"The Apple" - The TOS Mythbuster Episode!

Transporter use are inconsistent at best. Even DS9 had an emergency because an airlock wouldn't open.

But, yes, one line would help clarify it.

 

Hardly, because we could then argue back and say it was no issue because we know all about atmospheres and shuttles. Better leave it at trusting that the heroes know their stuff.

We saw the crate van Gelder arrived in. Most cargo items appear to be man-sized for a reason, but that one had to sit on the platform exactly because it was so inconvenient.

Still capable of fitting through the doorways, though. But if bigger items need to get aboard, perhaps the back wall of the transporter room folds like an accordion? After all, that's exactly what the set wall does, and at times it's at odd angles as the result...

As for bottlenecks, something unrelated to shuttle numbers probably precluded shuttle rescue, yes. But likewise, something Evil Kirk did to the machinery at a location OTHER than a transporter room killed the transporters, so it's pretty clearly a separate issue as well.

We basically never get a "dang, something broke in this very room!" emergency with the transporters. Typically, it's a mysterious calamity that "downs the whole fleet" until the mystery is unraveled. Or then a hit against centralized resources elsewhere, such as in "Enemy Within". Conversely, when sparkles fly in a specific transporter room, it seldom deprives the whole ship of capacity explicitly. Combining all the evidence to read "multiple rooms, central resources elsewhere" is easier than combining it to read "single room that fails", although the opposite can be done within certain limits (read: by treating TOS in splendid isolation).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Oh, yeah? So, on TNG, they must never have said "the transporter room." Oh, wait!

Indeed. For example, from "First Contact" (the episode) [http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/189.htm]:

PICARD: Mister Data, will you escort the Minister to the transporter room?​

Saying "the room" would seem to support the idea that, on the Ent-D, there is a designated default transporter room, as basically already posited upthread in regard to the TOS Ent.

Yeah.

So, if you're willing to go beyond the literal in one instance, why stop there? Why not keep going in order to get to place where things make the most sense?

in "This Side of Paradise," maybe the crew was too high to operate more than one transporter room at a time. I mean, they were pretty dang high!

 

You're trying to refute a statement I never made. I never said that TNG hadn't used the phrase "the transporter room." I said that TOS only used the phrase "the transporter room." Not the same thing.

If you can find an instance of TOS (not TAS) referring to multiple transporter rooms, then you'll have disproven my point.

 

Do we?

"The ionization in the upper atmosphere is shorting the guidance systems." One line. Vague enough to pass muster on a 1960's sci-fi television show.

Except for that one time when Kirk plucked a widget out of the console in "Wink of an Eye." And as I said, Deela didn't walk Kirk down to another transporter. Instead, her jealous boytoy spent a bunch of time trying to fix it. Did that widget short the dozens of transporters allegedly on the ship? That would be a pretty lousy way to build a transporter system.

In "The Tholian Web" Scotty and O'Neil spent a lot of time working on one transporter console, not a system hub in Engineering. If this console was the issue, why not jog down to Transporter Room 7 and give that one a go?

Why didn't Spock ask Kyle if the other transporters were down when the planet killer made the one pad we saw go "poof!" Never did they refer to the transporter in the plural. Obvi this is like arguing politics, so "we won't solve it here."

 

My point is that they could use "the room" ten billion times with no other phrasing used at all, and it would still not require there to be only one room, even though unquestionably it would support the premise that there is only one room. The reason is because a sensible interpretation of "the room" in the case of multiple rooms has been provided. Of course, if it had ever been said that there is only one transporter room on the ship, then that would have settled it. But AFAIK there wasn't.

Evidently what we have is a situation wherein generally there is one transporter room that is designated as the one to be used for transport. The others are not in service, or wouldn't be except in an emergency.

In "The Tholian Web," when Scotty said that only three transporter frequencies were operational, he meant period. This is an example in canon of a bottleneck that would exist regardless of how many transporter rooms there were. Even if there were multiple transporters, that doesn't mean that they couldn't share essential equipment like transporter signal transceivers.

Those are great questions.

Roddenberry and company seem to have intended there to be multiple transporter rooms, but there is only one in the standing set, and at the end of the day not even the best of writers and staff could keep it all straight.

 

Maybe she couldn't.

KIRK: You're the enemy?
DEELA: Yes. You beamed me aboard yourself when you came up. A ridiculously long process, but I've taken care of it.​

If she had modified just the one console then the others would have taken for ever.

 

And a bit of math, assuming three minutes for a transport (enter, mount the platform, de-materialize, re-materialize, move out of the beam down location.) Pretty generous for people on a spore-induced high.
430 / 6 = 71.667 so 72 transport operations in all.
72 x 3 = 216 minutes or 3 hours 36 minutes to evacuate the crew with one 6 person pad. 430 people outside one room.
216 / 2 rooms = 108 minutes or 1 hour and 48 minutes with two 6-person pads. 215 people outside of each room.
216 / 4 rooms = 52 minutes with four 6-person pads. 104 people outside three rooms and 103 outside one.

So that wait line doesn't really mean only one room.

 

And we can deal with the other cases, well, case by case.

But oftentimes, we shouldn't. In "Enemy Within", the issue is not with technology. The ship is capable of miracles; so is her crew. But Kirk is down for the count, and at times can't order a course of action even if Spock first spells out for him. The plot of the episode is "too little, too late", mixed with a bit of "too much of the superficially important", aka "bad leadership". For all we know, the shuttle pilots were itching to go, but Scotty had been ordered to concentrate on the transporters, Spock was dedicated to keeping the Doppelgänger secret, and Kirk hardly remembered he was aboard a starship, let alone that she carried shuttles.

But yes, high winds. So the shuttles aren't the first option, and Kirk never gets down to the seventh. Or even the third.

Generally, if Mystery Force prevents transport, it might be useful to modify a single unit to defeat the Force, and unnecessary to modify several. If a central resource is hit, though, no doubt it should be repaired, and probably not via a hatch in the wall, floor or console of a specific transporter room... Yet treknology is all about "rerouting" (in addition to "reversing the polarity"), and perhaps the "modify a single unit to cope" thing can be achieved by bypassing the lost central resource in certain cases while not in others?

Timo Saloniemi

 

...The real problem thus being figuring out how Decker's crew could have beamed down to their doom between blasts from the DDM.

But that was always a key problem there, and again not really a tech issue. What would make them beam down to their assured deaths? Loss of discipline and reason doesn't work because even with twenty transporter rooms, the action would consume the better part of an hour and somebody would say "Now wait a minute!", or start shooting his fellow crewmen, or stop to eat her own leg or whatever. A cunning plan to distract the DDM somehow, one on which every crewman reasonably agrees, is likely there - and it probably would involve the crew getting ready for beam-down action well in advance of the action itself, and figuring out clever ways to speed up the process.

Nevertheless, this adventure is a key argument for accepting the "emergency evacuation transporters" for the required extra capacity. We can then slap imaginary limitations on them so that they aren't an asset in any other sort of an adventure - just like lifeboats aren't great for chase scenes in naval fiction while MOB boats might be. That the evac transporter would be nothing but four or so regular ones clumped together is the least likely option there...

Timo Saloniemi

 

To be fair, when they wrote that line they did not expect it to still dissected continuously 50+ years later.

 

precisely.

well, she knew what room would have been the first choice that day because she read the bulletin board in the morning. Besides, wasn’t room 4 o’brian’s favorite?

interesing, thanks, I’ll have to pay attention to that next time I watch it!

good point.

we see that happening with basically EVERY set. To me it does indicate that the ship is constantly upgraded, just like the sets were.

they are not so difficult to find. Space seed. And probably many more.

my interpretation of that was that beaming down the crew took a long time, with Decker valiantly staying on board the constellation to battle the machine while the crew slowly beamed down.

 

Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home had mentioned Kirk's era had no money and it took place before TNG (chronologically and productionwise).

Also, in the future people could be using archaic statements as metaphor. That's a huge stretch for some episodes, such as "The Apple". Others, like "The Doomsday Machine" allow some wiggle room. TOS had plenty of other myths and consistencies that were easier to peg down anyway. The most fun one is Spock acting with derision over one of his ancestors who was human - a season later and his daddy is the helluvan ancestor in question...

On edit: oops, brainfog. Thew ancestor who married a human (not was )

 

I always thought there were multiple transporter rooms, but one transporter system. Which is why everything goes down when there's an issue. If one looks at TOS in isolation, yeah you can make an argument for one but I don't think there's anything on-screen that "busts" the idea that there are multiple rooms. While it didn't make it on-screen, we see from the writer's guide that there are supposed to be multiple rooms.

I always figured "the" transporter room was whichever one was closest to Kirk's current location. One transporter room really doesn't make a lot of sense. Matt Decker would've had a hell of a time with the Constellation busted beaming down six to eight folks at a time.

Budgetary conceit, I would imagine.

 

We don't "evidently" have a situation where one transporter room of many is "the one" at any given time. We don't have evidence that there is more than one transporter room at all. And I think given all the times that everyone says "THE transporter room" on the show, the burden of proof is on those who think there is more than one. And I don't think statements some posters are making that finish with "it makes sense there is more than one." It "making sense" is not proof of anything.

 

Well, on the contrary, yeah we most definitely do have such evidence indicating there could be multiple transporter rooms, in the form of behind the scenes material written during production, whose authorship can be traced to Roddenberry himself. This evidence has been presented in thread. There are more kinds of "evidence" than what is presented on screen.

 

Well the workaround is that the DDM disengaged combat after crippling the Constellation near the third planet and headed back to finish off the fourth planet. The Connie crew beamed down and then the DDM hit the Connie again as it circled back to start on the third planet.

 

Theory number one:

According to post # 25 from CorporalCaptain:

Andn # 32 CorporalCaptain says:

Assumng that the episodes of Star Trek happen in order of seasons, when was the date of The Making of Star Trek compared to the seasons?

It seems fairly reasonable to assume that the fictional date of The Making of Star Trek is between the second and third seasons. And there is some evidence of how long it was after two of the second season episodes.

In "Who Mourns of Adonais?"Chekov is 22. Chekov is also 22 in The Making of Star Trek, making the interval between them somewhere between 0.000 and 1.000 years.

Sarek is 102.437 years old in "Journey to Babel", and events of that episode are mentioned as past events in The Making of Star Trek, where Sarek is said to be 102 years old. So between 0.000 and 0.563 years have passed between "Journey to Babel" and The Making of Star Trek.

So what The Making of Star Trek. says about the number of transporter rooms may be correct as of the time between seasons when the Enterprise might have had a long overdue overrhaul of its transporter rooom.

Maybe all the Constitution class starships were ordered to upgrade the number of transporter rooms sometime, perhaps near the beginning of TOS, but the Enterprise was at the starbase only long enough to have bulkheads torn down or built and other things done to build the actual rooms for transporters. Then the ship had to be sent on a mission before the actual transporter devices could be installed.

And everytime that the Enterprise reached a starbase to have the actual transporters installed in the extra transporter rooms, some thing happened and they had to be sent on a mission without it being done.

As I recall, HMS Hood needed upgrades like improved armor protection in the 1930s, but the British navy didn't have funds to schedule it during the Depression, and then World War II started in 1939, and HMS Hood was needed too much to be taken off duty for the upgrade. As a reesult, HMS Hood was penetrated by a German shell, exploded, and sank at the Battle of the Denmark Strait on 24 May 1941. Ony 3 of the 1,418 in the crew survived.

And increasing the number of transporter rooms doesn't seem like as important an upgrade for the Enterprise as improving armor protection was for HMS Hood, so it seems like an upgrade which could have been defayed for years. So maybe the addiitonaltransporters were not installed into the addiitonal transporter rooms until an upgrade between the second and third seasons.

So that would mean that the Enterprise had only one working transporter room for two thirds of the series.

That would leave over 20 episodes in the third season where the ship had several working transporters insead of only one. But I don't know how many third season episodes had statements mentioning only one ttransporter room.

Theory number two:

I recently posted suggesting that most TOS episodes happen in alternate universes of their own.

See # 170 and # 172 at: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/wnmhgb-question.308175/page-9#post-13807352

Possibly episodes suggesting that there are several working transporter rooms happen in alternate universes to episodes suggesting that there is only one working transporter room.

 

yeah, what made decker think it was a good idea to evacuate his crew on a planet while fighting a machine that destroyed...well, planets is a puzzler. Unless the constellation was too crippled for its life support to sustain all 400 of the crew, but then why evacuate all? Or, perhaps, unless he already was thinking he could blow up the machine by blowing up the ship, as they eventually do, but he doesn’t seem privy to this strategy later in the episode.

 

It does make perfect sense for him to plan on ramming the beast. What we learn is that the DDM had deprived the ship of phasers (as stated, and this also establishes that Decker knows a bit about how to fight the DDM and how not), but not of maneuverability yet (or they couldn't have reached the planet). Decker then beams the crew down, implicitly with their approval since he wouldn't have the means to force the issue. And then the DDM hits again.

Since Decker at that point laments the fact that he is "up there", he probably wasn't planning on a suicide plunge, but instead was counting on a last-second bailout. So when he gets another starship to play with, one equipped with working phasers, it's understandable that he doesn't go suicidal immediately. But when he runs out of options... Well, returning to Plan A (even if with the insufficient little shuttledinghy) seems natural. And Kirk thus gets the idea that Decker never had the motivation or opportunity to spell out for him.

No "Kelvin pods" on that ship, it seems. But ramming the DDM at planetary orbit sounds tactically smart, since the beast is going to come there sooner or later, and then perhaps concentrate on feeding, so the ramming ship has the opportunity to pounce. A transporter bailout (even if site-to-site) would work, then.

Timo Saloniemi