There are a few interesting problems that crop up in analyzing fictional weapons portrayed on television or the movie theater. Specifically, scale and speed of weapons. The speed photon torpedos come out of the tube has little to do with how fast they have to be to strike targets 40, 50, 90, or 300 thousand kilometers away in a couple seconds; the speed turbolaser bolts fly at is slow enough to make even orbital bombardment seem fairly iffy. Even the ion cannon bolts seem a bit slow, considering the ability to peg orbital targets. This is a basic problem of depiction. If the weapon truly moves at a significant fraction of lightspeed, there would be little or nothing to see; a blur in a single frame and it's over. If it doesn't move that fast, it would be completely ineffectual against an opponent who did have fast weapons. Similarly, a truly high yield weapon should produce dramatic effects on inert objects... and very specific effects planetside. We rarely see those in either franchise. Then, more generally. there are physics violations. For example, hand phasers bowl targets over on some settings, yet have absolutely no recoil for the user. When a "laser" bolt, moving far slower than light, strikes a metal hull in ROTS, there's a big orange fireball as of a gasoline explosion. A gram of antimatter doesn't release any more than 180 terajoules when reacted with matter - being nowhere near enough to rip off the atmosphere of an Earthlike planet, as seen in TOS once. A torpedo or grenade or missile may generate an explosive effect that simply doesn't behave as an explosive effect should. Finally, there are consistency problems. A weapon that behaves in one fashion in one movie or episode may behave differently in another, either in range, appearance, or effect. For these reasons, we're going to have to take everything we see and hear about ST and SW weapons with a grain of salt.