Phaser command

The PHASER command fires a ship's phaser system immediately. It uses standard phasers outside hyperspace and automatically switches to hyper-phasers when the firing ship is at warp.

Syntax

PHASER direction [spread]

direction is a relative bearing from -180 through 180 degrees: 0 is straight ahead, positive values are starboard, and negative values are port.

Outside hyperspace, optional spread ranges from 0 through 5 and defaults to 1. A wider spread covers a larger arc but reduces concentration and damage. At warp, the command accepts only a direction; hyper-phasers have fixed beam width and do not use the spread argument.

Firing checks and shields

The command rejects an inoperative system, insufficient phaser charge, invalid arguments, or a hyper-phaser still cooling down before a shot is fired. A successful standard-phaser attempt lowers a player's raised shields after the command-level checks, but before the neutral-zone check. Thus a neutral-zone attempt leaves phaser charge available but shields down. If firing is allowed, standard phaser charge is spent even if the shot misses every target. Hyper-phaser discharges spend flux instead.

Hit reports

Classic GE and ge-next do not use identical tests for deciding whether a target receives a hit message. In classic, standard phasers report only after final integer damage is greater than zero, while hyper-phasers report any eligible ship inside the beam and scanner range even when calculated damage is zero. Classic's formatter calls both zero and one point "no" damage; for standard phasers, only the one-point result reaches the hit-message path, while hyper-phasers can report either result. See Phasers and Hyper-phasers for the separate calculations.

ge-next uses positive calculated damage as the contact threshold for both weapon paths. An exact zero produces no target hit message (the firer still sees the normal firing message); a positive amount below one point is a contact described as "no" damage, while one point is described as "negligible." Standard and hyper-phaser hit descriptions now follow this same distinction. Shielded standard-phaser contacts retain their shield-impact wording, including "<1" for a sub-point impact. The calculations and classic differences are covered in Phasers and Hyper-phasers.

Phaser command

Contents

Syntax

Firing checks and shields

Hit reports

See also