The Starfleet Phaser Rifles, Vengeance Phaser Rifle (John Harrison drops this on Kronos and Spock picks it up), and Vengeance Phaser Pistol were made in-house by Studio Art and Technology, based on designs by John Eaves.
The Starfleet rifles were cool, the scopes on top are spring loaded and pop up, also when you depressed the trigger there was a little piece underneath that actuated back and forth exposing a lit "power core", none of that stuff was really shown very well in the film. The Vengeance rifle was not ever really seen in close up, which is a pity because there was a ton of detail- it wasn't ever tied to the Vengeance in the film, but if you saw it next to the pistol you'd see the lineage, and during production they were known as the "Bad Ship Phaser" and "Bad Ship Rifle", lol
I'm really impressed with how tight a lid Bad Robot kept on everything, we knew almost zero of the plot, including anything about John Harrison or even that there WAS a John Harrison. All we really knew was there was a "bad ship", that somebody's blood was somehow important, and there was a volcano, lol We basically found out stuff when everybody else did.
Also, we made McCoy's medical instruments(the ring scanner on the shuttle, hyposprays, blood extractor) the Torpedo eyepiece scanner, the spinning serum extractor (seen at the beginning before Mickey from Doctor Who puts the test tube and ring in the case) a ton of little gadgets I'm probably forgetting.
Oh, we did the "cold fusion" device Spock detonates in the volcano, and the nozzle on the fire hose Kirk throws into the helicoptery/hovery/whatever thingy.
Fun show. Glad to have been a part.
Stormy - that's awesome... Any pictures you can share? So hard to see clear views of any of these weapons...