List of weapons in Star Trek

The Star Trek fictional universe contains a variety of weapons, ranging from missiles (the classic photon torpedo) to melee (primarily used by the Klingons, a race of aliens in the Star Trek universe).

A directed-energy weapon emits energy in an aimed direction without the means of a projectile. It transfers energy to a target for a desired effect. Intended effects may be non-lethal or lethal. For example, in Star Trek, a hand phaser can be set to "stun" or "kill".

Lasers are a sidearm in the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage", and laser pistols appear in several Original Series episodes, although later episodes in The Next Generation seemed to indicate that the laser's use as a weapon was outdated. In one instance, the ship-mounted lasers of two spacecraft were incapable of overcoming even the navigational shields of the USS Enterprise-D, though on at least two other occasions it was threatened with destruction by laser-armed spacecraft. The Borg cutter weapon is a laser, as mentioned in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who" and is apparently incapable of directly penetrating Federation shielding. (Although it is effective at making 'surgical' incisions into a ship's hull.)

According to The Making of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry claimed that production staff realized that using laser technology would cause problems in the future as people came to understand what lasers could and could not do; this resulted in the move to phasers on-screen, while letting lasers be known as a more primitive weapon style.

When the laser had reached its upper limits of power, a new weapon was invented at Jupiter Station for the newly designed NX-class. This new weapon could fire much greater energies at longer range but the drawback was that continuous fire would cause damage to the emitter. To solve this problem, Starfleet scientists devised a way to fire the weapon in short pulsed burst streams to help regulate the temperatures of the emitters in a state of constant fire. The pulse cannon is a rather simple particle beam weapon and Starfleet Command ultimately decided on using the more powerful plasma cannon on the NX-class Enterprise. The pulse cannon was nevertheless considered an effective energy weapon at the time and was adopted by many private craft such as freighters and privateers due to its lower cost of implementation.

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