Transporter Room

Non-fans know what the transporter room is.

 

In the first movie? That is, ST:TMP, which is what the OP is talking about? No, transporters were down, and killed the next folks trying to beam up.

In the first Abrams movie? Well...

- The cadets go up in shuttles
- The strike team skydives instead of using the transporter
- Spock beams down, at great risk to his life, to save his parents, and then up again - but then banishes Kirk by using an escape pod rather than beaming him down

Pretty suggestive, really. Except the skydiving was explicitly because Nero's drill jammed transporters. Perhaps Spock did intend to beam Kirk down to Delta Vega in a fit of rage, but calmed down and chose a method that had not killed anybody within the past hour?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yes.

#1 The cadets would have arrived faster if they beamed up in groups.
#2 I was fine with this. What if the drill moved, and people were beamed over open air. Woops!
#3 Spock was at risk, because the planet was collapsing into a black hole. The transporter itself was not the risk.
#4 It's a thing in Trek were angry Captains throw people off their ship via escape pod. Don't have a problem with this.

 

Non fans of DC know who Batman is too, but they still introduce him, his gizmos and his Batmobile in his origin stories. ST'09 was an origin story.

 

See, I'm not sure the cadets and crew would have arrived any faster if beaming up in groups of six. I mean, how many of them were there? How many transporters would have been running? We don't know, but "around a thousand" is a valid guess for the former, and we never see a second transporter room...

All the shuttles can take off basically simultaneously. The ship can depart right after they land in the bay, again near-simultaneously. The flight itself takes an indeterminate time, but probably just minutes. A single shuttle can house thirty people; the bay hosts perhaps 24 of those. That's already a hefty percentage of the likely crew contingent there, moving to orbit in the same time it takes to beam up, what, ten groups of six? Even if it were a hundred groups, the shuttles still should be launched!

No reason not to use the transporter for whatever pitiful little help it can provide on top of the shuttles. Or the transporters of the big starbase, after which the crew can rush to the ship via the supposed gangways. But absolutely no reason not to use the shuttles, either!

Timo Saloniemi

 

The transporters are never showed to be unsafe anywhere in the Abrams movies.

The idea that transferring hundreds of people via shuttle may be more efficient does make sense, though.

 

...Especially if the task force expects to conduct evacuations at the other end. Clearly, numbers are expected to be decisive, or Starfleet would only have sent one ship to Vulcan (and they could have afforded to crew her with skilled officers and crew, too). So getting extra shuttles onboard the Enterprise would need to be done in any case.

Transporters in Abramsverse... Even McCoy gripes about them much less than the TOS average would have it. And if anything, transporters do more and better than the heroes would expect: they have the interstellar transporter, they circumvent malfunctions such as when taking first Spock and then Uhura down to hunt for Khan, and they even manage to use a non-manrated system for evacuating people from Krall's camp without any suggestion of problems.

It's basically endemic to the movies overall that tech works better than one could hope for: Scotty worries that the Franklin won't do well in atmospheres, and she does, or that his transporters aren't up to the job, and they are, or that the ship will rust underwater,a and she doesn't. Oh, a shuttle may ingest volcanic dust and fail, but the heroes expected even worse. Or a torpedo is gonna blow up on the faces of the heroes unless they are vewy vewy caweful, and brute force saves the day.

So I could well see the heroes overall being wary of the transporter, even though and especially because it works so well. Their overall fear of technology failing must come from some sort of precedent!

Timo Saloniemi

 

That was no way to do a ship reveal! They should have flown the shuttle around very, very slowly for at least ten minutes, showing several angles of the ship tantalizingly partially hidden by pieces of the spacedock and other equipment, before finally giving us the full glory shot of the front of the Enterprise right as the music strikes a rousing crescendo.

Kor

 

And that's what they did, only at the fast&furious 21st century tempo the movie otherwise adhered to...

Timo Saloniemi

 

what about a sensible middle ground? Just saying...

 

Adds some credence to Pegg's theory that the Kelvin-verse branched off long before the Kelvin event, going back maybe to the First Contact events. In Enterprise, the transporter was at first distrusted but by season 4 it was in pretty regular use. Conversely, in Beyond, the USS Franklin, which was refitted and still in use years after the Romulan War, still only had its transporter used for cargo. Scotty had to modify it to rescue the crew.

 

Not necessarily: it’s not extremely clear in the movie, but I thought he was using the cargo transporters to be able to transport more people at the same time.

 

OR - they just wanted the shuttles on board as well? We don't have to overthink this.

 

Scott says in the movie the transporter was only used for cargo. Then he transported like 12 people at a time in it

 

from what I got that transporter was used for cargo. We very well know that the Nx-01 has functional transporters for people and I would be very surprised if the writers of the only Abramsverse movie to reference previous canon outside TOS weren’t.

 

why would it show them specifically using that transporter? NX-01 only had one transporter, and as the Franklin is both smaller and a little older, it's a leap to imagine it had another one hidden somewhere. I don't see why the dialoge that Pegg wrote for himself would go into the matter that that transporter was for cargo if he was going to turn around and turn on this alleged other one.

 

I mean...kind of. I just took it as transporter technology was not emphasized in research and it simply sat and stagnated. Scott tried to demonstrate it with a professor and end up sending an admiral's beagle far away to never be seen or heard from again. Prime Spock introduces confirmation of his theory and he starts to work with it, only for Section 31 to confiscate it.

Again, I always took it as the transporter tech simply wasn't explored in favor of other technology.

 

he wrote it because using a cramped transporter room would have meant transporting much less people at a time. Yes, the Franklin was older than the enterprise Nx-01, but remained in service for some 15 years after her launch and it’s reasonable to think it had been refitted...surely seemed to have more advanced computers and a more comfortable bridge.

 

I'm going with what was said in the movie and shown. I can imagine an entire separate deck full of people transporters, but why bother?

 

In any case, I’m not sure what is the point of the discussion...I can’t see where transporter technology would be worse in the alternate universe, especially as invariably performs better than the prime counterpart, including in this example, where Scotty transports multiple people (at times an issue on TOS even with the enterprise) using a 90 year old cargo transporter.