Which has canonical precedent in the Enterprise transporter accidentally intercepting Gary Seven's beam in "Assignment: Earth," drawing him to their pad instead of his.
A Time to Kill- beaming through shields?
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Which has canonical precedent in the Enterprise transporter accidentally intercepting Gary Seven's beam in "Assignment: Earth," drawing him to their pad instead of his.
Every time I see a new one of your books, David, I say thank you again with my pocketbook. 
^ Hey, I just know a good name when I steal one. 
I don't like that explanation because it would essentially remove the whole limitation of having to lower shields to use transporters. 24th-century starships could just momentarily revert to 23rd-century-style shield technology during a beam and still have adequate protection in most situations.
In case of "Relics", we not only can but probably must think in terms of major cuts in the action. Our heroes are buzzing inside and around an object the size of a small star system, without the benefit of warp drive; their antics by necessity must take several minutes even when mere seconds are depicted on screen.
In practice, then, there's probably quite a bit of action between LaForge's hail to the E-D and the bit where Scotty says the transport ship can't maintain shields much longer, even if these are cut back to back. Picard and pals then discuss that they have one minute and forty seconds till they reach the doors; the camera cuts to LaForge and Scotty for a few seconds; and Picard orders the transporter beam energized. Most of those hundred seconds went "unused", and it's not difficult to assume Picard used them to give LaForge instructions to drop shields on his mark, then have them automatically re-raised to keep the Dyson sphere door open a few extra seconds.
Of course, the other possibility is that LaForge and Scotty were beamed to safety at the exact moment the shields of the transport ship collapsed - that is, when the torpedoes from the E-D hit her. That should be quite doable: the rescue of Chakotay in "Caretaker" is similar split second stuff, for example. Picard simply commanded "energize" a few seconds in advance, because transporters (and transporter chiefs!) typically require a bit of lead time...
Whether Janeway's shields were up in "Caretaker", "Maneuvers" and "Dragon's Teeth" which all involved transporter rescue during combat... Well, it is debatable. It would be quite possible to drop shields for a few seconds, and quite possible for the camera and the audience to miss the relevant commands. Delta quadrant weapons, especially Kazon ones, were always depicted as somewhat wussy, and might well be allowed to hit an unshielded starship a few times.
Timo Saloniemi
In practice, then, there's probably quite a bit of action between LaForge's hail to the E-D and the bit where Scotty says the transport ship can't maintain shields much longer, even if these are cut back to back. Picard and pals then discuss that they have one minute and forty seconds till they reach the doors; the camera cuts to LaForge and Scotty for a few seconds; and Picard orders the transporter beam energized. Most of those hundred seconds went "unused", and it's not difficult to assume Picard used them to give LaForge instructions to drop shields on his mark, then have them automatically re-raised to keep the Dyson sphere door open a few extra seconds.
Of course, the other possibility is that LaForge and Scotty were beamed to safety at the exact moment the shields of the transport ship collapsed - that is, when the torpedoes from the E-D hit her. That should be quite doable: the rescue of Chakotay in "Caretaker" is similar split second stuff, for example. Picard simply commanded "energize" a few seconds in advance, because transporters (and transporter chiefs!) typically require a bit of lead time...
Whether Janeway's shields were up in "Caretaker", "Maneuvers" and "Dragon's Teeth" which all involved transporter rescue during combat... Well, it is debatable. It would be quite possible to drop shields for a few seconds, and quite possible for the camera and the audience to miss the relevant commands. Delta quadrant weapons, especially Kazon ones, were always depicted as somewhat wussy, and might well be allowed to hit an unshielded starship a few times.
Timo Saloniemi
Huh? That doesn't follow. For one thing, why assume it would be easy to downgrade the system like that? Can you "momentarily revert" your Blu-ray player to a laser disc player, or your computer-regulated fuel injection system to an old-style carburetor? Not all technologies are downward-compatible.
For another thing, the whole reason 24th-century shields would be more advanced is because they'd need to be in order to counter the 24th-century weapons of their enemies. Reverting to older shield technologies could leave them just as vulnerable as dropping the shields.
Especially where transporters are concerned. Consider the weapon potential of the transporter. You could use it to beam time bombs into your enemy's bridge or engine room. To beam away their engines or weapon emitters. To beam their crew into space and claim the intact ship as a prize. Transporters are horribly dangerous to an unshielded ship in a combat situation. Which is the whole reason why it's important for shields to be able to block transporters. If a ship in combat downgraded or compromised its shields in any way to allow it to beam people out, it would create an opportunity for the enemy to send a transporter beam in.
Of course, if you're dealing with an enemy that has technology no greater than what Starfleet had in the 23rd century, then maybe that wouldn't be an issue. But presumably any established enemy -- Romulans, Cardassians, Tzenkethi, Talarians, etc. -- would keep pace in the arms race (and that includes transporter advances). And any new enemy could easily have superior technology, in which case you'd want to be as protected as possible.
It's intuitively clear that there would be many degrees of shields, just as there would be many degrees of cloaks. Star Trek can deal with the dramatic consequences of differing levels of cloaks (that is, with an inconsistent portrayal of the properties of the cloaking device), albeit with some difficulty. Can one beam through a cloak? Can one maintain cloak while firing? Can one track a cloaked ship with sensors of type X, Y or Z? The answer seems to be "depends on the cloak"...
However, having different kinds of shields, or different kinds of "shield/transporter rules", seems to be a much bigger dramatic problem - as this thread already indicates. Writers mess up with this at their peril, and beaming through shields always makes people all across the fan spectrum cry foul.
...Even in the very first episode to introduce the "rule". In TOS "A Taste of Armageddon", we first are told that Kirk can't be beamed to safety as long as Scotty keeps the shields up, yet moments later Ambassador Fox beams down to the planet anyway. Not only would it be implausible for him to be able to get the shields dropped against Scotty's explicit orders, but it's a plot point that the villains would destroy the ship as soon as the shields were lowered! Essentially, every time the writers do something like this, they basically cheat in a whodunnit, betraying the trust of the audience, taking away their ability to adapt to the fantastic and futuristic setting of the show.
Timo Saloniemi
However, having different kinds of shields, or different kinds of "shield/transporter rules", seems to be a much bigger dramatic problem - as this thread already indicates. Writers mess up with this at their peril, and beaming through shields always makes people all across the fan spectrum cry foul.
...Even in the very first episode to introduce the "rule". In TOS "A Taste of Armageddon", we first are told that Kirk can't be beamed to safety as long as Scotty keeps the shields up, yet moments later Ambassador Fox beams down to the planet anyway. Not only would it be implausible for him to be able to get the shields dropped against Scotty's explicit orders, but it's a plot point that the villains would destroy the ship as soon as the shields were lowered! Essentially, every time the writers do something like this, they basically cheat in a whodunnit, betraying the trust of the audience, taking away their ability to adapt to the fantastic and futuristic setting of the show.
Timo Saloniemi
The Enterprise can also fire phasers and torpedoes with shields up, but at the same time is protected from enemy fire. Hm...
That was a really good one, kkozoriz1...
No, I don't think the issue of beaming out through shields has been brought up. It would probably only arise if somebody wanted to escape from a hostile ship or installation; one of 'em DS9 Mirror Universe stories, perhaps?
I much prefer the idea that shields only block incoming stuff (and selectively at that) to the idea that certain frequencies can pass both ways. If your phasers get out because they are tuned to frequency X, then you are essentially sending your secret frequency over to the enemy every time you fire at him! You'd have to shift frequencies after each shot, and "BoBW" and the like make it sound as if this is never done in routine combat. Indeed, ST:INS suggests that any attempt at retuning the shields will temporarily weaken them, so drastically that even a transporter beam can push through; only inexperienced or slightly hysterical people would decide to retune after getting hit by a tetryon pulse if there was a battle going on...
One-way shields are a much more satisfactory idea. If they're based on what the tech books say they are, namely gravitons suspended in subspace magic, then they probably have properties similar to those of the tractor beam, including utter defiance of Newton's laws or issues of symmetry.
Timo Saloniemi
No, I don't think the issue of beaming out through shields has been brought up. It would probably only arise if somebody wanted to escape from a hostile ship or installation; one of 'em DS9 Mirror Universe stories, perhaps?
I much prefer the idea that shields only block incoming stuff (and selectively at that) to the idea that certain frequencies can pass both ways. If your phasers get out because they are tuned to frequency X, then you are essentially sending your secret frequency over to the enemy every time you fire at him! You'd have to shift frequencies after each shot, and "BoBW" and the like make it sound as if this is never done in routine combat. Indeed, ST:INS suggests that any attempt at retuning the shields will temporarily weaken them, so drastically that even a transporter beam can push through; only inexperienced or slightly hysterical people would decide to retune after getting hit by a tetryon pulse if there was a battle going on...
One-way shields are a much more satisfactory idea. If they're based on what the tech books say they are, namely gravitons suspended in subspace magic, then they probably have properties similar to those of the tractor beam, including utter defiance of Newton's laws or issues of symmetry.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah. You'll e.g. cook yourself alive if you try to cloak by using "full reverse shields" that prevent anything and everything from leaving your shield bubble...
An important part of a shielding system will have to be a sensor system that decides what to block and what to let through. Lasers are a big problem: you have to let in visual light all across the spectrum, but whenever the enemy pumps energies at you at a specific visual wavelength, you have to block them at once. One wonders whether the shields work by concentrating their effectiveness against certain threats, while being commeasureately weakened against others... And whether this explains why lasers are so piss-poor against shields. They are so narrowband that the shields can easily be concentrated against them, whereas phasers might have been designed to be very broadband and thus harder to block.
Timo Saloniemi
An important part of a shielding system will have to be a sensor system that decides what to block and what to let through. Lasers are a big problem: you have to let in visual light all across the spectrum, but whenever the enemy pumps energies at you at a specific visual wavelength, you have to block them at once. One wonders whether the shields work by concentrating their effectiveness against certain threats, while being commeasureately weakened against others... And whether this explains why lasers are so piss-poor against shields. They are so narrowband that the shields can easily be concentrated against them, whereas phasers might have been designed to be very broadband and thus harder to block.
Timo Saloniemi
In Double Helix: Red Sector, someone wants to know why the Federation embassy has shields where you can't beam out-- why not just stop someone from beaming in-- and Eric Stiles says that configuration is too unstable, and it sucks up too much energy to maintain it.
It wouldn't need to be a backwards-compatible technology. Why not just have both types of shield emitters on the ship? Lower one while raising the other, or have two layers of shields.
There are many other uses for shields, though, besides combat situations (and that only applies to combat with equally advanced enemies). It doesn't make sense to me that they would completely abandon old-style shields if they had the benefit of allowing beaming while still offering protection.
To use the transporters as a weapon, the enemies would have to lower their own shields too, wouldn't they?
Maybe there are other reasons why old-style shields are a bad idea. Maybe they're too inefficient and drain too much power.
I think you're overthinking this by assuming I'm talking about two completely different shield technologies here. I'm just assuming normal progress over time. I'm talking about the fact that you'd reasonably expect a transporter from 2370 to be more advanced than a transporter from 2290, so it seems reasonable to conclude that a deflector shield from 2290 -- particularly one on a crashed ship that had gone without maintenance for all that time -- might not be adequate to block a transporter beam from 2370. And thus, the "beaming through shields" scene in "Relics" can be justified as something other than a mistake.
Which is probably why the use of transporters in combat situations hasn't been more common.
Ultimately, this all boils down to the fact that these are plot devices, and technical rationalizations will always take a back seat to the needs of the story. Transporters are a useful gimmick for storytelling; they save the need for filming shuttle-landing scenes, they allow the story to be told at a faster pace, and they can sometimes spark stories from their operations or malfunctions. However, they also create a storytelling problem because they potentially make it too easy to extract characters from danger. So you need to have a way to neutralize them when the story calls for it. Postulating that you can't beam through shields is a handy way to do that. If you established definitively that the ship's technology allowed beaming people through shields, then you'd lose the most effective way to ensure that the heroes remain in danger and the story can be told. You'd be stuck with having the transporter break down every week or having there conveniently be some natural substance that blocks transporter beams in the vicinity of every site where a landing party gets into trouble.
So no matter how logical it is that a starship should have the capability to beam through shields, no matter how complex and well-reasoned your technical arguments for justifying that capability, it's just plain never going to happen. Because these are not real devices, they are plot devices.
It's been a while, but I believe that the Voyager writer's guide mentions something about utilizing the frequency windows technique established in "The Wounded" to allow people to beam in and out with the shields up. Perhaps Rick can shed light on this since he or Mike would've written that text. "Caretaker" doesn't make any note of this being an issue in either transport direction, so I figure that this is just something they can do now. Thanks O'Brien!
Mark
Mark
No, Sternbach and Okuda wouldn't have written the writers' bible; are you referring to the VGR technical manual provided to writers? Looking through my copy, I don't see any reference to the frequency windows; in fact, it says on p. 18 (the page about transporters) specifically that "[t]he transporter cannot be used when the ship's shields are operating...." Pretty much anything in the VGR writers' tech manual that wasn't VGR-specific was essentially copied from the TNG writers' tech manual.
And the VGR bible I have (season 3 edition) doesn't say anything about transporters, since the technical stuff was left for the manual. It just covers the premise and characters, with only the broadest discussion of the ship and technology.
And the VGR bible I have (season 3 edition) doesn't say anything about transporters, since the technical stuff was left for the manual. It just covers the premise and characters, with only the broadest discussion of the ship and technology.
^ I win!
Actually, one more question:
Worf later makes a reference to mind-melding with Spock. Can you please let me know what this is referring to?
I'm starting to think Trek novels should be annotated like comics used to be in the 80s!
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