""Phasers are Red, Photons are Blue..."" Topic

… or are they? I can't make up my mind! \(O_o)/

Show of hands please, space-gamers – which colours do you most associate with Phasers and Photorps in the Star Trek setting?

Oh, and the Reason Why, for those interested:

Being an impatient sort of guy, rather than wait for the 'official' X-Wing to Star Trek mod, I've begun trying to work out ways of modding the game myself.

The thing is, Starships carry a LOT more firepower than fighters, and their weapons can engage in more than one 90° arc to the front. So, I'm thinking the ship's base needs multiple arcs – some in colour X for phasers, others in Y for torps.

White. Because my parents were too cheap to buy a color TV.

First time I saw torpedoes when they registered color was when the Klingons were getting beat by V'ger. Phasers didn't stick until Wrath of Khan.

So lots of red.

Phaser – blue
Photon – red
Disrupters – green
Quantum – white

Phaser – organe
Photon – red

No, Vsb, phasers are red. Everybody knows that.
Especially people who just watched "The Corbomite Maneuver".

IIRC, photons are bright yellow.

But there's also this: YouTube link

What Virtualscratchbuilder said!

…Jem' Hadar have a bony ridge,
and Klingons do too..

Oooops! Sorry, thought this was a thread for bad Star Trek poetry

Ditto Virtualscratchbuilder's comment

IIRC, both phasers and photon torpedoes were white in the original series. They looked a little more like a pale gold in TNG.

…strychnine is good for what's ailin' you

Apparently the this is some kind of sf revamp of the Sonics classic…

Hmm… I like VSB's colour code… I think that would work well…

As for bad Star Trek poetry –

I wandered lonely as an Intrepid Class
That floats on high o'er scripts and plots,
When all at once I saw a mass,
A host, of angry Trekkies.

IIRC, both phasers and photon torpedoes were white in the original series. They looked a little more like a pale gold in TNG.

Nope. I've been re-watching TOS, and I can confirm that the original phasers (at least in some episodes) were red.

"Balance of Terror" is coming up on my re-watch queue, so I'll comment on photon torpedoes then.

'photons are red, phasers are blue and if it's a super-nova, it's all over for you…….'

Photons are red and phasers are blue
I wish my shirt was likewise, then I'd make it 'till part II

The original series was all over the place. Early "phaser" shots were re-used later on as photon torpedo shots. Later on the Phasers were the beam weapon we are more familiar with.

Googling up images of "Enterprise Phaser" shows them both red and blue (I remember the red color from "Who Mourns Adonis", blue I remember from the planet killer episode). So pretty much whatever you want is good there.

Looking at Photon Torpedos they are Red, White, and Blue. The Red and White from TOS shows (though one looks like the redone FX that were recently done), while the Movie photons show a red one and a blue one.

IIRC, on the box front of my old SFB, the phaser beams were white (with maybe a blue tinge to them).

Doug

Fed Commander art generally has phasers as light blue, photons as red, disruptors green, and plasma orangey.

I seem to remember in TNG, while fighting the Borg, the Enterprise D phasers changed colors to represent the 'frequency modulation'!

The digitally re-mastered TOS episodes have standardized the FX to depict the phasers as blue. I believe that color is the most canonically correct *for the TOS era*. Although, as has been pointed out, the original source material was all over the place.

Next Gen phasers are orange. I don't know if there was ever much (if, in fact, any) deviation from that.

As meaningless as it may seem to add real world physics to this thread, blue light has inherently more energy (stronger wavelength of light) then red, yellow, green, ect. Violet would have the strongest wavelength, and 'should' have the longest range. Again, I admit the absurdity of trying to add real world physics to this.

Reverse the polarity, man!

As meaningless as it may seem to add real world physics to this thread, blue light has inherently more energy (stronger wavelength of light) then red, yellow, green, ect. Violet would have the strongest wavelength, and 'should' have the longest range. Again, I admit the absurdity of trying to add real world physics to this.

Yep. That was the point of the video link. Ironically, of course, for a laser the best beam wouldn't be in the visible spectrum— and barring someone spraying dust or moisture around the battle area, lasers of any color wouldn't be visible as beams, just circles on the target.

But as the video also points out, a "particle beam weapon" could be both visible and in color. Since a "phaser" is essentially a particle beam weapon, it can be whatever color you want it to be.
So maybe the phaser crews cycle through a "color of the day," or fit the whim of the captain— rather like the constantly changing attire of the bridge crews in TOS (one day Uhuru's wearing red, the next gold). Gotta keep those phasers up with the latest in fashion!

….damn the torpedoes, 'cause I'm firin' them at you.

If cartoons have taught me anything it's that beam weapons are always color-coded; good guys: blues, and bad guys: reds.

Which interestingly makes TNG feddies the bad guys, but since GI Joe has never steered me wrong thus far. . .

The original Cylons shot blue bolts as well… who knew they were the good guys?

The Sunbow cartoon had the Joes firing red lasers and COBRA shooting blue lasers. I think it got reversed when DiC took over production of the GI Joe cartoon.

Wait, X-Wings shoot red lasers! Evil rebels! I should have realised… its the winners who write the histories…

Tie fighters shoot green lasers. But the green/red symbolism is reversed with light sabers. Sounds like Lucas was messing with our heads the whole time.

I just watched "Balance of Terror" with my wife, and yeah, the TOS is all over the place.

The "phasers" in that episode act like torpedoes, and are white blobs with purple edges that shake the ship when fired and explode in flashes of orange and white. (I suspect that no one had come up with the idea of "photon torpedoes" yet.) They're also fired by a multi-step process that requires three (possibly four) separate control panels (the navigator's station, a charging station, another monitoring station (I guess) and a firing station.
In other episodes, the firing is done by vocal orders to a phaser crew, in others by a button on the bridge!!!

Not to resurrect an old thread and say I told you so, but this image:

shows the remastered Enterprise D clearly firing a multi-colored phaser against the Borg.

PS- my favorite scene in Balance of Terror is when the phaser 'room' is hit and leaks purple gas! (imagine how boring all these battles would be with invisible weapons).