People still like non-transporterized goods. Can't recall where that was said.
Is transwarp standard in the Kelvin timeline?
- Thread starter The Rock
- Start date
I remember that from a book, where the shipping service went so far as to lift all goods by shuttle, or landed cargo ship. That seems extraordinarily excessive, and inconsistent with the statement that the ethical and metaphysical questions around transporters have been solved. If transporters are good enough for people, they should be considered no more altering than any other form of travel.
Resolved by most, but there will always be doubters.
By replacing them with a whole lot of far greater UN conventional dangers, most notably the fact that you can't actually see where the hell you're going or where your cargo is going to land when you beam. It's the exact same reason why mail carrier rockets never took off (pun intended).
No, it's 66% reliable from what we've seen. Three people have used it, and two of them landed safely.
But consider that one of those three people was James T. Kirk, whose personal awesomeness field allows him to cheat even the worst possible odds, it's probably closer to 50%. Which is to say, 50% of the people who attempt transwarp beaming die gruesome and embarassing deaths wherever it is they happen to materialize.
It also has to account for the thickness of the planet's atmosphere and the probability of the transportee arriving in anything resembling safety. In particular, take any random GPS coordinate and plug that into Google Earth -- any three numbers between 0 and 360 for latitude and longitude -- and see where that lands you. Just for giggles, I randomly plugged in six numbers:
81N, 117E: Middle of the Arctic Ocean
04N, 04E: 30 Atlantic Ocean, 30 miles off the coast of Lagos
17S, 01W: South Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of Nambia
117N, 81E: Antarctica (nuff said)
13S, 51W: Brazil, middle of nowhere, couple of miles from a rec center
31S, 145E: Middle of the Pacific Ocean, 300 miles off the coast of Japan
So for six random attempts to beam someone to Earth without a real destination solution, you've just sent four of them to a watery grave and stranded one of them in a frozen wasteland. The one who survived is in the middle of the jungle and can probably find his way back to civilization IF he knows exactly where he is and what direction to go. If he doesn't, you're Oh for Six.
Most of which isn't SAFE for landing. And we don't even know for sure that transporters will automatically deliver their cargo to the ground; starship transporters do this because the operator deliberately plots a beamdown site and controls the altitude of the people beaming down. With transwarp beaming, you literally have NO IDEA where you're going to end up, so you can't account for changes in seal level or local topography; you're just as likely to materialize half a kilometer under ground, or half a kilometer above it. Either way, you're screwed.
No, it means beaming onto a ship traveling at warp is POSSIBLE. As Scotty found out the hard way, it is neither easy nor particularly safe.
Which I'm pretty sure I already mentioned in alluding to the clandestine use of those systems by people like Section 31 and the Tal Shiar, who are exactly the kinds of people who would use that kind of crazy system on a semi-regular basis. Even the receiving pad and relay systems imply the creation of infrastructure on a pretty large scale, which has security implications of its own (as Khan flamboyantly demonstrated).
Otherwise, this whole conversation is just the Star Trek version of "Flying cars will change the world!" Well no, actually they won't, and there's alot of REASONS why they won't.
With a receiver they could lock onto that, and without one all they would need is a clear volume for delivery.
Kirk landed safely, Scotty landed in the water tube. I still consider it a safe landing because it was far more likely for them to appear outside the ship than in. The two beam-ins managed to maintain their beam-out separation, meaning they somehow didn't deviate at all while transported, they appeared exactly where Scotty sent them. That means the only limitation is knowing where you are going, and a target on a completely predictable course, like a planet, would make targeting extremely easy.
The thickness of a planet's atmosphere is negligible versus the profusion of gas in interstellar space, besides which normal atmosphere has never limited a transporter's ability to beam.
That's what not knowing where you want to go will get you.
A receiver would reduce the margin of error in the beam somewhat, but you'd still need to be able to put your transporter beam within a couple kilometers of the thing you're beaming to at least (probably MUCH closer than that, realistically).
Without a receiver... "all you need is a clear volume" is glossing over the hugeness of that problem. It's like saying "Sky diving is easy. All you need is a parachute."
... where he was only spared from a gruesome death by the pipe just happening to have a very convenient release valve. If that valve hadn't been there or if Kirk hadn't known how to open it, everyone on C-deck would have Scott Smoothies on tap.
Also consider that if their landing site had been just four meters further to the right, BOTH of them would have ended up in the water tank.
Also consider that if they had landed just one and a half meters further DOWN, they would have materialized inside the deck plates and died instantly.
And yet the ship ITSELF is full of things that it would be extremely unsafe to materialize near or inside of. They both had a very good chance of being killed with that stunt, and the only reason they even attempted it was because the alternative was to do nothing and watch Earth be utterly destroyed by Nero.
So transwarp beaming is a high risk longshot proposition, like orbital skydiving or "guns blazing two-man boarding party" or any of the other crazy shit Kirk comes up with that barely works. It's not something anyone would use under NORMAL circumstances, only when they were desperate or otherwise under the gun.
Until you get close enough to the surface to breathe the atmosphere, in which case it is several thousand times denser than the interplanetary medium.
Consider, however, that if a transporter beam is tuned to only resolve in the presence of a solid object (and there's no reason why it would, since they routinely beam through walls and buildings all the time) then 70% of those blind transporters will actually materialize on the BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN. Which is an improvement, really: they won't have time to drown, they'll be instantly crushed to death before they know what's happening.
The only way you can really target a landing site with that kind of precision is to be close enough to the target to sight it and lock on to it. If you're close enough to do that, you can just use a NORMAL transporter, no transwarp fuckery required.
Of course they do.
To be fair, that was Pike's idea.
No they don't. They explore and they defend themselves and their own property. Most displays of power projection in the conventional sense would actually violate the prime directive.
Yes, but it's something they're trained to do and are comfortable enough doing that none of them thought it was weird being asked (Kirk thinks "Fencing" is a weird choice for advanced hand to hand combat, but jumping out of a shuttlecraft in orbit? That's kid stuff).
He does the same kind of thing when he boards the Vengeance, and mentions that it's not totally unusual when Scotty tries to warn him about the tiny airlock hatch they have to go through.
What's significant, though, is that the kind of people who are comfortable using transwarp beaming are the same kinds of people who are comfortable climbing into space suits and firing themselves at high speed out of airlocks, through a huge debris field, to dive through "shotglass" of an airlock at 100m/s. These are not the kinds of things NORMAL people do with their spare time, and neither is transwarp beaming.
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From Wikipedia:
Power projection (or force projection) is a term used in military and political science to refer to the capacity of a state to apply all or some of its elements of national power - political, economic, informational, or military - to rapidly and effectively deploy and sustain forces in and from multiple dispersed locations to respond to crises, to contribute to deterrence, and to enhance regional stability.[1]
Putting giant starships near borders, competing for resources using both diplomatic and military means, garrisoning unstable areas of neutral space and putting starbases/repair and maintainence facilities near contentious areas, administering and upgrading freindly foreign facilities, interdicting supply vessels between allied foreign powers, offering diplomatic mediation on starfleet freindly terms....basically everything we've seen starfleet do that isn't outright scientific or humanitarian has been force projection and has nothing whatsoever to do with the prime directive.
Yep. And in actual usage neccesarily implies the deployment of those forces beyond one's own borders for that purpose. That's the operative word there, "projection," and implies that military power is being projected far from the nation's actual borders. In military science and political discourse it's also understood that power projection is a manifestation of national policy and their standing orders and rules of engagement reflect the political agenda for the region. Nations that do not project power as a matter of policy -- Japan, for example -- place strict controls on the conduct of their forces when traveling abroad or when moving through international waters/airspace.
The Federation does this only in the vicinity of its own colonies and territories or for planets and civilizations with whom they have close relations. Bajor would be a good example, to the extent that the Bajoran government desires or even accepts a Starfleet presence
Would count as "power projection" only when they do this outside of Federation space. OTOH, Starfleet's dealings with Bajor were explicit in acknowledging Bajoran sovereignty over both the space station and the surrounding airspace, with the Starfleet presence only one of technical and administrative support.
Put simply, the Federation has a vastly different idea of how to go about expansion and the pursuit of resources. Their exploration ships identify resources, and if the resources are owned by somebody else they either attempt to buy those resources for a fair price or try to recruit those owners to join the Federation.
The crucial difference is that should Starfleet assets actually encounter regional instability, foreign supply vessels supporting military operations, they're not legally empowered to DO anything about it. They can research the problem and share the results of their research, and they can defend themselves if attacked directly, and that's about it.
No, the military theory of power projection suggests that the presence of combatant or military forces in a region represent political representation of their nation's interests within that region, and those interests are exactly as credible as the forces that represent them (it's the formalization of Von Clausewitz' famous dictim "War is the continuation of politics by other means.") Starfleet's standing orders prohibit this use of power almost explicitly, and we've seen that direct attacks against Starfleet vessels can be met with force but do not in and of themselves constitute an act of war. Even less so for attacks on Starfleet facilities and outposts.
The most you could say is that Starfleet VESSELS can project power for their own interests, but there are policy constraints in place that prevent them from doing so in pursuit of Federation political goals. Ironically, this suggests that Kirk's various violations of the Prime Directive are justifiable on the grounds that he did it purely to defend his ship and his crew; his intervention on Neural, even despite the Klingon presence, would have earned him a reprimand at least.
Which is exactly what starfleet captains do, it's the premise of the show that they are acting outside of the federation and even known space for a large portion of the time. They negotiate and fly the flag on behalf of the federation often so far removed from any central command that they are effectively autonomous. The fact that they act fairly and equitably whilst doing so has no bearing on the fact that as representatives of the Federation they do so from positions of credible military strength, deployed outside their own borders. Usually no threat is made or even implied without provocation but negotiations are nonetheless carried out at the expense of other powers, powers whose own more belligerent stances require starfleet to be able to project meaningful force.
What policy constraints are we talking about? The Prime Directive refers specifically to situations involving pre warp civilisations, I made no such proviso. We see the Enterprise in every incarnation outside federation space acting to negotiate deals, befriend potentially useful neighbours and compete with Klingons, Romulans, whoever for the goodwill of the natives, most often those natives who have acess to some resource both parties covet. They do so in the interest of the federation and by necessity do it in vessels that are a meaningful deterrent and show them to be capable of matching their rivals. This is force projection.
As for their legal constraints beyond the Prime Directive we are given surprisingly little information about the federations legal systems with regard to foreign policy, most of what we see on screen is based on the moral compass of a given captain or admiral, typically with regard to judgements in the specific, not as insights into any standing policies per se.
Re watch Reunification, this is exactly the scenario they encounter. They explicitly do act, outside of their space, in their own interests. No legal case is brought against any party involved, or even mentioned.
Yes they respect Bajoran sovereignty and on at least one occasion are prepared to leave in order to accommodate the wishes of the Bajoran authorities. Nonetheless they do not simply offer "technical and administrative support", they run the station as (at best) a joint facility whose senior officers (not to mention CO) are overwhelmingly starfleet personnel. They upgrade the facility with their advanced weapons. They supply it with numerous armed support craft and a resident warship, under the command (not "administrative support") of a starfleet officer, right on the edge of a rival, belligerent, power's space and well outside of their own. Crucially they quite clearly do so in their own interest and none of that equipment or materiele is placed under the jurisdiction of the Bajoran government. This is power projection and the Cardassian government clearly recognises the fact.
The premise of the show is that they're on a mission of exploration and scientific research. That's not even up for dispute.
Power projection is a specific enough military doctrine that simply "doing stuff far from your own base" doesn't satisfy that criteria. The projection of power implies the projection of POLICY and is a deliberate act with a calculated, pre-determined outcome in mind. It's also a relatively new concept in military science that has become popular in modern parlance because it fits the prevailing narratives of the relationship between politics and warfare.
What Starfleet does is analogous in some ways, different in other ways. But exploration and power projection are not the same activity, any more than rugby and football are the same sport.
And the internal politics of warp-capable ones ("Redemption" and "The Siege"). Even mediating disputes between warring parties depends largely on the good will and friendly relations with the people involved and it's understood even then that one or both parties could order Starfleet to take a hike ("Vengeance Factor").
In other words there's no weight of POLICY behind a Starfleet presence, only the enforcement and/or obedience to local laws and customs and any applicable interplanetary agreements. That makes all the difference.
Power projection isn't just a buzzword for "roam around wherever we like." It's a concept with a specific enough connotation that not all military organizations include it as part of their mandate or operational objectives. Significantly, Starfleet is not technically a military organization, so it wouldn't literally apply to them even if they set out to do it.
Exactly. There's no weight of policy behind what they do or why they do it; it is, for all intents and purposes, a sophisticated research project that happens to reveal Romulan involvement in the Klingon Civil War. A squadron of well-equipped journalists could have accomplished the exact same finding in the exact same way and it would make little difference.
The use of those ships as a SHOW OF FORCE would be another matter entirely, challenging the Romulans to a blockade or actual interdiction of their ships. If, for example, the Klingons didn't CARE if the Romulans were involved, then Picard's fleet would have no way of keeping those weapons from getting to the Duras warriors; they're legally barred from interfering in any way save what they are permitted to do in their own mandate, which is uncover information and share it with whoever asks for it.
Again, "power projection" implies a military presence with the weight of state policy behind it and the implicit use of force to back up that policy. The Federation's overriding foreign policy is "Don't interfere" which is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of power projection. Starfleet can act as researchers, journalists, ambassadors and (within limited jurisdiction) as law enforcement, but NOT as instruments of Federation foreign policy.
Assuming that concept even EXISTS in Cardassian military science (which, given its absence in their discussions with the Federation, it probably doesn't). I don't see that a 20th century Earth term has a whole lot of validity for a 24th century alien civilization organized as a military dictatorship.
Of course, the Cardassians have all kinds of funny terminology for other people's ships and equipment, so their interpretation of Starfleet's policy is probably about as valid as the Klingon's (which is to say "Not at all")
First off, it was Redemption, not Reunification, my apologies...
Quite clearly not the case, they explicitly do far more.
A given, but has no bearing, I made no such assertion. Nor is it a new or particularly modern idea, its a new term for an age old idea. Navies have been doing it by other names for centuries. It isn't actually anywhere near as sophisticated or complicated a concept as you seem to believe. Remove the terminology and you'll find it's been standard practise wherever prevailing conditions have allowed throughout history and arguably before.
Exactly what they are doing at DS9, at the Romulan blackade, at all the many occasions we see starfleet vessels in deep space competing both diplomatically and militarily for resource rights.
No, they're a highly disciplined and structured official uniformed organisation, acting as the primary armed body of a government in times of peace and war. They just dislike the term military even though no one can summon up a convincing distinction between it and them. By the 24th century they've changed the terminology, but it's hard to make a case from onscreen evidence that they are anything but.
A squadron of well equipped journalists with photon torpedoes? They DID blockade the Romulans, refused to move when threatened and actually pre emptively opened fire. The threat wasn't simply to expose the plot, they were fully prepared to engage the Romulans if need be.
They discussed at length and in heated terms, they just didn't use the phrase "force projection". Dukat railed against the federation presence at DS9 which he clearly interpreted as intimidation. Starfleet gained an awful lot from having a presence on the station and there's little doubt that putting serious military assets right in the cardassians back yard was a major factor in the decision to "administer" the station.
Again, you seem to be making a case based on "force projection" being a far more intellectually sophisticated idea than it actually is. You want to compete with rivals outside of your own territory? You task powerful mobile military assets with doing just that, simple. It's boils down to pretty basic ideas about intimidation and dominance which predate military science by a long chalk.
Quite clearly not the case, they explicitly do far more.
A given, but has no bearing, I made no such assertion. Nor is it a new or particularly modern idea, its a new term for an age old idea. Navies have been doing it by other names for centuries. It isn't actually anywhere near as sophisticated or complicated a concept as you seem to believe. Remove the terminology and you'll find it's been standard practise wherever prevailing conditions have allowed throughout history and arguably before.
Exactly what they are doing at DS9, at the Romulan blackade, at all the many occasions we see starfleet vessels in deep space competing both diplomatically and militarily for resource rights.
No, they're a highly disciplined and structured official uniformed organisation, acting as the primary armed body of a government in times of peace and war. They just dislike the term military even though no one can summon up a convincing distinction between it and them. By the 24th century they've changed the terminology, but it's hard to make a case from onscreen evidence that they are anything but.
A squadron of well equipped journalists with photon torpedoes? They DID blockade the Romulans, refused to move when threatened and actually pre emptively opened fire. The threat wasn't simply to expose the plot, they were fully prepared to engage the Romulans if need be.
They discussed at length and in heated terms, they just didn't use the phrase "force projection". Dukat railed against the federation presence at DS9 which he clearly interpreted as intimidation. Starfleet gained an awful lot from having a presence on the station and there's little doubt that putting serious military assets right in the cardassians back yard was a major factor in the decision to "administer" the station.
Again, you seem to be making a case based on "force projection" being a far more intellectually sophisticated idea than it actually is. You want to compete with rivals outside of your own territory? You task powerful mobile military assets with doing just that, simple. It's boils down to pretty basic ideas about intimidation and dominance which predate military science by a long chalk.
It tells us something indeed... merely that the distinction is in people's heads, not that there's a difference in the actual quality of food.
Replicated food is quite likely prepared differently (could be programmed to certain gourme tastes)... but those might not suit 100% of the population. Say that 1% or 2% says 'it just doesn't taste right' - that merely tells me that the way it's been programmed is simply not to their liking.
If you recall, there were only very few people who 'complained' about replicated food not tasting as 'the real thing'.
This is easily attributed to people's individual preferences in terms of how they grew up and how they were mainly fed to begin with - assigning emotional context to those specific memories and then attributing personal bias.
Trek Humans are supposed to be beyond such nonsense anyway, but TV has a way of dumbing things down for the sake of making a show more 'relateable' (whatever that means - the whole purpose is to showcase something completely different and educating people about it so they would understand this difference and possibly appeal to it).
Hand cooked meals are associated with an emotional context... while replicated food not as much (though plenty of people can spend time in front of a replicator modifying it in order to produce food that tastes to their individual preference).
The difference is merely in those people's heads. Nothing more.
It's a NEW term for an old idea that in antiquity was known as "Empire" or "Dominion" or similar terms we recognize today as implying the capacity to exercise political influence over ones colonies and controlled territories as well as the capacity to threaten into compliance or conquer enemies. It was invented in the first place in the aftermath of World War II at a time when western thinkers were not (even now ARE not) comfortable openly endorsing an imperialist foreign policy and so they created a jargon term that didn't raise as many red flags in political discourse (likewise, the U.S.M.C. never retreats, they just perform a "retrograde advance.")
There are actually quite a number of these concepts couched in comforting jargon that describe things Starfleet goes out of its way not to do. These include but are not limited to most forms of expeditionary warfare outside of declared hostilities, rendition of prisoners, "threat containment" (sieges) and "Police actions." When you boil down the jargon to its actual definition, you find the classical use of military power to back up a political agenda, which directly contradicts Starfleet's charter and their pledge not to interfere and allow members of all civilizations to make their own decisions and/or their own mistakes.
It's not a question of sophistication, it's a question of purpose and circumstances. It's like the difference between a murder and an execution. I'm sitting here saying "Police officers are not allowed to murder people" and you're saying "Sure they are! They do it all the time!" and citing examples of law enforcement agencies murdering people in the street without trial.
tl;dr Starfleet performs "power projection" in the same sense that a police department can perform a lynching. It's not that they never do it, it's that they're never SUPPOSED to do it.
I can live with that
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