You can’t have a Star Trek show without phasers. Following yesterday’s reveal of the new Star Trek: Discovery communicator, CBS today revealed the phaser for the show. The new look was unveiled on the official Star Trek: Discovery Twitter account with a tweet saying “Set phasers to stun. #StarTrekDiscovery premieres September 24 on #CBSAllAccess.”
Set phasers to stun. #StarTrekDiscovery premieres September 24 on #CBSAllAccess: https://t.co/7YqXHeyC7N pic.twitter.com/k3NLKkSVpf
— Star Trek: Discovery (@startrekcbs) July 18, 2017
These new reveals appear to be part of CBS’ plan to hype Discovery during Comic-Con week leading up to their big panel on Saturday.
A closer look
The new phasers are a close match to The Original Series “Type 2” design in form factor. Brass accents on the trigger, muzzle, and four heat sink fins on the back of the phaser highlight a black and silver matte body. Also seen are some of the same features and knobs as the original design, such as the circular control on the side and an intensity dial on the top. The grip is much more modernized than the old design, with an ergonomic pistol grip, and more complex styling that melds nicely into the top half of the phaser, rather than a simple black handle. Like The Original Series Type 2 phaser, the Discovery phaser also appears to have a secondary, detachable “Type 1″ phaser on the top. Hopefully, we will get to see these smaller units in action on away missions too.
We got our first glimpse at the phasers last month in their holsters worn by Michael Burnham and Captain Georgiou as the two stood ready to beam down.
Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green packing phasers
If you look closely you can see their holstered phasers.
Holstered phasers from Star Trek: Discovery
A Cage/TOS mashup
The new phasers generally stay true to The Original Series design that we are used to seeing in the hands of Kirk and Spock. The new design seems specifically drawn from the Type-2 phaser seen on the original Star Trek. There’s even what appears to be a detachable smaller phaser 1 on the top.
TOS-era phaser
Eagle-eyed fans will notice one feature in particular that hearkens back to an era before The Original Series that we know and love. The three-nozzled muzzle design is a direct reference to the laser pistols seen in the original pilot, “The Cage.” Given that Discovery takes place approximately 10 years before the USS Enterprise sets off on its five-year mission under the command of captain Kirk, this seems like a nice blend that fits the time period in-universe.
“The Cage” laser pistol
Star Trek: Discovery premieres on September 24th on CBS with all subsequent episodes on CBS All Access in the US. See our Discovery info page for more details.
Keep up with all the Star Trek: Discovery news at TrekMovie.
I am digging, that.
That phaser is sweeeeeeeet!
Now that’s a phaser.
It’s going to be bad ass to watch them twist the barrel to go full power setting. Kind of like when in The Cage when he twisted the barrel to blast open the Telosian elevator door trying to rescue Captain Pike.
It’s a hybrid of a laser and phaser. I’m gonna call it a ‘Phlaser’.
Or a laphser.
Or sarleph
Nice blend of The Cage and TOS aesthetic, with a modern pass at detailing. Love it. Perhaps, like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was “A New Hope” for a new generation, DISCOVERY will be TOS for a new generation.
I think you’re spot on with that observation.
To be fair (and off topic), what people who complain TFA is a rehash of ANH dont understand is, thats the point. Lucas’ always said the trilogies are echoes of each other. And it dove tails with the sense of fate and destiny running through the movies.
I almost expect that to be somewhat addressed as the trilogy goes on with the idea they have to break away from the echoes of fate in order to truly end the Sith/Jedi co-dependency for good.
But I agree.
Discovery is showing us what the Cage/TOS era of Star Trek really looked like. And if you imagine TOS being rebooted today, it would fit this look, even if every syllable of word in the script is the same.
“Really looked like”? What do you mean? Don’t you know this is fiction?
>;>}
I do like this New Universe phaser, at least from what I can see of it. But the rest of it, uniforms, ships, etc. so far, I like the Original Universe Cage era better.
@TUP,
“To be fair (and off topic), what people who complain TFA is a rehash of ANH dont understand is, thats the point. Lucas’ always said the trilogies are echoes of each other. And it dove tails with the sense of fate and destiny running through the movies.”
That’s just BS. You don’t make a new entry in a trilogy just to rehash the very same story from the previous entry.
And EP 1 wasn’t an echo of EP IV, neither were the other movies in the trilogies.
The point of the rehash was to do A New Hope for a generation that had never seen it. And if that’s the point here, I love it. As TUP says (and he and I often disagree)– it will show us how Star Trek REALLY looked. The idea being that what we saw on TOS wasn’t quite accurate. I wouldn’t even mind them taking a few liberties with story continuity, either, and chalk it up to history being wrongly remembered.
Certainly we will have to overlook DS9 and Enterprises looks back (or assume they were inaccurate as well). I can forgive DS9 because it was pretty cool.
Enterprise was routinely stupid.
It’s not the same story. It’s not even close actually. Just reminiscent.
I think as long as they’re generally consistent, I don’t mind little details contradicting past episodes/series’. I mean, already there are a TON of story inconsistencies in existing Trek, from episode-to-episode, series to series. O’Brien’s rank being one.
Yeah but episode 1-3 aren’t like Star Wars films at all. The look, the characters and the story telling so they don’t count. Episode VII is a rehash in respect of history repeating its self
In real life, history can repeat itself. Wars often feel the same, or similar. Not that movies have to be 100% realistic, but they felt the need to tell a similar story for a new generation, and I’m okay with that.
The real question is why they felt the need in 1983 to tell such a similar story to ANH just 6 years prior.
From everything I’ve seen so far their attention to detail is amazing. I’m loving the look and feel of this show. I’m excited.
It’s amazing what you can do when you have a budget.
I agree. Anyone thinking this was going to be a cheap production is likely wrong. The fact they are providing very close looks at props tells you they have a commitment to detail (which is good as we can assume this will air in HD).
Big Budget? Car Floor Mat wall in Transporter room.
Stop being anal.
Agreed!! I’m excited and can’t wait for September
It is all for HD so that probs account for the extra detail needed.
My guess is these props will be on display at the show.
UUH! Me Likey!
Very very interesting. I honestly didn’t expect it to look THAT much like the original TOS phaser (with a ‘Cage’-laser inspired “barrel”, obviously) but it really appears to have all the dials and knobs and grilles and even the silvery finish on the Type 1-part. Just the handle looks a lot more ergonomic.
Wait. You’re telling me they made design nods to The Cage? But I thought they were burning the canon of Star Trek with pride?
Looks great!
That apparently detachable unit, wouldn’t that be more likely to be the power pack?
Why? Considering it has always been a secondary phaser, it’s a fair assumption.
Isn’t the handle on the bigger phaser supposed to be the power pack?
And yeah, THIS i actually like.
According to OMEGA GLORY if I recall correctly (haven’t seen that one this century.)
Don’t recall ever seeing a secondary phaser ever being popped off, or anyone ever reloading. I’m guessing there’s a drawing floating around the internet somewhere that spells it all out, though.
But but but they didn’t get phasers until TOS! They should have lasers. THIS WILL BE AN EVEN BIGGER DISASTER THAN ENTERPRISE AND THE KELVINVERSE COMBINED! ;)
Not true. The crew of the Kelvin in Star Trek 2009 used hand phasers if Im not mistaken. That would be, what, 20 years before Discovery?
Sarcasm there, TUP. Don’t think tacotuesday meant anything by it other then an oblique shot at those who are hyperventilating that Discovery is all wrong. ALL. WRONG. DAMNIT.
Oh, wait…
Why is it that so many trekkies always keep calling doom and disaster before ever having seen a complete episode? Be glad we are getting something new, watch it and then give your opinion.
I believe the wink at the end of his comment was intended to signify it as sarcasm.
Because all reports spell doom for the original Gene Roddenberry Universe of Star Trek- unless its just the marketing fools targeting non fans like Beyond & Nemesis- where the marketing did not represent the actual product & turned people off before they even saw them.
What reports? I have never seen or read ANYWHERE that this will be anything but a success. Just because YOU don’t like what you see and YOU won’t watch it doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t excited for this. And fyi, I’m a TOS fan since I was a kid… that was my Trek. But BEYOND was a great movie. It had the feel of the original Trek. It ranks in my top 3 behind TWOK and TUC. It’s simple… you don’t like wht you keep seeing and hearing… stop reading about it and don’t watch.
Beyond was a mess. They tried so hard to hit every trope and cliche of TOS, the movie came off as broad satire. Easily the worst of the 3 JJ-verse films.
I strongly disagree. It was by far the best of the 3. Strong characters, good story, had the spirit of a Trek story, you get more about the characters.
I think we all just saw a glimpse of the hottest-selling toy for Christmas 2018.
I assume they will want to refer to these as Phasers rather then lasers. Keep in mind, Star Trek 2009 tells us that Phasers were in use 20 years before Discovery. I guess Pike’s Enterprise in The Cage just liked retro weapons!
Ok, looks great.
Now lets see the Tricorders :-)
Trek 2009 also told us that the Federation was a “peace-keeping armada.” Still trying to un-hear that one. :-)
That — along with ‘enlist in Starfleet’ — are what still make my ears want to start wiggling in disbelief all on their own. Right up there with the Paramount press release on ID that mentions something about somebody ‘detonating the fleet’ – but at least that wasn’t in the actual movie.
None of those are errors because Bob Orci is a Star Trek expert.
Chuckle/snicker/barf/DeltaVega.
I have no problem with a shift to enlistment and peace keeping armada. It’s just splitting hairs really. The focus was still on exploration, science, and peace, so how the fictional Starfleet operated from a logistics perspective is not something I’m going to scrutinize.
Enlist was an odd term although there are enlisted men & women in Starfleet. Perhaps Pike felt Kirk needed boot camp, not officer training.
“Armada” would, if anything, refer to Starfleet, not the Federation. But it’s a fairly clunky use of the word even in that case.
What happened here is the script had the “armada” statement in it, and normally someone on set would call out “wait, that’s wrong” if the mistake got that far, and the script supervisor and director would be allowed to change it. However, the script for filming was handed over before a writer’s strike (that lasted through filming) began, and the rules are that no script changes can be made during a strike. At all. So it (and other things that could have been changed for the better) stayed in. I believe either JJ or Bob Orci (or both) noted that when asked before.
Related: https://filmschoolrejects.com/wga-strike-2009-movies-affected-b630825b03eb/
I know they called them lasers, but they were using phasers in The Cage. 1) They look just like the phasers in the second pilot. 2) They do things a laser wouldn’t. 3) More importantly, Gene Roddenberry himself realized calling them lasers was a mistake. The Making of Star Trek include a series of memos where his technical advisor suggested not calling them lasers in the first pilot. Roddenberry rejected the suggestion at the time but when they made the second pilot, he realized he was wrong.
This is the problem I have with so many fan’s obsession with canon and continuity. They want to set in stones fleeting references that even the creators realized should be changed.
Lasers was a colloquial term, like ice box for refrigerator.
People want to ignore real-world impacts of certain things. So when one day the correct uniform is at the cleaners, and they use a slightly different one, fans want it explained, or want all future shows to be consistent with it.
If designers decide something else looks better, suddenly they want a whole series of episodes to explain why, and worse, the future writers who were nitpicky fans of the show agree, and set a precedent where they have to explain everything.
I remember there was an issue of Green Lantern in the 90s where a character was mistakenly colored green in ONE PANEL and they felt the need to write an entire story to explain why.
Like explaining why Khan looked different in STID? lol Hey, we can sell comics to translate our crappy creative decisions.
It wasn’t a creative decision– it was a mistake. The colorist messed up in ONE panel because he thought it was a different character, probably forgot to consult the script.
Nice. Wish it were more retro-Cage-centric, but still like the aesthetics of it.
Agreed. Wish they’d pushed it even a little further in that direction, but as a TOS fan I’m still very pleased.
This is the sort of design I’d hoped to see in the Kelvin Timeline reboots. While I like the Abrams movies, I really don’t care for the ship and prop design. These Discovery designs are a great mesh of TOS styles along with updates to modern aesthetics. I’m hoping we see a tricorder tomorrow.
Any chance get to see a TNG time travel episode further in the future? Would be interesting.
Id generally say yes, we’d get time travel (whether its to an established era with those characters, who knows). But if the story telling is always a season-long arc, you might not. But time travel is a staple of star trek so I would suspect so.
Now this — and that awesome communicator yesterday — is how you update TOS designs for a new era.
I’m not a fan of the communicator (too TWOK-like), but the tricorder is the real make-or-break for me, as the only tricorder I’ve ever liked — and that one I absolutely loved — is the TOS one.
Sorry, the TNG tricorder is the ONLY tricorder! The TOS “brick” is basically a ham radio in space. Awful! I mean, it’s cool as retro tech goes, but I hope they update it similarly to the communicator and phaser (though the original communicator and phaser were already much cooler than the tricorder).
I hope the tech we see on screen can actually look more real than before, rather than a clearly fake screen on a prop..
That’s really only noticeable in HD though. They didn’t create these shows in the 80s to stand up to high definition.
color AND styling make the unit memorable, and the silver/black is classic, whereas the TNG beige is as dated and blase as can be, and looked bad even back in the day.
To turn another user’s quote around, “If you don’t respect and love TNG, you’re not a true Trekkie!”
Obviously everything about TNG was PERFECT and if you disagree you’re not a true fan!
Nah. We’re all entitled to have opinions about various incarnations of Trek and still be true fans. I however loved the TNG aesthetic, particularly the tricorder (which was grey, not beige).
TNG was a crapfest of a sleeping pill…the writing was mostly horrific and pedestrian. The acting, outside of Stewart, Burton and Spiner? Laughable when not cringe-inducing…FX right out of Atari and a musical score my dentist office wouldn’t be caught dead playing. But the tricorder was bad-ass. A miniature box stuffed with dozens of st robing twinkling LEDS that mean nothing. But it looked very cool. It’s the only TNG prop replica I own.
The line must be drawn here! That looks less like the aforementioned mashup and more like a tri-lens camera. The only shooting Starfleet will be doing with that thing is for their student film. And to think Jeffrey Hunter died under suspicious circumstances for this! Here comes Brian Dennehy in a Dr. Boyce cameo to declare the project dead on arrival. Don’t bother asking the producers to tell everything they known about trilithium because they know nothing of trilithium – the only Nexxus they’re familiar with is the shampoo product. Hello darkness, my old friend.
Breaking Update!
Here’s the new Phaser Rifle
https://mobile.twitter.com/startrekcbs/status/887401594781704192
Looks great, how can they get this so right & everything else so wrong?
Consistent design aesthetic please!
Agreed.
I think it all looks fairly consistent. Everything looks great (so far).
Everything I’ve seen so far is consistent. Not sure what you’re referring to. But then again, all you do is complain about the show all the time.
Reminds me of my old Bolex H-16
Knew that was you even before I looked up and saw the username! (made me think ARGUS 8mm myself, and also of a hokey spy satellite camera in the old Connery film WRONG IS RIGHT.) You should see that sometime, Nielsen has a pretty good sized role in it, and it is one of the three best things Robert Conrad ever did (along with MURPH THE SURF and I guess the battery commercial,) playing a George C. Scott-like warhawk military guy, who has a tendency to push the nuclear football over to the President whenever ANYthing happens. A real mess of a movie, but the good parts are VERY good. Last thing I enjoyed from Richard Brooks, who you probably remember is a fave of mine for just three pictures: THE PROFESSIONALS, BITE THE BULLET and LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR (latter is still not out on blu-ray!)
You can tell when I don’t want to work on articles, I really tend to spew here!
THIS MAKES ME SICK!
One detail that is faithful to the 60s show and us Trekkies go GAA GAA?!
Nice prop. So much better than the horrible JJ Plinko Phasers.
It’s beautiful. :3
Now we’re talkin’!!!!
Fantastic!!!!
So what you’re saying is, like anything else in life, there are things you like about it, and things you don’t like about it. What a shock! Maybe swearing it off before you saw everything was a bad idea, who’d have thought?
Makes you wonder if there’s MORE to the show you’ll like, such as the characters and story, and if all that complaining will have been a waste of time…
Hate the Klingons. Love this.
So they made the front a mini version of the triple lens mount of a Arri-S camera?
wow positive remarks about Discovery I am shocked. Maybe Just maybe we are all starting to accept that this new series will be decent. pfffft nah will never happen
i for one will be watching it and enjoying every episode
When you think about it, a phaser is a nasty weapon. If you don’t vaporize and vanish, you cook. It heats your organs. Even stun would leave your gibblets medium rare. Ow!
I don’t think the phaser is specifically just a heat weapon, I got the impression it was just some kind of energy field that incapacitates you on stun, shocks your system to hurt you at higher settings, enough to vaporize you at the highest.
This almost makes up for the bad idea of what the new starship will be. Someone put a lot of thought into this Phaser. Looks great to me. Now have to have a replica.
Love the phaser!!