My take on The Galileo Seven

Maybe it was a mass-to-energy ratio issue which equated to about three normal people. Fatties like me are SOL.

 

Perhaps they can beam two on one pad but it isn't generally safe.
Or like in "Day of the Dove" if there are more than 6 they can put them in stasis and reconstruct them later. But I suppose there would be an upper limit to the amount they could store. I can't see them being able to store hundreds but what would I know. In the VOY episode where they kept the telepaths in transition it was for a considerable amount of time but I can't remember numbers and it was 80 years later

 

One would think that the transporter would be agnostic to what it is beaming though. It doesn't seem to have trouble with distinguishing equipment and clothes from the person wearing them, or, an escaping Van Gelder from a box, so why would the transporter see two people touching as somehow different?

 

I don't think it would see them differently. But I do like Mass-Energy ratio idea. Maybe the the transporter frequencies available in "The Tholian Wen" only allowed so much mass to be beamed up and that turned out to be 3 people. Any more mass added and you'd have a transporter accident where not everyone comes over in one piece.

We've seen large masses like the whales and water in ST4 beamed up but I suspect they had to get really close to pull that off to maximize energy and transporter frequencies?

 

Or not in orbit at orbital speeds - I know there are questions about the speed of the E versus typical orbital velocity but clearly something is expending energy to compensate for the need to synchronize momentum.

 

So how does a transporter work putting you on a planet?
1. Sensors find a place on a planet that is rotating underneath your ship in orbit.
2. It manages to drop your feet exactly on the surface, not one inch above or below.
3. It manages not to materialise you into a tree or a cow.

Beaming back seems relatively more simple if you ignore people sitting on seats in the Galileo and the Mirror Mirror exchanging clothes. Although I don't know why when they "beam up everything in an area" they don't beam up chairs and carpets etc.

I cant even try to explain the Mirror Mirror clothes swap. Even if the sensors did distinguish between clothes and humans just why the hell would it change clothes on people?

I think in order for the transporter to work then the ships sensors must be able to find a safe place on the surface of a planet without a solid object in it, then the transporter preliminary evacuates the volume of air from the surface and replace it with the person from the Enterprise. That doesn't explain what happened "And The Children Shall Lead" as nothing in the transporter stopped the security guards being beamed into space.

 

It's implied that they choose either open areas, provided co-ordinates, or transporter pads. Implied, but often ignored. The obvious fix should be that you can only be transported back if you have a communicator to act as a local relay for the quantum scanner. A minor issue, since if you can detect people from orbit, you can always beam down a spare. The crisis in Miri was silly. With no communication from the landing party and the signal from the communicators clearly coming from a different location to the crew, Spock would have just beamed down more communicators.

 

Just dropped on YouTube. Includes some TOS, but mostly TNG transporter mechanics.
How Do Star Trek Transporters Work? (subtitle: Death Trap?):

 

That's another good point. In "The Enemy Within" it is implied that the mains would compensate for the velocity difference and that in an emergency the impulse engines could do the same. Another factor for transporter operations.

 

The transporter ended up being used in many different ways, but initially I thought the Enterprise had to be in geosynchronous orbit to be effectively stationary over one spot on the planet surface for beaming up or down. Of course, that notion didn’t last as story demands dictated otherwise.

 

… which would require all landing parties to be at the equator and even then would need a velocity adjustment as the actual “speed” of a rotating planet at ground level is less than what is needed to move an object many miles higher across the same angle. (Radius from the planet center is larger = more distance traveled to circle = faster speed.)

 

I'm fine with the Enterprise having to use her engines to maintain a "forced" orbit-ish position over the planet in order to line with transporter targets on the surface - futuristic tech, not a big deal.

Plus it helps justify all those moments where a loss of engine power leads almost instantly to a crash course out of orbit, not really an option if the ship were in a proper, "natural" orbit.

 

Probably. Scotty's amazement at pulling it off indicates that it was no ordinary transport. Whether or not the Klingon technology and equipment was inferior to the Federation's is an interesting corollary to that, but Scotty never mentions the Klingon element as an aggravating factor. And he would have been the first to do so.

 

One other thing that puzzles me is energy consumption. In TOS, shuttles must have warp engines for certain stories like the Menagerie or Metamorphosis to work and for them have anything more than notional functionality. Some stories, suggest that the power reserves of shuttles are limited but if they have warp drive, they must have antimatter engines and a warp core. The mass of the object must pale in comparison to the energy required to warp space or transport someone (I realise, NuTrek and Discovery notwithstanding that TOS shuttles didn't use transporters). So, given that they have very limited space for antimatter reserves and the engineering section is under the floor, how much use would shuttles ever really be?

 

Much like Man Vs Machine, Logic Vs Emotion is a central theme for the original series. From almost the beginning they fabricated this dynamic between Spock (logic) and McCoy (emotion). When you look at this episode in that context, how else would it have played out? You have the emotional humans reacting poorly to the logical Vulcan and the logical Vulcan failing to take into account that logic may not be able to solve every problem.

This type of thing would play out in other episodes as humans chafed at Spock's lack of emotional awareness but after all, he's Vulcan and he's supposed to act that way. It doesn't help that Spock is half-human and at odds with that fact throughout the series.

It's quite an interesting dynamic and makes for great drama which after all is what writers and producers are looking for.

 

Per TOS, the shuttlecraft is ion powered that leaves an exhaust of antimatter residue. It has a limited fuel/power reserve, i.e. fuel tank(s) and fuel lines which might be magnetic containment in nature. ("Warp core" is TNG, so, not applicable in TOS.) I like to think that the fuel is some sort of "intermixed" M/AM ion plasma (with a little dilithium dark magic holding the plasma together without reacting) refueled by the Enterprise. Insert fuel into the one onboard reactor and you get general power for the shuttlecraft. Also, feed the fuel directly into the two warp engines (the two big obvious cylinders) for warp drive. Two separate systems powered by the same fuel explains the shuttlecraft power/warp drive best: one M/AM reactor; and two M/AM warp engines.

In The Galileo Seven, Scotty extracted a fuel substitute from the phasers (a very small amount of it) that would run the ship's reactor getting antigravity impulse drive, charge the batteries and other general power, but it was not compatible with the warp engines, so, no warp drive. YMMV .

As for overcoming the huge power requirements for transporters and warp drive, I think the "transtator" technology goes a long way in circumventing the power issues. Spock: "The transtator is the basis for every important piece of equipment that we have."

 

Ooh. The transtator is the shuttle equivalent of Heisenberg compensators?

 

The interesting thing about the TOS shuttles are that they are immensely safe in crashes. Even the leaking fuel isn't dangerous in "The Galileo Seven". Yet we know that with sufficient energy (from the batteries) that the fuel can be ignited for liftoff and later when dumped as a flare. And that the reactor can be adjusted to function with a substitute fuel supply like energy from hand phasers.

I don't think that phaser energy can be ignited but in this case the reactor is doing something to convert the energy into fuel (an energy to matter reaction maybe?) that can be then used by the engine pods. The batteries were ruled out as they didn't have enough to directly power or fuel? a lift off. Even with all the phasers it was barely enough fuel for liftoff and an orbit so I'd imagine that fully fueled for interplanetary or interstellar flight a shuttle would have many many times that amount of fuel onboard for the flight.

 

I haven't read anything past part of the first page, but "THE GALILEO SEVEN" is one of my favorites of TOS.

One thing I noticed in the episode... when McCoy says, "So ends your first command", Spock retorts the same, but in a voice thst seems sarcastic. Obviously, being XO of the ship, he has been in command situations before. So I think it was Spock just laughing at McCoy, for lack of a better term, for thinking this was his actual first command.

 

I presume that while Spock has most certainly been in the position of command before (going all the way back to The Cage after all!), this is the first time that he's been isolated from the usual command structure of the ship with only a small number of crew and cut off from all the usual resources, in a desperate survival situation.
I could be wrong