Transporters as Weapons

[Juju Zombie]

There's so much technology in Star Trek that could be weaponized, it's mindboggling.

I mean, a warp-based railgun alone would annihilate nearly any opponent with a single shot.

 

[Mytran]

The amount of memory required to transport quantum patterns of that many living things in a wide angle beam would be astronomical.

As opposed to what - the normal astronomical amount of memory required to store the position and speed of every single atom in a human body? This is why I think the "scan every atom and duplicate" system is flawed, despite the popularity of it in the spin-off technical manuals.

Besides, I don't actually think the transporter "stores" the pattern in any sort of memory medium.

Remember the episode when Doctor Pulaski got old, "Unnatural Selection", and they wanted to pull her pattern out of the buffer to filter the virus out of her system .......

Perhaps the Crazy Eddie Quantum Superposition effect leaves a landing imprint on the Transporter system - not enough to duplicate entire people, but enough to "tweak" an incoming signal into something a little different.

Something similar must have happened in Lonely Among Us, I imagine.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Besides, I don't actually think the transporter "stores" the pattern in any sort of memory medium.

Remember the episode when Doctor Pulaski got old, "Unnatural Selection"

Do I have to?

There's so much technology in Star Trek that could be weaponized, it's mindboggling.

I mean, a warp-based railgun alone would annihilate nearly any opponent with a single shot.

And USS Vengeance had TWO of them!

Something similar must have happened in Lonely Among Us, I imagine.

What is it about this thread that continually reminds people of the most godawful moments in Trek history?

Next thing you know we'll be beaming Tuvix across the Vanishing Point.

 

[Sgt_G]

And this entire topic is why I think I shall write my stories set in an alternate universe in which transporters only work pad-to-pad.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And this entire topic is why I think I shall write my stories set in an alternate universe in which transporters only work pad-to-pad.

Or at least be consistent enough with a set of limitations that you aren't tempted to use them as magic genie beams. Abramsverse did a good job of this, IMO, where just the fact that an object is moving around too much makes beaming complicated; ups the difficulty level a bit, makes the Heroes really WORK for it.

Style wise, I prefer this. It's not the 60s anymore, we can actually AFFORD to CGI a shuttlecraft landing sequence on a new planet ever week! 99% of all problems encountered by an away team could be solved just by having a shuttlecraft (with med gear, supplies and an evac pilot) standing by in a secure landing site, but more importantly, WATCHING them solve that problem would be pretty cool to see as well.

 

[Juju Zombie]

There's so much technology in Star Trek that could be weaponized, it's mindboggling.

I mean, a warp-based railgun alone would annihilate nearly any opponent with a single shot.

And USS Vengeance had TWO of them!

References? I just did a quick Google search and I can't find any mention of such. Are you confusing the torpedo launchers with railguns, let alone warp railguns?

(Hint, a single shot from a warp-powered railgun would almost certainly annihilate anything it hit. I mean, even a golf ball going as slow as, say, ten percent the speed of light would be devastating. Forget a heavy slug traveling in excess of C.

'Course, that would also make suicide warp ships the ultimate doomsday weapon in any war, especially for planets and moons, but that's never been an issue in Trek either to my knowledge. The Dominion War would have been over real fast if it were, with them winning hands down.)

 

[Ithekro]

I did a alternate take on Star Wars once (for an RPG setting) were the Heroes of Yavin were killed/captured during the events of Empire Strikes Back, and the players needed to be the ones to take out the new Death Star. Because things were on a different track, the Death Star II was finished, making it basically invulnerable to starfighter attack and the Rebel fleet just isn't large enough to take it out conventionally. So they concocted a plan to steal a Super Star Destroyer, break all its failsafe systems and bring it out of hyperspace inside the Death Star. Taking an object moving at FTL speeds to zero inside basically should be like a bullet through an apple, even if the apple is the size of a small moon and armored.

 

[Pauln6]

And this entire topic is why I think I shall write my stories set in an alternate universe in which transporters only work pad-to-pad.

Or at least be consistent enough with a set of limitations that you aren't tempted to use them as magic genie beams. Abramsverse did a good job of this, IMO, where just the fact that an object is moving around too much makes beaming complicated; ups the difficulty level a bit, makes the Heroes really WORK for it.

Style wise, I prefer this. It's not the 60s anymore, we can actually AFFORD to CGI a shuttlecraft landing sequence on a new planet ever week! 99% of all problems encountered by an away team could be solved just by having a shuttlecraft (with med gear, supplies and an evac pilot) standing by in a secure landing site, but more importantly, WATCHING them solve that problem would be pretty cool to see as well.

Ha ha - I agree up to a point. If you have a localised qunatum scanning device i.e. a communicator or tag then it shouldn't matter if you are moving. Every sub-atomic particle in your body is moving, the planet is moving a lot faster than any human movement, the ship is moving, and the universe is moving. It's a fairly redundant limitation. Once the atoms in your body are tagged, spooky action at a distance means it shouldn't matter if you are moving, and the scan takes place in an instant. Amanda should be alive.

Blakes 7 teleporters functioned quite happily with a similar limitation. There is still plenty of scope for landing parties to take spare tag or communicators on rescue missions and site to site transports would not be instantaneous. Further, if you accept that matter 'leaks away' during each transport, you can introduce formal limitations to the number of transports any one person can make in a short space of time and have a legitimate reason to rotate crew and/or reserve transporters for particular types of missions.

You would also have a transporter pad in your brig as standard for the system to divert unauthorised transportees to a secure holding area.

I'm not so willing to sing the praises of NuTrek transporters overall. By increasing the distance that they can work in NuTrek they open a different can of worms that is just as great an aberration as the worst of TOS or TNG in my book.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There's so much technology in Star Trek that could be weaponized, it's mindboggling.

I mean, a warp-based railgun alone would annihilate nearly any opponent with a single shot.

And USS Vengeance had TWO of them!

References? I just did a quick Google search and I can't find any mention of such. Are you confusing the torpedo launchers with railguns, let alone warp railguns?

There's no confusion. That's what they're DESIGNED to be over at ILM. We've never actually seen Vengeance's torpedo launchers up close.

Hint, a single shot from a warp-powered railgun would almost certainly annihilate anything it hit.

Well, a warp-powered deflector shield would absorb a significant portion of its kinetic energy in the same way for the same reason, but I'm thinking that's the beauty of these kinds of weapons: your shields either stop them completely (because they have a lot more repulsive power than your weapons), or they don't, in which case a huge chunk of your ship gets blown away.

OTOH, it wouldn't actually do that much damage unless the projectile goes through a thick part of the ship with a lot of material in its path. Otherwise it's just a really violent through-and-through (e.g. General Chang's torpedo).

'Course, that would also make suicide warp ships the ultimate doomsday weapon in any war, especially for planets and moons

That was a major plot point in the "Romulan War" novels, IIRC. It's apparently considered a type of extremely nasty war crime and most people avoid doing it because doing so invites your enemies to retaliate in kind.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm not so willing to sing the praises of NuTrek transporters overall. By increasing the distance that they can work in NuTrek they open a different can of worms that is just as great an aberration as the worst of TOS or TNG in my book.

TOS and TNG were pretty inconsistent with theirs too; at least in the Abramsverse it requires special technology and/or an advanced knowledge of transwarp physics to make it work, in which case long-distance beaming isn't a technological feat so much as a complicated daredevil stunt that only EXTREMELY savvy Starfleeters would even consider trying.

It's sort of like how the technology now exists to launch a human being from one side of the world to the other via ICBM, but nobody thinks that's a really efficient way of transporting commandos halfway around the world... nobody, that is, but the captain of the ballistic missile submarine who knows EXACTLY where the assassin is and just happens to have a passion for skydiving.

 

[JES]

There's so much technology in Star Trek that could be weaponized, it's mindboggling.

I mean, a warp-based railgun alone would annihilate nearly any opponent with a single shot.

And USS Vengeance had TWO of them!

References? I just did a quick Google search and I can't find any mention of such. Are you confusing the torpedo launchers with railguns, let alone warp railguns?

(Hint, a single shot from a warp-powered railgun would almost certainly annihilate anything it hit. I mean, even a golf ball going as slow as, say, ten percent the speed of light would be devastating. Forget a heavy slug traveling in excess of C.

'Course, that would also make suicide warp ships the ultimate doomsday weapon in any war, especially for planets and moons, but that's never been an issue in Trek either to my knowledge. The Dominion War would have been over real fast if it were, with them winning hands down.)

Wouldn't all those warp drives exploding damage the fabric of subspace? Probably why nobody in their right mind does it. Then again, isn't that what the Jem'Hadar did with their bug ships on occasion?

And I thought the BFGs on the Vengeance were some sort of accelerated phaser beam cannons.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Wouldn't all those warp drives exploding damage the fabric of subspace?

No more so than a tsunami damages the "fabric" of the ocean.

Space may not be an ocean, but it aint a prom dress either.

And I thought the BFGs on the Vengeance were some sort of accelerated phaser beam cannons.

Those were available, but as far as anyone can tell were not actually used in the film. They're the large circular phaser emitters mounted on the secondary hull on either side of the deflector dish, just above the ports for the phaser balls.

 

[Pauln6]

I'm not so willing to sing the praises of NuTrek transporters overall. By increasing the distance that they can work in NuTrek they open a different can of worms that is just as great an aberration as the worst of TOS or TNG in my book.

TOS and TNG were pretty inconsistent with theirs too; at least in the Abramsverse it requires special technology and/or an advanced knowledge of transwarp physics to make it work, in which case long-distance beaming isn't a technological feat so much as a complicated daredevil stunt that only EXTREMELY savvy Starfleeters would even consider trying.

Long distance beaming tended to be used for more advanced civilisations in the TV shows but inconsistency is always irksome. The Ferengi subspace beaming tech was an annoying hand wave but if they didn't make transporter tech versatile in the first place they wouldn't need to layer on inconsistent limitations.

The silly thing about NuTrek was that the long distance beaming DIDN'T actually require specialist technology. They used a broken down transporter in a 23rd century shuttle. In STiD doesn't Scotty indicate that it's his calculations cribbed from the future that are the key? I would have been far less scathing if the characters had needed to make alterations to the technology and the shuttle was fried after one use.

Plus it would seem that the issue with distance should be a matter of maintaining the integrity of the signal over those longer distances. It isn't at all clear to me why Scotty should crack that problem using 23rd century tech when every scientist in the Federation failed to do so in the next 80 years with superior 24th century tech.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The silly thing about NuTrek was that the long distance beaming DIDN'T actually require specialist technology.

No, it required advanced knowledge in subspace physics that otherwise would have taken Scotty several years to work out. As with many things, it's a technique that's probably harder to LEARN than it is to actually DO.

Plus it would seem that the issue with distance should be a matter of maintaining the integrity of the signal over those longer distances. It isn't at all clear to me why Scotty should crack that problem using 23rd century tech when every scientist in the Federation failed to do so in the next 80 years with superior 24th century tech.

What makes you think "Every scientist in the Federation" failed to do so? Or, for that matter, even bothered to try?

And even assuming they did, sometimes that's how science works. Montgomery Scott could very well be the Nikolai Tesla of the 23rd century.

 

[Pauln6]

What makes you think "Every scientist in the Federation" failed to do so? Or, for that matter, even bothered to try?

And even assuming they did, sometimes that's how science works. Montgomery Scott could very well be the Nikolai Tesla of the 23rd century.

True, I base my prejudice on Spock Prime's comments but he could have been 'implying' a lot of stuff. TOS Scotty was a great warp engineer and good at improvising in a crunch but he was never really portrayed as theoretical genius. He was more of a blue collar worker done good. This sort of clumsy story-telling falls into the category of Anakin building C3PO for me. The main characters are abnormally amazing instead of normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances.

I suppose I feel offended at the notion that a human man from the 23rd century should re-define transporter use in his spare time after he retired instead of innumerable 24th century scientists who have had an additional 80 years to work on the theory. Even if Scotty built on the work of others from the missing 80 years, they get no credit here. It smacks too much of western colonialism to me with the humans being cast in the role of white Europeans bringing shiny improved science to the backwards alien member of the Federation. You get shades of this attitude in STVI too.

I realise that some of the greatest breakthroughs in history were accidental or by non-professionals but the notion of the universe bigging up Scotty to paper over timey wimey cracks is very tiresome to me.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I suppose I feel offended at the notion that a human man from the 23rd century should re-define transporter use in his spare time after he retired instead of innumerable 24th century scientists who have had an additional 80 years to work on the theory.

That's kinda what I just asked: what makes you think anyone but Scotty was actually working on it? The way he tells it, he's the only person in the universe who thinks it's even POSSIBLE, everyone considers it to be a crackpot idea that isn't worth their time. In fact, it was his experiment with transwarp beaming that got him exiled to Delta Vega in the first place; why would he spin his wheels tying to revisit THAT whole debacle?

I also didn't get the impression that Scotty invented transwarp beaming way out in the 24th century. I'm pretty sure that he did this during his time in Starfleet. It could very well be something that Scotty Prime came up with before he was ever assigned to the Enterprise.

As even you put it:

TOS Scotty was a great warp engineer and good at improvising in a crunch but he was never really portrayed as theoretical genius. He was more of a blue collar worker done good.

Which would explain why nobody in the scientific community took him seriously. To be sure, I would imagine the only reason SPOCK knew about his equation is because they were serving together on the Enterprise when Scotty discovered it. And if this is something discovered by accident by some blue collar mechanic in a deep space mission, totally unknown to academia and hundreds of light years from the nearest patent office, nobody in the broader Federation is going to know about it until after Scotty retires, if then. In fact, Scotty himself even implies that this is more or less what SHOULD have happened, when he expresses his outrage that Section 31 "confiscated" his transwarp beaming equation. "Confiscated" suggests that he gave up the formula under duress: he wasn't about to share the formula with the entire universe royalty free.

The only thing you're really tripping over is this idea that transwarp beaming is some kind of utterly game-changing technology that totally changes the way starships are built and the way anyone from anywhere uses transporters. Really, though, it's probably not all that special, just a cool engineering trick you can pull off if you're really good with numbers and have a good fix on your target. In that sense, it's one of the MANY interesting tricks Scotty has picked up over the years in order to protect his reputation as a miracle worker.

 

[Pauln6]

The only thing you're really tripping over is this idea that transwarp beaming is some kind of utterly game-changing technology that totally changes the way starships are built and the way anyone from anywhere uses transporters. Really, though, it's probably not all that special, just a cool engineering trick you can pull off if you're really good with numbers and have a good fix on your target. In that sense, it's one of the MANY interesting tricks Scotty has picked up over the years in order to protect his reputation as a miracle worker.

That is one trick that's worth noting - they were beaming to another Federation ship with a beacon they could lock onto. It's not a trick that would work on any old ship that far away. However, the fact that this was not mentioned specifically left me wondering if the next writer would take this into account.

And they didn't! Khan beams 20 times the distance to an enemy planet. It seems likely that he had pre-organised the landing site though so an encoded beacon could have been put in place but again, this wasn't mentioned specifically so it's wide open for the next writer again.

 

[Ithekro]

Khan probably had time to plan his trip. Kirk and Scott didn't have all that long and they guessed it work. Khan knew it would work since it had been done before. Section 31 probably tested the thing a few times as well.

A planet can be predictable it where it will be. A starship moving at warp speed?

 

[Pauln6]

Khan probably had time to plan his trip. Kirk and Scott didn't have all that long and they guessed it work. Khan knew it would work since it had been done before. Section 31 probably tested the thing a few times as well.

A planet can be predictable it where it will be. A starship moving at warp speed?

Yes there are probably ways to predict the rotation of Earth relative to the rotation of Qu'onos and the intervening space - transport co-ordinates are mathematical. It's far easier doing the maths for two sub-light objects with relatively predictable speeds than if one or both vessels are at warp where the slightest miscalculation leaves you millions of KM off target.

However, there would also have to be no intervening objects large enough or solid enough to block scanners. Given that Khan wouldn't know for sure when the emergency meeting would take place presumably he has a greater than 50% chance of the sun or the Klingon star or one of the intervening planets in either system blocking his way. We know that this is the case even in NuTrek since Kirk and Spock can't transport until they have a clear line of sight of the Narada and Sarek could not be beamed up from beneath Vulcan's surface. This seems to be either a quantum scanning issue though since we often see people beaming to and from underground locations when they have communicators on hand or a particular issue with the type of rock.

If, as has been suggested, he was re-routing his signal through specially adapted communications relays then his only issue would be getting from the Federation border to the Klingon homeworld, which is still pretty major. It's not as if his pattern can stay inside the relay for 4 hours waiting for the planet to reappear from behind the sun.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That is one trick that's worth noting - they were beaming to another Federation ship with a beacon they could lock onto. It's not a trick that would work on any old ship that far away. However, the fact that this was not mentioned specifically left me wondering if the next writer would take this into account.

And they didn't! Khan beams 20 times the distance to an enemy planet. It seems likely that he had pre-organised the landing site though so an encoded beacon could have been put in place but again, this wasn't mentioned specifically so it's wide open for the next writer again.

Actually the novelization suggests he did EXACTLY this, piggybacking the signal through a half dozen relays in order to get to his final destination. He had set it all up head of time, evidently so that slagging all of Starfleet's top brass would be the very last thing he did before running off to Kronos.

Alan Dean Foster apparently based the novelization more on the script than the actual film, so I would consider this to be basically the explanation the writers used. Again, it's an interesting kind of daredevil stunt through subspace, but it's not the sort of thing most people would do if they had a choice; I would venture that it would have been safer for Khan to have himself shipped to Kronos in, say, a Class-8 probe than risk a disturbing and humiliating death in a transwarp beaming malfunction.