Originally posted by DigiFluid
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We know that it’s never brought up in Enterprise. The Phasers there just seems to run off ship’s main power via the EPS grid, and Reed was able to boost their power by linking them to the impulse reactors (which damaged the ship in the episode they were first featured in but we don’t know if he was able to fix that issue after).
We know that as was pointed out Phaser reserves could apparently be depleted in a Constitution class ship but that they could then be recharged in TOS.
We know from TMP and onwards that Phasers were linked to the Warp Core to gain a boost in power (which was a convenient way of explaining why an energy weapon that should be travelling at light speed cannot be used at Warp...).
And we know that Defiant used the Energy Cells and that Voyager never seemed concerned about losing phaser power despite all their oft spoken concerns with conserving energy.
Based on all that the best assumption I can make is that the phasers are run off a separate battery that can be recharged by the Warp Core. This makes sense since you’d still want your ship to be able to fight even if main power goes off line or you need to Eject the Warp Core. Since that would still be a concern in the TMP and TNG eras and Decker in TMP specifies that the Warp Core gives the phasers a boost by directing power directly to them, we can assume that the Phasers would still function without the core even then but they’d lose that boost. The power cells we see in Defiant are possibly a trade off. The Warp Power in a war is probably needed elsewhere like maintaing the shields or boosting the impulse engines and so on, but you still want that power boost to the phasers. So you use the independently charged power cells to add that boost.
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