VOY s1e12 "Cathexis"
Things that hand phasers can do:
- Stun
- Kill
- Disintegrate
- Explode
- Sick lightshow that impresses everybody
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Don't forget heat rocks!
being able to self-destruct with the precision to either act as a flashbang OR destroy an entire ship somehow.
even melting gravel and pebbles together to make climbing spikes.
But only a couple of times.
And tan!
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The survivors of AR-558 coming home and being asked why they didn’t use the wide beam setting.
Iirc, this is basically mag-dumping the phaser, so probably not useful for... Well, anything but exactly this scenario and checking for changelings
Also works on the type 3 phaser rifle, but you're probably right about the power cell drain.
Might I add, this is also only displayed on Voyager.
They do phaser sweeps on DS9 for Founders, but only for a few episodes.
Right, I meant in an offensive capacity.
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That makes sense, but there should have been one person in the back who came forward every now and then and just reset the field then withdrew to recharge.
Ouch.
my favorite example of "we can do this extraordinary thing and we will never talk about it again":
- starfleet can create copy of dead or lost people using transporter
- seven is literally necromancer and can resurrect dead...
- That alien transporter with a range of 40,000 light years (the spatial trajector) that just can't work on Voyager because it has an incompatible power supply
- Infinitely fast travel at warp 10 that comes with serious, but entirely curable side-effects
Infinitely fast travel at warp 10 that comes with serious, but entirely curable side-effects
Janeway and Paris preferred to stay in the delta quadrant rather than explain their giant Yeerk babies.
It annoyed me so much that Discovery basically wrote off all the propulsion technologies that didn't quite work in the 24th century, just so the spore drive could be special in the 32nd century.
I have much the same gripes about Voyager making the Warp 10 speed limit a universal hard limit, rather than something that the warp drive was simply not able to achieve.
At least Discovery's could still pulled them back out of the rug with them not having to wring every single piece of dilithium for all it's worth.
"If you go just a bit faster than the Voyager, the universe itself breaks, and all propulsion technologies are obsoleted past the threshold" is much harder to get around without something like Q shenanigans.
My favorite is the repair tool from S1 PIC, the one powered by imagination. Lets just create and forget a magic wand that commoditizes the entire engineering department 🙃
Ultimate vibe engineering.
I'm going to be honest - the first season of PIC was so bad I tried to forget about pretty much everything but Laris. I am pleased to report that I successfully forgot everything about the imagination repair tool and still no longer recall it.
I hope you didn't start watching the second season.
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or the detachable Enterprise saucer section
i think that one was about money, shooting the separation scene turned out to be more complicated and expensive than they thought...
Isn't there a plant in TOS that can heal wounds that's never brought up again?
i only remember this plant, not sure it was healing anything...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
If we're counting Kelvinverse stuff, the plot twist in Star Trek Into Darkness in which magic villain blood turns out to be the universal cure for Actual Death also qualifies.
Oh how I aspire in writing my own Star Trek stories to both not do that, and explain away why it's like that (basically: "forgot we could do that").
Tuvok knows that nothing beats the Spread Gun
Contra and Metal Slug. So much good times.
God dammit, you guys unlocked a lot of memories.
Like going to CiCi’s Pizza and playing Metal Slug, Power Stone, Striker 1945, Crusin’ World, Rampage…
I need to reinstall my emulators.
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but the laser is so cool
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I miss Anderson’s rational voice of reason in an unrealistic sci-fi style of acting.
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Someone should've written down what happens when you shoot something with a zat three times.
just a piece of paper on the wall of the mess
Know your Zat!
1 tap = stun
2 taps = kill
3 taps = vaporizeDid you use the correct amount of taps?
Did you use the correct amount of taps?
I hear one of them is still tapping
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Gotta be my next series to re-binge.
(Or skip to atlantis. ... Or reschedule Bab5 again first...)
Like Kira said, "... It's a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon. Too many things can go wrong with it. I think you should stick with the Cardassian rifle. Smaller, easier to use, and if we get boarded I don't want you to have to think too much about the weapon you're using."
Maybe people in starfleet forget the features available in the pinch of the moment. (&/or writers "forget" for convenient writing devices).
... Or maybe starfleet academy['s training] is not as great as the much lauded (but lacking merit (?)) "competence porn" selection bias that we see gives the impression of.
Wish they'd explored Kira mentoring Ziyal more. Coulda been her lil badass protégé.
Wasn’t she, though?
Ziyal was doing terrorism on occupied DS9 right alongside Kira.
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Phasers are super versatile but they need to be programmed. That's not something you want to be doing on the battlefield - which is why the default function is "point and click to shoot".
And most of the time we see phasers used - aside from the occasional stone heating or vaporising - it's in a battle situation where reaction time matters. Tuvok had a moment to set things up, but in most other situations, that moment might be deciding if you live or die.
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I think the next time we see the wide beam setting is LD.
Oh, right. While not as big a field, Mariner does use that function.
I was thinking of the time she was scraping carbon off slightly harder carbon.
Then there's that too.
Misreading that as Turok really threw me off for a second
What is this, Abrams Star Trek?!!
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