BabelHuber wrote:
I explain it a last time, since I get tired of repeating myself: Sometimes a higher energy output would be advantageous to a situation, like fucking heating up a cover someone hides behind. Since nobody does it, it is not possible.
You've got a chain of logic there, but the last step is assumption contradicted by on-screen evidence. It is this last leap that's at issue. It is not that I am either ignoring or not understanding what you are saying, I am saying I am pointing out a flaw of it which repetition of your point does not address.
No-one does it in combat, but we have seen higher power elsewhere.
We also have other examples of phaser settings that would be tactically useful being drastically under-used, but that also doesn't make wide-beam or such impossible, just oddly underused for not fully understood reasons, as it is demonstrated possible.
Hm, for that matter, on heat, whenever they've heated a rock or such, it's been a longer duration beam. Superheating a quarter-inch patch of a box on a side facing you does not make staying behind cover uncomfortable, a more sustained heating would be needed. Heat beams don't work quite like you assume, it's not just a 'shoot and heat up the whole thing'.
You can point at other examples all day long, but this doesn't change the fact that these other situations occur, too.
So? I don't think you get how proof works. To prove something is possible, it only has to happen once. To prove something is impossible, one example of it happening eliminates that possibility. High settings has happened on multiple occasions and has been used against metal and similar materials, so metal being immune is out, and it not existing at all is out.
All you've demonstrated is that they don't in many situations- which has a variety of possible explanation of which 'can't' is one of the only ones we can rule out. If something both does and doesn't happen in different circumstances, then it is possible, but leaves us with a question of what the differences are.
And you haven't provided a sane explanation for this, just lame excuses why people don't use the settings they should have available according to your theory.
Your opinion on whether or not the explanations are sane doesn't change that here are the facts as they stand-
One, people have used these settings on multiple occasions.
Two, these uses include against metal and other dense material
Three, they have not used them in combat, including against rock and other similar cover, not just metal.
Four, why they do not use them in combat is unknown.
We can speculate as to why, there are multiple logical side-effects of higher settings (ammo usage, amount of beam time on target needed to get the effects, whatever), none of which are proven, but one, two, and three solidly torpedo your thesis here. You cannot get impossibility from the components you have presented us with, and you rejecting possible explanations does not make yours true- other explanations merely need to be possible and not-contradicted by onscreen evidence to have a highly likelyhood of being correct than yours.
