Arming distance? That’s the only thing I can think of.
I always thought “battle stations” was kind of ridiculous in Star Trek. Only in “Wrath of Khan” do they actually show what going to “battle stations” meant- the crew shifts jobs, clear away flammable stuff, etc… and that’s in one scene before they go to battle the Reliant in the Mutara Nebula.
Otherwise, the lights change color and that’s about it.
I am convinced that there is some form of transporter technology attached to handheld phasers, because instantly vaporizing a person/creature would result in some sort of concussive event that, I suspect would have a blast radius far greater than what we have seen as typical phaser firing range (do not use these things indoors on “kill”). The phaser-transporter unit must be displacing all that material to somewhere else to forestall catastrophes.
I wonder if Randall Munroe has done the math on this.
There’s also the “automatic boundary” feature, which disintegrates the person and their clothes (and more than once, the phaser itself), but ONLY the person, not the chair they are sitting in, or the wall they are leaning against, or the first inch of the floor/ground they are standing on.
The disintegrate setting is a different setting than destruct, which turns the phaser into a bomb. That does more than vaporize someone. It makes a most satisfactory boom.
The kill setting just kills the subject (if they have physiology similar to humans) without vaporizing them. (It’s more humane.) The stun, well, stuns. The heat setting simply increases molecular activity. Good for warming cold coffee. There’s also the fine focused beam, good for cutting through tough metal.
These aren’t just different strengths of the same beam - each beam is modulated, or one might say, phased, in order to do different tasks.
Then there is that troublesome scene in ST VI: The Undiscovered Country where a kitchen pot is vaporized without damaging or even toasting the dough? meringue? within. Shouldn’t that mean that a phaser blast would leave behind the contents of a creature’s digestive tract? For that matter, what the hell is that KP clown making in that pot? After the pot goes bye-bye, the contents just sit there, holding up a large whisk. Anything with the ability to do that is too thick to be using a hand-held whisk on.
Oy, I just rewatched that. I’d forgotten how stupid the entire scene is. What’s with all the stereo gear in the galley? How stupid Chekov is. How slow “security” is. How thick that pancake batter is!
And, for the record, the pot was “wayporized”.
Are you suggesting that my dryer has a transporter unit in it and subspace is littered with unmatched socks? Was the transporter first developed by careful study of the dryer effect?
I understand the desire for simulated daylight. But why have fake windows when you already have real windows?
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/4/4b/USS_Enterprise-D%2C_These_Are_the_Voyages.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20190727031723&path-prefix=en
Like Khan…i think Chang was playing with him. In TWOK, A shield-less (Though they do have ‘screens’ up…whatever that is) 1701 is hit with a photon torpedo.
Stairs. If you want to get from one deck to another you either take the turbolift, or climb a Jeffries Tube. Why don’t they have stairs?
You do not “climb a Jeffries Tube” to get between decks. The Jeffries tubes were specifically in the struts between the lower hull and the engine pods and nowhere else.
I have to say, that’s not correct. They were all over the ship.
There are Those Who Believe that gangways as seen in TOS were “Jefferies Tubes”, though I am not one of them. For me, JTs were for access to systems only.
I beg to differ. There are lots of little tubes all over every ship, and always called Jeffries Tubes.
One example, among many.
Why are there even so many real windows in the first place? One nice detail of Battlestar Galactica was that the only place on the whole ship was a ceremonial bridge of no strategic importance (the actual command center was deep within the ship).
I would put lots of “windows”. It helps maintain the sanity of the people on the ship. I am sure that we would do this right now with submarines and the like, if we had the technology to do it and the power drain was negligible.
At least some of the time you have to show what’s really out there (otherwise they might lose all touch with reality) but the rest of the time you can show whatever keeps people happy and/or informed.
(I don’t blame them for not doing this in the show, I am just talking about how things would play out in a “real star trek” scenario).
You could just make the hull out of seamless transparent alumin(i)um (i.e., corundum) with a layer of harmful-radiation-absorbing water between the inner and outer shells and just paint or dye it on the inside where you want it to be opaque.
Corundum is aluminium oxide. And making your hull one giant crystal is not a great idea in a universe that goes on and on about the (supernatural) powers involved in “resonance frequencies” and the like.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking out the “window” of a submerged submarine and, most of the time, there wasn’t much to see at all. Undifferentiated blue-green during the day and undifferentiated pitch-black at night. Sometimes you’d get streaks of bioluminescence at night, but much of the open ocean doesn’t have a lot going on. I suspect there’s an analogy with interstellar space in that regard.
One time (and only one time) we were surrounded by a pod of dolphin. We put both scopes up and spent at least an hour watching them swim around and above us. That was pretty cool, but it would be hard to justify the cost of the transparent aluminum for as often as it happened.
That actually was my original point.
What I was saying was that just having windows and seeing dots of light is pointless. But, at the same time, feeling continuously indoors for years is also not good for sanity.
So, my opinion is that you’d have fake windows where you’d show some fancy VR outside of flying through the sky in Vulcan or whatever, only periodically switching back to what’s really out there.
We could consider it a hijack though; it’s something which is true for any scifi featuring long (or endless) missions, not just Star Trek, but would never be shown in fiction for various reasons.