Designation: Type IIIa Assault Phaser
Length: 850 mm
Mass: 4.05 kg
Effective range: 550m
Rate of Fire: Single shot only
History: The Type IIIa assault phaser was first developed in the aftermath of the Borg incursion of 2365 in order to incorporate lessons learned during the conflict, such as the automatic frequency rotation chip developed by the crew of the Enterprise-D. In order to make full use of this feature, the weapon moved away from the traditional continuous-beam design of Federation weapons towards a pulse-fire design, using technology initially developed for use in the Defiant-class project. With the growth of the Dominion threat in 2371, Starfleet decided that the weapon, at this stage still bearing a considerable resemblance to the earlier Type III, should become the replacement for the earlier weapon, and should be redesigned in order to accommodate the needs of the mass Federation army being developed to face the new threat. This necessitated a move away from the Type II-Tricorder-powerpack combination of the Type III casing which, though effective, required considerable training to use effectively, training which would not be possible given the short time available to produce each trained soldier. In addition, the weapon's firepower and flexibility was significantly reduced from the 16-settings of earlier phasers, capable of vaporising humanoids, to a single killing setting, manifesting as a blast rather than a beam, in order to increase magazine capacity and simplify the design for ease of production. The new design bore a closer resemblance of the projectile weapons used by humans in centuries past than the multi-purpose tools of Starfleet. Moreover, while previous phasers had been tools as much as a means of defending oneself, the type IIIa was intended for a single purpose - to kill the enemy.
The new phaser rifles appearing from First Contact onwards, drawn in Paint from a drawing in the Fact Files, with the history basically explaining a) why they look like proper weapons and b) why they don't make people disappear. The pulse-fire tech from the Defiant, and the idea of it being a much simpler weapon to manufacture are my own ideas, the rotating frequency chip comes from BoBW, and the lack of settings from their use (I don't think we've seen them exibit the range of settings of other phasers). The idea of Starfleet needing an easy-to-use weapon for it's Dominion-War mass army and the concept of the Type III being a Type II, a tricorder and a powerpack in the same casing comes from things I've seen on the web- I saw the ideas, thought they sounded sense, so I put them in.
Only two things are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe: Albert Einstein.
