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Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!decvax!yale-com!leichter
From: leichter@yale-com.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: Re: startrek error
Message-ID: <1649@yale-com.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-Jun-83 23:39:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: yale-com.1649
Posted: Mon Jun 20 23:39:25 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 21-Jun-83 23:35:00 EDT
Lines: 17

re:  landing party caught and freezing on planet surface:
There IS an attempt to beam a heater and supplies down to the party; it fails
(the stuff arrives non-functional).  As to heating the area with ship's phasers:
Careful watching reveals that phasers have several modes of operation:  stun;
heavy stun; something like stun with no name that kills the person with no
externally visible effects (Anton (?) Coridian dies this way in "The Conscience
of the King"); disintegrate object (makes the "object" hit flash and disappear;
the object is NOT burned up, since things near it are not affected); heat
object shot - mainly rocks, metal doors, and suchlike stuff; and some other
undescribed effect that causes a ship to shake when hit by phasor fire.

It appears that ship's phasors do not have a heat-objects setting.  In the
TV shows, at least, their effect is always of the disintegrate or just generally
damage ship class.  (In TWOK, ship's phasors seem to heat things up; maybe the
design was changed...)
							-- Jerry
					decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale