Ha, I'd forgotten that TNG had the keyring-flashlight model as well as the dustbuster. Least visually satisfying prop ever.

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. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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