This has produced some interesting push-and-pull over the years and a lot of design compromises driven by deeply riven ideologies. Some of them are fairly benign; the first five or six Starfleet Chiefs of Staff imported and re-established the tradition for legacy, staid, elegant but ever so slightly boring ship names from the old United Earth Space Forces (and before that, wet-navy) traditions, which is why the ships have a lot of place names and one-word virtue names (Enterprise, Excelsior, Valiant, Defiant, etc.) rather than the more arts-fartsy names some of the more avant-garde members of the Federation Council sometimes advocate for. The Betazoids, for example, periodically push for ship names like Spirit of Unity Undaunted or The First and Last Argument of Fools and they never quite seem to make it out of committee.

Conversely, the "science first, shooting never if we can help it" wing of Starfleet has often controlled the (civilian, politically-appointed) position of Secretary of Starfleet, which has significant control over ship design and outfitting. This is why Starfleet vessels are known for their robust science facilities, oversized scanner and comm systems arrays for ships of their size and class, their efficient engines optimized for long cruises rather than the highest possible flank speed or best possible maneuverability, and for their general massive overengineering compared to the starkly utilitarian "this is a warship, meant for war" ship designs of other major star nations.

The Phaser Mark IV Type 2 represents what happens when these two factions collide in a... less than productive way. The form factor was designed in about two days by a cadre of human, Betazoid, Deltan, and Trill Production Design (as in, stage and screen production) majors pursuing their B.F.A's at the Daystrom Institute's College of Art and Design in the 2250s.

It wasn't ever intended to even be submitted seriously or sourced for procurement; rather, said Production Design majors were tasked with producing a form factor that would look really smoking hot when their buddies doing post-doc work over at the Institute proper went to stand before the Procurement Board, mated a Phaser Mark IV, Type 1 to their "big battery pack, an(d) enhanced accelerator-emitter array" attachment, and asked them to approve it for production, if you please. The probably apocryphal story is that the artists were told "look, just give us a place to put the button that looks slick as hell. You'll get course credit."

And they certainly managed that! The idea was that once the technology was approved, they'd get actual engineers and some experts in industrial design, not a pack of undergrads, to come in and give it a facelift, make it fit-for-purpose.

One problem. The Procurement Board loved it. Not the technology; that got sort of a "yeah yeah, it does what you said it would do, gold star" response. But the shell the technology was encased in.

And the Starfleet Procurement Board, as well as their patrons and backers on the Federation Council and within the Federation itself, was just beginning to embrace a tendency towards batshit insanity at this point in time.

Seriously. There was about a four or five decade span during the late twenty-two hundreds when the Federation went through a period of what can only be termed "aggressively barely functional aesthetics." Style ruled the day. If you were a woman in Starfleet and maybe wanted to wear some pants instead of an extremely elegantly tailored miniskirt that had been tailored just for you? Well that was just too bad. If you were any gender (or none at all, in the case of at least two Federation member species) and you wanted pockets, or a utility belt, or a place to conveniently rig out a gear load that was more than just what you could fit in your two hands or a single holster, again: too. bad. That "wasn't the image" they wanted Starfleet to project. Everyone was supposed to look like a smartly dressed go-getter in their slimline minimalist outfits with their art-deco inspired gear, and they weren't supposed to have too much of the latter.

Frankly, even the holsters were regarded as something of a grudging compromise; they ruined the lines of the pants, you know.

They didn't quite take this to the point of total madness; stuff still, you know, worked. The underlying design of everything was strong and functional. But the implementation was pretty dangerous at times; Starship interiors even had quite a lot of directional and warning(!) signage stripped from them in order to minimize clutter. The Constitution-class cruisers were astounding ships, but god help you if you wandered into engineering without already knowing precisely how close to the warp core it was safe to stand, because Starfleet sure as hell wasn't going to do something as gauche as paint a line on the deck to let you know.

The worst of this design philosophy was pared back by the twenty-three hundreds, but it still continues in an attenuated form. Even the Dominion War didn't manage to kill it dead; it just seems baked into the Federation's DNA for some reason.

Bit of a digression there. So yeah. Basically, a bunch of artists cobbled together a design for a military weapon that was never intended to be taken seriously, and it ran right into the buzzsaw of a rising political and aesthetic movement that, while well-intentioned, was in many ways actively dangerous to the safety of a lot of people.

They all got A's, tho.

-Merc
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