We've been reading a great book, THE STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION TECHNICAL MANUAL By Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda. It is amazing the detail they went into on describing the Enterprise D! If you like this sort of thing we highly recommend it. But as we're reading it I can't help but think of the similarities of this fictional ship to the real star ships of Our Ancestors. Many of the things they describe are very similar to what we possessed.
Then, too, some things are very different. Our weapons' systems were nothing like the Enterprise's phasers. We had positive matter beam projectors and negative matter bolt projectors.  Awesome weapons, to say the least!
The beam projectors consisted of a device about forty feet long, about three feet on one end, and about five feet on the other.
Most of the system was six accelerators that produced a hollow tube of energy about the diameter of a common pencil that achieved speeds in access of two-hundred times the speed of light.  This, in itself, would do a great deal of dmage to any unshielded object.  But it was, in reality, only the carrying system.  At the back of the weapon was a firing chamber in which was created an intense magnetic field into which was injected a quantity of positive matter and a few moments later half the amount of negative matter.  The horrendous reaction produced drove the unused positive matter into the beam tube and sent it hurling from the ship to destroy initially anything that came in its path.  Even a fully shielded ship had difficulty taking a direct hit from a single beam.  If you got caught in the cross point of two ships that had several weapons, forget it!  Your ship was reduced to a gaseous ball that quickly dissipated into the inter stellar void, leaving little for anyone to ever find.
All our hand weapons were based on the same system, only in smaller versions, their power determined by the size of their firing chamber.
Our second weapons system was similar, but no force in the universe can contain a negative matter charge.  So these weapons were merely a heavily shielded firing chamber open to space.
The negative matter was injected and the positive matter behind it.  The bolt of the negative matter was projected out and you put as much distance between you and anything it might hit as possible, because it wasn't going to be there after the negative matter struck it.
No, our weapons weren't like those on Star Trek, nowhere near them at all