Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Phasers

In The Next Generation, we got to see a new evolution of the starship phasers in the form of phaser strips.

Phaser strips are long lines of large numbers of phaser emitters that run all across a ship's hull. Energy would travel along these lines and converge on the best possible spot for targeting. A Galaxy-class ship like the Enterprise-D came equipped with twelve separate phaser strips, allowing them to fire in almost any direction (though, one of those phaser strips was only usable when the saucer was separated, located on top of the ship's neck).

We don't know exactly when Starfleet switched from primarily using phaser banks like those on Kirk's Enterprise to phaser strips like in The Next Generation, but the earliest ship we've seen with phaser strips is the Ambassador-class Enterprise-C from the year 2344, which we saw in the Next Generation episode Yesterday's Enterprise.

Some ships, such as the Defiant, came equipped with pulse phaser cannons, which rapidly fired concentrated bursts, as opposed to the steady beams of particles that shoot from standard phaser arrays.