The styling adopted was controversial, deemed in many circles to be 'too aggressive', but the ergonomics studies which had led to the recent Type 3 phaser rifles were clear on the advantages of a 'weaponised' grip/design in combat situations. The front half of the unit is a phased energy emitter, far larger than previous Type 2 designs - and indeed, larger than the older models of the Type 3. Beneath the emitter is a small rail which allows easy fixing of attachments to the weapon - target seeking and aiming assistance devices, micro photon grenade launchers, etc. Behind the emitter is a large capacity power cell, designed for easy of replacement in the field.
But the greatest advantage of the Strike Phaser lies beneath the power cell; a small but powerful isolinear computer system which is capable of modulating the phaser frequency, harmonics, resonance patterns, nutation, polarisation, quantum backscatter, refraction indexing, subspace rebounding, particle density - in all more than sixteen beam parameters, each of which can be adjusted to more than 600 settings. This gives the Strike Phaser more than 4x10^41 different beam setting options, all of which are adjusted randomly by the control system after each discharge. This is claimed to make the Strike Phaser almost impossible to counter - it does not ignore forcefields as such, but rather the constantly varying and completely unpredictable nature of the beam means that it is almost impossible to optimise a forcefield to be immune or even particularly effective against it. Against the Borg, it is expected - hoped - that it will prove impossible to adapt to the Strike Phaser.
