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In the YATI it says Founders shot with phasers die or revert to their liquid form, so how can the Founder (who is pretending to be Kira being engulfed by a crystal) shoot the crystal (which is really a part of herself)? Well, it seems to me the phaser and phaser beam are just a part of the founder too. After all, Founders aren't seen to use hand-held weapons, preferring to just use their abilities to fight. And we've seen that a Founder can shift into fire, so I'm sure they could shift into a (simulated) phaser beam.

Cant say I recall that scene but that is a cool idea.

Have we ever actualy seen a Founder take on a form with numerous moving parts? Then there's the whole question of how he generated the beams at all.

Well if they can become fire a phaser beam would be to hard. They would look like it but probably not have the same properties. And the "Phaser" could just be a shell to look like a real one.

Perhaps it just created something that looked like a phaser and beam, but was actualy just a solid shape.

Rochey wrote:Perhaps it just created something that looked like a phaser and beam, but was actualy just a solid shape.

They could even recreate a fluid shape - they should probably be able to form the appearance of a phaser beam.

There are a lot of YATIs where you can make up some vaguely plausible explanation for them. I take them as YATIs so long as the episode itself doesn't provide an explanation.

As for Founders firing phasers, if a Founder could produce a functioning phaser beam from its own body then several encounters with them would have gone very differently. The Ship, for instance, or that one where they played hunt the Founder on the Defiant. We've never seen a Founder produce a phaser beam by itself, despite many situations where they would want to.

I'm not sure he ment a real phaser beam but just something that looked like one with out the same properties. So basically a beam of light. And since they can turn into fire that doesnt seem beyond their capabilities.

The difference between a beam of light and a weapon is just wattage

And range and the fact that a founder cant really afford to go "losing" mass by firing a part of themselves away like that. The founder here absorbed their own beam from the sounds of it.

Rochey wrote:Have we ever actualy seen a Founder take on a form with numerous moving parts?

Well, we did see the one that could turn into a spaceship with interstellar travel capabilities, and some sort of sensor equipment that let him scan the runabout Odo was in.

What? When?

Teaos wrote:What? When?

Chimera. The episode with Laas, the changling who could turn into fog or fire.

To be fair, the Founder in "The Ship" was critically wounded. Though I agree that the best a changeling could accomplish is the APPEARANCE of a phaser beam.

I see no reason why the phaser (and the beam) couldn't have been genuine. In "Homefront", when Sisko and the local security mooks were using Odo as a guinea pig for anti-Founder phaser tests, he proved capable of retaining his shape for a couple of seconds against a level 3.5 phaser sweep. If the Founder in "Heart of Stone" set the phaser at, say, level 1, she could probably have endured the beam while retaining her disguise pretty easily.