Obviously, it was sometime before Captain Pike and after Star Trek: Enterprise.
Are there any books that divulge into this?
Are there any books that divulge into this?
When did Star Fleet Start Using Lasers as Weapons?
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
- Start date
They didn't use lasers.
Enterprise used the new fancy phase pistols.
And the other shows used phasers.
Not the same thing as a laser.
However we did see lasers used as medical devices, i.e. laser scalpel.
And used as signalling beacons in TOS and TNG.
Enterprise used the new fancy phase pistols.
And the other shows used phasers.
Not the same thing as a laser.
However we did see lasers used as medical devices, i.e. laser scalpel.
And used as signalling beacons in TOS and TNG.
Various books have conflicting views on lasers in Trek, with some dismissing them as ever being used as weapons and ignoring what they were called in "The Menagerie." On screen, though, Worf is on record of saying in TNG's "A Matter of Time" that there weren't any phasers during the 22nd-Century, so that still leaves it open that Starfleet either went straight from phase pistols to phasers or maybe that lasers were some sort of interim weapon between the two.
I tend to favor the idea that lasers were used in Pike's time. Perhaps phase pistols never went into mass production and phasers were the later improved version that did by the time Kirk took over.
I'd like to accept everything from Trek as given unless I have a really pressing reason not to. Pike may have used lasers, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have used phasers - his crew simply pocketed the Swiss Army Phaser, with three prominently interchangeable doodads for the working end. So, phaser for downing enemies, laser for cutting holes in the doors of enemies, and perhaps a flashlight as well?
Lasers may well be a special tool running parallel with phasers for the entire history of human starflight in Trek. They aren't weapons, they are cutting tools, being used alongside slugthrowers, plasma pistols and finally phasers. But step by step, Starfleet's weapons become more versatile, eventually absorbing the cutting tool role as well.
Mind you, lasers are weapons elsewhere in Trek. Just not in Starfleet. Alien ships sometimes pack them in TNG. Alien infantry may carry some in "Loud as a Whisper" (although that is arguable - while there is mention of "laser activity" on the planet, it's never directly associated with the rifles we see). Would Starfleet have had a phase in its history where such weapons were used? If so, we never heard of it.
Which misses the mark somewhat, as Worf was being asked what important technologies came into being within the past 200 years (that is, mid-22nd to mid-24th). Riker apparently answers the wrong question, too, referring to the great influence of the warp coil (on human history?) even though we well know it (and the effects Riker enumerates) predates the mid-22nd century.
Riker would have to be formally wrong unless we argue "warp coil" to be absent from all (Earth) warp engines until ENT starts using that terminology. Worf would have to be formally wrong unless we argue Archer's phase weapons were not phasers despite almost sharing a name and certainly sharing the practical effect. But both could be excused in other fashions as well: Riker by saying that his warp coil did have a massive influence in the two centuries in question, despite having lesser influence earlier on, and Worf by saying that there were no phasers in the 22nd century until there were, i.e. the invention was important for going from zero to hero.
Timo Saloniemi
Lasers may well be a special tool running parallel with phasers for the entire history of human starflight in Trek. They aren't weapons, they are cutting tools, being used alongside slugthrowers, plasma pistols and finally phasers. But step by step, Starfleet's weapons become more versatile, eventually absorbing the cutting tool role as well.
Mind you, lasers are weapons elsewhere in Trek. Just not in Starfleet. Alien ships sometimes pack them in TNG. Alien infantry may carry some in "Loud as a Whisper" (although that is arguable - while there is mention of "laser activity" on the planet, it's never directly associated with the rifles we see). Would Starfleet have had a phase in its history where such weapons were used? If so, we never heard of it.
Which misses the mark somewhat, as Worf was being asked what important technologies came into being within the past 200 years (that is, mid-22nd to mid-24th). Riker apparently answers the wrong question, too, referring to the great influence of the warp coil (on human history?) even though we well know it (and the effects Riker enumerates) predates the mid-22nd century.
Riker would have to be formally wrong unless we argue "warp coil" to be absent from all (Earth) warp engines until ENT starts using that terminology. Worf would have to be formally wrong unless we argue Archer's phase weapons were not phasers despite almost sharing a name and certainly sharing the practical effect. But both could be excused in other fashions as well: Riker by saying that his warp coil did have a massive influence in the two centuries in question, despite having lesser influence earlier on, and Worf by saying that there were no phasers in the 22nd century until there were, i.e. the invention was important for going from zero to hero.
Timo Saloniemi
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Shortly after Dr. Evil's first successful shark trial
Actually, it would still hit the mark as it would keep the idea that phasers came after either lasers or phase pistols.
With ENT, we have to accept the phase pistols. And that creates the problem that the phase pistols, even if potentially a completely different technology, have all the characteristics of phasers - and Worf would be concerned about the characteristics exclusively. He would have to be mistaken in his actual claim that there were no phaserlike weapons in the 22nd century...
...Even more so as his kinsmen in that era already operated very phaserlike weaponry! Or is Worf domesticated enough to think (like Riker) purely in Earth terms? Do only Earth discoveries/acquisitions matter to him?
Timo Saloniemi
...Even more so as his kinsmen in that era already operated very phaserlike weaponry! Or is Worf domesticated enough to think (like Riker) purely in Earth terms? Do only Earth discoveries/acquisitions matter to him?
Timo Saloniemi
Worf really wouldn't be mistaken if there was a definite distinction between phasers and phase pistols. The difference between them could be not too unlike the ones between phasers and lasers. He would still be correct if phasers didn't really exist in the 22nd-Century (otherwise, one could claim that we have "phaserlike" weapons today).
And yet each appearance of an actual "Menagerie" style hand weapon, it clearly is meant to be an earlier model of the weapon the crew is outfitted with 'now.' Thus, they may have been called lasers in "The Cage", but the name change to phaser is intended to be retroactive.
And Uhura's "Old-style hand lasers" could be meant to be from a couple of hundred years before.
And Uhura's "Old-style hand lasers" could be meant to be from a couple of hundred years before.
But that's the thing - we can clearly see there isn't any distinction.
Like us, Worf would only be concerned with what he can see. It wouldn't matter to Worf if one tech was based on the immolation of space chameleons and the other on the tickling of rapid nadions, as long as both stunned and killed victims and heated rocks and coffee and cut logs etc. If Starfleet had failed to develop the rapid-nadion weapons, then Worf would simply consider the space-chameleon-burning ones the triumph of Federation (?) science that he should brag to "Rasmussen" about.
Quite so. But it does solidly establish that the heroes used to operate lasers in the weapon role in the (possibly distant) past, a fact I didn't realize was confirmed anywhere.
The concept of a name change doesn't appeal to me because the heroes clearly continue to speak of lasers in various contexts (usually, contemporary tools or alien weapons) all the way to the late 24th century. Pike's crew also only speaks of lasers in the tool context, that is, as relates to the task of cutting through obstacles... Perhaps phasers were no good for that in the early years? Or lost the ability (possibly extant in ENT even though not demonstrated, that log incident aside) as a tradeoff, the way modern combat guns are poor for blasting through locks in doors and have to beg for help from a dedicated door-busting shotgun even when certain older military firearms would have had no problem there. An extra laser barrel for the phaser sidearms would make good sense, then.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes. Roddenberry changed his mind about calling the weapons "lasers" because his science consultants pointed out that they didn't behave at all like actual lasers, so he corrected his mistake by changing the name. It's just an early rough-draft idea that was abandoned, like "James R. Kirk" and "lithium crystals" and "Bill Riker" and Data using contractions and Trills not using transporters. If Roddenberry had gotten the chance to do a second story set in the Pike era or before, he would've ignored the "laser" business and stuck with phasers. And Enterprise did the same when it introduced phase pistols in the 22nd century.
As I've said before, fans and creators see fiction differently. Fans see a work in its final form and assume that's the only form it should have. To creators, though, that work is the end result of a long process of trial and error and correction and revision, and it's never perfect, just as good as they could get it when they ran out of time. And in an ongoing series, that process of trial and error has to happen more publicly than it would for a novelist or a moviemaker, say. You don't always get the option to fix all the mistakes before the public sees them, so you have to refine it as you go. So audiences should be careful about getting too attached to details from the earliest installments of a series. Often they just aren't quite right and need to be corrected on the fly.
Is it possible that we only heard the word "laser" in the aliens' mind-recreations? Maybe they spoke with an accent.
The view Roddenberry himself sometimes promoted was that Star Trek was an after-the-fact dramatization of the "real" events. In his ST:TMP novelization, he adopted the role of a 23rd-century producer who'd created an "inaccurately larger-than-life" fictionalization of the Enterprise's real adventures, and suggested that TMP represented a more faithful dramatization of the V'Ger incident, with Kirk on board as a consultant to keep Roddenberry's imagination from running away with him. At the same time, when fans asked about the change in the Klingons' appearance between the series and TMP, he basically asked fans to believe that they'd always looked that way but TOS just hadn't shown it correctly due to lack of time and budget.
So in this case, he'd probably just ask us to accept that they would've been called phasers in the "real" events that "The Menagerie" was dramatizing, but that it was erroneously changed to "lasers" in the course of the adaptation.
Still, given that the pilot footage in "The Menagerie" was, as you say, the Talosians' recreation of the events, we could apply the same Doylist thinking there and assume it was the Talosians who got the word wrong. After all, English isn't their native language.
Anyway, I believe the term "laser" is only spoken twice in the entire pilot, so it's easily enough overlooked.
Yet it is frequently used elsewhere in Trek, so there's not much motivation to overlook it. That is, lasers don't disappear from the Trek universe with the introduction of phasers.
Conversely, the sidearms from the pilot reappear several times: the second pilot, "Man Trap", "What Are Little Girls Made Of?". Nothing about these reappearances indicates these wouldn't still be lasers: they work much the same way they did in the first pilot, and nobody utters a word to the contrary.
(Sure, in "Little Girls", the weapon does more than just cut: it engulfs people in the make-disappear effect. But amusingly enough, anybody referring to the gun as a "laser" fires it with the beam coming from the thin, tall endpiece, while the make-disappear effect comes from the thick, short endpiece...)
Timo Saloniemi
Conversely, the sidearms from the pilot reappear several times: the second pilot, "Man Trap", "What Are Little Girls Made Of?". Nothing about these reappearances indicates these wouldn't still be lasers: they work much the same way they did in the first pilot, and nobody utters a word to the contrary.
(Sure, in "Little Girls", the weapon does more than just cut: it engulfs people in the make-disappear effect. But amusingly enough, anybody referring to the gun as a "laser" fires it with the beam coming from the thin, tall endpiece, while the make-disappear effect comes from the thick, short endpiece...)
Timo Saloniemi
Actually, we don't really know that since we really don't know the internal mechanics of either. For all we know, the later device was more of a game-changer than the former.
To nitpick just a bit, since the phaser rifle was mentioned by name in the second pilot, it seems that phaser tech already existed, so either the modified hand weapons now signified phaser upgrades from lasers, or the phaser/laser selection option always existed?
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Or, as has been said more than once in this thread, the earlier weapons were meant retroactively to always be phasers, no upgrade other than appearance necessary. As far as no one says "these are now phasers", no one says "these are still lasers" either. Thus, the intent is that they are and have always been phasers.
Did I really need to point out explicitly that I was referring to the "in universe" point of view, not the "real world point of view"? Apparently, in your case, I did.
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