"She'll launch on time, sir - and she'll be ready."

This might explain why our heroes opted to walk to V'Ger, rather than beam to their destination - and why it ever occurred to them to request an emergency beam-out, either.

But that's too great a departure from the rest of Trek to be accepted if one wants to accept ST:TMP as taking place in the same universe as the other movies...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Or perhaps Starfleet had attempted to make the new Enterprise shielded from external transporters for some reason. Even when the Klingons are boarding her they use the transporter pads.

In TMP, when walking to V'Ger and running back while its tranforming, I would guess they just still don't trust the transporter, or the energy from V'Ger could interfere.

 

Which is interesting, for in Court Martial and The Trouble with Tribbles, we see Kirk and Spock beaming to the starbase/space station into those mini, two-man transporter pads.

 

Except that doing so would be a violation of protocol. Unauthorized transports may be acceptable under specific circumstances, but Kirk's boarding a vessel moored in dry-dock wouldn't fall into that category--the V'Ger threat notwithstanding. Recall that when Kirk stepped off the shuttle-pod that he had to formally request permission to board the ship he'd just been granted command of (and had commanded previously), as if he were a guest entering someone's home.

--Sran

 

It could be something as simple as the fact that transporting is even safer when transporting to another pad.

But the dialouge in TMP at the time of the transporter accident seemed to indicate it was the Enterprise that was doing the transporting

SCOTT: Transporter room, do not engage! Do not.... TECHNICIAN: Too late; they're beaming now!

RAND: Starfleet, override us! OVERRIDE...! Yank them back!

STARFLEET VOICE: Unable to retrieve their pattern, Enterprise....!
SCOTT: We're losing the pattern...! KIRK: Starfleet, boost your matter gain; we need more signal!


If Starfleet was doing the beaming, why the call to the transporter room to not engage? Of course at that point it might simply be that starfleet initatied the transporter cycle and the Enterprise took over when it was in the buffer.

 

^For basic site-to-site transport, I've always had the impression that the process entails the transporters at the two sites working together. One transporter begins the sequence (the dematerialization), and the other completes it (the rematerailzation), sort of like a runner handing a baton to another runner.

In the case of the Enterprise transporter, the malfunction rendered it unable to properly accept the patterns of Sonak and Ciana from Starfleet (hence, the distorted figures that appeared on the pads); Starfleet attempted to reverse the transporter but was unable to reacquire the normal patterns of either officer.

--Sran

 

The real question is where was the failsafe system as soon as that circuit failed. The transporter should have shut down, there was a second or two before they began the transport sequence.

 

^That might have to do with whatever sensor Cleary was replacing when Kirk showed up, as Decker appeared to have tracked down the problem when Kirk pulled him away.

--Sran

 

Which would seem to be more dangerous than having one transporter do the work.

This really is something Trek has failed to deal with. They've beamed to and from locations without transport pads hundreds of times, so the pads really would seem to be technologically unnecessary. We could pose some other use for them, such as better scanning for microbes, or ability to stun or hold incoming enemies...

Do ship shields block transport beams? That would make sense, story-wise.

 

Technologically unnecessary, perhaps, but not unnecessary where military protocol is concerned.

Yes, they do; however, there are ways of circumventing the shields.

--Sran

 

It gets weirder the more you think about it. Whenever the Klingons or Captain Ramart or somebody beam aboard from their ship, they come in on the transporter pad. When Kirk and Spock beam down to Ardana (or whatever the planet with the cloud city is), they materialize on the transporter platform on the ground.

I have no answer...

 

TOS always had transporter pads at one end of the process - site-to-site beaming was a TNG improvement to the technology. I suppose we could hypothesize that a pad at both ends in TOS's day was considered even better, perhaps "safer" ironically enough.

 

^That's a good point. I also wonder if (given that Enterprise hadn't been made yet) Gene Roddenberry viewed the transporter as something new (in-universe) at the time that TOS first came on the air; recall that "The Cage" featured two transporter operators (who may have been aboard specifically for that task) as opposed to one, which suggests that the process was much more complicated during the 23rd century compared with Picard's time.

--Sran

 

IIRC, "A Piece of the Action" definitely established that the Horizon didn't have transporters 100 years before, as Kirk didn't know how to explain them to the Iotians.

 

That was just Kirk thinking the Iotians didn't know, though. Kirk knows relatively little about things that happened a century before his watch - see "Balance of Terror". If Kirk was mistaken about the history of invisibility tech, he might have been confused about things like subspace radio and transporters, too.

As for Kirk not having formal permission to come aboard the Enterprise if beaming up using Starfleet HQ transporters, it would have been a trivial matter of phoning the ship first.

Umm, the Klingons in ST3 apparently use the actual transporters of the Enterprise! The sparkle effect is the blue Federation one, not the red Klingon one. Apparently, Kruge's ship was shot to pieces at the time, and only managed to repair her own transporters some time later, leaving Kruge at the mercy of the Starfleet transporter operator - which wasn't a problem, because that operator in turn was at the mercy of Kruge's nicely functioning disruptors and torpedoes.

FWIW, we know that a non-Klingon pad can receive a Klingon signal, too - this happens with the Cardassian unit at DS9 Ops in "Dramatis Personae". This isn't a case of the Klingons beaming onto an inert Cardassian pad, either, as the Klingon transporter had exploded several seconds before the materialization attempt with the red sparkling took place... (The attempt failed, but the signal was not lost, and the heroes managed to materialize it from an amber Cardassian sparkle moments later!)

So we have three distinct modes for pad-to-pad: 1) pad A sends people to inert pad B, 2) pad A sends a signal that pad B actively materializes, and 3) pad B grabs people from inert pad A. And from that DS9 ep, we know that we cannot predict the sparkle color in case 2: it can be typical to pad A or to pad B.

In most episodes, it would seem that the pad operated by our heroes is the active one, and it is difficult to demonstrate it wouldn't be the only active one. But ST:TMP is a confusing case where two pads seem to be active simultaneously or near-simultaneously - so either some variant of case 2 above, or a flip-flop between cases 1 and 3.

The dialogue there is beyond ambiguous, of course, but from that DS9 episode we know that a signal can be juggled inside a system formed by two transporters, including one that is badly broken (or vaporized!), until materialized at one end or lost forever. TNG "Realm of Fear" adds the option of the pattern remaining in limbo inside a buffer adjoining one of the transporters, and various other eps suggest select elements of the pattern may remain behind while others are either lost or materialized or unconventionally stored (as pure data; as energy-based lifeforms; etc.). We could easily argue that the Enterprise is doing all the beaming in ST:TMP, until their transporter hiccups and Rand says "Override!" at which point Starfleet HQ activates their own pad for the very first time and tries to receive the phased matter package that's loose in the system.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yet Kalo knows that the people beaming down ``can't do nothing till they're through sparkling,'' which is quite an inference to draw from having seen one example ever of people beaming down.

 

Yeah - the one thing the Iotians were not was stupid Chicago gangsters from the 1930s. In order to play that particular sort of make-believe, they must have been pretty good with advanced technology, or they couldn't have created the facsimile society in just a hundred years. (For all we know, the "early industrial" civilization reported by the Horizon originally was just another sort of make-believe, inspired by the previous visitors.)

But the issue here is Kirk thinking the Iotians wouldn't know about transporters. This suggests Kirk didn't know the Horizon already had transporters. But ENT indicates that skippers from that era would have had those devices available, even though not necessarily installed... So we have two options here:

1) Kirk had looked up the specs of the Horizon and had discovered she did not have transporters aboard
2) Kirk had not looked up the specs of the Horizon and therefore did not know that she actually had transporters aboard

Either way, the Iotians would probably have had previous exposure to this technology, which is ubiquitous in the Alpha Quadrant - but option 2 would give them further exposure, perhaps even within living memory of Kalo (whose lifespan we do not know).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well, just going by what TOS told us in the episode, the clear implication and intent is that the transporter hadn't been invented yet. Anything else is just after-the-fact fanwank.

 

^ But...but...but we LIVE for after-the-fact fanwank! Isn't that why we're all here?

 

^In the end, that is all we have (left).