And they stopped using it for precisely that reason. It could tend to look like the phaser blast was coming from the actor's fingers unless they made it a point to refer to/show the phaser being drawn.

>Also, semi-relatedly, I've just remembered that (at least on the
>original TV series) the pistol grip does make the phaser more
>powerful as well as longer-lasting. It's a plot point in the episode
>with the Horta ("The Devil in the Dark").
>
>>Most of the Trek universe is like that. Like wandering around in shirt
>>sleeves right next to the antimatter reactor; no real-life
>>organization is going to let any crewmember near that thing without
>>serious anti-hazard measures taken, on account of the slight chance
>>its going to "spring a leak"
>
>To be fair, the engineering crewmen do wear radsuits in the movies.
>In the TNG era, the fact that emergency forcefields were pretty much
>instantaneous and ubiquitous was used as the justification to save
>all that money omit specialized engineering PPE. Which is an idea
>that got kicked around for the original series—in the episode
>where spacesuits first appeared, the script called for some kind of
>handwave about personal forcefields instead, but the producers decided
>it would require too extreme a suspension of disbelief. Which may
>have been the only time anyone involved in the production of Star
>Trek ever said that. :)

I actually do miss the radsuits from the movies; they made a lot of sense. They'd have still made sense even in the TNG force field omnipresence. Kind of like I wouldn't want to be standing in an open shuttlebay in anything less than a full-on spacesuit, even as reliable as Trek Tech is. :)

Back to the Type 1 phaser. In the original series, it didn't have a pushbutton trigger. It actually was fired by pressing a dial from one end to the other. The Christmas ornament they put out a number of years ago of the TOS Type 1 actually replicated the raising panel and that it wouldn't "fire" until you reached the end of the dial travel. It made a LOT of sense from a "you want to be sure you're going to fire" and "not firing when it's bumped or dropped" standpoint.

Here's a pic of the "firing position". https://www.yourprops.com/movieprops/original/yp_510ed8d5375214.75401370/Star-Trek-The-Original-Series-Type-1-Phaser-1.jpg?x

>
>--G.
>-><-
>Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
>Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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