The Starship Enterprise fires her port forward phaser bank in this image published on March 12, 2021.
That’s hot.
Up until now the phaser turrets have been featureless mirrored surfaces (you can still see this in the image above on the starboard side phaser bank, which hasn’t been retrofitted yet). The design of the turrets is based on the artillery laser cannon seen only once during the TOS series, in the pilot episode “The Cage”. Each weapon is attached to an articulating armature that allows independent targeting of the beams. (A feature not seen in TOS, but who’s to say it wasn’t a capability?)
When they’re not in use, the weapons retract and are hidden behind sliding doors in the “ring”. (And that’s another reason the turrets are on armatures… it takes a bit of maneuvering to get these things to slide down past that convex area in the ring surrounding the lower sensor platform!) The sliding doors will be nearly flush with the hull, which in my “head canon” solves a problem for me: The TOS Enterprise was not a ship of war; she didn’t brandish her weapons emplacements for all to see. So how did the ship fire her phasers (and for that matter, her photon torpedoes and her science probes) if there were no visible holes in the hull? Easy: the ports are hidden behind sliding panels. We just couldn’t quite make them out in the blurry images transmitted backwards in time to our Motorola color TVs.
Here are the turrets in action. The first video was published as a test to see how well a desaturated and more grainy film look would work (I don’t think it does), and the second removes those effects. I’m still messing with the final appearance of the phaser beams, but I’m zeroing in on the formula.