Assignment Earth Blunders

In re-watching this epsiode, I just noticed that it includes a second example (the other being "A Piece Of The Action") of site-to-site transport being used in TOS. Kirk explicitly has Scotty beam him and Spock directly from the rocket base to Gary Seven's apartment, and not to the transporter pad he apparently has in his vault, either. Neat!

-MMoM

 

Great find! I guess all the "can't wait to see his face" shenanigans in The Cloud Minders was just done for pure diplomatic vindictiveness after all

 

I think it's nicely covered with Scotty's need to verify that he only got Plasus and not Droxine, too...

...So the idea that site-to-site would somehow be special, difficult or modern as of TNG is debunked?

I don't think we ever had any dialogue to the effect of site-to-site being an achievement. And now we have "Context is for Kings" as the earliest site-to-site datapoint, right? Unless I'm missing an ENT example (and in that case we'd have to explain away the counterexample of the Malurian m/am reactor briefly materializing on the platform before being forwarded to the owners).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Site to site transporting (IMHO) simply involves a standard "beam up/down" procedure that bypasses the materialisation on the platform in between. IOW it seems instantaneous to the transportees, but isn't really. Since the machine on ENT was a cutting edge piece of tech, it's not too hard to believe that it didn't have a "skip stage 2" function available.

 

Alien transporters are of course their own thing, and Gary Seven is entitled to better hardware. But Klingon transporters in a supposedly not all that cutting edge BoP site-to-sited two-and-a-half whales and lots of water. Do we have ENT examples of that sort of thing? How did the marauders in "Marauders" move up the deuterium when they weren't buying in penny parcels? Were there explicit examples?

Timo Saloniemi

 

What makes you think the Klingon Bird of Prey is "not all that cutting edge"?

 

Well, the ship is old news to Kirk, who's familiar with its characteristic cloak flicker and all. The transporter is basically the same as seen in ENT, effects-wise, but otherwise an unknown quantity. It's just that Scotty never attributes any special performance or potency to the hardware he is forced to beam the whales and their water with, i.e. it's not explicitly credited with any cutting edge.

It doesn't appear that ENT would have site-to-site transport examples to predate "Context is for Kings". There's the intraship beaming action in "Chosen Realm" to put the lie to Kirk's worries in "Day of the Dove", though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Just re-watched that one, and in addition to the two above points, it should also be noted that the destination in that case was deep inside a sealed underground cavern lined with exotic materials. So that's another additional layer of coverage—no pun intended!

Of course, it does make me wonder now if the original idea in the other episodes—though one that would nonetheless be freely mutable by virtue of not actually being shown as here—might have been that the subjects indeed were briefly materialized on the Enterprise before completing the transport. Despite Kirk explicitly ordering that they be beamed "directly to Seven's apartment" in "Assignment" it takes a short while for him and Spock to turn up on the scene. But we don't know how many doors and rooms they had to navigate after their initial arrival—the suite has several, and we don't actually see them materialize before entering from the next. (And of course there is editing of parallel scenes in play up to that point.) And the one in "Action" seems fairly instantaneous, with the fellow still having his hand raised to his ear as if holding the phone. (Although, I do seem to remember the guard in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" holding his pose in disbelief for a fair moment after materializing in the transporter room, too. Just to play devil's advocate.)

-MMoM

 

I think the Botany Bay (1996) and the SS Valiant (2064) could also be examples of this; presumably the Bonaventure (circa 2060s) and the USS Franklin (2164) are as well. For a series whose motto is "To boldly go where no man has gone before", they certainly ran into a lot of places where humans had already been.

 

It's from a 2nd season TNG episode, "The Royale". A manned American ship designed for extra-solar exploration that disappeared ca. 2037. One of the crew members wasted part of his personal effects weight allowance by bringing a bad novel in dead tree format...

 

...But even that didn't help stop the ship from accelerating across interstellar distances. An Okudagram was prepared but never used, suggesting Earth at the time considered the disappearance a "thrust anomaly" rather than an outright abduction. Of course, the official report would say so (and involve Venus and weather balloons in it somehow, too) even if flight control knew very well that aliens had captured the ship!

FWIW, the Charybdis mission was "the third manned attempt to travel beyond the confines of Earth's solar system". Clearly, it succeeded, but if Earth listed it as a mere "attempt", it probably hadn't gone beyond Pluto yet when lost. The wording might also suggest that the previous two attempts had been no more successful.

Whether the Charybdis was supposed to fly to another star, we can't readily tell. Perhaps the mission tested hardware that would take humans to stars, perhaps it merely wanted to putter around at a thousand AUs or so to see what could be found there. But Picard would probably use more grandiose language if describing an attempt at interstellar flight.

Timo Saloniemi