It's important to remember that this show started in the 1960's, and it's necessary to consider the attitudes and mindsets of the time. These were mood phasers.
Also I imagine whoever was making the effects were considering not only what looked best in that particular shot, but the quality of both the broadcast signals and the TVs receiving those signals at the time.
I think your observation about the color of the beam changing as they rotated frequency in Best of Both Worlds was a good catch. And it makes a lot of sense. Color in light is based on the frequency of the EM wave.
I was hoping he was going to use that as the basis of his argument, as I noticed the different colors in that episode and have always wondered how it affected the TOS canon of beam colors.
@@sununconquered all energy waves have a color. Wave frequency is related to wave energy. Since all that waves really are is traveling energy, the more energy in a wave, the higher its frequency. The lower the frequency is, the less energy in the wave. ... When it comes to light waves, violet is the highest energy color and red is the lowest energy color. Phasers are in fact particle beam weapons. A particle beam is a stream of charged or neutral particles, in many cases moving at near the speed of light. There is a difference between the creation and control of charged particle beams and neutral particle beams, as only the first type can be manipulated to a sufficient extent by devices based on electromagnetism. The manipulation and diagnostics of charged particle beams at high kinetic energies using particle accelerators are main topics of accelerator physics. Because they are weapons based on electromagnetism (IE light as a propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields. More generally, the existence of electromagnetic radiation: coupled electric and magnetic fields traveling as waves at a speed equal to the known speed of light.) colors are produced.
Maybe TOS needed to rotate frequencies, so the bank would not burn out single frequencies and thus last longer. By the movies this problem could have been overcome so they just use the one that is slightly more efficient / better for the shield frequency, but retains the ability to alter frequencies (BoBW), for example for maintenance of certain frequencies (idk...) or use cases that require a specific frequency.
Maybe each shipyard built from local resources. Lots of cobalt (and Andorian weapon engineers) in-system, so build blue phasers - lots of iron in-system, so build red phasers - etc. You never know which varieties of crystals and coils and capacitors the local refit shop or local quartermaster will issue, or where they came from, and you don't care if they meet all the modular component specs. This also offers an "in universe" explanation for TOS-era weapons (and ship hulls) changing colours. And an explanation for TNG-era replicator-made uniformity.
"Charge phaser banks and prepare to open fire!" "Hang on a second... What day is it, sir?" "It's Thursday." "Thursday, hmm? That's... green, correct?" "No. It was green yesterday. Thursday is orange." "Are you sure? I thought Tuesday was orange." "Only on the second Tuesday of the month. Tuesday is normally pink." "Okay, thanks. Orange phaser banks ready, sir!" "Belay that... The enemy must have gotten bored and flown away."
See, now that makes me think of Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen thinks he's in a basement set and goes, "Okie dokie, let's fire blue particle cannons full, red particle cannons full..."
You could change them to any one of 65535 colors. Most weapons officers left it set at default, but some were prone to screwing around and trying different colors. Blue for Federation Day, Green for Klingon Kwanza, etc.
I have a feeling that the beam color for the ships was because of the special effects capabilities of the time. They were probably experimenting on the fly with what color they could create compared to the footage they had and trying to see what worked best to actually show up on the image
I did some research and found all the TOS sound effects on a site called TrekCore. This led me to sites that explained that Roddenberry wanted a sound effect for everything, and for each set to have unique associated sounds. Turns out the photon torpedo effect was one of the few borrowed sound effects. It was borrowed from the "skeleton ray" sound in War of the Worlds, though the TOS sound guys added compression and distortion. All I can find out about the skeleton ray effect is that it came from an electric guitar and two reverbs. I think War of the Worlds sound guys cut a guitar string to get the sharp attack.
I'll be honest, TOS is really, really terrible at maintaining any consistency. And really, can you blame them? It was a low budget TV show in the 60s with only a minor following. It wasn't the monolithic franchise that it would become. It was just, "Captain Kirk is firing his ray-gun in this shot. We need you to superimpose the effect as cheaply as possible."
TOS was not low budget, not for its time. It may be hard to believe but it had a comparable budget to the Mission: Impossible series that CBS was also producing and often went over budget for its episodes. The only reason it seems so low budget is because the effects technology available to the production team was not up to the task of what they wanted to do.
Centurian128 That and the fact that they kind of over step their means even with that healthy budget so the actual show tended to make do with recycled shots.
Honestly it was a high budget show for the era. It's only considered low budget 'now' because we can do basically all the visuals on your desktop of choice and the sets are fairly minimalistic when they aren't outright recycling existing sets of other shows.
The continuity problems have been VASTLY overstated. Like here - there's no reason to assume phasors would be a constant color, since there are a huge number of different setting combinations. In all but a few instances, you only find discontinuity if you assume discontinuity going into the question.
Makes sense that conditions on various planets would require frequency adjustments for optimal performance. That would explain the wide range of colors seen in some instances in TOS beyond just random changes. This planet has too much argon...set phasers to purple.
Perhaps no setting adjustment necessary ... the beam simply appears to have different colours in different atmospheres? Although I admit breathable atmospheres must have similar enough compositions that such a phaser-colour-shifting phenomenon would likely be minimal (or trivial).
I look at a modern analogy to this problem. Different shells/missiles are used for different targets. Maybe blue frequencies works better on Klingon shields that red, or green works better for defeating federation shields.
Obvious but not consistent. This video already points out low phaser-colour consistency in TOS/TOS-R and the better phaser-colour consistency of TNG. But then we have final seasons of DS9 and every season of VOY ... and all the TNG-era movies ... with all sorts of ad hoc Treknobabble frequency rotation, modulation, and phasing tricks which never actually changed the phaser colours (often because space battles recycled existing footage).
I still kinda like the idea that the phasers are different settings ( consistent or not, I like the idea). I always just thought orange was the color of a phaser a "full power" at least during TNG.
For me it was always obvious that color of phaser is related to it's frequency, after all we can see its light (like light bulbs with neon, argon etc. got different color, but its elementary school knowledge) I love your work!
THANK YOU OMG THANK YOU I had a debate with some dude for like an hour about this same thing until eventually I just found that episode and showed it to him, dude you are brilliant
I always figured after TOS, the color change was due to the fact that they channel the phasers through the main engine and therefore it gives a different color than in the TOS. I know that still doesn't explain a lot of the inconsistencies, but it's fun to think about :D
"TOS doesn't get the respect it deserves"....ehhhhh Everything about Star Trek from 09 onwards has been a love letter to TOS, from the films, TV series, fan videos, podcasts and everything else ATM it feels like Trek IS just TOS with TNG+ being seen as optional extras. If anything TOS gets too much respect, leading to people getting antsy about "CANON VIOLATIONS" about a series that wasn't focused on world building so much as episode to episode morality plays (United Earth Starfleet? Vulcanian? etc etc)
i for one want to see more progression and less regression or down right retcons. i worry that stp is going to be too much picard and not enough star trek and the only thing we will be left with is, ughh, discovery.
Hello there, Star Wars fan here. It looks like there's a pattern here... Original content is loved, but has some consistency problems (minor in case of SW). New content is out. While better overall, the old one is preferred by the fans. Time passes, nothing major comes out. Something eventually comes, but based on the original content. BUUUUUT the new content is like the original only on the surface, as it is just an pretty shell with bad writing and political statements inside. Am I wrong on something? Please let me know! And no, the Prequels actually have a better story overall. No shame in liking the new Star Wars movies and Star Trek content, but please understand that modern cinema and tv are quite dull... They forgot they should tell a story instead of lecturing us about politics.
@@bluecaptainIT also a star wars fan and I agree with you. i believe it to be the main problem with the sequel trilogy. pretty or cool scenes with a story built around them, but without much thought put into how to get from pretty scene to the next one. its why the movies while nice looking feel disjointed from movie to movie and at times from sequence to sequence. i'm also willing to go out on a limb and say its why the star wars story movies (rogue one, solo) and the Clone Wars, Rebels and Mandalorian series feel better, they have a cohesive story to tell and do a good job of giving natural character growth without just giving a character what they need at any given time because they need (blank) for the scene to work
Yeah, there's a difference between a love-letter and nostalgia-baiting to make a quick buck while simultaneously butchering all of the spirit and point of the originals. 09 onwards Trek has been. . . anywhere between rough to disaster.
can you explain why in the newer shows and movies they stopped using Continues phaser Beams and instead switched to short Pulses ? especially with hand held weapons. it makes no sense since it seems less useful , and it seems they only did the change to look more like star wars
because it allows for higher accuracy and such - controlled bursts allow for better aim than just a continuous beam, where if your target is moving fast enough, perhaps a large amount of it would just fire off into space, wasting energy
@@starsilverinfinity but it's much easier to aim a continuous beam since you can see where it's going and can adjust your aim as you're firing until you hit your exact target. i'm talking specifically about hand held phasers
I think from a showmakers perspective the pulse-weapons are just a better weapon. They are flashier and make a fight generally more interesting, because you have tons of pulses flying around as opposed to the "old" TNG phasers which would through some magic lock on to the right target themselves at a weird angle and instantly incapacitate anyone that gets hit. Meanwhile with pew-pew phasers you can get characters missing shots and "only" be injured when hit (though sadly that stupid incineration-setting has made its way into DSC aswell...)
IRL the continuous beams were cheaper effects than animating multiple beams on screen, at least they were In the time of TOS and TNG. By the time DS9 went all digital effects it wasn't much of an issue, but wasn't changed to keep consistency. They use pulses now because some people think they look more "actiony".
You should do a video about how the tiny hand phasers in TOS were super powerful, then became less powerful in TNG, and then finally turned into the weakest phasers, the giant phaser rifles in DS9 and Voyager. Also, everyone knows purple is the most powerful color.
@@starsilverinfinity, it doesn't matter they both make use of the boson called photons whose power can be measured in modulations of coherent frequencies.
Something's visible color is just how different frequency/wavelength settings look to the human eye. Different color lasers are literally just different wavelengths/frequencies. So a Green laser is just a different frequency setting from Orange.
@@marineplaysairsoft with different frequencies come different power levels. This is displayed in Red shifting and Blue shifting. This is why if warp drive was real all the radiation impacting the warp bubble would result in a planet destroying Gamma Ray burst when the ship exits warp. In other words the warp field is compressing the normal harmless light from stars, blue shifting it into lethal waves of Gamma Ray Energy.
Hmmm... Different colours of particle weapon emissions would imply different wavelengths. That's directly related to the energy content of the discharge. So technically, particle energy weapons discharges that appear red would be the weakest, while those appearing blue would be the strongest/ most powerful.
Good video! When I watched the original series as a child, I noticed the different colours but never thought about it. I just accepted it and moved on. Simple me :)
Just like when the phasers were fired out of different parts of the _TOS Enterprise_ in different episodes. (Dome under saucer/ where the _TMP refit 'observation deck'_ would go.) Seems the SFX crew didn't have a 'story bible' yet, to keep consistency. P.S. in _TNG's Darmok,_ we see phasers coming out of the forward torpedo tubes: and return fire glancing off the hull _(without anyone shouting 'shields have failed'.)_ I always thought that was a reference to TOS inconsistency...
actually, per Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, I believe the refit observation deck is on the back side of the saucer. But I may be thinking of the rec deck.
It’s important to note the Constitution in both Prime and Kelvin were built expressly for the purposes of exploration and as such were designed to be the single most adaptable and customizable ships in the fleet. With the sheer number or frequent refits and changes made to both vessels it would stand to reason they are constantly messing with phase placement.
The Torpedo tube phaser was a special effects error on part of the production crew. This was fixed for the VHS and DVD releases. This video actually shows the DVD version of that scene at 0:22.
They retconned the shit out of the power level of Starfleet ships in TNG. Kirk's Enterprise could travel to the edge of the galaxy, the center of the galaxy and through time relatively easily. They could fight literal gods with 1701/A and have at least a fighting chance and/or actually win. NCC-1701D/Defiant/Voyager were completely powerless against anything similar that we see on those shows.
My theory is that the original Enterprise under Kirk encountered so many advanced technologies and improvements (Kelvan speed boosts and the like) and that the Enterprise crew was already a little rogue and would try things that the rest of the fleet wouldn’t dream of, it resulted in a ship that wasn’t even fully understood by Starfleet’s engineers and couldn’t exactly be replicated. This might explain why in Star Trek 5 they broke the ship by initially taking it to speeds available only to the first Enterprise at the time. Scotty remarks how the ships seems to have been built by “monkeys.” Well it might seem that way if you are a super genius miracle worker who has spend his whole live optimizing one ship with alien technology not available anywhere else in the galaxy.
Very interesting, EC Henry. I never noticed the colours in TOS and early TNG, but I have noticed that later TNG, DS9 and VOY seem to favour ORANGE phaser beams throughout.
Thank you for this! There are so many assumptions made by fans that have been reinforced over the past 50 years that make people jump to bad conclusions about what is and isn't "canon" (not that continuity has ever been the franchise's strong suit). But you demonstrate again and again that often, whether something is "canon" or not is essentially subject to one's imagination and understanding of what actually was, not what's come to be accepted by a vocal segment of the fandom. Appreciate your work!
Back when I had the free time to play Star Trek Online, I remember how different energy weapons had their own colors. Phasers-Orange, Disruptors-Green, Plasma-Light Blue, Tetryon-Blue, Polaron-Purple, Antiproton-Red. I just assumed they were fixed because I did not pay attention to the actual show that closely. Love this video's explanation!
Or we could just assume that the various colors for phasers were to allow them to be visible on black and white television sets, which were still the norm in the late 1960s.
3:09 If referring to the TOS Balance of Terror those pulse phasers were actually the Photon Torpedo - screen writers got the name wrong which was corrected for every other episode
A thing I noticed which isn't canon but might be interesting. I'm one of the Axanar videos they said that the Andorians were happy to give the Federation the phasers, so Andorian made weapons. Andorians have light blue beam weapons in Star Trek Enterprise. So given that in Axanar's lore they were making the Ares class only a few years before the Constitution class maybe that's why TOS phasers were blue, since they were Andorian made. I might be totally wrong but I like this little idea I came up with. Edit: and he says that in the beginning of the video xD my mistake.
If I was too guess, since different frequencies have different colors, I would've guessed that phaser tech in the TOS era wasn't consistent in keeping frequency, and they got better at it during the movie time period and the next generation. But ENT kind of messes that idea up. But, ENT phasers were considered to be "low-yield", so maybe it was easier to keep frequency at lower yields, and the higher yields of the TOS era required more expertise in keeping frequency, which was mastered during the time period of the movies and the next generation. That's what my thought process was. Also thanks for bringing up the color change during Best of Both Worlds, a lot of people forget that.
nicely done! the use of ship's phasers on stun in 'A Piece of the Action' was always one of my favorites. it seems, to me to be a hilariously 'Federation' move they never used; "all batteries, set to maximum stun, compute optimal strafing pattern. put the whole continent to sleep, fire when ready."
Great video! I didn't know about the inconsistency (I've only watched the remasters), but I found learning about it really interesting. Also can I ask where in the original series pulse phasers are shown? I don't have any idea where they are shown in the first season of TOS. Thanks.
I'm wondering that too. I recall photon torpedoes on the old show were usually a bluish white but sometimes red. Maybe he's confusing the red photons with pulse phasers?
For the TNG phasers from Best of Both Worlds, the momentarily green appearance of the phasers was because they were firing through the Borg tractor beam. IRL it was likely an unintentional effect of layering the tractor beam effect over the phaser effect. In-universe, it was just the effect of viewing the phaser beam from within the wider tractor beam which it was partially obscured by.
Ive got a few questions : $1 I got my enterprise lighting kit today and I'm wondering what that metal round hickey do is. It looks like a power plug in. Also what's the polarity on the MEDS. ? Is the long lead positive or is the short lead ? I forgot since it's been a few years since I've built an LED kit.
But how can we see the light at all, and what is its cause? My guess is that the visible light emitted from the beam has something to with particle decay or particle interactions within the phaser particle beam.
IRL a powerful beam of positive ions that was neutralized at the end of the weapon (helps with beam focus) can produce a small amount of light due to the electrons used for neutralization gradually moving into low energy states. For an extremely powerful particle beam of Trek tech level, that could even create a movie-style bright beam. However, particle beams are useless in atmosphere, so this explanation doesn't really apply.
To be fair, "we" aren't the only ones who forgot about stuff like wide-beam phasers. The writers usually forgot how useful they would be in many episodes.
I had the Idea of a Resistance K-Wing, Resistance U-Wing, Resistance E-Wing, Resistance T-Wing, and RZ-3 A-Wing. Because your Star Wars models are Amazing.
The one that always bothered me was DS9’s Way Of The Warrior. In almost every case Klingon phasers/disrupters are green, but in this one instance (at least in DS9) they have these giant red beams. This is minor as it is a great episode.
Perhaps phasers (like lasers) are essentially invisible to the naked eye in space. Only visible when travelling through a dense medium (like an atmosphere) or when striking a dense object (like the target). And perhaps their advanced ship computers automatically overlay visual colours and effects onto these beams when displaying them on consoles or the main viewscreen, shift the invisible spectra into realtime visual simulations. So that the Captains and crews of the ships can actually see what's happening while shots are being fired. And perhaps we, the audience, are privileged to share this view. And perhaps each Captain or each console operator can configure these overlays with whatever colours and effects they prefer.
please do a 3D redesign of the Imperial I or II SD with improvements to its structure and weapon compliment that overall improve its performance while still sticking to the Tarkin Doctrine, would love to see what your version would entail
Good video! Sounds like the colors (sorry, US spelling is my thing) are more or less random. It all depends on what the effects guys thought were cool. But if folks want to rationalize all of this, that's good too. It makes the ST universe all the more richer. Many thanks!
I've always loved the Delta 7 starfighter from star wars. Though I think it would have been amazing as a space superiority fighter. Would love to see you do a model of the next gen delta 7 designed to be the equivalent or superior to the x wing.
Could you please make a Video about how the Phasers are functioning? I love these cool Weapons who are so different from these common "many pulses after another"-Laser Cannons.
There were multiple settings on the phasers. Several stun settings alone. In "The Man Trap" we see a short stun burst that leaves the victim conscious. The longest firing was in "The Cage" transmitting ships power. The color could merely have been a power designator so the user would know what setting it was on without looking. Also consider disruptors that had no visible beam. The visible beam could have a targeting beam like our own laser targeting designators.
In the actual LASER side: In the U.S. military, colored lasers are sometimes used as a visible marker so the shooter can see where the invisible high-powered laser is aimed at the target. (Actually, so that outside observers can see the intended target as well.) In Sci Fi, a similar methodology could be followed.
I'm wondering how? Able to knock out everyone in a couple of city blocks from orbit, no injuries. In star fleet battles *SFB* they mention in a short story that it's Tridee myth and when they have to knock someone out from orbit for a stealth mission, they just teleport a large amount of water above them which falls and hits hard enough to KO the target, but not kill them.
The bigger question is why they didn't use it more. The only time I remember is 'A Piece of the Action', but there were many times when it would have been useful, especially if they were willing to go ahead and stun Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
casbott In real life we have devices that can incapacitate large groups of people with sonic waves. I see no reason why the as yet fictional nadeon particles can’t be set to a frequency that produces similar effects. Also worth noting that Janeway threatens to vaporize Henry Starling’s building using Voyager’s shipboard phasers. Now this may have just been an empty threat considering Temporal prime directive implications and the fact that Chuckles and herself were still in the building but it does suggest the potential range of power that shipboard phasers are capable of exerting on a surface from orbit.
Because on TNG they said rotate phaser frequencies we know that there are different powers of phasers. For instance the frequency of a wave is directly proportional to the energy of a single particle in a wave. So a blue phaser would be more powerful than a red phaser as it's higher on the EM spectrum. This could just represent the amount of power going into the phaser array at the time.
That's not really how laser power works. It's not "This beam emitter can produce 10^30 photons per second. What color do we want them to be?" A 1 MW red laser produces more photons than a 1 MW violet laser, so they both emit the same amount of power even though the violet photons have more energy individually.
They're *phasers*, not lasers, and isn't part of the EM spectrum, so there's no reason to think frequency is proportional to energy. It's science fiction. It's intentionally different from actual real-world tech. Roddenberry specifically used a made-up word and didn't use lasers because he didn't want science fact to catch up with the show and prove that what they were doing with the technology was impossible. Can we all please stop pretending there's an explanation now? It's make-believe.
@@rogerschneider5971 Roger, I don't want to insult you but what you said is stupid. It's why i'm constantly disappointed with Star Trek fans who you'd think would be scientifically savvy or at least receptive. Gene Roddenberry thought far more carefully about the scientific reality of the show. He wanted to have as much semblance of reality as possible. He created Time Warp because he read and understood General Relativity (probably better than most). The episode BEST OF BOTH WORLDS absolutely shows that "UPPER EM BAND" correlates to the blue color in the phasers. We see in when Enterprise fires and we see it when the Away Team disables the Borg Cube. This also occurs in reality. I'm not sure why you would say or think otherwise.
@@saquist I say it because it's true. I teach physics. I'm well-aware of the relationship between color (frequency) and energy. The thing is, that energy you're referring to is the energy of a photon. There's no reason to think phasers are beams of photons. If they were, they'd be lasers, and Roddenberry went out if his way to coin the term phaser to avoid the use of the word laser specifically so comparisons with lasers wouldn't be made.
I can easily see different frequancies of Phaser blasts showing a different color. Remember that light colors depend on the freq of the light. And as the phaser tech advance and Starfleet found ways to put different amount of power through the phaser beam they settle on a good multi-purpose frequency to use, and just change the point X frequency of it, AKA what is the difference between red and crimson.
As an SF writer myself I suggested that when a hand weapon was fired the beam itself was invisible, but the air along the line of the beam would be ionized. The colour of the flash then depended on the relative abundance of noble gases in the atmosphere.
Also remember, beams interact with their environment. Varying concentrations of atmospheric gases could cause the beams to scatter different colors. Out in space, even. Remember those "Bussard Collectors"? There are molecules (solar and cosmic winds) to be collected, and they can possibly affect things as well.
Makes total sense to me. Back in the day phaser frequencies were rotated far more often dependant on situation until a coverall frequently was found that worked for most situations... Until the Borg turned up...
I think the Notion that all phasers were the same color was bolstered if not started from STO ( Star Trek Online ) which color coded all damage type to be a specific color. Phasers were orange, Disruptors were green, Polaron were purple, Plasma were Blue-green. People who got into Trek through STO may have the misconception that colors are more fixed than they are, but the shows and movies never established such color patterns.
In Star Trek voyager episode janeway talks to Kim about the old starfleet and “what we take advantage of today” she mentions “no phasers” “no holodecks” I don’t know if she means phaser strips or phase cannons I think the early TOS phase weapons are not the same as voy era phasers
Could be like tracer rounds To identify friend and foe (or in this case what type or power phaser your firing) Edit: I realize tracer rounds are primarily to hemp with accuracy (but with a phaser there is not drop off from gravity)
We did not get pulse phases in the original series. What you showed was a photon torpedo. The script writers goofed. In every other episode where they fired photons it looked just like that picture you showed.
I try to enjoy it, but it just doesn't have the same kind of feel as 90s trek. I grew up never having seen any of TOS, but watching TNG and VOY constantly. It seems like half the episodes are about the crew getting easily tricked by beautiful women, when they're meant to be the military and not get tricked so easily. There are definitely good episodes though. It feels more like a bad rip off of the twilight zone sometimes though. And there's no room for the characters to breathe. It's all plot. Like in the 90s treks, they all had a ton of scenes in every episode where the characters had scenes talking about how they were feeling going through some traumatic event, or character building, showing all different kinds of sides of characters, like you know that Worf hates surprise birthday parties. In TOS it's just scene after scene that only talks about the plot and nothing else, and the character of these characters is merely implied, like you get a line where Bones is annoyed at spock again for some reason, but you never got to see why there's tension there in the first place, or some kind of arc and resolution with that, it's just apparently set in stone that sometimes there's that sort of friendly tension between them and they never show why. It's not enough in TV and movies and plays to just _say_ something is there, you have to follow the rule of "show don't tell". It's like in writing its considered amateur to keep saying "Jeff was angry", "Bill was in love", "Jane was happy", instead of _showing_ they have those feelings by their actions. The TOS movies are a lot better at this however. They show for instance Kirk being depressed at not being a captain any more, and the tension between him and the new enterprise captain because he just commanders the ship.
@@duffman18 finally someone said it who is not me. I was also annoyed by the constant "women tricks the crew" thing and there really nothng was "going on" on the course of the show. The first and thr last episode were just like any other. Also we almost didn't get to see anything about the characters. I can't understand how can be the original the no1 trek for so many people when compared to the 90's trek it lacks so much things. On the other hand the movies are great and adressed all these problems. I still remember watching the motion picture which seems to be the movie everyone hates on the internet, a lot of them calling the slowmotion pic. Well i remember it was miles better then tos and think it's a really good movie. Finally it dealt with more characrer stuff and was considerably more sense of danger than the "unimportant nameless redshirts die" trope in tos. I have similar problems with firefly, which is also praised to no end. The setting, the visuals and characters are all very well establsihed and executed. The problem is that again, over 14 episodes there isn't anything going on besides some people want to get river for his mind in 2-3 episodes. The crew just wandering around space without any clear motivation. Also there isn't much lore or maybe non at all except a war in the past which is why some people hate each other but that's pretty much it.It's a good series nonetheless and yes it had potental had it not been cancelled but i fail to see why people praise the shit out of it with just these 14 episodes + movie. And the lack of episodes is not an excuse. Stargate sg-1 for example did much more things with a movie + it's first 14 episode. The episode "the torment of tantalus" which is the 10th ep. in s1 has so many thing going around that i'm hyped to see more of the world, and nor just about the characters.
@@kormosmate2 yeah The Motion Picture is maybe my favourite of all the star trek movies (I love TNG but I hate all the TNG movies for the most part). It reminds me so much of 2001 A Space Oddysey, and has the same running theme of rebirth, and it looks beautiful. Unlike the other movies it's not trying to copy star wars and just be about action, it's pure star trek. I like William Shatner's theory (that he wrote in one of his non-canon star trek novels) that V'ger is what eventually became the Borg, even though that doesn't really work since the borg have been around for millenia according to seven of nine. I didn't like firefly either, and I don't get why it's so highly praised. I guess you either love Joss Whedon's style or you hate it.
It does make sense for phaser weapons to semi randomly change frequencies. If there was a standard frequency, there would be a standard shield, making the standard frequency useless, which in turn would make the standart shield useless because the standard frequency would no longer be standard because no one would use it.
Wait what? I’ve seen Best of Both Worlds dozens of times and I’ve never noticed the color changes in the prefire phaser strips. Do you need to go frame by frame to see it?
Yes, it is less apparent in the original SD release, and the effect is mostly confined to the close up EC featured in the video. Most of the rest of the phaser effects in the episode are the standard effects used throughout the series.
One possible reason/theory the phasers in TOS and TMPs is due to federation phasers only being able to fire a single frequency at a time, while TNG they possibly had the ability to fire multiple frequencies that then comes out orange.
@Scott Billingham Thanks for the info. to clarify, I was suggesting that beam weapons were color coordinated with the blood. Not focusing on the blood itself.
STO players have been asking the Dev's to give them variable colored weapons for ages and the developers have stated they can't because CBS have very strict rules on exactly what weapons can be what colours, and yes it does come down to frequencies with their explanation being that different frequencies have different particle effects .
Well, the real reason is the effects team couldn't be bothered to be consistent. But, if we do want to embrace the coloring like you propose here, I think we can actually explain it even a little better. Now, we know shields need a frequency and you can fire through them with the right frequency, so maybe it is related to that, but that still doesn't explain the inconsistency of hand phasers. However, since we're dealing almost exclusively with the original series here, maybe it is just as simple as their tech of that period didn't really concern itself with locking down a frequency and as such, over time, tended to drift giving different colors. By TNG tech had changed to lock down those frequencies a lot better resulting in the color being far more consistent.
What about the possibility that TOS equipment wasn't refined enough to produce a consistent frequency, and so the color varied due to imperfections in its manufacture/materials/assembly?
Maybe the colours varied because the weapons would be alteted in how they operated, perhaps in order to prevent premature wearing of some component(s)?
In all the series, the phaser beams are seen exiting the phaser over several frames. This means that phasers aren't just slower than light, they're slower than bullets! You could just duck and get out of their way! Also, at 2:04, you can actually see the beam being sucked back into the phaser.
Color denotes frequency. There's much talk in at least 90s-era Trek about phaser frequency. The reason that you can still get a kill with different colors would be based on the intensity of the energy - not the frequency. (if we were to use the metaphor of sound, pitch and volume are different! phaser color is more like pitch than volume)
I feel like the canon explanation (at some point) was that TOS phasers were of Andorian design? Maybe in the Enterprise episode where the Terrans steal the Constitution class Defiant? I think in the case of TOS, the remaster should take precedent over the original, as the original's effects were... incredibly budget constrained.
Interesting fact: thought the TNG and DS9 technical manuals both suggesting that starship combat maneuvers usually happened in hundreds of thousands of kilometers, by now the only trek series (even including movies) that did represented such a combat scale on special effect shots is still the TOS. (of course we know the true reason maybe just because BVR combat shots are cheaper when making special effect)
It's important to remember that this show started in the 1960's, and it's necessary to consider the attitudes and mindsets of the time. These were mood phasers.
The sporadic colors were due to the special FX farmed out to different lighting companies.
Legit Post is Legit.
Also I imagine whoever was making the effects were considering not only what looked best in that particular shot, but the quality of both the broadcast signals and the TVs receiving those signals at the time.
I think your observation about the color of the beam changing as they rotated frequency in Best of Both Worlds was a good catch. And it makes a lot of sense. Color in light is based on the frequency of the EM wave.
I was hoping he was going to use that as the basis of his argument, as I noticed the different colors in that episode and have always wondered how it affected the TOS canon of beam colors.
Aren't phasers actually particle weapons i.e. 'rapid nadeon' beam?
@@sununconquered Indeed they are, but they're carried by a beam of light to get to their target.
@@sununconquered all energy waves have a color.
Wave frequency is related to wave energy. Since all that waves really are is traveling energy, the more energy in a wave, the higher its frequency. The lower the frequency is, the less energy in the wave. ... When it comes to light waves, violet is the highest energy color and red is the lowest energy color.
Phasers are in fact particle beam weapons.
A particle beam is a stream of charged or neutral particles, in many cases moving at near the speed of light.
There is a difference between the creation and control of charged particle beams and neutral particle beams, as only the first type can be manipulated to a sufficient extent by devices based on electromagnetism. The manipulation and diagnostics of charged particle beams at high kinetic energies using particle accelerators are main topics of accelerator physics.
Because they are weapons based on electromagnetism (IE light as a propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields. More generally, the existence of electromagnetic radiation: coupled electric and magnetic fields traveling as waves at a speed equal to the known speed of light.) colors are produced.
Drive is 32 minutes
Maybe TOS needed to rotate frequencies, so the bank would not burn out single frequencies and thus last longer. By the movies this problem could have been overcome so they just use the one that is slightly more efficient / better for the shield frequency, but retains the ability to alter frequencies (BoBW), for example for maintenance of certain frequencies (idk...) or use cases that require a specific frequency.
Maybe each shipyard built from local resources. Lots of cobalt (and Andorian weapon engineers) in-system, so build blue phasers - lots of iron in-system, so build red phasers - etc. You never know which varieties of crystals and coils and capacitors the local refit shop or local quartermaster will issue, or where they came from, and you don't care if they meet all the modular component specs.
This also offers an "in universe" explanation for TOS-era weapons (and ship hulls) changing colours. And an explanation for TNG-era replicator-made uniformity.
This is a pretty clean potential explaination
"Charge phaser banks and prepare to open fire!"
"Hang on a second... What day is it, sir?"
"It's Thursday."
"Thursday, hmm? That's... green, correct?"
"No. It was green yesterday. Thursday is orange."
"Are you sure? I thought Tuesday was orange."
"Only on the second Tuesday of the month. Tuesday is normally pink."
"Okay, thanks. Orange phaser banks ready, sir!"
"Belay that... The enemy must have gotten bored and flown away."
That took some time to type up
Phasers, not Fizzbin.
See, now that makes me think of Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen thinks he's in a basement set and goes, "Okie dokie, let's fire blue particle cannons full, red particle cannons full..."
😂😂
You could change them to any one of 65535 colors. Most weapons officers left it set at default, but some were prone to screwing around and trying different colors. Blue for Federation Day, Green for Klingon Kwanza, etc.
I have a feeling that the beam color for the ships was because of the special effects capabilities of the time. They were probably experimenting on the fly with what color they could create compared to the footage they had and trying to see what worked best to actually show up on the image
bunnygrill: and production costs. The sound was cicadas and that was the only reason for transporters (hangers and landing craft cost too much)
Also TOS had absolutely the best photon torpedo launch sound.
I agree, it just sounds so nice
Anyone know how they made it? Sounds like a simple metallic sound run through some spring reverbs to the point of unrecognizable distortion.
And the best sounding doors, turbo lifts, food dispensers and transporters
I did some research and found all the TOS sound effects on a site called TrekCore. This led me to sites that explained that Roddenberry wanted a sound effect for everything, and for each set to have unique associated sounds.
Turns out the photon torpedo effect was one of the few borrowed sound effects. It was borrowed from the "skeleton ray" sound in War of the Worlds, though the TOS sound guys added compression and distortion. All I can find out about the skeleton ray effect is that it came from an electric guitar and two reverbs. I think War of the Worlds sound guys cut a guitar string to get the sharp attack.
and sometimes the phasers sounded like torpedos too, and.. flew like them.
I'll be honest, TOS is really, really terrible at maintaining any consistency. And really, can you blame them? It was a low budget TV show in the 60s with only a minor following. It wasn't the monolithic franchise that it would become. It was just, "Captain Kirk is firing his ray-gun in this shot. We need you to superimpose the effect as cheaply as possible."
Sure... And we loved every minute of it. 😀
TOS was not low budget, not for its time. It may be hard to believe but it had a comparable budget to the Mission: Impossible series that CBS was also producing and often went over budget for its episodes. The only reason it seems so low budget is because the effects technology available to the production team was not up to the task of what they wanted to do.
Centurian128 That and the fact that they kind of over step their means even with that healthy budget so the actual show tended to make do with recycled shots.
Honestly it was a high budget show for the era. It's only considered low budget 'now' because we can do basically all the visuals on your desktop of choice and the sets are fairly minimalistic when they aren't outright recycling existing sets of other shows.
The continuity problems have been VASTLY overstated. Like here - there's no reason to assume phasors would be a constant color, since there are a huge number of different setting combinations.
In all but a few instances, you only find discontinuity if you assume discontinuity going into the question.
Makes sense that conditions on various planets would require frequency adjustments for optimal performance. That would explain the wide range of colors seen in some instances in TOS beyond just random changes.
This planet has too much argon...set phasers to purple.
Kirk: Does this phaser color clash with my uniform?
Perhaps no setting adjustment necessary ... the beam simply appears to have different colours in different atmospheres?
Although I admit breathable atmospheres must have similar enough compositions that such a phaser-colour-shifting phenomenon would likely be minimal (or trivial).
I look at a modern analogy to this problem. Different shells/missiles are used for different targets. Maybe blue frequencies works better on Klingon shields that red, or green works better for defeating federation shields.
The electromagnetic spectrum's various frequencies is literally why there's a rainbow of colors. It seems so simple and obvious in retrospect! XD
The first thing that came to mind when i saw the title of this video. Different colors, different frequencies.
Obvious but not consistent. This video already points out low phaser-colour consistency in TOS/TOS-R and the better phaser-colour consistency of TNG.
But then we have final seasons of DS9 and every season of VOY ... and all the TNG-era movies ... with all sorts of ad hoc Treknobabble frequency rotation, modulation, and phasing tricks which never actually changed the phaser colours (often because space battles recycled existing footage).
I still kinda like the idea that the phasers are different settings ( consistent or not, I like the idea). I always just thought orange was the color of a phaser a "full power" at least during TNG.
For me it was always obvious that color of phaser is related to it's frequency, after all we can see its light (like light bulbs with neon, argon etc. got different color, but its elementary school knowledge)
I love your work!
I'm not really phased
...I see what you did there....
But you are stunned?
ba dum tiss
It’s just a phase
This joke is disrupting my day
THANK YOU OMG THANK YOU I had a debate with some dude for like an hour about this same thing until eventually I just found that episode and showed it to him, dude you are brilliant
I always figured after TOS, the color change was due to the fact that they channel the phasers through the main engine and therefore it gives a different color than in the TOS. I know that still doesn't explain a lot of the inconsistencies, but it's fun to think about :D
"TOS doesn't get the respect it deserves"....ehhhhh
Everything about Star Trek from 09 onwards has been a love letter to TOS, from the films, TV series, fan videos, podcasts and everything else
ATM it feels like Trek IS just TOS with TNG+ being seen as optional extras.
If anything TOS gets too much respect, leading to people getting antsy about "CANON VIOLATIONS" about a series that wasn't focused on world building so much as episode to episode morality plays (United Earth Starfleet? Vulcanian? etc etc)
i for one want to see more progression and less regression or down right retcons. i worry that stp is going to be too much picard and not enough star trek and the only thing we will be left with is, ughh, discovery.
Hello there, Star Wars fan here. It looks like there's a pattern here...
Original content is loved, but has some consistency problems (minor in case of SW).
New content is out. While better overall, the old one is preferred by the fans.
Time passes, nothing major comes out.
Something eventually comes, but based on the original content. BUUUUUT the new content is like the original only on the surface, as it is just an pretty shell with bad writing and political statements inside.
Am I wrong on something? Please let me know! And no, the Prequels actually have a better story overall.
No shame in liking the new Star Wars movies and Star Trek content, but please understand that modern cinema and tv are quite dull... They forgot they should tell a story instead of lecturing us about politics.
>love letter
is this a joke?
everything from 09 onwards has been a lobotomized tos
@@bluecaptainIT also a star wars fan and I agree with you. i believe it to be the main problem with the sequel trilogy. pretty or cool scenes with a story built around them, but without much thought put into how to get from pretty scene to the next one. its why the movies while nice looking feel disjointed from movie to movie and at times from sequence to sequence.
i'm also willing to go out on a limb and say its why the star wars story movies (rogue one, solo) and the Clone Wars, Rebels and Mandalorian series feel better, they have a cohesive story to tell and do a good job of giving natural character growth without just giving a character what they need at any given time because they need (blank) for the scene to work
Yeah, there's a difference between a love-letter and nostalgia-baiting to make a quick buck while simultaneously butchering all of the spirit and point of the originals. 09 onwards Trek has been. . . anywhere between rough to disaster.
Love this channel! Star Trek lore is certainly a strange thing to navigate when it comes to explaining the budgeting of TOS, and you do a great job!
Dude that was a really good video. I didn't know the different colors means different frequencies. That makes sense and it's cool.
can you explain why in the newer shows and movies they stopped using Continues phaser Beams and instead switched to short Pulses ? especially with hand held weapons. it makes no sense since it seems less useful , and it seems they only did the change to look more like star wars
because it allows for higher accuracy and such - controlled bursts allow for better aim than just a continuous beam, where if your target is moving fast enough, perhaps a large amount of it would just fire off into space, wasting energy
@@starsilverinfinity but it's much easier to aim a continuous beam since you can see where it's going and can adjust your aim as you're firing until you hit your exact target.
i'm talking specifically about hand held phasers
@@NitpickingNerd same thing as before - better accuracy and less energy waste
I think from a showmakers perspective the pulse-weapons are just a better weapon. They are flashier and make a fight generally more interesting, because you have tons of pulses flying around as opposed to the "old" TNG phasers which would through some magic lock on to the right target themselves at a weird angle and instantly incapacitate anyone that gets hit. Meanwhile with pew-pew phasers you can get characters missing shots and "only" be injured when hit (though sadly that stupid incineration-setting has made its way into DSC aswell...)
IRL the continuous beams were cheaper effects than animating multiple beams on screen, at least they were In the time of TOS and TNG. By the time DS9 went all digital effects it wasn't much of an issue, but wasn't changed to keep consistency.
They use pulses now because some people think they look more "actiony".
You should do a video about how the tiny hand phasers in TOS were super powerful, then became less powerful in TNG, and then finally turned into the weakest phasers, the giant phaser rifles in DS9 and Voyager. Also, everyone knows purple is the most powerful color.
MM Purple...Polaron flavored
Poloron had no safety
I live alone with my cat. 56 years old, done with women so I love this channel! Glad I subscribed! Not kidding.
Another question thats been bugging me - now explained
thanks!
He got it wrong...color does equate to power and BoBW said as much. We know it scientifically as well.
saquist BoBW? And phasers aren’t lasers sooo
@@starsilverinfinity, it doesn't matter they both make use of the boson called photons whose power can be measured in modulations of coherent frequencies.
Something's visible color is just how different frequency/wavelength settings look to the human eye. Different color lasers are literally just different wavelengths/frequencies. So a Green laser is just a different frequency setting from Orange.
@@marineplaysairsoft with different frequencies come different power levels. This is displayed in Red shifting and Blue shifting.
This is why if warp drive was real all the radiation impacting the warp bubble would result in a planet destroying Gamma Ray burst when the ship exits warp.
In other words the warp field is compressing the normal harmless light from stars, blue shifting it into lethal waves of Gamma Ray Energy.
Hmmm...
Different colours of particle weapon emissions would imply different wavelengths. That's directly related to the energy content of the discharge. So technically, particle energy weapons discharges that appear red would be the weakest, while those appearing blue would be the strongest/ most powerful.
Good video! When I watched the original series as a child, I noticed the different colours but never thought about it. I just accepted it and moved on. Simple me :)
I honestly never noticed the color differences in Best of Both Worlds! That's cool.
Just like when the phasers were fired out of different parts of the _TOS Enterprise_ in different episodes. (Dome under saucer/ where the _TMP refit 'observation deck'_ would go.)
Seems the SFX crew didn't have a 'story bible' yet, to keep consistency.
P.S. in _TNG's Darmok,_ we see phasers coming out of the forward torpedo tubes: and return fire glancing off the hull _(without anyone shouting 'shields have failed'.)_
I always thought that was a reference to TOS inconsistency...
actually, per Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, I believe the refit observation deck is on the back side of the saucer. But I may be thinking of the rec deck.
It’s important to note the Constitution in both Prime and Kelvin were built expressly for the purposes of exploration and as such were designed to be the single most adaptable and customizable ships in the fleet. With the sheer number or frequent refits and changes made to both vessels it would stand to reason they are constantly messing with phase placement.
The Torpedo tube phaser was a special effects error on part of the production crew. This was fixed for the VHS and DVD releases. This video actually shows the DVD version of that scene at 0:22.
@@hudsonball4702 Thanks! (Of course, the stardrive-section fires phasers from that location anyway...)
"What color do you want the phasers today captain?" "I'm feeling a bit blueish green today."
They retconned the shit out of the power level of Starfleet ships in TNG. Kirk's Enterprise could travel to the edge of the galaxy, the center of the galaxy and through time relatively easily. They could fight literal gods with 1701/A and have at least a fighting chance and/or actually win. NCC-1701D/Defiant/Voyager were completely powerless against anything similar that we see on those shows.
Someone should do a Star Trek vs Star Wars video using TOS power levels.
Kirk: "Heh, you made me use 10% of my power."
@@ussbased-a7074 Kirk passes through the galactic barrier at 100% power
My theory is that the original Enterprise under Kirk encountered so many advanced technologies and improvements (Kelvan speed boosts and the like) and that the Enterprise crew was already a little rogue and would try things that the rest of the fleet wouldn’t dream of, it resulted in a ship that wasn’t even fully understood by Starfleet’s engineers and couldn’t exactly be replicated. This might explain why in Star Trek 5 they broke the ship by initially taking it to speeds available only to the first Enterprise at the time. Scotty remarks how the ships seems to have been built by “monkeys.” Well it might seem that way if you are a super genius miracle worker who has spend his whole live optimizing one ship with alien technology not available anywhere else in the galaxy.
One thing comes to mind from the Axenar pilot, 'The Andorians were happy to sell us the phasers.'
There's no reason phasers should operate on a visible wavelength other than cinematic effect.
I agree. ST TOS deserves more credit. Thank you.
Very interesting, EC Henry. I never noticed the colours in TOS and early TNG, but I have noticed that later TNG, DS9 and VOY seem to favour ORANGE phaser beams throughout.
The classic TOS phaser sound is actually the classic cartoon tyre / feet skidding sound (Tom & Jerry, etc.) speed up incredibly fast and looped.
Thank you for this! There are so many assumptions made by fans that have been reinforced over the past 50 years that make people jump to bad conclusions about what is and isn't "canon" (not that continuity has ever been the franchise's strong suit). But you demonstrate again and again that often, whether something is "canon" or not is essentially subject to one's imagination and understanding of what actually was, not what's come to be accepted by a vocal segment of the fandom.
Appreciate your work!
Back when I had the free time to play Star Trek Online, I remember how different energy weapons had their own colors. Phasers-Orange, Disruptors-Green, Plasma-Light Blue, Tetryon-Blue, Polaron-Purple, Antiproton-Red. I just assumed they were fixed because I did not pay attention to the actual show that closely. Love this video's explanation!
Or we could just assume that the various colors for phasers were to allow them to be visible on black and white television sets, which were still the norm in the late 1960s.
That was really interesting! I've never even thought about it before.
Your channel is excellent, thanks for the upload! I was very curious about this
3:09 If referring to the TOS Balance of Terror those pulse phasers were actually the Photon Torpedo - screen writers got the name wrong which was corrected for every other episode
Nice video thanks! When is Pacific 201 coming out?
A thing I noticed which isn't canon but might be interesting.
I'm one of the Axanar videos they said that the Andorians were happy to give the Federation the phasers, so Andorian made weapons. Andorians have light blue beam weapons in Star Trek Enterprise.
So given that in Axanar's lore they were making the Ares class only a few years before the Constitution class maybe that's why TOS phasers were blue, since they were Andorian made.
I might be totally wrong but I like this little idea I came up with.
Edit: and he says that in the beginning of the video xD my mistake.
Great observations. I feel rare in that I like TOS and TNG about the same.
If I was too guess, since different frequencies have different colors, I would've guessed that phaser tech in the TOS era wasn't consistent in keeping frequency, and they got better at it during the movie time period and the next generation. But ENT kind of messes that idea up. But, ENT phasers were considered to be "low-yield", so maybe it was easier to keep frequency at lower yields, and the higher yields of the TOS era required more expertise in keeping frequency, which was mastered during the time period of the movies and the next generation. That's what my thought process was. Also thanks for bringing up the color change during Best of Both Worlds, a lot of people forget that.
nicely done! the use of ship's phasers on stun in 'A Piece of the Action' was always one of my favorites. it seems, to me to be a hilariously 'Federation' move they never used; "all batteries, set to maximum stun, compute optimal strafing pattern. put the whole continent to sleep, fire when ready."
Great video! I didn't know about the inconsistency (I've only watched the remasters), but I found learning about it really interesting.
Also can I ask where in the original series pulse phasers are shown? I don't have any idea where they are shown in the first season of TOS. Thanks.
I'm wondering that too. I recall photon torpedoes on the old show were usually a bluish white but sometimes red. Maybe he's confusing the red photons with pulse phasers?
For the TNG phasers from Best of Both Worlds, the momentarily green appearance of the phasers was because they were firing through the Borg tractor beam. IRL it was likely an unintentional effect of layering the tractor beam effect over the phaser effect. In-universe, it was just the effect of viewing the phaser beam from within the wider tractor beam which it was partially obscured by.
I totally agree with you. TOS is awesome and besides this nice little Corellian Freighter, the original Enterprise is my most favorite Ship of all. ^^
After the Borg episode, I think I just concluded color was based on frequency which is true to real life. Colors are just frequency.
I like the rotating phaser frequencies explanation. It just makes sense
Ive got a few questions : $1 I got my enterprise lighting kit today and I'm wondering what that metal round hickey do is. It looks like a power plug in. Also what's the polarity on the MEDS. ? Is the long lead positive or is the short lead
? I forgot since it's been a few years since I've built an LED kit.
You could also chock the different colors up to the phaser arrays being produced by different manufacturing processes for the emitters.
There are TOS phasers in the hit game Star Trek: Online and they are fully blue.
So Am not sure why they are not considered "blue" or even "aqua"
Plasma beams and torpedoes are also blue.
But how can we see the light at all, and what is its cause? My guess is that the visible light emitted from the beam has something to with particle decay or particle interactions within the phaser particle beam.
good question!
IRL a powerful beam of positive ions that was neutralized at the end of the weapon (helps with beam focus) can produce a small amount of light due to the electrons used for neutralization gradually moving into low energy states. For an extremely powerful particle beam of Trek tech level, that could even create a movie-style bright beam. However, particle beams are useless in atmosphere, so this explanation doesn't really apply.
To be fair, "we" aren't the only ones who forgot about stuff like wide-beam phasers. The writers usually forgot how useful they would be in many episodes.
I had the Idea of a Resistance K-Wing, Resistance U-Wing, Resistance E-Wing, Resistance T-Wing, and RZ-3 A-Wing. Because your Star Wars models are Amazing.
The one that always bothered me was DS9’s Way Of The Warrior. In almost every case Klingon phasers/disrupters are green, but in this one instance (at least in DS9) they have these giant red beams. This is minor as it is a great episode.
Gavin Smiley Star Trek Online introduces a type of red forward firing disruption mega gun on their TOS style D9-class. This might explain that weapon.
Perhaps phasers (like lasers) are essentially invisible to the naked eye in space. Only visible when travelling through a dense medium (like an atmosphere) or when striking a dense object (like the target).
And perhaps their advanced ship computers automatically overlay visual colours and effects onto these beams when displaying them on consoles or the main viewscreen, shift the invisible spectra into realtime visual simulations. So that the Captains and crews of the ships can actually see what's happening while shots are being fired. And perhaps we, the audience, are privileged to share this view.
And perhaps each Captain or each console operator can configure these overlays with whatever colours and effects they prefer.
What is this for a shot at 3:30? It looks so great!
fantastic content as always!
So the differing phaser hues are the result of being set at differing frequencies and modulations?
please do a 3D redesign of the Imperial I or II SD with improvements to its structure and weapon compliment that overall improve its performance while still sticking to the Tarkin Doctrine, would love to see what your version would entail
Good video! Sounds like the colors (sorry, US spelling is my thing) are more or less random. It all depends on what the effects guys thought were cool. But if folks want to rationalize all of this, that's good too. It makes the ST universe all the more richer. Many thanks!
I've always loved the Delta 7 starfighter from star wars. Though I think it would have been amazing as a space superiority fighter. Would love to see you do a model of the next gen delta 7 designed to be the equivalent or superior to the x wing.
Could you please make a Video about how the Phasers are functioning? I love these cool Weapons who are so different from these common "many pulses after another"-Laser Cannons.
There were multiple settings on the phasers. Several stun settings alone. In "The Man Trap" we see a short stun burst that leaves the victim conscious. The longest firing was in "The Cage" transmitting ships power. The color could merely have been a power designator so the user would know what setting it was on without looking. Also consider disruptors that had no visible beam. The visible beam could have a targeting beam like our own laser targeting designators.
In the actual LASER side: In the U.S. military, colored lasers are sometimes used as a visible marker so the shooter can see where the invisible high-powered laser is aimed at the target. (Actually, so that outside observers can see the intended target as well.) In Sci Fi, a similar methodology could be followed.
I'm just still wondering why the tos phasers on the Enterprise have a stun setting
Same reason as why the hand units do, to incapacitate a large group rather than kill them.
I'm wondering how?
Able to knock out everyone in a couple of city blocks from orbit, no injuries.
In star fleet battles *SFB* they mention in a short story that it's Tridee myth and when they have to knock someone out from orbit for a stealth mission, they just teleport a large amount of water above them which falls and hits hard enough to KO the target, but not kill them.
The bigger question is why they didn't use it more. The only time I remember is 'A Piece of the Action', but there were many times when it would have been useful, especially if they were willing to go ahead and stun Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
casbott In real life we have devices that can incapacitate large groups of people with sonic waves. I see no reason why the as yet fictional nadeon particles can’t be set to a frequency that produces similar effects.
Also worth noting that Janeway threatens to vaporize Henry Starling’s building using Voyager’s shipboard phasers. Now this may have just been an empty threat considering Temporal prime directive implications and the fact that Chuckles and herself were still in the building but it does suggest the potential range of power that shipboard phasers are capable of exerting on a surface from orbit.
Because on TNG they said rotate phaser frequencies we know that there are different powers of phasers. For instance the frequency of a wave is directly proportional to the energy of a single particle in a wave.
So a blue phaser would be more powerful than a red phaser as it's higher on the EM spectrum.
This could just represent the amount of power going into the phaser array at the time.
That's not really how laser power works. It's not "This beam emitter can produce 10^30 photons per second. What color do we want them to be?" A 1 MW red laser produces more photons than a 1 MW violet laser, so they both emit the same amount of power even though the violet photons have more energy individually.
They're *phasers*, not lasers, and isn't part of the EM spectrum, so there's no reason to think frequency is proportional to energy. It's science fiction. It's intentionally different from actual real-world tech. Roddenberry specifically used a made-up word and didn't use lasers because he didn't want science fact to catch up with the show and prove that what they were doing with the technology was impossible. Can we all please stop pretending there's an explanation now? It's make-believe.
Correct phaser color correlates to power
@@rogerschneider5971
Roger, I don't want to insult you but what you said is stupid. It's why i'm constantly disappointed with Star Trek fans who you'd think would be scientifically savvy or at least receptive. Gene Roddenberry thought far more carefully about the scientific reality of the show. He wanted to have as much semblance of reality as possible. He created Time Warp because he read and understood General Relativity (probably better than most). The episode BEST OF BOTH WORLDS absolutely shows that "UPPER EM BAND" correlates to the blue color in the phasers. We see in when Enterprise fires and we see it when the Away Team disables the Borg Cube. This also occurs in reality. I'm not sure why you would say or think otherwise.
@@saquist I say it because it's true. I teach physics. I'm well-aware of the relationship between color (frequency) and energy. The thing is, that energy you're referring to is the energy of a photon. There's no reason to think phasers are beams of photons. If they were, they'd be lasers, and Roddenberry went out if his way to coin the term phaser to avoid the use of the word laser specifically so comparisons with lasers wouldn't be made.
I can easily see different frequancies of Phaser blasts showing a different color.
Remember that light colors depend on the freq of the light.
And as the phaser tech advance and Starfleet found ways to put different amount of power through the phaser beam they settle on a good multi-purpose frequency to use, and just change the point X frequency of it, AKA what is the difference between red and crimson.
As an SF writer myself I suggested that when a hand weapon was fired the beam itself was invisible, but the air along the line of the beam would be ionized. The colour of the flash then depended on the relative abundance of noble gases in the atmosphere.
YAAAAY SOMEONE ELSE GOT IT! XD Thank you EC Henry!
Also remember, beams interact with their environment. Varying concentrations of atmospheric gases could cause the beams to scatter different colors. Out in space, even. Remember those "Bussard Collectors"? There are molecules (solar and cosmic winds) to be collected, and they can possibly affect things as well.
Can you please address where the phaser and photon emitters are on the TOS enterprise.
Lore reloaded’s next video “did the q tamper with phaser colour schemes in the tos era”
2:27 I always asumed the phaser beam looked green because it was trying to over the borg tractor beam to destriy the tractor beam source.
Makes total sense to me. Back in the day phaser frequencies were rotated far more often dependant on situation until a coverall frequently was found that worked for most situations... Until the Borg turned up...
Ds9 had phaser sweeps in each room at federation headquarters.
What I learned today: phasers have colors.
Different colors because of different frequencies makes most sense tho.
totally agree with the posters saying that color is a function of the frequency setting. The Best of Both Worlds episode shows that very well.
I think the Notion that all phasers were the same color was bolstered if not started from STO ( Star Trek Online ) which color coded all damage type to be a specific color. Phasers were orange, Disruptors were green, Polaron were purple, Plasma were Blue-green.
People who got into Trek through STO may have the misconception that colors are more fixed than they are, but the shows and movies never established such color patterns.
In Star Trek voyager episode janeway talks to Kim about the old starfleet and “what we take advantage of today” she mentions “no phasers” “no holodecks”
I don’t know if she means phaser strips or phase cannons I think the early TOS phase weapons are not the same as voy era phasers
Yo henry, does having the footage run in that "viewscreen" save your videos from being claimed by the acoustic people at CBS/Paramount?
Could be like tracer rounds
To identify friend and foe (or in this case what type or power phaser your firing)
Edit: I realize tracer rounds are primarily to hemp with accuracy (but with a phaser there is not drop off from gravity)
We did not get pulse phases in the original series. What you showed was a photon torpedo. The script writers goofed. In every other episode where they fired photons it looked just like that picture you showed.
Some see TOS as an outlier, I see it as standing above the rest! 😉
Same here!
I try to enjoy it, but it just doesn't have the same kind of feel as 90s trek. I grew up never having seen any of TOS, but watching TNG and VOY constantly. It seems like half the episodes are about the crew getting easily tricked by beautiful women, when they're meant to be the military and not get tricked so easily. There are definitely good episodes though. It feels more like a bad rip off of the twilight zone sometimes though. And there's no room for the characters to breathe. It's all plot. Like in the 90s treks, they all had a ton of scenes in every episode where the characters had scenes talking about how they were feeling going through some traumatic event, or character building, showing all different kinds of sides of characters, like you know that Worf hates surprise birthday parties. In TOS it's just scene after scene that only talks about the plot and nothing else, and the character of these characters is merely implied, like you get a line where Bones is annoyed at spock again for some reason, but you never got to see why there's tension there in the first place, or some kind of arc and resolution with that, it's just apparently set in stone that sometimes there's that sort of friendly tension between them and they never show why. It's not enough in TV and movies and plays to just _say_ something is there, you have to follow the rule of "show don't tell". It's like in writing its considered amateur to keep saying "Jeff was angry", "Bill was in love", "Jane was happy", instead of _showing_ they have those feelings by their actions. The TOS movies are a lot better at this however. They show for instance Kirk being depressed at not being a captain any more, and the tension between him and the new enterprise captain because he just commanders the ship.
@@duffman18 finally someone said it who is not me. I was also annoyed by the constant "women tricks the crew" thing and there really nothng was "going on" on the course of the show. The first and thr last episode were just like any other. Also we almost didn't get to see anything about the characters. I can't understand how can be the original the no1 trek for so many people when compared to the 90's trek it lacks so much things. On the other hand the movies are great and adressed all these problems. I still remember watching the motion picture which seems to be the movie everyone hates on the internet, a lot of them calling the slowmotion pic. Well i remember it was miles better then tos and think it's a really good movie. Finally it dealt with more characrer stuff and was considerably more sense of danger than the "unimportant nameless redshirts die" trope in tos. I have similar problems with firefly, which is also praised to no end. The setting, the visuals and characters are all very well establsihed and executed. The problem is that again, over 14 episodes there isn't anything going on besides some people want to get river for his mind in 2-3 episodes. The crew just wandering around space without any clear motivation. Also there isn't much lore or maybe non at all except a war in the past which is why some people hate each other but that's pretty much it.It's a good series nonetheless and yes it had potental had it not been cancelled but i fail to see why people praise the shit out of it with just these 14 episodes + movie. And the lack of episodes is not an excuse. Stargate sg-1 for example did much more things with a movie + it's first 14 episode. The episode "the torment of tantalus" which is the 10th ep. in s1 has so many thing going around that i'm hyped to see more of the world, and nor just about the characters.
@@kormosmate2 yeah The Motion Picture is maybe my favourite of all the star trek movies (I love TNG but I hate all the TNG movies for the most part). It reminds me so much of 2001 A Space Oddysey, and has the same running theme of rebirth, and it looks beautiful. Unlike the other movies it's not trying to copy star wars and just be about action, it's pure star trek. I like William Shatner's theory (that he wrote in one of his non-canon star trek novels) that V'ger is what eventually became the Borg, even though that doesn't really work since the borg have been around for millenia according to seven of nine. I didn't like firefly either, and I don't get why it's so highly praised. I guess you either love Joss Whedon's style or you hate it.
@@duffman18 i heard about that v'ger theory too, and if i remember correctly there was timetravel involved too hence s.o.n's claim
It does make sense for phaser weapons to semi randomly change frequencies. If there was a standard frequency, there would be a standard shield, making the standard frequency useless, which in turn would make the standart shield useless because the standard frequency would no longer be standard because no one would use it.
Wait what? I’ve seen Best of Both Worlds dozens of times and I’ve never noticed the color changes in the prefire phaser strips. Do you need to go frame by frame to see it?
You can see it at normal speeds, but might be harder to notice in standard definition.
Yes, it is less apparent in the original SD release, and the effect is mostly confined to the close up EC featured in the video. Most of the rest of the phaser effects in the episode are the standard effects used throughout the series.
It's hard to make out the phaser color because they're firing through the Borg tractor beam.
You can make it out on Netflix
So, why didn't they retcon the phasers to red or orange to be more consistent?
One possible reason/theory the phasers in TOS and TMPs is due to federation phasers only being able to fire a single frequency at a time, while TNG they possibly had the ability to fire multiple frequencies that then comes out orange.
Do you have a speak quirk or is what I hear a regional accent thing. For colors I hear cow-wers and when you say words with O and L together.
On ENT, Humans (red blood) had red beams. Andorians, blue; Vulcans/Romulans, green. I don't recall, but I bet Klingons are purple.
@Scott Billingham Thanks for the info. to clarify, I was suggesting that beam weapons were color coordinated with the blood. Not focusing on the blood itself.
STO players have been asking the Dev's to give them variable colored weapons for ages and the developers have stated they can't because CBS have very strict rules on exactly what weapons can be what colours, and yes it does come down to frequencies with their explanation being that different frequencies have different particle effects .
Well, the real reason is the effects team couldn't be bothered to be consistent. But, if we do want to embrace the coloring like you propose here, I think we can actually explain it even a little better. Now, we know shields need a frequency and you can fire through them with the right frequency, so maybe it is related to that, but that still doesn't explain the inconsistency of hand phasers. However, since we're dealing almost exclusively with the original series here, maybe it is just as simple as their tech of that period didn't really concern itself with locking down a frequency and as such, over time, tended to drift giving different colors. By TNG tech had changed to lock down those frequencies a lot better resulting in the color being far more consistent.
What about the possibility that TOS equipment wasn't refined enough to produce a consistent frequency, and so the color varied due to imperfections in its manufacture/materials/assembly?
Maybe the colours varied because the weapons would be alteted in how they operated, perhaps in order to prevent premature wearing of some component(s)?
In all the series, the phaser beams are seen exiting the phaser over several frames. This means that phasers aren't just slower than light, they're slower than bullets! You could just duck and get out of their way! Also, at 2:04, you can actually see the beam being sucked back into the phaser.
Color denotes frequency. There's much talk in at least 90s-era Trek about phaser frequency. The reason that you can still get a kill with different colors would be based on the intensity of the energy - not the frequency. (if we were to use the metaphor of sound, pitch and volume are different! phaser color is more like pitch than volume)
i like the way it is on star wars where the color of your light saber is based on how evil you are.
I feel like the canon explanation (at some point) was that TOS phasers were of Andorian design? Maybe in the Enterprise episode where the Terrans steal the Constitution class Defiant? I think in the case of TOS, the remaster should take precedent over the original, as the original's effects were... incredibly budget constrained.
Interesting fact: thought the TNG and DS9 technical manuals both suggesting that starship combat maneuvers usually happened in hundreds of thousands of kilometers, by now the only trek series (even including movies) that did represented such a combat scale on special effect shots is still the TOS. (of course we know the true reason maybe just because BVR combat shots are cheaper when making special effect)
First!
Also, I've gotta say I'm really impressed at the amount of work you put into these deep analyses.