Comments on: Set Phasers to “Vaporize”

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Sun, 13 Nov 2016 06:15:15 +0000

*You can get 1L of water to become 1000L of steam, but A: you'd have to superheat the water to 16 million kelvin, the same temperature as Sol's core, and B: this is plasma, not steam.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 17:12:50 +0000

The original Star Trek got on with the story as well as saving a lot of money with very simple effects. A room with a big TV screen? It’s a starship bridge, now get on with the story. Captain Kirk’s image goes fuzzy, like a TV screen between channels- he’s teleported. Get on with the story. He’s holding a small briefcase? It’s full of antimatter to blow up a planet. Get on with the story. Phasers got the victim offstage as reliably as Davy Crockett Indians falling out of their tree- now you can get on with the story.

The first Star Wars and Star Treks got on with the story a lot better than the sequels.

I like David Drake, but I don’t want to see a movie about dealing with vaporized redshirt goo clogging everything on the Enterprise. Star Trek screenwriters aren’t as good as Drake anyway.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 14:10:49 +0000

For comparison, a modern rifle cartridge delivers roughly 2 kilojoules of kinetic energy, 1/100,000th the energy needed to vaporize a human.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 18:25:08 +0000

A phaser magically dumps all its energy into the target.

A real video of a similar event will be mainly leakage, so the environmental changes will be largely down to leakage.

I roughed out the vaporization energy at 180MJ. About 45 kilograms of TNT. The volume increase isn’t really 1000, it’s about 24. One litre of water becomes 24 litres of steam. Nevertheless, the blast from a magic phaser will be about 45 kg of TNT’s worth, which would indeed wreck the place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7-uJhssw_U

In real life need at least 400 kg of TNT worth of blast to deliver enough energy to the human to vaporize it. (1 ton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAYVMXYYAp4) The damage from the human itself isn’t going to be noticeable. Regular lightning doesn’t vaporize people, so imagine super-lightning with enough current to do so. Whole streets of windows would shatter, at the very least, just from the lightning.

By: Space Nookie

Space Nookie — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:45:03 +0000

To be fair, phaser vaporization looks a lot like transporter teleportation, and I’m sure that saved some money on special effects.