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The answer should seem fairly obvious, however apparently phasers have shown KEW-like effects in the past, and I have heard it asserted that they are in fact a type of kinetic weapon. Is there any type of truth to this? Or is it sheer idiocy (my personal answer)? Hopefully somebody here could provide me with a solid answer.

They can't be either. Their effects are completely incompatible with both. DEW doesn't work because even ignoring the fact that a DEW with enough energy to vapourize a human being would not only result in there being a human being's worth of vapourized matter (which is curiously absent) but wouldn't do that, it's drill a tunnel through said human (likely killing him in the process to be sure but not by complete vapourization) and expend most of its energy on whatever happens to be behind the guy you shot at.
Kinetic weapons don't work either. Phasers display no recoil whatsoever and the only time they DO display clear kinetic impact effects (the Klingon Kirk phasers in TSFS) is completely incompatible with physical impactors.

Ah that's what I figured. The vaporization thing never occurred to be before though. I suppose in the event of true vaporization there would be something of an explosion, which is of course missing.

Batman wrote:They can't be either. Their effects are completely incompatible with both. DEW doesn't work because even ignoring the fact that a DEW with enough energy to vapourize a human being would not only result in there being a human being's worth of vapourized matter (which is curiously absent) but wouldn't do that, it's drill a tunnel through said human (likely killing him in the process to be sure but not by complete vapourization) and expend most of its energy on whatever happens to be behind the guy you shot at.

Sometimes phasers do punch holes into people, examples are in the episodes The Augments and Suspicions. It's only the highest setting that inspires complete disintegration.

This is a rather poorly phrased question, and it ignores the fundamental nature of phasers as a sort of particle beam weapon.

Rather, particle beams, which are DEWs, are also kinetic energy weapons because kinetic energy is the way they do damage to the target. Moreover phasers aren't massless particles, they don't move at lightspeed.. but they do move so they HAVE to have KE by definition. Is the KE a damage mechanism? We don't know, but it's not impossible either. We know phasers can have significant thermal effects but we've never actually witnessed the disintgration mechanism having thermal effects to any great degree.

That out of the way I'm presuming this has something to do with some retarded thread elsewhere, and if so what specifically is it phasers are supposed to be doing?

Connor MacLeod wrote:This is a rather poorly phrased question, and it ignores the fundamental nature of phasers as a sort of particle beam weapon.

Rather, particle beams, which are DEWs, are also kinetic energy weapons because kinetic energy is the way they do damage to the target. Moreover phasers aren't massless particles, they don't move at lightspeed.. but they do move so they HAVE to have KE by definition. Is the KE a damage mechanism? We don't know, but it's not impossible either. We know phasers can have significant thermal effects but we've never actually witnessed the disintgration mechanism having thermal effects to any great degree.

That out of the way I'm presuming this has something to do with some retarded thread elsewhere, and if so what specifically is it phasers are supposed to be doing?

I understand the question is poorly phrased and You guessed correctly. The premise of the current discussion is that the Borg can adapt to KEWs because apparently phasers are now KEWs, so therefore bullets and melee attacks would be worthless against them.

So in all reality it's the same trollercoaster that's been going on for years now.

I thought phasers fired EM and nadion particles in a ratio determined by the phaser's setting...

I would think at most settings the KE is definitely not the damage mechanism.

the atom wrote:The premise of the current discussion is that the Borg can adapt to KEWs because apparently phasers are now KEWs, so therefore bullets and melee attacks would be worthless against them.

That sounds like the work of Borg fanwhores trying to further wank out an already dubious ability...

the atom wrote:So in all reality it's the same trollercoaster that's been going on for years now.

Indeed.

KEWs can cover a gamut of topics, and they won't all behave differently. A knife and a bullet will behave differently. A bullet and a particle beam will behave differently. Hell a projectile itself can behave differently depending on shape, velocity, mass, etc. Much more ifnormation is needed if a comparison can even begin to be made, much less analyzed.

But aren't KEWs strictly speaking a physical impactor of some kind (projectile, melee instrument, etc)?

The particles in a particle beam absolutely are physical impactors. They may be tiny and of little mass, but they're definitely physical, and unlike a knife or a baseball bat, they're also likely going to be moving rather fast. While they're generally treated as a subset of DEW in most SciFi they at the very least have the potential to be kinetic energy weapons.

We got into this one floor up in the Sci-Fi forum earlier today. (Can't remember if you were involved, Batman, so don't hit me for saying something you already know. ) The consensus was that yes, the particles do impart kinetic energy, but subatomic particles don't have enough KE to do anything of note even when accelerated to relativistic speeds, and that the damage done by a particle beam is from the other energy in the beam (heat, electricity, whatever).

StarSword wrote:We got into this one floor up in the Sci-Fi forum earlier today. (Can't remember if you were involved, Batman, so don't hit me for saying something you already know. ) The consensus was that yes, the particles do impart kinetic energy, but subatomic particles don't have enough KE to do anything of note even when accelerated to relativistic speeds, and that the damage done by a particle beam is from the other energy in the beam (heat, electricity, whatever).

I was a part of that conversation, it was in relation to phasers against SG Replicators. And yes, particle beams do tend to use other mechanisms besides KE to do their damage. In the case of phasers, it's the funky effects that nadion particles cause, with their odd NDF/"vapourising"/phaserising/fucking shit out of the space-time continuum business.