Because of dimensional shipping mixup I got a copy of Skald the Rhymer’s brain tapes. After some work I was able to find the blueprints to his dimensional conveyor. Before it was destroyed by flaming bees I was able to set it to transport a Star Trek TOS Type 2 Phaser to your bedroom. The box is DNA coded. Don’t let your pets or loved ones contact it.
For our purposes a Type II phaser has these settings:
[ul]
[li]Stun / Range: 90m / 1 charge[/li] No unprotected human can possibly withstand it.
[li]Heat / Range 6m / 1 charge per second.[/li]It causes 3rd degree burns with less than a second of contact to exposed skin and can generally work like a cutting torch, let’s say it can cut through a foot of 1" thick steel each second.
[li]Disrupt / Range 90m / 3 charges[/li]This will kill an unarmored human with less than one second contact if it hits center of mass 95% of the time. Limb shots may simply utterly cripple the limb and send the target into deep shock. Assume that it causes roughly the same damage to objects as a 30mm round from an A10 Warthog.
[li]Dematerialization / Range 30m / 5 charges[/li]Glow and go. A human sized individual is reduced to a lingering ozone smell. This setting can destroy five cubic meters of rock in one go.
[/ul]
You have three power packs counting the one in the Phaser and each power pack holds 100 charges. You can wide angle any of the settings to create a 60° cone for ten times the number of charges. The weapon creates a fairly quiet theramin-like '60s electronic sound when in use and generates significant light for all settings.
You are confident that since I am likely to be killed by Cyborg Monkey Ninjas for my sass, you are never going to get a resupply, and current Earth technology can’t charge the power packs.
Just keep it as a self-defense weapon. Set on stun to avoid legal problems. What else am I going to do, overthrow the government or something? A phaser doesn’t make me immune to bullets.
When you say it can destroy five cubic meters of rock, what do you mean? Does it reduce that much rock to rubble? Is the material destroyed utterly? If there’s rubble to clear I’d be too lazy to bother but if it just vaporizes the rock I’d have fun creating a secret underground lair.
I’d probably mess around with it blowing up random shit until I got bored and then I’d just keep it for self-defense. And even then I’d probably rather get a normal firearm. If I used it in public or whatever the government would swoop in and confiscate it (and maybe even take me in for “questioning”).
I wonder how easy it would be to find a buyer without alerting the world to its existence… I’d have to find someone uber rich who’d be interested and think of a way to convince them to meet with me in private so that I can demonstrate that the device is real and functioning. I might be able to make a few million off of it.
So, disassemble and reverse engineer the batteries for a patent isn’t on the table? My grandchildren would be sitting pretty if they owned the rights when technology caught up to be able to mass produce them…
Could I program a set area for it to disintegrate? As in, would I have to basically paint my secret lair out of the rock or could I just aim it at the ground and program a floorplan for it to carve out? If the latter I’d definitely do that before trying to pawn it off on some billionaire.
The default Phasers have never been shown doing that, so you’d probably have to do it shot by shot. And the holes are generally uneven, probably based on the peculiar variability in the target materials.
Hereis a scene (at 42:30) where two smaller (and weaker) Phaser 1s burn through a wall.
At least, not yet. I intend to change that. Drain one power pack while studying the effects of the various beams, then study the drained pack to try to figure out how it works, then either drain or not the second power pack, depending on what’s learned from the first one, and then study the third one while fully charged. Oh, and also do every sort of non-destructive test I can think of on the phaser with power pack removed.
I figure, even if I can’t reverse-engineer the power pack, the beam emitter (especially for the stun beam) should have tremendous practical implication.
I would say that working on a full power pack is probably really dangerous. Even a drained one might still contain enough energy to render you extra crispy. As always, exercise caution when examining devices from the future or other dimensions.
I should clarify, by the way, that when I say that I would do these things, I mean that someone else would do them, and I’d make suggestions and analyze the data. I’m a theorist, not an experimentalist, and I expect that the real experimentalists would be doing their experiments from the other side of several meters of reinforced concrete, possibly from a bunker a long way away.
Given limited ammo and no hope of resupply, it would probably go in the back of the gun cabinet until something really nasty comes along. And by “really nasty” I mean “demonstrably immune to hollow points”.