Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryguy
One question. I watched the clip a couple of times. At 12 seconds in, are the torpedoes firing out of the phaser lance? It could be my eyes playing tricks on me. However I'm having some traumatic flashbacks of the phasers firing out of the torpedo launcher in "Darmok" right now. Oh the humanity! *shudder*
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I recall that effects glitch from the episode...a stunning (but thankfully rare) example of a major blooper on the part of the effects people.
It took me a minute (and a quick viewing of the clip) to realize which shot you meant, but the answer to your question is yes. But, there's a good explanation for this:
In "Darmok," the effects people made a gaffe that flew right in the face of what had been previously established in the show. (They'd fired probes and torpedoes from that same location, and never any form of directed energy--and it was never again seen after that incident; the only other time we saw anything of that sort was in "The Battle," when a tractor beam came from midway up the neck of the engineering section, about where the torpedo launcher is--but the first season is barely considered canon even by the writers, so who's counting?)
In that episode, there was absolutely no justification for it...there was an order for phasers to fire, and that was that.
This time around, we have some flexibility. Granted, we did see that large canon fire what looks like a souped-up disruptor of some kind in Scene 23, "Escape from New Romulus." But recall also that in the same scene, we saw the
Fitzgerald fire what looked like standard Starfleet phasers from its ventral array.
From then to now, we've had the holographic Braiyon Garr busy doing upgrades to the ship's systems, including the warp drive (notice that after the scene in the cargo bay, suddenly the visual effect is identical to what we saw in the last film when the ISS
Voyager was at warp), the shields, and--according to Ronston in the second-to-last scene that was posted--the weapons systems as well.
The change in the visual effect from a beam of directed energy to bursts not unlike Klingon disruptors, thus, is conceptualized in the script notes as an effect of Garr's upgrades.
