Weapons in Star Trek

The Star Trek fictional universe contains a variety of weapons, ranging from missiles (photon torpedoes) to melee (primarily used by the Klingons, a race of aliens in the Star Trek universe). The Star Trek franchise consists mainly of several multi-season television shows and fourteen movies, as well as various video games and merchandise. Many aspects of the Star Trek universe impact modern popular culture, especially its fictitious terminology and the concept of weaponry on spacecraft. The franchise has had a widespread influence on its audiences from the late 20th to early 21st century. Notably, Star Trek's science fiction concepts have been studied by real scientists; NASA described it in relation to the real world as "entertaining combination of real science, imaginary science gathered from lots of earlier stories, and stuff the writers make up week-by-week to give each new episode novelty." For example, NASA noted that the Star Trek "phasers" were a fictional extrapolation of real-life lasers, and compared them to real-life microwave based weapons that have a stunning effect.

The franchise depicts various weapons which mostly fit the motif of the raygun, the most prominent of these being the "phaser". These directed-energy weapons emit energy rather than a projectile, though some (particularly in newer Star Trek shows) do fire bolts/pulses. A hand phaser can be set to "stun" or "kill".

Phasers are common and versatile phased array pulsed energy projectile weapons, first seen in the original Star Trek series and later in almost all subsequent films and television spin-offs. Phasers range in size from small arms to starship-mounted weaponry. Phasers can either fire projectile like energy bolts or directed energy beams like a raygun.

Phaser output can be adjusted in both area of effect and output: a typical hand phaser can be adjusted so that it will merely shock or stun a living organism, while the effects of higher settings range from burning, disintegration, or to true vaporization. This versatility means they can also be used as welding torches or cutting tools, and can create heat sources by firing at a large, solid object (like a rock). The stream can be adjusted to strike multiple targets at once, strike a single target with precision, or even destroy large amounts of material. Phasers can be set to overload, whereby they build up a force-chamber explosion by continuously generating energy without releasing it; the resulting blast can destroy most natural objects within a 50-meter (160 ft) radius. The overload process is marked by a distinctive sound that increases in volume and frequency until it is deactivated or it detonates. Personal phasers can be made small enough to fit in the user's palm and still be lethal. Larger and more powerful phaser rifles are issued to security personnel.

Ship-mounted phasers have a similar range of functions on a larger scale: The phasers on the USS Enterprise can be used as an "anti-missile" defense to destroy incoming projectiles, stun entire city blocks full of people, destroy cities, and even destroy entire asteroids up to a given size. The ship's phaser system is also said to be capable of destroying continents.

Although starships are frequently shown firing their phasers while at Warp speeds across the various Star Trek series, this was generally avoided during The Next Generation, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual states that it is impossible. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, on the other hand, describes an "ACB-jacketed beam device" as the mechanism which allows phasers to function at Warp speeds.

According to later series, phasers release a beam or bolt of fictional subatomic particles called "rapid nadion", which are then refracted ("rectified") through superconducting crystals. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual indicates that the superconducting crystals used in phasers are called fushigi no umi, which is Japanese for "sea of mystery", and the phrase is written ふしぎの海 in the original glyphs. This was a homage to the 1990 anime series Fushigi no Umi no Nadia, known in North America as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.

The phasers in the 2009 reboot film Star Trek appear similar in shape to the classic phasers, but fire singular energy pulses instead of a sustained stream of them, in a fashion similar to semi-automatic weapons. This version of the phaser has two settings, stun and kill, which fire blue and red colored pulses respectively. The barrel of the weapon is two-sided, one being colored red and the other blue to indicate the current setting; the user must manually rotate to the other output to use the other setting. A similar change is seen in the starship-mounted phaser banks, which also fire single energy pulse instead of continuous streams. In Star Trek Beyond, the barrel sides of the sidearm phasers are flat and both barrels shoot blue bolts that deal no physical damage, while the barrel tips are still colored blue and red.