Logistics inside a starship--the turbolift
- Thread starter Nerys Ghemor
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Timo,
Actually it is the turboshaft network seen in the turbo car in TMP, not something else, not air conditioning network. I have the Director's Edition on DVD and either on the Mike OKuda text commentary or the voice commentary it states that Bill Shatner steps forward blocking the diagram, but before he does you notice a small white square moving on the network diagram moving from the cargo bay area of the ship (to the bridge).
Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
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"Who's been holding up the damn elevator?" -Doctor McCoy "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"
...And there, Saavik apparently held the elevator right in front of McCoy's boarding station, blocking any other cabs from reaching that location.
Waiting for the cab to arrive might be a feature of the system at seldom-used boarding stations, but shouldn't plague the bridge where turbolifts are the main means of access and there is frequent and important traffic. And indeed we never see our heroes waiting for a bridge turbolift - instead, we see two characters enter two different cabs back-to-back in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", with just a few seconds between the door openings. That more or less confirms the idea of multiple cabs serving a single shaft and the "cab rank" concept.
Or then Lokai dashed into the cab first, frantically pressed the "Transporter Room" button and the "Doors Close" button at the same time, and leaned against the back wall, panting - but before the lift could move, Bele entered. "Did you already..?" Lokai nodded weakly. Bele gave an uncertain little nod in return, then turned his attention to the ceiling. Lokai found something extremely interesting in the back corner of the cab, and started to hum a nervous little tune, but soon caught himself, and the cab descended to an awkward silence. A few decks down, the doors went "pling!", and Lokai dashed out past Bele, avoiding his eyes, accidentally brushing against his sleeve nevertheless. Even before clearing the door, he realized this was not yet his floor, but the faux pas humiliation of admitting to the error would have been unbearable; he kept his running step steady and headed for the nearest staircase.
The relentless hunter rocked on the balls of his feet, waited for the doors to close, nervously tapped a rhythm with his fingers (in the tune Lokai had earlier hummed, although Bele didn't consciously realize this, and would have vehemently denied it if questioned), and rode to his floor. With the next "pling!", he leaped into the corridor, his eyes darting left and right, spotting the familiar pattern of black and white just clearing the corner. "Loooookaaaaaai!!!", he roared, launching into pursuit, blood pounding in his ears, filling his mouth with its metallic taste. The taste of victory, the taste of closure. Just within his grasp...
Timo Saloniemi
Waiting for the cab to arrive might be a feature of the system at seldom-used boarding stations, but shouldn't plague the bridge where turbolifts are the main means of access and there is frequent and important traffic. And indeed we never see our heroes waiting for a bridge turbolift - instead, we see two characters enter two different cabs back-to-back in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", with just a few seconds between the door openings. That more or less confirms the idea of multiple cabs serving a single shaft and the "cab rank" concept.
Or then Lokai dashed into the cab first, frantically pressed the "Transporter Room" button and the "Doors Close" button at the same time, and leaned against the back wall, panting - but before the lift could move, Bele entered. "Did you already..?" Lokai nodded weakly. Bele gave an uncertain little nod in return, then turned his attention to the ceiling. Lokai found something extremely interesting in the back corner of the cab, and started to hum a nervous little tune, but soon caught himself, and the cab descended to an awkward silence. A few decks down, the doors went "pling!", and Lokai dashed out past Bele, avoiding his eyes, accidentally brushing against his sleeve nevertheless. Even before clearing the door, he realized this was not yet his floor, but the faux pas humiliation of admitting to the error would have been unbearable; he kept his running step steady and headed for the nearest staircase.
The relentless hunter rocked on the balls of his feet, waited for the doors to close, nervously tapped a rhythm with his fingers (in the tune Lokai had earlier hummed, although Bele didn't consciously realize this, and would have vehemently denied it if questioned), and rode to his floor. With the next "pling!", he leaped into the corridor, his eyes darting left and right, spotting the familiar pattern of black and white just clearing the corner. "Loooookaaaaaai!!!", he roared, launching into pursuit, blood pounding in his ears, filling his mouth with its metallic taste. The taste of victory, the taste of closure. Just within his grasp...
Timo Saloniemi
Very well, I'll fix it:
* * *
I don't see any reason it shouldn't work that way at all turbolift stations.
I thought about mentioning this too, but I couldn't remember if I actually saw it or if I just imagined that I did?
Anywho, TAS also has an episode where Kirk steps in to the T/L and then we see a close up of the C/S diagram from "TMOST" and we can see a small curser move down the main shaft and then turn, at about deck five, and proceed toward the aft, after which the scene cuts back to Kirk steping off the T/L. The implication being that this is a dislpay added to the T/L car at some point post TOS?
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Finite number of cars - too many, and you just waste space, materials and mass.
Thus, if the records show that turbolift stations X, Y and Z are almost invariably used only at shift changes, it doesn't make sense to tie up 3+ cars there all day. Ergo, if someone wants to take a lift from one of those stations at another time, they'll have a short wait (and if there's an actual crisis, they won't be using a turbolift anyway - either systems will be down and they'll have to use a Jeffries tube, or they can request a site-to-site transport in a life-or-death situation).
But it's three hundred years in the future. Don't forget Clarke's Third Law. If they can replicate food ostensibly out of thin air, isn't it at least possible that the turbolift cars could someone manifest only when needed, and not have to clog up the turboshaft wasting space?
Just because we can't explain something in terms of today's technology doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible in Star Trek. I think it's unnecessarily limiting to say these work much the same as normal elevators of 300 years previously, but they can also go sideways.
I don't know, I'm not a "Treknologist," so I've never bothered to spend much energy trying to explain it. But I can't explain the transporter or warp drive either, and I have no problem accepting that future technology. I mean, for heaven's sake, if they've conquered the need for zippers, then they could probably have fixed the problem of waiting for elevators.
Just because we can't explain something in terms of today's technology doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible in Star Trek. I think it's unnecessarily limiting to say these work much the same as normal elevators of 300 years previously, but they can also go sideways.
I don't know, I'm not a "Treknologist," so I've never bothered to spend much energy trying to explain it. But I can't explain the transporter or warp drive either, and I have no problem accepting that future technology. I mean, for heaven's sake, if they've conquered the need for zippers, then they could probably have fixed the problem of waiting for elevators.
The thing is, though, the TOS ship was almost steampunkish as far as science fiction spacecraft go. It was a hellhole of manual labor - thousands of buttons needed pushing, hand-cranked valves littered the walls of the corridors, people had to climb up and down on awkward ladders, and the launching or recovering of a shuttlecraft took significant and seemingly shipwide effort. Whenever something needed repairing, the crew had to go crawling.
Things like ergonomy or crew comfort thus seemed really low in the priority list of the ship designers and builders. Turbolifts that arrive on time? Let's first have engines that can be controlled without having to run between three set walls, crawl up a hole in a fourth, and stick clumsily shaped tools in cramped holes while maintaining an impossibly uncomfortable posture where one can't see what one's doing.
Timo Saloniemi
Things like ergonomy or crew comfort thus seemed really low in the priority list of the ship designers and builders. Turbolifts that arrive on time? Let's first have engines that can be controlled without having to run between three set walls, crawl up a hole in a fourth, and stick clumsily shaped tools in cramped holes while maintaining an impossibly uncomfortable posture where one can't see what one's doing.
Timo Saloniemi
Of course, it's purely subjective, but that's just my opinion. I'm not saying it should be fact, but it certainly makes sense to me.
From a conceptual POV, it's possible, certainly. But we know they don't from ample evidence - not least on DS9, where the turbolifts came up in plain view!
Plus, replicating turbolifts on-demand (a) wouldn't solve the waiting problem - it takes 5-10s to replicate a plate of food or equivalent, already longer than the usual turbolift wait, and presumably would take longer still for something larger & more complex and (b) would open the question of "why bother with turbolifts at all". If you're going to spend the time & energy to replicate lifts on-demand, you'd be better installing a network of self-service short-range transporters all over the ship and skipping the lifts entirely...
A train network is probably a better analogue than today's lifts - you have fixed tracks (turboshafts), but with points(junctions) to switch from one track to another, and discrete stations (specific places to board or alight the turbolifts), with precisely computer-controlled management of the speed & paths of the lifts to prevent collisions.
One may wonder whether the cabs run on railroad-like "tracks" because of the basic nature of the system, or merely because space is at a premium and the "lanes" of the system have to be as narrow and confining as "tracks" even when the basic nature is one of a road network with free-roaming taxi cabs...
In ST5:TFF, we see a turboshaft that would be big enough for perhaps three standard lift cabins, all the way from top to bottom. Perhaps that sort of free-flying is the preferable mode of operations for turbolifts after all? (Alternately, that shaft could have been a special one for a very wide cargo lift that would not move sideways at all - but we didn't see loading doorways to justify such size, and we didn't see the lift itself even though it would have had no place to go.)
Or you could skip the transporters and have the ship materialize the required controls, instruments and locations next to the user on demand.
TOS technology has its practical limitations. It no doubt also has psychological ones: certain creature comforts are so contrary to the nature of us the creatures that we would only very slowly accept them as part of our lives. Slowly moving turbolifts may actually be psychologically necessary to keep people sane in the era of transporters!
Timo Saloniemi
In ST5:TFF, we see a turboshaft that would be big enough for perhaps three standard lift cabins, all the way from top to bottom. Perhaps that sort of free-flying is the preferable mode of operations for turbolifts after all? (Alternately, that shaft could have been a special one for a very wide cargo lift that would not move sideways at all - but we didn't see loading doorways to justify such size, and we didn't see the lift itself even though it would have had no place to go.)
Or you could skip the transporters and have the ship materialize the required controls, instruments and locations next to the user on demand.
TOS technology has its practical limitations. It no doubt also has psychological ones: certain creature comforts are so contrary to the nature of us the creatures that we would only very slowly accept them as part of our lives. Slowly moving turbolifts may actually be psychologically necessary to keep people sane in the era of transporters!
Timo Saloniemi
Well, I'm a TOS man myself, and this is a question of personal continuity, not canon. Something like that can be written of as retcon, because I would be willing to wager that the DS9 producers didn't consult the TOS people on how they intended for the turbolifts to work.
So, yeah, canonically, it's a given. But I'm just suggesting an alternate way that maybe they should've worked, or possibly how it actually was intended to be on the original show.
They wouldn't necessarily need to materialize out of thin air like the food, but I think there must be some way that they could have enough cars and a logistical situation that would allow them to always have one waiting at every entry. I mean, if they have 300 years to work it ("it" being the essential concept of the elevator), then you'd think they'd be able to solve the waiting problem in that time.
Think of it this way. If we started from the standpoint that turbolifts didn't have a wait, would you be able to come up with a convincing explanation for how it could be done?
If nothing else there might be a slight wait at times because another turbolift is already passing through the same shaft and isn't going to stop to pick up additional people for some reason (full? priority override?). I can see the starship designers preferring the occasional brief wait to having to make all turboshafts double-wide.
Actually if the wait's usually going to be "brief" (and surely the tech is advanced enough for the lift to determine when the next lift would be available) perhaps the lift doesn't stop to avoid situations where the new passengers end up with an even longer transit time due to wanting to go in the opposite direction from those who boarded previously.
Actually if the wait's usually going to be "brief" (and surely the tech is advanced enough for the lift to determine when the next lift would be available) perhaps the lift doesn't stop to avoid situations where the new passengers end up with an even longer transit time due to wanting to go in the opposite direction from those who boarded previously.
Also how many turbolifts are there, where are they stored in the ship? Aren't there circumstances where two lifts are going down the same tube?
I don't think you're going to find numbers for how many turbolifts a ship carries...certainly not canonical ones. Obviously two lifts can move down the same tube...while the tubes aren't double-wide, much like railroad tracks there are areas where a lift can bypass another if necessary.
Indeed. I saw a show on skyscrapers, and they talked about how modern skyscrapers have multiple elevators sharing a shaft. That is, if you want to go to the 60th floor, you take an express elevator from the lobby to the 30th floor, where you board an elevator in the same shaft as one that only serves floors up through 29.
A guy said on the show, as a way of pointing out how much space this saved, that based upon what we now know about how long people are willing to wait for an elevator, and thus how many elevators you need to serve a specific number of square feet of office space, that if the Empire State Building had the appropriate number of elevators, the ground floor would contain nothing but elevators, without even space to access them.
