Phasers, how do they work?

[His Divine Shadow]

Well?

Personally I think they consist of several, separate components put into one.

First off, one central part is a real, normal laser, which is like a delivery system, secondly we have two more systems, one that transfers electricty, for stunning, another is for transferring nadion particles(the technobabble particle responsible for the NDF reaction).

Now when a ship fires at another ship the laser delivers both an energy beam of an unknown power that heats/melts/vaporizes the enemy hull, the nadion particles delivered along with it do the NDF reaction on the afflicted material, which might be more suspectible to it when they're in an excited state(hot).
This could explain the heating and NDF'ing effects we see.

I also assume they can alter the ratio of nadions in the beam, which is why some newer FX shots show hardly any thermal effects.

[Lord Edam]

I reckon it's something similar toyours, only with less components. Only two, infact.

One that induces ElectroMagnetic effects in the target - it's heated, nerves get fried etc. The other is the Nadion / PooC effect. At the lowest settings it's all induced EM effects, at the highest it's more Nadion than EM. In between it's a mixture of the two.

Targets that can't be PooC'ed would experience just the EM side of the things, the raw power of the phaser.

Targets that can be PooC'ed would experience both the raw power and the PooCing - at higher settings everything is PooCed before any EM effects appear.

[Howedar]

Wizards.