multiple transporter rooms on TOS Enterprise

[Extrocomp]

The idea that there was more than one transporter room on the original Enterprise originated in the book 'The Making of Star Trek', published in 1968. On page 192, it describes that there are 11 transporter rooms on the Enterprise. 4 of them are ordinary 6-person transporters, 2 of them are cargo transporters and the other 5 are 22-person transporters that are used only in emergencies.

Despite this, the TOS episodes only ever mentioned "the Transporter Room". The episodes 'The Enemy Within' and 'Wink of an Eye' very strongly implied that there was only one transporter room, although in my opinion, there are many reasons why 'Wink of an Eye' should not be considered canon.

So why did the TV episodes not acknowledge that the Enterprise had more than one transporter room, if the info came straight from the writer's guide? And are there any novels that mentioned additional transporter rooms on the Enterprise, or even the fabled 22-person transporter?

I seem to remember that the TAS episode The Lorelei Signal mentioned multiple transporter rooms and I know Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual had pictures of all three types of transporter.

 

[Timo]

Well, the context in which "transporter room" would get mentioned in a typical TOS plot would be one where our heroes were heading for said room to begin a mission, or contacting said room to inquire on the status of heroes who had used that room to begin a mission or were in a process of recovery.

That is, the context would call for the expression "the transporter room", specifically the one relevant to the plotline. There would never be a plot need to specify "a transporter room, and please do mind our ship has several"; our heroes would know which one was relevant that day, during that mission.

That said, the episodes provide circumstantial evidence for and against the idea that the single set might have represented multiple locations. In "Enemy Within", a lucky phaser shot does disable some sort of a centralized resource - but not at the transporter room, but rather at some sort of a centralized engineering facility that might well serve dozens of transporter rooms. Earlier on in that episode, transporters were taken offline because an unidentified hiccup had developed in one of them; it would only be prudent to take offline all the multiple rooms. In general, any time the transporter failed our heroes, story logic would not allow them to go to the next transporter room even if it existed because the same failure should usually affect that one as well.

In contrasting evidence, different episodes featured different-looking transporter rooms (because the set evolved during the course of filming). Depending on your viewing order, the different looks might or might not be explainable as a series of upgrades; an equally good explanation is that we saw at least two separate rooms.

The changes to the set come in two basic categories: changes to the door (which changed color back and forth), and changes to the back wall (which wasn't seen in most episodes, but when it was it either did or did not feature a viewscreen).

Similar set vs. fictional room questions abound regarding the engineering facilities. The set changes a lot during the course of the show, but OTOH we have plot reasons to believe that Main Engineering is much larger than the set; so perhaps we're seeing multiple slightly different rooms that are all part of the same vast complex?

Returning to transporters, these usually appear to be located in the saucer, close to sickbay. Some episodes such as "Dagger of the Mind" specify the deck and suggest vicinity to some other facility such as Engineering or Cargo Hold, though. Another argument for multiple transporter rooms...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Despite this, the TOS episodes only ever mentioned "the Transporter Room". The episodes 'The Enemy Within' and 'Wink of an Eye' very strongly implied that there was only one transporter room...

As Timo explained, "The Enemy Within" implied nothing of the kind -- it was the main transporter circuit in engineering that was damaged, preventing all the transporters from working. And there are references to "transporters," plural, in TOS. For instance, in "The Galileo Seven": "In my opinion, the transporters are now safe for human transport."

So why did the TV episodes not acknowledge that the Enterprise had more than one transporter room, if the info came straight from the writer's guide?

Because the job of a TV episode is to tell a story, not to serve as a travelogue or technical manual. There is no obligation for a story to provide extra information that isn't relevant to the story's events, particularly if that information would be needlessly distracting. Information given in a series bible is not something writers are required to use, just something that's available for them if it serves a story. If an episode had come along that depended on there being more than one transporter room, then that fact would've been mentioned. Since it was usually more dramatically convenient to treat the transporter room as a bottleneck, the only way on or off the ship, the existence of backup transporter facilities was generally glossed over.

 

[Scout101]

Then again, when Kirk sabotaged the transporter in Wink of an Eye (already kinda mentioned), messing with the console prevented them from beaming down. Unless he did something in that one console that killed them ALL, it implies just the one. And messing with one resulting in killing them all would be poor design.

Then again, ignoring the story needs and focusing on practical design, there WOULD be several of the things, as well as a few cargo transporters (although the cargo ones may not be safe for human transport, except in real "take your chances" emergencies).

 

[Omega_Glory]

Information in the Making of Star Trek isn't canon unless it appears onscreen. The Enterprise never had 11 transporter rooms....or bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts, or anything else that's been suggested over the years but not confirmed onscreen.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Information in the Making of Star Trek isn't canon unless it appears onscreen. The Enterprise never had 11 transporter rooms....or bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts, or anything else that's been suggested over the years but not confirmed onscreen.

Didn't Kevin Riley refer to the bowling alley in "The Naked Time," making it canon?

 

[Mysterion]

Information in the Making of Star Trek isn't canon unless it appears onscreen. The Enterprise never had 11 transporter rooms....or bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts, or anything else that's been suggested over the years but not confirmed onscreen.

Didn't Kevin Riley refer to the bowling alley in "The Naked Time," making it canon?

Given Riley's stae of mind at the time, how reliable is his statement?

 

[Christopher]

Then again, when Kirk sabotaged the transporter in Wink of an Eye (already kinda mentioned), messing with the console prevented them from beaming down. Unless he did something in that one console that killed them ALL, it implies just the one. And messing with one resulting in killing them all would be poor design.

Not necessarily. Think of it as a networked computer system. It wouldn't make much sense to make it impossible to modify the network unless you entered commands from every single computer within the network. Generally someone with administrative access can send commands to the whole network from any single computer attached to it. It's easy enough to assume that's what Kirk was doing there.

Alternatively: The Scalosians would've had to modify the transporter for their use, otherwise it would've taken hours to beam down from their POV, and that would've probably been most unpleasant. So perhaps they'd only modified that one transporter to be able to function at Scalosian-suitable speeds, and all the others were therefore useless to them despite having normal function.

Information in the Making of Star Trek isn't canon unless it appears onscreen. The Enterprise never had 11 transporter rooms....or bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts, or anything else that's been suggested over the years but not confirmed onscreen.

You're overstating the case. "Not canon" doesn't mean "absolutely not true." It just means that it's unconfirmed either way. I mean, we never saw a bathroom on the ship, but that's hardly "proof" that there were none. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We don't know for a fact that the E had 11 transporter rooms, but it would be just as wrong to assert as fact that it didn't. And it's a perfectly logical conjecture that there would be more than one transporter.

 

[Ronald Held]

The Enterprise could have several cargo transporters that were usually rated for inanimate matter, which we never saw.

 

[Omega_Glory]

Information in the Making of Star Trek isn't canon unless it appears onscreen. The Enterprise never had 11 transporter rooms....or bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts, or anything else that's been suggested over the years but not confirmed onscreen.

Didn't Kevin Riley refer to the bowling alley in "The Naked Time," making it canon?

Maybe.....or was it a movie theatre? He did say something about something...yes. Gonna have to review it now.

Christopher: I don't think that you can assume 100% that the ship had anything that isn't mentioned. Bathrooms, yes, because humans need such a thing and there were no piles of sh$t laying around the ship showing the lack of them. But 11 transporters are not essential items for human survival, so since they didn't specify, you can't really assume they exist. It would make some sense that the ship would have a cargo-sized transporter or two, or that there are a couple of transporter rooms for sending people around....but 11 is a bit of a stretch. I'm not sure there was room on the ship for 11 transporter rooms and everything else they had to cram in there.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher: I don't think that you can assume 100% that the ship had anything that isn't mentioned.

I never said you had to. I said you can't assume 100% that it didn't either. Lack of proof that something exists does not prove its nonexistence. It might be there or it might not. And it's just as wrong to assume it doesn't exist as it is to assume that it does. If you don't know, the sensible thing to do is to admit that you don't know rather than making an unsupported assumption either way. Doubt is not something to be feared. Indeed, in the absence of hard data, doubt is the only honest position to take.

But 11 transporters are not essential items for human survival, so since they didn't specify, you can't really assume they exist.

True, you can't assume there are 11. But that doesn't mean there has to be only one. That's an equally unjustified assumption.

However, I disagree with you that it's an unreasonable conjecture to suggest the presence of 11 transporters. As Extrocomp stated above, TMoST's description specified only 4 personnel transporters, 2 cargo transporters, and 5 stations reserved for emergency use only. I hardly think that can be considered an overabundance. Say you have to evacuate the ship in a hurry. The emergency stations take 22 people each, the regular ones 6 each, so if they're all in operation at once, they can take 134 people. That means you'd need four cycles each to evacuate the entire 430-person complement. Assume 30 seconds per cycle and that's 2 minutes to evacuate the ship. If there were only one 6-person transporter on the entire ship, it would take 72 trips or 36 minutes to evacuate. And if that transporter's broken, the crew is doomed. That's clearly unreasonable.

Of course you don't need to remind me that's just conjecture. That's obvious. We don't know how many transporters the ship actually had. But it's not very reasonable to assume it had only one. The fact that we have no proof of others doesn't mean they couldn't have existed.

 

[Sci]

I'll never understand "strict constructionists."

"If it's not in [x], then it isn't valid/real!"

If it's not in the Bible, it didn't happen.

If it's not in the Constitution, you can't do that.

If it's not in the Star Trek canon, then it doesn't exist.

Is Star Trek an exercise in creativity, or it is an attempt to create a definitive technical manuel? Is it a story being told, or is it just a box that we put some things in and try to keep everything else out of?

 

[kitsune]

it was the main transporter circuit in engineering that was damaged, preventing all the transporters from working. And there are references to "transporters," plural, in TOS. For instance, in "The Galileo Seven": "In my opinion, the transporters are now safe for human transport."

Unless the Enterprise's designers were complete idiots, there would have to be at a minimum two personnel transporters: one in the saucer and one in the secondary hull. If the crew had to separate the ship in an emergency (which by now everyone accepts as a possibility on the Constitution class), a transporter room would be a pretty basic requirement to have regardless of which part of the ship you're in. Extrapolating from this, it's safe to infer that there are at least two "main transporter circuits" that are completely independent of each other, one in each part of the ship. So the TOS writers didn't think this through well enough.

 

[Timo]

And messing with one resulting in killing them all would be poor design.

Or, more plausibly, an indication of the fact that Kirk knew his own ship while the Scalosians knew zip.

I'm reasonably sure Kirk could have sabotaged the transporters from his own cabin in the right conditions. Doing it in one of the transporter rooms might simply have been a bit more expedient.

Or then psychologically necessary: the Scalosians had to be convinced that the transporter was inoperable for good, and Kirk could do that by pulling a component out of a single console and then allowing himself to be caught red-handed. When Deela caught up with him, she'd believe Kirk had performed sufficient sabotage to prevent the Scalosians from overriding it, and would not make the override attempt.

Then again, ignoring the story needs and focusing on practical design, there WOULD be several of the things, as well as a few cargo transporters (although the cargo ones may not be safe for human transport, except in real "take your chances" emergencies).

I doubt that cargo transporters would be unsafe for human transport. I mean, that line is in many tech manuals, but we never see it in practice. In "Dagger of the Mind", van Gelder snuck aboard inside a cargo box, while the transporter operator was in the belief he was only beaming up cargo. As far as we know, van Gelder came to no harm. In "Datalore", Lore survived cargo transport just fine. When Q lost his powers and attempted a suicide mission aboard a shuttlecraft, the heroes in turn attempted to beam back the shuttlecraft - which would obviously have required a cargo transporter, and apparently still wouldn't have been fatal to the now-human Q.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

If the crew had to separate the ship in an emergency (which by now everyone accepts as a possibility on the Constitution class), a transporter room would be a pretty basic requirement to have regardless of which part of the ship you're in. Extrapolating from this, it's safe to infer that there are at least two "main transporter circuits" that are completely independent of each other, one in each part of the ship. So the TOS writers didn't think this through well enough.

It was only the fifth produced episode of the show; they hadn't sorted out all the details.

Besides, the job of TV writers is to tell a story, not to give an accurate technical documentation of a spaceship. The story required all the transporters to be down, so all the transporters were down.

 

[Timo]

Anyway, you have to draw the limit somewhere. The F-16 may have triply redundant flight controls, but it's still only got one engine. Two would be good for redundancy, but completely disastrous for the intended purpose of getting enough of these planes flying in your air force.

So perhaps those platforms, control consoles and rooms are dirt cheap, but the actual machinery that makes them teleport people is expensive enough that a single starship can't afford to have multiple examples aboard?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Omega_Glory]

I'll never understand "strict constructionists."
If it's not in the Constitution, you can't do that.

If they had adhered to this idea, the Constitutional Republic we used to have would still be here rather than this modified socialist/totaltarian state we currently find ourselves in.

If it's not in the Star Trek canon, then it doesn't exist.

If your'e talking about the official history/backstory of the show, this has to be. Otherwise it becomes a convulted, contradictory mess of fan assumptions.

Is Star Trek an exercise in creativity, or it is an attempt to create a definitive technical manuel? Is it a story being told, or is it just a box that we put some things in and try to keep everything else out of?

I rather like to think of it as a big orange bucket with barbed wire around the top to keep people from fiddle f&&king around with it.



Christopher: I agree there has to be more than one (mentioned that in my last post in case you missed it), but still 11 might be more than the physical size of the ship is capable of handling.

But then on the other hand, now that I think about it, given the evidence in Star Trek V, it would seem that one personnel transporter is all there is. Scotty is working on the transporter in a single room. Even if there are others, one transporter room offline wouldn't shut the others down (if there were others). Each would be on a separate circuit...not in series like Xmas tree lights.

As far as evac, navy ships of today don't have lifeboat capability to evac the entire crew in seconds.....don't see why the big E would either.

 

[Scout101]

To be fair, current navy tech doesn't include magic boxes that teleport you, however. If they did, there might be a few more of them in strategic areas.

A better arguement against massive 'evac' transporter systems is that they are flying around in spaceships, and most of the time there wouldn't be much to beam TO in an emergency. Life pods are more self-reliant that way, especially if you give them an ability to soft-land if needed. Biggest arguements would be that if you're abandoning ship, the ship is likely pretty screwed, so power may be offline, rerouted, or at a premium. With how touchy the transporters are, not smart to rely on them in that situation. Much better to just manually eject some airtight boxes with thrusters and hope for the best...

 

[Christopher]

If it's not in the Star Trek canon, then it doesn't exist.

If your'e talking about the official history/backstory of the show, this has to be. Otherwise it becomes a convulted, contradictory mess of fan assumptions.

No, it doesn't. You're confusing two totally different concepts: "It doesn't necessarily exist" (which is valid) and "It absolutely doesn't exist" (which is total nonsense). We've never seen Beijing or Venus or the molten core of the Earth in Star Trek canon, but that doesn't mean they don't exist there. We've never seen most of the billions and billions of Earth's inhabitants, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. We've never seen Captain Kirk's genitalia, but it's a pretty safe bet that they exist. Again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is valid and correct to say that something not established by canon might or might not exist. It is thoroughly irrational to say that it cannot exist.

Christopher: I agree there has to be more than one (mentioned that in my last post in case you missed it), but still 11 might be more than the physical size of the ship is capable of handling.

That doesn't make any sense. The Enterprise is comparable in size to an aircraft carrier. It's a huge vessel with two dozen decks.

Franz Joseph's blueprints handily show all eleven transporters mentioned in TMoST, and there's abundant room for them. The four main transporters are all shown on deck 7, two on the port side and two on the starboard. Three of the emergency transporters are on deck 8, one at the front and the other two at 120-degree intervals. One cargo transporter is at the aft of deck 10, designated as a cargo/supply level. The remaining two emergency transporters are at the front of deck 22, one on either side, and the remaining cargo transporter is at the aft of deck 23, the secondary hull's cargo level. All accounted for with plenty of room to spare. Again, it's conjecture, of course, but it's a plausible conjecture.

As far as evac, navy ships of today don't have lifeboat capability to evac the entire crew in seconds.....don't see why the big E would either.

Navy ships of a few hundred years ago didn't have propellers or radar or refrigerators. Do you therefore believe there's no reason why modern ships should have them?

 

[JB2005]

Navy ships of a few hundred years ago didn't have propellers or radar or refrigerators. Do you therefore believe there's no reason why modern ships should have them?

Waste of taxpayer's money? :P

Is on our navy to be fair, never does anything!

(Btw if you're in the Royal Navy and read that, I'm kidding, I kid because I care)