For this one I wanted to do a phaser rifle in the same style as the Type 1 and Type 2 phasers from the original series. I love the phaser rifle that appeared in Where No Man Has Gone Before, but I love it in a kitschy kind of way, because it's just got that goofy 50s retro future aesthetic going on to such an absurd degree. Whereas the weapons we saw in the series had a real practical look and feel to them. I always felt sad that we never saw a personal weapon bigger than a hand phaser in TOS - it would have been fantastic to see the redshirts carrying rifles around when they were going into danger spots.
I have taken a few liberties with the design, though. More on that in the other images!
Two things that always bothered me about the original series weapon designs are addressed here. One... TOS phasers have no safety that we know of. So I fitted my rifle with a three position safety switch. S is Safe, P is Pulse fire, and B is Beam fire. And yes, it is ambidextrous, with another identical switch on the other side.
The other addition is a trigger guard. I always thought the Type 2 should have had one of these. Gun safety is your friend, especially when your weapon can demolish a building!
Power selector dial. Another minor tweak here - a coloured band differentiating stun settings in green from kill in yellow and vapourise/disintegrate in red.
Behind it is the beam width slider, which lets you vary your beam to fire tight pinpoint beams or a wide field. Original series weapons tended to be a little light on controls, given how many settings you could apparently change on them! It always amused me when Kirk would order people to set phasers on wide beam or something, and they'd pretend to fiddle with the controls when there was no control on the weapon to do that.
The business end! Effectively just a set of nested cylinders, this whole thing took like 60 seconds to make! That said, I didn't do quite enough faces here to give it a smooth surface in close up. Making any model in blender is a compromise - the more faces you have, the smoother and better the shapes look. But when you run over a certain number - around 15 - 20 million - the program gets slow and somewhat buggy.
The stock. One thing that always bothered me about the Type 3 rifle used in The Next Generation was the lack of any kind of stock. And yes, there's (presumably) no recoil from a phaser weapon, so you don't need to brace it as such. But holding a rifle to your shoulder allows for better aiming accuracy!
Anyway, it just looks right for a rifle to have a stock.
One cool feature of the Type 2 is the hand grip, which is a power pack. I figured a rifle would need more power reserves, so I put a foregrip on the weapons which allows it to double up on power packs. I'm not sure I like this idea, however. One thought I had was to make the grip a normal one, no power pack there, and then make that entire forward handgrip a huge detachable power pack. Another was to go with a bullpup style configuration, with multiple power packs at the rear of the weapon. Or perhaps something like the P-90 setup, with a horizontal power pack. You should have more flexibility with power pack location, after all, since there is no mechanical bullet feed to worry about.
Maybe I'll try out some of these other ideas in future. They could be variants of the Starfleet design, or rifles from other races or something.
FIRE!!!!!!
I still such at making energy beams in blender. *Sigh* You'd think there would be a straightforward setting to say something like "Put a light halo around this object", but there isn't.
I always preferred the blue-white phaser beams of TOS (though there were times TOS did red ones) over the orange/red beams of TNG and beyond. I guess they thought orange beams stood out better or something, but the blue-white just looks more powerful to me. Hmmm, I wonder if Discovery will use a blue-white beam? Too much to hope that they'll have laser cannon, I suppose.
So that's my TOS phaser rifle. Hope you like it.
-tech sighting system for sniper applications.
