"beam me out" problems

[Itisnotlogical]

Has anybody else noticed that people are able to be beamed out pretty much instantly whenever something life-threatening is about to happen? In example, in "The First Duty" from TNG, several cadets were able to beam out of the shuttles, despite the fact they were all the way across the ship, and the shuttles probably exploded on impact. And that's without considering the fact that they had to lay safe coordinates down, step onto the pad, and finally energize... This is bothering me, and I'm not usually a stickler for things like continuity and such.

 

[JoeFromEarth]

I love it when they beam someone of a ship 30 or so seconds after it blows up.

 

[Gary7]

I love it when they beam someone of a ship 30 or so seconds after it blows up.

You forget that in most cases, the people are already in the pattern buffer... 30 seconds after the ship blows up, the transporter engineer is rematerializing them.

But yes... I do think there are way too many "close calls" on the transporter usage. Unfortunately that's a side effect of the series formula, instead of sticking to plausibility.

 

[Timo]

I don't find the mentioned aspects of "First Duty" impausible at all. You don't need to establish coordinates when you always know that one end of the process is the pilot's seat and the other is the evac station at Mimas. Indeed, the seat is probably a "transport seat" the same way modern aircraft have an "ejection seat". The actual transporting machinery would still lie at Mimas and would not be lost when the craft was; once the pilot started sparkling, he'd be safe and sound, phased out of this universe, impervious to the explosion of his craft from around him (we've seen people getting shot at and shot through when sparkling, and they survive just fine - see ST6 for example).

What's a bit iffy about "First Duty" is the distance across which the transporter is implied to work. The traiing craft collide at what they call the Titan flight range, and are rescued by transporters at Mimas. The distance between those two moons of Saturn is always about a million kilometer at least, while starship transporters sometimes appear to have a maximum range of mere tens of thousands of kilometers. But fixed installations might be more capable, and the whole Titan flight range might be chock full of "pattern enhancers" or whatnot. It would be designed specifically for safety, after all; if instant surefire transporter rescue weren't possible, then I'd think something was not written particularly well...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Finn]

^Yes. I figured they had some of precaution in some of the core star systems, especially with cadets flying around...

 

[JarodRussell]

I love it when they beam someone of a ship 30 or so seconds after it blows up.

You forget that in most cases, the people are already in the pattern buffer... 30 seconds after the ship blows up, the transporter engineer is rematerializing them.

But yes... I do think there are way too many "close calls" on the transporter usage. Unfortunately that's a side effect of the series formula, instead of sticking to plausibility.

More that in every other case beaming is instantaneous, but when a ship explodes, it needs 30 seconds for a person to materialize. Chief O'Brien always plays for drama.

 

[The Wormhole]

Actually, my problem is whenever a shuttle or runabout explodes and the people within use the transporter to escape. We usually see them materialize at their emergency coordinates after the shuttle/runabout blows up. So with the shuttle/runabout gone, its transporter is also gone, so how did the people in mid-transport survive? The transporter is now gone, so what's allowing them to materialize?

 

[Finn]

There might be a piece of an equipment aboard designed to do that in case of an explosion save a warp breach.

 

[Timo]

A somewhat simpler explanation would be that the machinery aboard the doomed ship or craft has already transformed the escapees into the "phased" form and shoved them towards their destination. After that, no machinery is needed: the lump of "phased matter" simply travels through "phased space" towards its destination without needing any machinery to sustain the phased state or the travel, where it reverts back to normal matter again without any need for machinery.

Essentially, the transporter is like a catapult or a torpedo tube. Once the projectile is airborne, the catapult may be destroyed yet the projectile still travels to its destination and makes landfall there. Or a buoyant object fired out of a torpedo tube continues to travel underwater even though the submarine is destroyed, and eventually and inevitably pops up to the surface.

Transporter beams are far from instantaneous, and may well travel either at the speed of light, or then at some arbitrary speed that is slower than c - just like phasers, the other part of Star Trek technology where "phasing" is part of the pseudophysics, have their beams travel at speeds that are significantly below the speed of light. Thus, a transportee "fired" from a doomed ship or craft may materialize at the destination several seconds after the loss of said ship or craft.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[zar]

The simplest explanation is that the materialization scene is "meanwhile". It doesn't actually happen after the explosion.

 

[Nardpuncher]

That's why I don't take the transporter too seriously.

The idea of a machine that could take you apart, turn you into energy and then move to someplace many kilometers away is crazy enough...that you can rematerialize in that place without there even being another piece of the device there to help in the reforming process is crazier!

 

[DrTaylor]

I sit back and enjoy it with a healthy sense of drama. If it's too crazy, I eat ice cream and curse the universe. Try that. You'll feel better.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Just think of the transporter as using something similar to quantum entanglement. You link or entangle two particles, keep one and send the other halfway across the galaxy. You then do something to the particle you kept and the other one reacts as well. No lab, no equipment. Strange but true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

 

[JoeFromEarth]

That's why I don't take the transporter too seriously.

The idea of a machine that could take you apart, turn you into energy and then move to someplace many kilometers away is crazy enough...that you can rematerialize in that place without there even being another piece of the device there to help in the reforming process is crazier!

And don't even think about the air you've just displaced!

 

[Timo]

I never do.

Timo Saloniemi