In Star Trek, when someone is hit with a phaser blast at the ‘kill’ setting, they’d glow, and then vanish. Complete disintegration. I don’t remember that happening on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or Star Trek: Voyager. Did I just miss it? Or do phasers not make people vanish anymore?
It was one of the settings, but generally considered uncool. Picard did keep telling people they were defensive weapons… I remember O’Brien telling a story about fighting in a battle and a woman tossed him a phaser she had been using; he shot somebody and the guy was incinerated.
Riker had to disintegrate the immortal, living weapon in an early episode. A quick Google tells me it was Yuta, from episode:TNG S3E9. It seemed a painful situation to him. They’d had sex, I guess, so that’s always a buzzkill. And one Riker must face a lot, given hes such a makeout artist.
Conspiracy (1x25) and Conundrum (5x14) both feature phaser vaporizations of bad guys. In the First Contact movie, Picard points out to Lily that she would have vaporized him, had she fired on the highest setting.
In the novelization of Star Trek: First Contact, ironically, Lily’s phaser was on setting one, which would have given Picard “a rather nasty rash”.
The illegal Varon-T disruptor from “The Most Toys” (TNG) caused a woman to be slooooowly disintegrated from the inside out. She had, like, 10 seconds to feel it and scream as she died. It was horrifying.
If you think about it, phasers set to disintegrate could be used to commit the perfect murder. No body will ever be found.
Well, if you’re happy violating the laws of physics. I mean, where does the matter go? Anything energetic enough to pull a body apart is going to leave some kind of signature behind – probably a smoking radioactive crater 100 feet across – but something. The transporter, on the other hand… Now there’s a device with endless possibilities for mischief.
Although I suppose that phasers and transporters could be based on the same technology. That would explain why a phaser set on disintegrate knows where the body of the victim ends and everything that they are touching begins.
I’ve often wondered about weaponized transporters. Everyone knows that you can’t transport through shields, but the reason given is that the shields disrupt the pattern. OK, that’s a problem if you’re trying to get someone through live to the other side, but what if you’re just trying to kill an enemy? Transport out their captain, or their warp core, or if you can’t target precisely enough just big chunks of their hull. You won’t get a functional captain, core, or hull out the other side, but who cares? The point is that they don’t have one, either. Or even better: Convert the matter to energy remotely, and then don’t transport the energy. Just leave it there. What was once a chunk of their hull is now just a big total-conversion explosion.
One of the Star Trek novels I read gave the after-action report of Scotty’s Kobayashi Maru test, in which he transported photon torpedoes (basically, antimatter bombs) onto some of the enemy warbirds. As you said, it doesn’t have to get there intact, it just needs to get there as antimatter. Better if it isn’t intact, really…
Well there’s the big Real World problem with “disintegration”;
Explosives are chemicals which react and turn violently into gas, which is what the explosion is. If you ‘vaporize’ someone, that’s a fuckton of “vapor” and would really be the equivalent of setting off a person-sized bomb.
There are no real world physics where you can disintegrate a person and leave nothing behind.
So I’m fairly happy with Star Trek for moving away from that.
Edit: the disintegration part in the original show was 60’s effects and sensibilities. There is NO WAY they were going to be allowed to show injuries and dead bodies like that.
I read that book too! Loved how Scotty took that test so personally. My favorite part of that book, though, was the Galactic Politics game that Sulu played.
Wasn’t it impossible to perform some action, but the computer running the Kobiashi Maru simulation didn’t know that?
Essentially yes. Scotty did something which, according to all theory would work, but just didn’t test out in the real world. The computer allowed it.
Another Trek Lit story, and I sure don’t recall which one, said that Starfleet moved away from “total disintegration” phasers because people weren’t as reluctant to use them for some psychological reason.
Hey, I’ve got a little list.
Well they still haven’t shown ( other than Conspiricy ) someone with similar wounds to a shotgun blast or sniper death.
But TOS did show dead bodies after the cloud monster got them. That was kind of gruesome.
In a series with FTL drives, instantaneous FTL communications, teleporters, time travel, psychic powers, naturally conceived alien-human hybrids, shapeshifters, wormholes, omnipotent godlike aliens, immortal humans, aliens laying their eggs in micro-singularities, giant space amoebas…?
(Personally, I’d be happier with them fudging the physics if it had kept the infantry weapons, tactics, and engagements from being completely braindead in later years, especially when they were trying to go all “gritty war story”/“Battlestar Galactica 2003”-(Beta) )
Phaser beams were designed to interfere with the molecular pattern of an object, so zapping something with one was more a matter of breaking down its internal cohesion than melting it or blowing it up.
That’s why the mugatu et al. just sort of evaporated when they were hit by one. They did, however, leave behind a residue of organic matter, as was established in TNG.
The one time somebody actually exploded was way over the top and very cool. Lots of shock value! 
I remember seeing James Doohan being interviewed by Tom Snyder on his late night talk show. Must have been about the mid 70’s, or whenever they started selling “blue prints” for the Enterprise. Tom Snyder pointed out that apparently there were not any restrooms on the Enterprise and how did they deal with that? James Doohan replied that it was simple. “You set your Phaser for disintegrate and aimed very carefully”.
If the disintegration setting really did break down molecular bonds, it should do it for all compounds, correct? So instead of the water and carbon dioxide, etc, in your body, you have a cloud of hydrogen and carbon and oxygen, which starts to disperse.
And if there is any source of ignition, all that carbon and hydrogen will immediately “recombine” with the oxygen. Could get a mite toasty standing close.
If it broke atomic bonds, well, that’s a different story. All of a sudden you have a huge cloud of electrons and protons in close proximity. That would be…interesting.
Was the Mirror Mirror disintegration panel a true disintegrator, or just some interdimensional transporter. Did it send whoever “to the cornfield”, as it were?
That is interesting. Perhaps that cornfield is full of 72 year old virgins. :dubious:
No, that ain’t it…
The Tantalus field? I suspect that if you searched hard enough you would find all of it’s victims inside of big tanks of water, guarded by blind Chinamen.
What about the disintegration chambers on Eminiar VII? My guess is: Soylent Green feedstock.