Talk:Star Trek: First Contact

One point of interest in this movie from a gun perspective is the new phaser rifles, which were developed because of a problem with the original prop.

See, Roddenberry didn't want the Enterprise's crew carrying anything that looked like a gun, so when he got more creative control over Next Generation he replaced the handgun-like Phasers with a thing that appears to be the offspring of a TV remote and a dustbuster. The Phaser Rifle was the same, with an awkward 2-point grip with no stock, and a fakey reflex sight with no second aim point.

The trouble wasn't apparent until the more conflict-heavy DS9; the Phasers were completely impossible to aim consistently, and when it came time for the SFX guys to draw in the beams, as often as not they didn't actually match the barrel axis. This becomes a problem when an actor is trying to make it look like they're lining up a difficult shot only for the gun to seemingly aim all by itself in the final cut. Hence the new rifle prop.

Moral of the story: guns look like guns for a reason. Evil Tim (talk) 01:37, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

I thought the aiming issue only affected the Type I and Type II phasers. The Type I was pretty much phased out since it was too small to be seen in an actor's hand to start with, and the Type II had a redesigned grip. The Type III rifle seen in TNG and DS9 actually had real pistol grips and even real sights. --Funkychinaman (talk) 02:03, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

From what I heard it was the performance of the rifle props as the Dominion War plot arc kicked off in DS9 that caused the creation of the new rifle seen in First Contact. It wasn't really such a problem with the handgun phasers, but at longer ranges and with the rifle having a much clearer axis it was more apparent they weren't shooting straight and that it was the design of the prop that was at fault for it. The best 'aim' you could manage with them would be the equivalent of a shotgun with a front vert grip and no stock. Evil Tim (talk) 02:16, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

But DS9 stuck with the original Type III rifles to the end, or at least until episode eight of the final season, well into the Dominion War arch and well after FC. If I recall, the only time the new phaser rifles showed up in DS9 was when Rom had one in "The Magnificent Ferengi." Voyager switched over immediately though, replacing the silly looking rifles that were introduced with the show. The story I heard was that DS9 flat out refused to use the new Voyager rifles because they looked so silly. Check out phasers.net, it's a fun read. --Funkychinaman (talk) 02:53, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

I seem to recall they showed up a few times in DS9; probably for the rest it was just they had the older props in inventory. Would be interesting to see if there's any correlation between what prop is used and how the actor is actually using it. And yeah, that "compression phaser rifle" looks ridiculous. Maybe they were planning to go to sector Kali-4-nya after checking out the anomaly. Evil Tim (talk) 03:35, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

I used to wonder how the heck they were supposed to hold those compression phaser rifles. But then I saw those California-legal ARs, and it all made sense. --Funkychinaman (talk) 22:19, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

I think the most interesting thing around the older rifle on that site is that the actors can't even seem to decide which grip has the trigger on it; some are holding it with their right hand on the front grip (supported by the diagram), some are holding both grips with their hands fully closed, and poor Avery Brooks is trying to have good trigger discipline with a weapon which doesn't seem to actually have one. Evil Tim (talk) 05:41, 11 September 2012 (EDT)

Plot hole

This has bugged me ever since I saw this movie: if Picard knew that projectile weapons worked well on the Borg, why didn't he immediately start replicating hundreds of old guns to use against them? --Funkychinaman (talk) 02:11, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

The Trekkie answer is that the Borg would adapt, but they can't adapt to knives and adapt to phasers by changing shield frequencies, so it's not at all clear how they could. You can't say the ship doesn't have the patterns because it can make a mechanically sound Tommy gun (and as I recall anything you can pick up in a holodeck is a temporary replicated object, not a hologram). I'm guessing it's because using a sensible solution to a problem wouldn't make up the technobabble quota. Evil Tim (talk) 02:16, 10 September 2012 (EDT)

Although two years after the film came out it was established that Starfleet vessels have a 24th Century kinetic weapon on file. The Wierd It (talk) 09:04, 10 September 2012 (EDT)