A bug in Beyond about Transporter

I noticed that in Beyond, when the crew found NX-04 Columbia, the chief said the transporter on board was not used to beam person. However, the teleporter was already used on NX-01 Enterprise for quite a while, remember the last episode Xindi War?

Don't you think it's a somehow a bug?

 

The Franklin(not the Columbia) predated the NX-01 Enterprise and thus had an older transporter system that was only used for cargo. The transporter aboard Enterprise was only recently upgraded and deemed safe for use with "biomatter like helmsmen and weapons officers."

 

In my post-series Enterprise: Rise of the Federation novels, I posited that the transporters used in ENT turned out to cause cumulative damage with extended use, so they stopped using them for personnel transport except in emergencies, until a safer, upgraded system could be perfected. I established that over three years ago, but it meshes nicely with Beyond. The transporter ban in the books was instituted in 2162 and is still in effect in 2165, and the Franklin was lost in 2164.

 

Nope, it's just another inconsistency. Star Trek is chock full of them, always has been.

 

Didn't seem like an inconsistency to me. The ship is older than NX-01, which was the first transporter approved to transport biomatter. According to the designer, she was meant to be a cargo ship.

The inconsistency is Franklin not having a shuttlebay.

 

Wow.

NX-02 Columbia (MIA Romulan War)
NX-04 Discovery (Destroyed Romulan War)
USS Franklin NX-326 (Beyond)

Franklin is an older warp 4 ship, before NX-01 ever launched, her transporters were an even older type. The NX-01 transporter was still only cargo rated when she left Spacedock, they were forced to use it for biological transport, something it was going to be tested for and passed for use later.

But as Christopher said, it had to be used by Enterprise and the other NX ships during the NX-01 mission and Romulan War by necessity, it dropped out of use after that until it was safe.

 

NX-01 supposedly had a transporter built to move cargo, too. Starfleet just decided to declare it safe for Armory Officers and Helmsmen. Doesn't mean it was, and doesn't mean Starfleet ever changed a single transtator in the actual circuitry. Scotty would justly worry about this sort of hardware...

Edit: Ah, ninja'ed. But no, the device was not cargo-rated in the pilot episode, it was recently (but quite officially) man-rated. The heroes had little faith in the piece of paper that turned the cargo unit into a personnel unit, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I watched Broken Bow the other day, Reed was commenting on how Starfleet had just declared it safe (theirs, and just theirs) for transporting people. But no one was eager to actually test the theory.

Of course we find out later they were already transporting people, who turned into some weird energy "ghost" in the early experiments. Archer just got lucky that Trip somehow happened on the solution to them coming out the other end 99.999% alright.

Franklin's was an older model meant for just enveloping cargo and moving it from A to B, Scotty in this universe is a lot more obsessed with transporter technology and all that transwarp stuff, that he and Jayla (who probably changed it anyway) that they made it safe enough for the rest of the movie...maybe.

If they're not riddled with tumors in ST4 we know they got it right.

 

No, they used it in the 2150s because they thought it was safe. They didn't discover the long-term downside until 2162, because, well, it was long-term. What I posited in the books was that it was subtle cellular and genetic damage that accumulated very gradually over extended, heavy transporter use, so that it was the sort of thing that couldn't have been discovered until people had been using transporters regularly for years.

 

Which goes out the window when they introduce the inventor and find out that Starfleet cleared it despite the horrific failures, without making it public knowledge, as then no one would ever use it.

They knew it wasn't safe, they just assumed that the NX-01 crew would go so long without using it, use it so little, or never put a valuable member of the crew through it, that it was fine if it turned a few more cannon fodder into ghosts until they worked out the kinks.

That's not how it went though...

 

Which is a bit odd, because people would have been using transporters for millions of years at that point. If it's something specific to Earth's cheap cargo cult copies, older and wiser species could have pointed this out, especially in 2162 when they were part of the outfit making use of this tech. If it's something inherent in transporter tech as such, somebody would have noticed long before 2151. Nah, make that everybody would have noticed.

But supposedly the kinks were worked out after those early experiments. I mean, there's nothing to suggest they weren't.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Uhh, no. You're referring to the accident that happened to Quinn Erickson in the first transporter trials, according to "Daedalus." But that was 15 years before the episode, in 2139. Transporters weren't cleared for human use until 2151. Obviously they fixed the problems -- spent a dozen years fixing them -- before finally deciding it was safe.

 

No.

I mean, no, it wasn't. Not only did other species verifiably have it (or something indistinguishable from it) before humans, but humans must have known of them having it. If Emory Erickson came up with the secret of how to build what others already have, it wouldn't be "a human invention" even if it involved a human inventing stuff.

Timo Saloniemi

 

According to ENT, humans invented it on their own, but other species like Klingons, Malurians, Osaarians, Xindi, and Orions were shown to have their own transporters. It was never clear whether Vulcans had them, but for the purposes of my books, I assumed they chose not to develop the technology, perhaps finding it illogically risky and just generally being less impatient than humans about getting from place to place.

 

And yet they didn't, and honestly, anyone can stamp "approved" on something, they basically said in the pilot that no one had actually been transported since 2139. They didn't know, and probably weren't expecting anyone to step into it.

 

I'm sorry, that's just not a reasonable conclusion. They had twelve years to perfect it, and you actually seriously believe they did nothing to correct the problem in all that time?

And no, they never actually said in the pilot (here's the transcript) that nobody had ever been beamed before. Just that "they claim it's safe" and that Reed and Mayweather were still wary. Obviously there would've been human tests before it was formally approved for human use. The fact that some people are nervous about a new technology doesn't mean the technology is unproven, just that human beings are wary of anything new. And why the hell would they even have installed the things on starships if they didn't expect anyone to use them?

 

Then why did they treat Archer beaming aboard later in the pilot as being the first human to be transported, like it was some particular honour, if they thought even one other person had been through it before.

 

They didn't. Read the transcript I linked to. All Tucker said was, "Sorry, Captain. We had no other choice." The words "first" and "honor" are never used in the context of going through the transporter. Besides, you were the one who brought up "Daedalus," and in that episode, Emory Erickson explicitly claimed that he was the first to go through the transporter. He may have covered up his son's accident, but Erickson himself was the first documented, publicly known user of the transporter. And it must've been years before Archer went through, because he said it was the "original transporter" and that it took a minute and a half to cycle through. Still, he went through and survived, which proves that he fixed the problems that cost him his son. And obviously he made further improvements afterward, because the transporter Archer went through worked in mere seconds.

 

Are you sure? In the ship's logs (viewed by Uhura) I remember seeing shuttles landing.