system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Trek] How do phaser rifles work?

Okay, I admit that I may not have paid all that much attention in school when we were learning about directed energy weapons, so don't judge me. Handheld and ship phasers are conventional directed energy weapons that fire a concentrated beam of energy, so there's a continuous beam of energy from the phaser to the target, right? So why do phaser rifles (Type 3? I think?) fire little bursts of energy that seem to do more damage?
gpt
They have another common name which sheds more light on their mechanism of action, and that name is "phaser compression rifles" or simply "compression rifles". These rifles work by wrapping phaser energy in an electromagnetic field, and packing that energy in. Instead of a smooth beam of phaser energy, you have a chaotic sphere of dense energy which virtually explodes once it makes contact with an object solid enough to distrupt the field.