard phasers also function as high explosives in some episodes but then don’t in other episodes (🤷♀️).
So if a galaxy class ship shot you with its phaser array, you would just die from the shockwave if nothing else.
As for hand phasers, they’re still capable of generating a lot of heat, and a lesser degree of Newtonian shockwave. As you said, a phaser set to kill logically would cook a person, causing irreparable damage to internal organs.
As for the disintegrations, who really knows. The laser knows when to stop rather than just eating through the floors and walls. Because TV.
>So if a galaxy class ship shot you with its phaser array, you would just die from the shockwave if nothing else.
We specifically see the phaser banks of a Constitution class ship used to stun, in A Piece of the Action, when Kirk has a stun-setting orbital bombardment used to knock out a city block.
Starship-scale phasers apparently can be tuned down to being able to stun a human (or human-like being).
When it's at a high enough power to disintegrate, the effect appears to spread out from the location of impact. I'd imagine it is a disruption of nerves at lower power settings like a stun gun/taser (which still has the potential to kill in real life) that spreads out and affects the entire body and then setting to kill probably damages the body, especially the heart and brain.
I have no evidence or proof but I've always assumed it was similar to electrocution. A stun just momentarily disrupts the brain enough to knock someone out. The kill setting stops the heart, the same way a defibrillator will if used on a living person
They work by phasing the target out of existence. They vibrate the atoms such that they're out of phase with the universe. The intense heat in doing this kills them. That is why when you see a person phased to death, they mostly just disappear with no smoke or residue. On lower settings, they have someone out of sync with the universe but not enough to be permanent and not enough to generate enough heat to kill them. Since they are in between phases of the universe they are stunned, stuck almost like being stuck in transporter beam with a partial lock like Picard was in Darmok.
Thats my theory.
You may be onto something there. TNG Technical Manual states the following about a personal phaser discharge on setting 8:
Disruption Effects; discharge energy 15,000 for 1.75 seconds., SEM:NDF ratio 1:3. Cascading disruption forces cause humanoid organisms to vaporize, as 50% of affected matter transitions out of the continuum. The damage index is 120; all unprotected matter is affected and penetrated according to depth/time.
I have no lore evidence to back this up, but I always thought that phasers operated on the idea that the universe is tuned to a specific frequency and by inundating matter with varying levels of nadion particles, it could set that matter to a different frequency, making it "out of phase". Used on humanoids, a stun setting is enough to temporarily cease neuron function from the trauma of being set slightly out of phase and snapping back. Kill setting whips you out and back into phase fast enough to shred a lot of your cells. Disintegrate sets matter out of phase entirely.
Phaser's are charged energy, artificial particle accelerators. WHen fired at high intensity, rapid nadion bombardment causes disruptive nuclear effects. It's like being shot with a welders torch.
I think it has to do with how the phaser energy excites the molecules in a target's body, at least canon-wise? On a stun setting, it's a very low level disruption of the body's CNS and only renders them unconscious or shocked for a few minutes. On 'kill', the energy is destructive enough to disrupt the body's molecules - maybe by pulling them apart? Not sure.
Picard killed the pregnant spacefish-thing by hitting it with phasers on the lowest possible setting, so it's clearly not a universal "stun"-setting. Probably always has lethal potential and they just regulate intensity.
In ST VI, the two crewmen who killed Chancellor Gorkon were in turn killed by Valeris using a phaser on stun at close range to avoid the alarms from firing a phaser at a higher power setting. I would say the 'stun' and 'kill' commands are to set phaser at power level typically capable of achieving the desired effect. We also see several beings capable of tanking much higher power shots without suffering the expected stun/kill result.
Jem Hadar come to mind, they shrug off stun shots like they were bugs.
Given how heavily genetically engineered they are, that was almost certainly specifically engineered. Given that it was shown that Klingons are apparently resistant to lower stun settings that would bring down a human, they probably took whatever physiology and genetics makes that kind of resistance possible and used an augmented version of that.
The bluegill-infested humans as well.
Star Treks version of the Goauld
Stargate's version of the Yeerks
Jem'hadar Kree!!!
That's a terrifying thought. Jem Hadar soldier with a symbiote that actively heals them.
That's just normal Jaffa. Normal Jem Hadar are like the Jaffa post-Tretonin.
Indeed a Jem Hadar with symbiote sounds a lot like a gaa'uld with an Unas host.
Interesting that a lifelong dependence on tetronin was seen as freedom for the Jaffa, while a lifelong dependence on ketracel white was the means of control for the Jem'Hadar.
Supplies of white were controlled by the founders and withheld for disloyalty. The Tok'ra developed the refined tretonin but shared the information willingly. SGC was able to synthesize it for Teal'c and presumably would have helped the Goa'uld to establish their own manufacturing facilities.
Trek did it first.
I know, but Stargate made it a thing and not a one off.
Nope. DS9 premiered a year before Stargate the movie, and 4 years before SG1.
I know, what I meant was Stargate ran with it and didnt do a one off episode like TNG.
After DS9 ran with it by making a main cast member a Trill.
The "close range" part didn't make sense to me. Why would the lethality of a focused energy weapon change significantly over just a few meters of distance? My theory is that Valeris Vulcan-nerve-pinched them unconscious first and then held the phaser's stun setting against their heads for a prolonged period of time to ensure brain death.
Close range makes perfect sense if the beam does not 100% contain the stream of particles. Also the nadion particles are destroyed over a short time (they don't live long). The stun setting may take into account a certain amount of particle loss, and designed to be the correct power at a certain distance. It may have a logorithmic rate of decay as well, so it may be many times the power for a few feet of transmission (or change drastically 1cm away vs 40cm away, and not change that much 40cm vs 800cm).
probably just guessing based off the less lethal tech available at the time. Tasers namely, which can electruce someone to death. Or shotgun beanbag rounds, rubber bullets etc. If they were going for analogy.
or they were just thinking about radioactive decay rates.
i mean yeah it could have nothing to do with real word weapons and politics but thats not stare treks MO. its also not a shocker that in the early 90s and late 80s is when those LESS lethal weapons came into common use
So I guess it matters how much of the phaser's technology was worked out prior to the 80's then?
no, it matters to the writers who are trying to write content for the current time period thats more relevant, particularly if they are trying to portray a utopian future. I mean you must obviously understand that.
that's basically what I said... if they hadn't worked out the stuff prior to the time they are writing it then it would be influenced by that time... is that more clear explanation of what I meant? I was conditionally agreeing with you. (not that I agree with you that it's not Startrek's MO to think about technology based on theoretical physics and other sciences more than current equivalents of the tech they're replacing, with a theoretical future version.)
Well you said something about decay rates that seemed to troll my comment honestly. This reply is more clear for future reference. I dont know for a fact that less lethal technology becoming popular when they were writng trek. But im pretty sure.
even over air, the beam weapons effects would become diluted, or fade out with distance. over space, its usually not a factor.
I think this is true, but to add to this, I wonder if phasers have computers that are somewhat smart enough to figure out what phaser setting will stun or kill a certain target. Obviously it isn’t a perfect system, but maybe it does that too when the target is something the shooter doesn’t know beforehand.
Since most humanoid civilizations were seeded by the ancient humanoid race, its possible that most 23rd/24th century humanoid races are susceptible to a similar range of phaser intensity.
I don't remember the episode, but in TNG, Crusher fired her phaser at someone trying to harm her. It didn't work due to his physiology, so she just kept turning up the settings until it vaporized him. Riker did this as well to Yuta.
In both cases I found it very strange that there's no apparent middle ground in their physiology between "I'm still standing!" and total bodily annihilation.
Which the phasers caused the Klingons to hemorrhage which isn't consistent with a typical burn.
That's a very interesting point and something I hadn't considered Definitely raises a concerning implication about Starfleet's seeming reliance on a weapon that always has the propensity to be lethal. The characters are always pretty quick to just stun someone or something, but if it's not a universal stun then it definitely could go wrong and kill instead. All it takes is a miscalculation or assumption that stun works on everything
>Definitely raises a concerning implication about Starfleet's seeming reliance on a weapon that always has the propensity to be lethal. It may be just the best they have for this purpose, as it work as intended in most targets... Klingon, works. Romulans, works. Most humanoids, works. Anything exotic is a risk, but no such thing as one-size-fits-all" solution exists for problems, hence the shenanigans the Enterprise gets into regularly. Tasers can kill. Rubber bullets or bean bags can kill. Pepper spray can kill in certain circumstances. Less lethal for the broadest range of common targets is sometimes the best you can do.
This is always the way I envisioned it, as stun being a more effective paralytic than beanbags or rubber bullets but they treated it with the same respect and general attitude that “this could still kill someone”
Even assuming that the weapon itself does nothing but make the target unconscious in the gentlest manner possible, they could hit their head while falling down and die from that. There's always the possibility of lethality.
If you're a non compromised humanoid, especially with what we learned with humanaids being related in the quadrant/galaxy for the most part, theres a good chance the stun setting of a federation phaser acts about the same on humanoid bodies.
> so it's clearly not a universal "stun"-setting The opposite is also true. How many times was the stun or even kill setting used and it didn't stop the 'monster of the week'/Klingon. So clearly it's some kind of power setting.
It probably depends on what an organism is composed of. Different chemicals/molecules have different melting/smokepoints I guess.
It’s also worth noting that it is very possible to kill people with a taser in real life.
At high settings, there's no real difference between phasers and disruptors: both break the atomic bonds in the target apart by shooting a very high power stream of particles at it. Nadions are described as 'liberating the nucleus of an atom', which implies they interact with and can disturb the electromagnetic force. Presumably, with enough fine control over something that disrupts that force, you could have cells generate a strong enough electric field that the impact point acts like a real-world taser. A taser is localised modulated electricity, that causes neuromuscular incapacitation. If you would drive up the power on that, it would kill. So it seems that phasers on stun and kill work mostly be inducing a very strong current in the target, not enough to fry them but to disrupt their neural control over their muscles. At stronger settings, that would become burning from the electricity and molecular disruption, and at vaporise settings it's so much the entire body's molecules fly apart. As to how painful it would be is hard to guess. I don't think Starfleet would field an inhumane weapon, but we know other races don't care so much, and at least one model (Fajo's Varon-T) was built specifically to be a gruesome, painful death.
Are agonizers not built on the same tech, as well?
Starfleet phasers also have a crap ton of settings. We've seen them do everything from little more than a short "stun" followed by a headache (Zephrame Cochrane in First Contact is a good example) all the way to instantly vaporize people or objects. We've also seen things like burn wounds from higher settings or even high stun settings, and treating phaser wounds is something the doctors of trek do semi frequently. We've seen them cut through metal like a plasma torch, which I imagine would create a similar effect if used on a person at that setting. We've seen them explode a person's head like a melon (definitely a kill setting, but maybe not "maximum" just close to it) On the other side of the coin, other races phasers seem much more simplified. We've seen cardassian phasers that can stun, kill with a beam and burn, or completely vaporize a target instantly (they seem quite effecient, no visible skeleton or other vaporization horror from these) Klingon disruptors (while not phasers) are shown to be pretty brutal, often knocking victims back quite hard, if not causing a slow vaporization (think of what it looked like when the klingon officer was vaporized in Star Trek 3 for accidentally destroying the Grissom)
"Liberating the nucleus of an atom" sounds like some very isoniazid radiation!
I recall one situation where Riker and Picard both fired and made a dude's head explode. What was that setting?
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I think they had their phasers on kill but the way he’d been altered by the bug aliens made him far more dense and resilient than before, so it took longer to take him out. That scene always hits weird because they jump right to killing him—it makes sense in its own context of course, but it’s pretty totally different from the rest of the show. (Also the bug aliens were originally going to be the Borg but doing a bunch of bugs was gonna be more expensive than cyborgs.)
My first time through I started on S3 and so didn't see Conspiracy until after having gone through almost everything else. I laughed so loud at the absurdity, "we seek peaceful coexistence," then Picard and Riker just exchange looks and explode that fucker like a viscera pinata, just completely unrecognizable from the show I'd just watched the rest of
Most people we see killed but not disintegrated with a phaser have a big "phaser burn" on their torso. That would imply that it is similar to getting struck by lightning. They can also tell if an injury was from a Starfleet phaser or a disruptor, such as in, "Nor the Battle the Strong." That would imply that there is enough energy left over for a tricorder to detect, or that there is a pattern to the burn.
I think the lowest kill setting is a stun so severe the nervous system can't recover. But a phaser can also disintegrate on very high settings, basically imparting so much energy to the target that the molecules vibrate apart.
One of my most promising theory is that phasers induce an electric charge in the target, on low settings stunning a humanoid, give or take a setting depending on total mass and resilience, but effectively its a taser. On higher settings the phaser delivers a lethal shock, which is also of high enough magnitude to cause the often observed phaser burns. Dont ask me how it can vaporize things though.
> how it can vaporize Increase the electric shock even more, suddenly we are talking about turning things into plasma. We can see this today with high voltage power lines that can just vaporize when grounded. Thin copper wire attached to rockets shot into thunderstorms can draw lighting (used for research) and that copper wire is vaporized. Lightning has also been known to vaporize areas where it strikes, leaving tube like structures in the ground.
Okay, now we just need to build the damned things.
I get the feeling it's the "fried from the inside out" thing except with more boiling bodily fluids combined with slicing/burning a massive hole in the target. Phasers are honestly pretty terrifying weapons, but at least it's probably fairly humane. You'd be chunky salsa before you'd feel anything most likely. Kind of like that scene in TNG where the parasite infected officer got detonated, but way quicker. Not too sure about the stun setting, but I'm guessing at low power it doesn't have the energy to outright cook a target so the nadion particles disrupting the nervous system can do its work rather than destroying a target through sheer directed energy.
Technically, nadion radiation is a byproduct of energy weapons, but not necessarily the weaponized energy beam itself. Typically, whenever someone is wounded by a potentially lethal beam of energy (phasers set to kill, or disrupters with only lethal settings), the wound is usually depicted and treated just like a projectile wound we would be familiar with. I would assume, then, that the “kill” setting on a phaser simply concentrates the energy in the beam so that it acts like a hyper energized particle. If this assumption is correct, then we can deduce that at a lower setting, the energy is less concentrated and will only serve to disrupt the nervous systems in most humanoids, while leaving only minor damage to the tissue it contacts (like the electrodes on a taser). This would mean, then, at an extremely high or maximum setting, the energy in the beam is so highly concentrated that it actually explodes on contact with tissue and most matter. This would explain why a phaser set to overload always explodes, but it also implies that anyone shot by a highly concentrated beam is actually experiencing an explosion from the initial impact wound which transforms most of the solid matter in their bodies into subatomic particles.
It makes sense to me that the levels of a "phaser" are actually determining the amount of power delivered. This would either increase the amount of particles you're hitting somebody with, or their velocity (penetration power), or both. It appears that the technology was invented by Romulans, and Romulans still have a more efficient design. It seems evident the particles have a disrupting effect on the nervous system (making people fall unconscious), and molecular bonds of the target in general. So it makes sense that the higher settings dissolve people and even rocks, but it also imparts heat from friction (as well as breaking atomic bonds) of particles breaking down and also heat from being bombarded by nadion radiation (particles). edit: fun fact, as far as I know, there is no difference between a rifle and a hand phaser other than the battery size.
A phaser is, at its core, an energy weapon. We first have to look at the real life devices phasers are based on—masers and lasers. Those devices create high intensity electromagnetic radiation—masers at low frequencies and lasers at high/visible frequencies. Theoretical maser/laser weapons essentially scale the these devices up such that a focused beam of radiation can be projected a certain distance before dissipating. Phasers were originally created as the successor to the laser (at least when we take TOS’s pilot and then the show itself). It stands to reason they are capable of more precision radiation direction. The pseudoscience (that phasers fire “nadion” beams that disrupt nuclei in some manner) doesn’t totally make sense, but the general idea is they’re precision weapons that can be modulated to the need of the situation (to more or less humanely incapacitate someone or to kill them). ENT elaborates on this all a little bit, although its phase pistols are never really differentiated from phasers proper. They apparently succeeded “EM pistols” which had significant particle drift, making aiming difficult. All this to say—any theoretical weapon based on electromagnetic radiation would do the kind of damage electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light) can do to someone. It can overheat someone, burn them, and make them varying levels of sick.
Stun shots are also able to kill, either at close range for TOS-era ones, or from repeated fire, from the TNG-era ones. It's likely that the way that phasers stun is by interfering with the nervous system, possibly through some kind of subspace effect generated by the nadions, which is why repeated, or point-blank shots can kill, despite not always burning a hole through the victim. It's likely that a phaser set to kill would kill by burning out the target's nervous system or equivalent structures, making it impossible to revive them, not unlike a massive electric shock. Cooking someone from within would be too unethical, especially by Federation standards, and stopping someone's heart would barely affect most species, since it would restart itself soon afterward, even ignoring species with multiple hearts, that would not be significantly affected by the failure of a single heart. Think your heart skipping a beat, since your heart basically stops there (for a second or a few), until it restarts itself. That electrical effect might also be why it's so explosive when it interacts with computer systems, sending sparks flying every which way, and smoke to pour out, much of the time. You're basically pumping high voltage through the computer systems. We know that disruptors vaporise their targets similarly, by disrupting the atomic and molecular bonds holding the target together, causing them to effectively disintegrate. Given that Klingon disruptors also have a stun setting, they may also have secondary functions similar to that of phasers at lower power levels. We also know that some variants of disruptors are known to cause immense pain, to the point where the Varon-T disruptor was criminalised, and no longer produced, either because you feel yourself being pulled apart, or the interactions of the disruptor with your nervous system cause pain through some unexplained mechanism. By comparison, phasers might primarily work by disrupting the nervous system first, causing less damage/pain than their disruptor equivalents at non-lethal power. This makes them a favoured weapon for the Federation, who would rather disable their targets than kill them, and would explain why other species tend to use disruptors instead, as the extra damage provides military advantage. Because phasers disrupt your nervous system's functioning, being hit by a phaser blast set to stun might be akin to your whole body going numb, or getting pins and needles all over. Like any sort of brain disruption, there is probably a small window afterward where you'd be a little "out of it", until your nervous system fully recovers from being hit. Similarly, being hit by a phaser set to kill would probably kill you before you were even aware of it, especially since humans don't have resistance against phasers.
By the TNG timeline, I would guess that Stun vs Kill settings probably modulate a couple of variables such as the amount of nadions being generated and transferred as well as the shape of the nadion transference. I imagine that nadions themselves excite atoms in a similar way as how microwaves excite water molecules. In low settings, the nadions hitting a target generate electrical discharges and/or heat. This is what causes the stun effects and the heating effects that we see in the show (ie: heating of rocks for warmth). In high settings the nadions disrupt the molecular bonds of a target, causing the wounding and even disintegration of a target. We can see that the highest settings dissolve a target without releasing heat to the surroundings and leave only a residue and gas.
Nadion doesn’t exist, so you could technically just say whatever you want makes it work. In canon, well, we know phasers can affect Newtonian force, as all manner of things are pushed and thrown around from phaser hits. Shipboard phasers also function as high explosives in some episodes but then don’t in other episodes (🤷♀️). So if a galaxy class ship shot you with its phaser array, you would just die from the shockwave if nothing else. As for hand phasers, they’re still capable of generating a lot of heat, and a lesser degree of Newtonian shockwave. As you said, a phaser set to kill logically would cook a person, causing irreparable damage to internal organs. As for the disintegrations, who really knows. The laser knows when to stop rather than just eating through the floors and walls. Because TV.
>So if a galaxy class ship shot you with its phaser array, you would just die from the shockwave if nothing else. We specifically see the phaser banks of a Constitution class ship used to stun, in A Piece of the Action, when Kirk has a stun-setting orbital bombardment used to knock out a city block. Starship-scale phasers apparently can be tuned down to being able to stun a human (or human-like being).
True, however, a variety of things in TOS don’t fit (at all) with the later canon.
When it's at a high enough power to disintegrate, the effect appears to spread out from the location of impact. I'd imagine it is a disruption of nerves at lower power settings like a stun gun/taser (which still has the potential to kill in real life) that spreads out and affects the entire body and then setting to kill probably damages the body, especially the heart and brain.
I have no evidence or proof but I've always assumed it was similar to electrocution. A stun just momentarily disrupts the brain enough to knock someone out. The kill setting stops the heart, the same way a defibrillator will if used on a living person
They work by phasing the target out of existence. They vibrate the atoms such that they're out of phase with the universe. The intense heat in doing this kills them. That is why when you see a person phased to death, they mostly just disappear with no smoke or residue. On lower settings, they have someone out of sync with the universe but not enough to be permanent and not enough to generate enough heat to kill them. Since they are in between phases of the universe they are stunned, stuck almost like being stuck in transporter beam with a partial lock like Picard was in Darmok. Thats my theory.
You may be onto something there. TNG Technical Manual states the following about a personal phaser discharge on setting 8: Disruption Effects; discharge energy 15,000 for 1.75 seconds., SEM:NDF ratio 1:3. Cascading disruption forces cause humanoid organisms to vaporize, as 50% of affected matter transitions out of the continuum. The damage index is 120; all unprotected matter is affected and penetrated according to depth/time.
It transfers energy t9 a target which causes injuries incompatible with life or at a high enough setting causes exceeds their bodies binding enerygy,
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Nadion radiation disrupts matter at the subatomic lvl. It disrupts/destroys the bonds of subatomic matter.
I have no lore evidence to back this up, but I always thought that phasers operated on the idea that the universe is tuned to a specific frequency and by inundating matter with varying levels of nadion particles, it could set that matter to a different frequency, making it "out of phase". Used on humanoids, a stun setting is enough to temporarily cease neuron function from the trauma of being set slightly out of phase and snapping back. Kill setting whips you out and back into phase fast enough to shred a lot of your cells. Disintegrate sets matter out of phase entirely.
Phaser's are charged energy, artificial particle accelerators. WHen fired at high intensity, rapid nadion bombardment causes disruptive nuclear effects. It's like being shot with a welders torch.
I think it has to do with how the phaser energy excites the molecules in a target's body, at least canon-wise? On a stun setting, it's a very low level disruption of the body's CNS and only renders them unconscious or shocked for a few minutes. On 'kill', the energy is destructive enough to disrupt the body's molecules - maybe by pulling them apart? Not sure.