We all remember the line in TOS' "Obsession" But what does that mean? If Kirk and Garrovick do not materialize, doesn't that mean they were lost? They certainly did not re-integrate at their point of origin, awaiting a second beam-up. Compare this to TMP, when Sonak was killed. Nobody could hit the reset button then. Any thoughts on how to reconcile this?
I guess we'll have to assume that the issue was reintegrating them out of the transporter pattern buffer - and that in the case of TMP, uploading them into the buffer didn't happen correctly in the first place.
Let's also consider the circumstances of the two different transport attempts. The "Obsession" transport sequence is begun seconds before an anti-matter explosion, and Kirk and Garrovick apparently have made it as far as the pattern buffer when it hits. In TMP, there's no anti-matter explosion, but the failure is due to defective equipment. Along with Kirk telling Starfleet to boost the matter gain while a defective transporter sensor is in the process of being replaced. No telling what that did to the circuits.
If I remember correctly from TMP, the Enterprise was not getting enough signal on its pads, and when the signal tried to reintegrate at Star Fleet, what managed to reform was not enough...in your case above, I think they were lost...
The module might well be the third level of redundancy in a process that normally works without a hitch... Or even completely unrelated to the process and what went wrong with it. Perhaps it allows the transporter chief to sense beam-down locations, rather than sense the process, and at this juncture there was no need to sense beam-down locations. In any case, TOS is rife with situations where people clearly are aboard the ship but not yet fully materialized ("Tholian Web" is a very similar case), paving way for all those later theories that feature a "pattern buffer" or a similar piece of equipment. Timo Saloniemi
^ to Timo...did that version of the transporter have the quadruple redundancy buffers that TNG had?...I cannot find the info...seems to me no, but the brain is not what it used to be...
The TOS transporter no doubt features some redundancies somewhere, but those aren't evident from the technobabble. Save for the fact that there appear to be multiple transporter rooms aboard the ship, represented by a number of dissimilar sets, yet if one is down for reason X, generally all the transporters of the ship are considered to be down - but that was how it worked in TNG as well. It's just that TNG had an actual Tech Manual, plus dialogue stating the existence of multiple transporter rooms even when there was just one set that very seldom was altered in any way. I'd suppose that if TNG has quadruple redundancy, the rough and ready TOS has at most a single level of it. Then again, some episodes seem to feature a six-person maximum for a single transport sortie, while others do not, perhaps because redundancies in the system are sometimes utilized for safety, sometimes for capacity? Timo Saloniemi
``Warning! Interrupting this procedure may result in the loss of critical data! Do you want to continue? Abort / Cancel / No'' … what failed user interface designer even writes these things?
In short: the Enterprise only had one bar and dropped calls.... Time to switch to Sprint-Transportability.
The gods forgiving me for laughing...sooooooo f*cking funny, WarpFactorZ...!!!! "...can you see me now...."? <adjust pattern buffer> "...now....?"
Here's an interesting idea... Could it be that "cross-circuiting" meant that a means has been developed to combine the transporter mechanisms of more than one room in the process in order to accentuate said process, canceling out whatever disruption was causing the "materializer" to be responding so weakly after the explosion? If so, Spock could've been experimenting with a new technique because the task was too much for a single mechanism to handle. (And presumably this process was not useful in preventing the problems encountered in "The Enemy Within" and "Mirror, Mirror"; perhaps it was not invented yet.) This would also mean that cross-circuiting transporter rooms ("A" and "B") was not applicable to save Sonak, possibly because Cleary's accident skewed the beam itself, making recovery of Sonak impossible.
That's a cool idea. I do hope Scotty was being less than literal about that "A piece of them, anyway" thing, and that the two were in the buffer the whole time. Probably Scotty was saying "This light here shows that they are in the buffer. Of course, it would light up even if only part of them was, but here's hoping..." Incidentally, the terminology would mean our TOS heroes prefer Transporter Room C, much like Picard had a thing for Transporter Room 3. Is there a naval superstition against using the first two transporter rooms, perhaps? Timo Saloniemi