Another Transporter Question

[Wingsley]

How many transporter rooms could the TOS Enterprise have, considering all the other facilities you would expect?

Franz Joseph's plans from the 1970's seem to have at least four of the six-man personnel beaming stations, plus at least three more of the 22-man personnel emergency evacuation stations, and cargo beaming stations on top of that.

Has anyone else drawn plans to include this kind of arrangement? If so, how did you arrange your transporter facilities throughout the ship? If not, how many transporter rooms did you include, and of what kind? Why?

 

[Albertese]

It could be argued that there was only one, since they always refer to "the transporter room" and never specify more than one. On the other hand, we did see a number of different "looks" for the transporter room. One had the big star field graphic on the wall, another had a viewscreen and one of those pyramid shaped viewers (like Spock had on the bridge) one the wall behind the console, and another had food slots on the wall near the door. Now, of course, there was only one transporter room set which was simply re-dressed, but, unless you assume the transporter room has some unexpected reconfiguration ability, I'm willing to take it as evidence of multiple, differently appointed transporter rooms. Especially since IIRC more than one of these configuration has been seen in a single episode (though i can't recall exactly which one --- I may be wrong on this point altogether).

I'm working on my own set of deck plans for Kirk's Enterprise (though I don't want to post anything till it's more or less finished) but for my money, I'm using a similar configuration to FJ's tech Manual in that there are four 6-man units, three 22-man emergency evac units, and Cargo transporters. I think FJ only had one of these but I was thinking about having two. (However, I'm putting them in different places than he did.)

There are a few references from the show that should be considered as well. Off the top of my head, "The Enemy Within" deals with the transporter quite a bit. The yellow ore that screws things up in the first place seems to be physically contaminating the system. I interpret this (by shoehorning some TNG Tech Manual stuff) to mean that instead of a each transporter unit having a dedicated pattern buffer, that ALL the ship's transporters share one unit. This has the added benefit of explaining why they always said "the transporter room:" there would only be one transporter room operational at any time since there was only one pattern buffer! The command crew and anyone else who would need to know would know which room was the active room at any given time. This episode also shows that there is a single object in an engineering area that, when shot with a phaser, can cut power to all the transporters.

As to cargo transporters, we have "Dagger of the Mind" In which they are beaming up cargo with the regular 6-man unit. Why would they do this if there was a regular cargo transporter? Perhaps the cargo transporter is such a power hog that they use the more efficient 6-man unit when the cargo size allows for it. Especially if there is normally only one transporter operational at a time; why redirect power from to the cargo unit when it's not really necessary?

Of course, this is just MY interpretation of what we saw on screen. Your milage may vary.

 

[SonicRanger]

How many transporter rooms could the TOS Enterprise have, considering all the other facilities you would expect?

One.

 

[ancient]

I would image that there is only one 'main' transporter room, which is why it was called "the transporter room" with no number.

There could be any number of smaller or specialized transporters. Like cargo transporters. These would be called "cargo transporter (#)".

But the transporter room we see in the series is implied to be the only one of it's kind.

 

[Timo]

The transporter in "Dagger of the Mind" delivered van Gelder somewhere on the lower decks, not in the saucer section (or else van Gelder arrived in the saucer and then somehow managed to reach deck 14 unnoticed). One could thus argue that it was a dedicated cargo unit, only it didn't look quite as distinct as FJ speculated. Ditto, perhaps, for the transporter in "Mudd's Women" which also seemed to deliver the ladies to somewhere below deck 12.

I'd thus readily believe in something like the FJ configuration, with half a dozen separate platforms - but, as speculated above, with some shared resources that would all be lost in "Enemy Within" when the Evil Kirk phasered the crucial conduitry. (The ore itself needn't have contaminated all the platforms - but the heroes simply couldn't take risks at that stage, not really knowing what had gone wrong.)

Referring to "the" transporter room is no biggie: it would be the one scheduled for use that day or week. After all, the landing party wouldn't be using multiple rooms, now would it? The heroes also take "the" shuttle, despite the ship supposedly having several.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

^ This raises another, interesting question: are all of the transporter rooms (assuming there are more than one, possibly even more than one type) located in one place? Or could they be scattered throughout the ship to aid in evacuation? (Remember, Commodore Decker ordered his entire crew down to the third planet in System L-374 after the Constellation was wrecked by the Planet Killer, strongly implying not only a Transporter-based evacuation plan being place place for starships, but also the redundant facilities to carry it out.)

 

[ancient]

FJ featured huge emergency transporter rooms with like 50 pads apeice (rather than just 6) in his blueprints. Seems excessive to me, but there you go.

With a crew of about 430 it would take 72 transports with only six pads to beam everyone. At about 10 seconds per transport, that's 12 minutes.

On the other hand, if there are 6 trans. rooms like that it would take only 12 transports on each (2 minutes).

So I see no need for huge transport rooms like on FJ's plans.

 

[SonicRanger]

Well, we've seen people standing in line, waiting to beam down:

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x24/thisideofparadise_302.jpg
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x24/thisideofparadise_305.jpg

It seems that a capacity to evacuate most of the crew in 2 minutes doesn't jive with that.

 

[Albertese]

Ancient
They're 22-man evac transporters not 50-man. But even double your estimated time is still pretty quick.

Sonicranger
Good point. On the other hand, people infected by the spores never really seemed to be in a hurry. Besides, maybe there's some sort of reason why you wouldn't want to use evac units if you could avoid it. Maybe they are so power intensive that evacuating the crew would drain so much power that the ship wouldn't be able to do something they still needed it for. (though the intent in the episode DID seem to be to abandon the ship entirely anyway... )

 

[ancient]

I don't have the blueprints in front of me, so I was guessing. Thanks for the correction. Either way, I don't think they're needed.

Continuity from TOS is often somewhat contradictory, so what you want to believe is largely up to personal opinion.

I imagine there are at least redundant transporters somewhere in the engine hull, but the writing in TOS - where a malfunction in 'the' transporter seemed to make transport impossible - suggests that there is no redundant system, and if there are multiple rooms they all rely on the same buffer/machinery.

Which doesn't really make too much sense either.

Take the Doomsday Machine ep. At the beginning Decker says he transported his whole crew to a planet. But then he says that the transporter broke down, stranding his crew. This kinda implies only one transport system with no backup.

Then later in the episode, the transporter room on the Enterprise is damaged, almost stranding Kirk on the Constellation. Once again, there seems to be no backup transporter system. Unless you want to believe that both times the backup failed at the same time, which would be very...unlikely. What would the point of a backup be if it always fails when the main sys fails?

 

[SonicRanger]

And Kirk easily disabled all transporter capabilities in "Wink of an Eye" by just messing with a single console in one room.

 

[Wingsley]

All of which could be explained if the transport mechanisms are interconnected, and can be affected by procedures directed at central locations. ("It's the main junction circuitry. I'll get it.") After all, if there are multiple transporter rooms, they all have to get their power from the same ship's power grid anyway, right?

 

[Timo]

One might think that strategic resources would be provided with redundant and sectioned supporting resources... Then again, it might simply not be practical to create separate power feeds for each transporter platform, if the likeliest failure mode is one that, say, disrupts the sending antennas and thus disables the entire system anyway.

In any case, it does make sense to have multiple platforms distributed all across the ship, even if they all require some central unit to function. An important job of the transporter is to distribute goods across the ship, after all...

Timo Saloniemi