There’s no recoil on those things. You can see the path of the beam. Yet every time there’s a shootout, everybody hits rocks, girders, etc. You should be able to snipe people with ease.
And we’ve seen that the burst can last for a long time (don’t remember which episodes, something where they were heating some rocks or something). Why don’t they just leave the beam running and wave it back and forth in the path of the target?
What I want to know is, since it is established that you can fire a sustained beam with a phaser, why don’t we see people sweep rooms with a constant beam, slicing up anything in their path?
In a third-season episode of Enterprise one of the MACOS (i.e. marines/red shirts) picks off a distant enemy using the nifty-cool-gee-whiz scope on her phase rifle but strangely she never uses it again, nor has anyone in the history of Star Trek. Heck, I’d’ve thought that once handheld energy weapons became practical, and computers got small and fast enough, you could just tell your weapon what to shoot and it’d aim itself.
Warning: Do not aim Amaz’n Lazer at the President…
Well, I half suspect that it’s because the average redshirt gets less training then the average mall security guard. Probably because anyone who flunks or can’t attend Starfleet academy has to become a redshirt(I’m guessing here, but it would explain why you never see anything but officers in Star Trek).
That still doesn’t explain why the officers don’t use better tactics though.
Exactly. There is no need to aim a phaser, any more than there’s a need to aim a machine gun. Point it in the general direction of the enemy and move it back and forth.
The point is that they still miss. All the time. And the Type 2 phasers from TNG are weirdly designed so it’d be nearly impossible to hit something with a human arm.
You’ve never played Counter Strike, have you? Spray and pray is not a good strategy. I’m always amazed at how often I can miss with an automatic weapon at point blank range.
If both sides of the fight are using the sweep my phaser back and forth stategy, it would be a draw nearly everytime. So to actually have a chance to win the battle, you would have to adapt the shot quick, then duck behind cover stategy.
I just don’t think there is any reason other than Smarmy’s. From what we’ve seen of how phasers work, the strategy should just be to point in the general direction, fire a sustained blast, and sweep around until you hit something. But people on the shows don’t do this for no reason that’s ever been explained on camera, and it’d be very tough to come up with a convincing rationalization. (I guess maybe a sustained blast eats up the charge really fast, but that’s not particularly consistent with what we’ve seen when people are trapped somewhere cold.)
One of the main plot devices for Star Trek has always been “give them cool toys, then take them away.”
They don’t use their phasers like laser hoses for the same reason they don’t teleport their enemies 500 feet into the air, or into a transporter buffer, or have the Enterprise stun the entire block on a regular basis, or call for evac at the first sign of trouble:
It’d stop the fight too soon.
Same sort of reason why they don’t have seatbelts: if they had seatbelts, they wouldn’t fall out of their seats.
Bah. If any of you had been paying attention, you’d have noticed that an unremarked effect of firing a phaser is that the shooter apparently becomes temporarily paralysed: they can’t sweep the beam, because they’re locked up tighter than Spock’s sphincter until they somehow manage to release the trigger.
The “sustained” beam settings are all “kill” settings, or “cutting” settings.
Starfleet uses deadly force only as a last result. Therefore, when we see Starfleet officers in skirmishes, their phasers are set on “stun”. Stun settings generate a quick burst, not a sustained beam. For example, from the Star Trek: The Next Generation - Technical Manual:
Now, none of the 16 settings listed seems to have a “sustained beam” component - the longest “burst” is listed as 1.75 seconds (for settings 6, 7 and 8: Disruption Effects)
However…
(Bolding mine.)
So there is clearly a way to produce a sustained beam, though the Technical Manual doesn’t seem to spell it out. I suspect that a sustained beam would have the result of depleting the weapon’s energy stores very quickly. That would explain why the standard settings produce a quick burst. It appears that there is a brief period of time required between shots for the emitters to recharge.
