The Best in Fictional Weaponry: The Phaser

*Originally published on 3/1/12



Where Star Wars fans had their lightsabers, Star Trek fans (referred to as Trekkies or Trekkers depending on the level of fandom) had their phasers. Even though Star Trek paints a more idyllic science fiction based future, people still needed a handy firearm in case things got nasty.

In the original series that aired in the 60's, the phaser was a pretty standard ray gun. It was gun shaped and only had two basic settings: stun and kill. While limited, it did get the job done and it served the Enterprise crew well, red shirts notwithstanding. The original phasers were also capable of hitting multiple targets at once or destroying a large area of material by widening the beam itself.

After the franchise jumped ahead a hundred years to the Next Generation era, the phasers got a sleeker design. Not only that, but the wielder's options went far beyond simple stun/kill. The phasers had a wide variety of different power settings that fell into those respective categories. This was especially useful when the omnipotent being known as Q introduced the Federation to a little species known as the Borg, a race of cyborgs who could adapt to weapons fire.

Phasers would also upgrade to rifle style weapons as well, though these were usually only wielded by security personnel.

As it turns out, phasers can be quite useful out of combat as well as in it. They can, and have, been used as cutting tools. Not surprisingly, they are most commonly used for welding, but they can be used as cutting tools as well.

In addition to this, phasers can also generate heat sources. That is to say that if you fired at an inanimate object such as a rock or a log, you could get a fire going.

While the hand-held phasers are what most Star Trek fans (and science fiction fans in general) think of when they hear the word "phaser". It should be noted that the Federation was able to apply the weapon to an even larger scale, equipping many of their ships with such weapons. Not only did it give the ships some offensive capabilities, but the phasers could also be used as a sort of anti-missile defense when the situation called for it.

Should a Federation member feel like he's been backed into a corner by a horde of enemies, he or she also has the option of overloading the phaser. This builds up a massive charge of energy, resulting in a large explosion with a radius of about 50 meters. Naturally, as each officer only gets one phaser, this is not a commonly used strategy and is only there to act as a last resort.

The phaser could have easily been buried in the plethora of ray guns that came out around the 50's and the 60's, but it has been able to endure, becoming one of the more recognizable weapons in science fiction and in media as a whole.