"The Apple" - The TOS Mythbuster Episode!

I'm resolved on a single transporter system on the ship which is limited to only one transporter beam apparatus. The beam has power and circuitry for only six separate "frequencies" for beaming separate objects at the same time. Usually, one person is one object, but if two people are in contact or close proximity, then the system can beam them as one object. Since the transporter has only one beam and six frequency slots, it makes sense that only one transporter room with six transporter pads is needed at a time. The ship can have other transporter rooms (i.e. two to four), but due to the one beam, six frequency bottleneck of the transporter system, they would not be useable at the same time and would be sitting idle. When one room is in use, then perhaps to prevent unsafe interference from other rooms or something like that, then the other rooms are locked out of the system (like today's "lock out, tag out"). I am also in the camp that the transporter pads are a critical safety system and very maintenance intensive since molecular-level dematerializing/materializing is a precision operation, so, several rooms are needed in order to have one set of six pads certified "ready" at all times. Some sort of internal ship posting identifies which transporter room is ready for the shift. The "ready" transporter room becomes "the" transporter room in ship conversation to avoid confusion.

Issue one: the changing appearance of the transporter room(s), namely food slots on the wall. Food slots were only seen in two episodes, four to five episode apart, namely Tomorrow is Yesterday and This Side of Paradise. Before, after and between these two episodes, the food slots were not there. It makes no sense in-universe to modify the room for food slots, then remove them only to put them back then remove them again ...Occam's Razor and KISS...there are more than one transporter room. Several other appearance examples come to mind further reinforcing the idea that there are more than one room versus continuously modifying this one room over and over again (like a TV stage set ).

Issue two: Kirk disabled the transporter system at only one console. The Scalosians were on the ship for hours of ship time which to them could have been days modifying one room to beam them quicker. Deela implied that the transporter experience was slow. "DEELA: Yes. You beamed me aboard yourself when you came up. A ridiculously long process, but I've taken care of it." What's the problem to the Scalosians? Two ideas come to mind. One, as we discussed in the past, people in transit are conscious during the process. A couple of seconds seems to be okay for most humans (McCoy, Barclay and Hoshi are unsettled by the process though), but to the Scalosians, it would be hours of dematerialized consciousness which may be unbearable/maddening to do it a second time. Secondly, Deela's "fix" to the transporter system was needed to beam up the other Scalosians and their deep freeze equipment in a more timely manner in order to invaded the Enterprise and her many systems. Hours in transport would slow their timetable and give the Enterprise crew more time to stop them. In either case, she modified one room's console which was needed to operate that room's modified connection to the transporter system to make the beaming process faster. The Scalosians determined that fixing the sabotaged console would be faster than remodifying another room once they figured out where the problem was at. (Also, the Scalosians may not be able to get around the "lock out" or the maintenance "unreadiness" of the other rooms if those concepts are used. )

Issue three: the transporter system encompasses areas outside a transporter room. Most of the transporter operation was accessed at a control console in a transporter room, but not in all situations especially with the power/circuitry for the transporter. In The Enemy Within, the transporter control circuity was damaged in Engineering. The Doomsday Machine episode showed Scotty repairing the transporter/power system inside a Jefferies Tube. Scotty also accessed features of the transporter system inside the Emergency Manual Monitor Room in Mirror, Mirror (he added extra power from the engines and balanced it for the mass of four people) and The Lights of Zetar (mass beaming equipment directly into place).

These examples give me the opinion that there are multiple transporter rooms, each with six dematerializing/materializing transporter pads with the limitation that only one transporter room (and its set of six pads) can be operated at a time, linked into one main control circuitry and one power system for the transporter beam. YMMV .

 

I've always taken it as the life support couldn't handle the 400 so it was a definitely die now versus maybe die later choice. We are told by Spock that life support is at low power levels and the repair crew mentions low atmospheric pressure and filtration being out. And that could be a somewhat recovered state after the 400 have been off the ship for a while. Additionally, with the emergency beacon activated, perhaps Decker was hoping help would arrive before the crew would be in peril.

The puzzler for me has been, why wasn't there some other people on board with Decker trying to restore the ship? I mean, look what Scotty and a couple of guys managed. Were all his engineers dead?

I don't think that was his mindset.

 

precisely. Had he been on board with ten people or so it would have made sense, but staying onboard alone is very odd. Unless the others were in one of the sections that got decompressed, Of course...

 

Might have simply lost his logic when things were the bleakest.

 

What shows up on screen trumps any behind the scenes material. On screen we have no evidence of more than one transporter room.

 

In the absence of actual evidence of there being more than one transporter room, this becomes just interesting fanfiction.

 

Depends on if we include TAS, which has a reference to Transporter Room 4

 

Addressed earlier in the thread is the idea that we are talking TOS not TAS and more transporter rooms could have been added between shows.

 

As I said, it depends

 

Just speaking for myself, I don't know TAS nearly as well as TOS, and I certainly wasn't considering it all when I started the thread. As best, I consider TAS in continuity only in a broad strokes kind of way.

 

If @Timo's right about the wall circuit in "Dagger of the Mind," then actually, yeah, we would. I hadn't commented on that so far, because IMO it's unclear in the TrekCore screencaps. I'd have to actually rewatch the episode to confirm that the wall circuit isn't present in the later scenes. But if it isn't, then, boom, that would be onscreen evidence in support of there being multiple transporter rooms in a single episode. See upthread for details.

But also, it's on screen in TAS that there are multiple transporter rooms, as also pointed out upthread. So, that's onscreen evidence, just not the kind that most fans are looking for.

 

So when Kirk flat out tells people in 1986 that they don't use money...and doesn't really get the value of money...?

 

It's sort of the opposite. No, the visuals don't create a sharp contrast between two uses of the set - the circuit board is not seen (nor is a blank wall seen in its place) when the set is used the second time. But the plot dictates that the first room be deep down on the ship, at Deck 14 or lower, which is where we get the sharp contrast: no other transporter room save perhaps the one from "Mudd's Women" is that far down in dialogue. At which point the unique circuit board steps in, allowing us to believe in a faraway cargo transporter just like the plot requires.

This is better evidence than the set having red doors one day and blue doors another. It is something that actually affects the fictional events!

It is also better than simply hearing that there are two or more rooms, because it also gives us a rationale for having more - the "other room" is different, and perhaps also placed differently for functional reasons.

If one episode of TOS had one transporter room that was triangular and three stories high, this could be dismissed as "upgrade" or "mere visual inconsistency" or "first/second/third season weirdness" or whatever. Even dialogue references to a Transporter Room 47 could be ignored. But plots that give us some sort of a plot reason to believe in multiple rooms (of multiple functions, in multiple locations, whatever) are fairly difficult to ignore unless one goes full throttle and decides that every episode (and perhaps every scene) of Star Trek exists in its own little pocket universe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In "The Trouble with Tribbles" Uhura explicitly discusses payment in credits for a tribble. There are numerous examples of some sort of monetary system in place in the 23rd Century throughout the series. These have been listed upthread.

I've always interpreted Kirk's comments in ST4 to mean that Kirk is referring not to money broadly, but specifically cash.

--Alex

 

Or, say, is flabbergasted that money would be related to food somehow, all lunches being free in the future.

Timo Saloniemi

 

47 transporter rooms seems a bit overkill, but I’m really digging the idea of at least one cargo transporter room. It would also not create confusion with people referring to “the” transporter room, as of course they mean the one intended for people.

It might even be a subsystem of the main one, so when Kirk sabotages it it goes down too.

 

There are at least three ways the transporters can go down, not counting the times it's space-windy outside:

1) Random shot at some different part of the ship altogether ("Enemy Within" and any time alien forces blast at the ship in general)
2) Cunning sabotage by experts, at a location of their choosing ("Wink", say; Kirk could probably stop the warp engines of is own ship by tampering with his cabin intercom)
3) Dedicated shot at the hardware in the transporter room itself (probably the rarest of them all, but Kirk in "Enemy Within" apparently was initially split because of contamination of a single room or pad or directly associated machinery)

Both 1 and 2 would be likely to bring down the whole system, regardless of the number of pads or rooms, first by happenstance, second by design. And 3 basically never happens anyway. Say, even if the damage in "Enemy Within" was just to the pad that processed the dirty coveralls of Technician Fisher, the heroes really couldn't tell before inspecting - and in the episode, either the inspection got nowhere because Wussy Kirk was mismanaging the effort, or then the contaminant indeed had done harm to the whole system like any proper space virus thing should.

So multiple pads would do little good in terms of redundancy. But TNG nicely shows why it's a good idea to have several rooms: you really would not want to beam to a pad that's still half a mile from your actual destination. For Picard's ship, the stated minimum is 20 separate rooms, but the ship probably has many more of those small cargo circles everywhere for cargo distribution, either initial beam-in or then subsequent intraship movement. And we know the only difference between "cargo" and "personnel" is the label: the hardware in the cargo holds and personnel rooms alike is safe for people (and antimatter!) without special keypresses. The same would probably hold for Kirk's putative mostly-cargo transporters, so that the "Dagger" one would be one of those yet allow for stowaways.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Which is stupid, in universe, because Kirk spent weeks in 1930 working for money and was the one doing all the shopping.

 

20 transporter rooms seem excessive even for the D IMHO. Besides, does and room above #6 ever get mentioned?

Not talking cargo transporters here, I wouldn’t be surprised if every cargo bay had one there.

 

If all the transporters, at a bare minimum, use the same external emitters then that's a route for contamination to spread.

Yes but things are much more expensive in the 1980s than the 1930s and Kirk doesn't know by how much, assuming he learned about the general concept of inflation in school. Plus, he doesn't have experience with the value of 18th century eyeglasses in any context.