Forcefield technology

[Timo]

Hmm. What role might the mesh fictionally play? Stopping of microwaves (a major threat in space for what reason exactly)? Regulating of transparency (turn the knob, the holes get bigger or smaller)? Heating for frost removal? Probably "all of the above" would be trivially possible, once you bother with even one of them.

I doubt the transparency of the material would need to be compromised merely to provide flexibility - we can do perfectly transparent and flexible today, after all. If not as flexible as wire mesh, then at least soft and balloonable which will do for the application depicted.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

I was thinking of making the helmets less susceptible to breakages - unlike those silly First Contact ones!

 

[Shawnster]

Hi, Shawnster. I don't think you entirely caught my point:


When they say the Hangar is depressurizing, that could mean either thing. That's all I was saying.

It's clear they are depressurizing the bay mechanically prior to ship arrival. Why would they vent perfectly good air into space?

Why should it have that feature? Loudspeakers (and microphones) on the outside would appear an obvious feature instead,

External speakers and microphones would not work in a vacuum.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

It's clear they are depressurizing the bay mechanically prior to ship arrival. Why would they vent perfectly good air into space?

There's a design trade-off involved. If you want to save the air, you have to give up room inside the ship for extra machinery, and haul around the extra machinery mass, which consumes fuel. No real spacecraft has ever done that.

OTOH, maybe the Enterprise could use the transporter to yank all the air out of the bay and put it back again. The transporter is already on board, so it's less of a trade-off. And it would explain how they re-pressurize a huge area so quickly.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's perfectly clear that, in TOS, shuttles are brought aboard with the hangar bay in a vacuum, matching conditions outside the ship, but there's no reason to assume that they must necessarily vent air into space to depressurize the bay.

 

[Timo]

What's perfectly clear is the opening between the landing bay and the exterior. (But forcefields are perfectly clear, too, at least in TOS.)

What's debatable is where this "hangar bay" is located and how it is accessed. A range of options is open for the audience, as there's no single truth either from in-universe evidence or designer or modelmaker intent. But it's simple to list the points favoring an underfloor hangar separate from the landing bay.

1) This is what we actually see in ST:TMP, even though a refit has removed quite a few walls and floors in apparent favor of forcefields.

2) This would give the turntable something meaningful to do, as shuttles by themselves ought to be nimble as helicopters (which don't benefit from turntables in ground handling, even if they have other types of ground handling aids - shuttles are in fact better than choppers there).

3) This would explain why the disembarking area looks different from the landing area in both TOS and TOS-R.

4) This would allow for the corridor access to the disembarkation area, complicated at best if squeezed on the landing bay deck.

5) This would be in keeping with Starfleet terminology of the preceding (ENT) and immediately following (TOS movies) eras.

External speakers and microphones would not work in a vacuum.

They'd be fine inside the transporter room, eliminating the "muffled voices" issue you brought up. And once they were in place, they would tie in to the radio/subspace system that's obviously there, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

They wouldn't need to depressurize the hangar deck to recover a shuttle and then re-pressurize it before people could enter, if there were a force field keeping the air in, as they had in TNG and, more to the point, in Bay 327 on the Death Star in the original Star Wars. Ergo, they didn't use such a force field on the original Enterprise. Pretty elementary, really.

 

[Timo]

Well, who knows? Keeping air inside would be a risk if those mechanical doors couldn't be trusted, so the upper space might be at vacuum for 95% of the time. But perhaps there would be special times where forcefields would be in use to keep the oxygen in, it being too much hassle to pump on those days when one needed to pump every half an hour or so?

We know for sure that certain individual shuttle launches in TOS involved pumping the facility called Hangar. We also know forcefields were in use a decade later. The issue on which the court has asked for further material and a recess is whether forcefields were in use before TOS, and the recess might be over in September - which is why it's healthy to point out that TOS doesn't actually rule out the use of forcefields, just like it doesn't rule out the existence of a dozen other technologies, real and fictional, that the TOS writers never dreamed about.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[J.T.B.]

There's a design trade-off involved. If you want to save the air, you have to give up room inside the ship for extra machinery, and haul around the extra machinery mass, which consumes fuel. No real spacecraft has ever done that.

Either way, there would have to be a certain amount of machinery: to remove and store the air from the hangar deck, or to create it when you need it again. My guess is air pumps, compressors and tanks would be simpler. Also that the ship's atmosphere is more recycled than "created."

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Either way, there would have to be a certain amount of machinery: to remove and store the air from the hangar deck, or to create it when you need it again. My guess is air pumps, compressors and tanks would be simpler. Also that the ship's atmosphere is more recycled than "created."

Okay... but nobody likes my idea for using the Transporter to evacuate air from the bay, store it safely, and beam it back in there to re-pressurize? It eliminates the need for vacuum pump machinery, saves all the air instead of some of it (pumps would never get it all), and it works a lot faster.

 

[Timo]

We don't get the impression that TOS transporters would be particularly flexible machines yet. Where would the air go? Staying in the pattern buffer for more than a few minutes sounds unlikely when even TNG transporters struggle with that sort of stuff. Beaming from A to B would mean Kirk needs an air tank the size of the shuttle hangar somewhere, lest we assume the transporter can compress the air somehow. (And yeah, it can already compress people, in "The Terratin Incident", but this comes as news to our heroes...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shawnster]

Okay... but nobody likes my idea for using the Transporter to evacuate air from the bay, store it safely, and beam it back in there to re-pressurize? It eliminates the need for vacuum pump machinery, saves all the air instead of some of it (pumps would never get it all), and it works a lot faster.

It's a nice idea and should work, except the air needs a place to be beamed to.

 

[Galileo7]

We don't get the impression that TOS transporters would be particularly flexible machines yet. Where would the air go? Staying in the pattern buffer for more than a few minutes sounds unlikely when even TNG transporters struggle with that sort of stuff. Beaming from A to B would mean Kirk needs an air tank the size of the shuttle hangar somewhere, lest we assume the transporter can compress the air somehow. (And yeah, it can already compress people, in "The Terratin Incident", but this comes as news to our heroes...)
Timo Saloniemi

It's a nice idea and should work, except the air needs a place to be beamed to.

What if they just temporarily leave it in the "transporter buffer" as it was suggested could be done to the Klingons in "Day Of The Dove" or was done with Scotty in "Relics"?

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Beaming from A to B would mean Kirk needs an air tank the size of the shuttle hangar somewhere, lest we assume the transporter can compress the air somehow.

I actually thought that went without saying, sorry guys. The transporter, on "wide field," would lock onto air molecules in the bay, de-materialize them, and then shift to to a tight-focus beam and deposit the air in a small tank.

Compression would occur automatically, just by tightening the beam and then containing the result in a tank. There's no extra "effort" required on the transporter's part, unlike mechanical compressors, which would have to do a lot of work.

Reversing the process is even simpler, because when the compressed air is beamed back into the flight deck, it will quickly expand to fill the available space without being told. Or simpler still: just open the tank valve and let the air back into the bay with no transporter beam needed.

 

[uniderth]

I agree with the idea that the launding/launching are is different from the embarkation/debarkation area. That just seems like the best of all the ideas. The transporter idea seems like just as much a waste of energy as the forcefield. And adds unnecessary complexity and magic to the issue.

Well, who knows? Keeping air inside would be a risk if those mechanical doors couldn't be trusted, so the upper space might be at vacuum for 95% of the time. But perhaps there would be special times where forcefields would be in use to keep the oxygen in, it being too much hassle to pump on those days when one needed to pump every half an hour or so?

We know for sure that certain individual shuttle launches in TOS involved pumping the facility called Hangar. We also know forcefields were in use a decade later. The issue on which the court has asked for further material and a recess is whether forcefields were in use before TOS, and the recess might be over in September - which is why it's healthy to point out that TOS doesn't actually rule out the use of forcefields, just like it doesn't rule out the existence of a dozen other technologies, real and fictional, that the TOS writers never dreamed about.

Timo Saloniemi

What recess will be over in September?

 

[Search4]

If they had forcefields on the brig seems reasonable they had on the hangar. Perhaps energy inefficient so pumping is easier.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

What recess will be over in September?

He was alluding to Star Trek Discovery (STD), coming to CBS's pay service next month.

 

[Timo]

...Specifically, the DSC trailer already shows some atmospheric-containing forcefield action across a shuttlebay door, about a decade before Kirk's TOS adventures, although we don't know whether that's a Starfleet shuttlebay door or perhaps a more advanced Klingon one.

There may also be an implication in that trailer that a classic Starfleet brig forcefield can contain air in a hull breach situation.

I actually thought that went without saying, sorry guys. The transporter, on "wide field," would lock onto air molecules in the bay, de-materialize them, and then shift to to a tight-focus beam and deposit the air in a small tank.

But if the transporter can do that, and regularly does, then why are our heroes so surprised at the possibility of this happening with a foreign transporter, and the ability of their own transporter to undo it, in "Terratin Incident"? Why do our heroes display continuing ignorance of such a capacity in "One Little Ship"?

Altering what's inside a transporter beam is a delicate business, first suggested as being possible in TNG. Compressing air molecules should not be appreciably simpler than compressing redshirts, even if one doesn't sweat nonlethality.

OTOH, a target being transported can itself adjust its form of existence easily enough: Kirk can lift a leg while beaming down so that his other boot isn't buried inside that protruding rock, or carry on a discussion, or even holster a phaser. A gas should expand if it feels like expanding, and consequently not compress if it doesn't feel like compressing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

But if the transporter can do that, and regularly does, then why are our heroes so surprised at the possibility of this happening with a foreign transporter, and the ability of their own transporter to undo it, in "Terratin Incident"? Why do our heroes display continuing ignorance of such a capacity in "One Little Ship"?

I'm not too concerned about TAS as techno-canon! And for myself, I take a cafeteria approach to the post-TOS live action shows: what I like is canon to me, and what I don't like is not set in stone.

Regarding "One Little Ship," I saw it only once, almost 20 years ago. Memory Alpha and Wikipedia are not big on specifics to help me out. But I think the Rubicon's actual atoms, protons, et cetera, were made smaller by space anomaly magic. Their mass was reduced as well as their physical size.

What I'm proposing for the flight deck is infinitely simpler: the transporter just has to reduce the distance between air molecules that are beaming into a storage tank, without altering the size of molecules or subatomic particles in any way. This simple compression of a gas would be useless in "One Little Ship" when they realized they could not breath the "full sized" air molecules inside the Defiant.

 

[Timo]

Nothing wrong with giving the transporter another ability not explicitly described, I guess. It's just that the device has only one special ability in TOS and TAS combined, apart from the usual teleportation from A to B thing, and that is the ability to restore status quo by using archived data ("Terratin", "Counter-Clock"). And if we eliminate TAS, then there are no special abilities mentioned at all.

Apart from the "hold for a while" one, that is. And it could work as an alternative to pumps. But if that one works, what else might? Not that there'd be any evidence that their fridges don't work by transporter stasis, of course.

I guess that deep down, I'm just concerned about losing the distinction between transport-only transporters in TOS and Swiss Knife transporter-replicator-stasis-manipulators a century later. Especially as the heroes appear to fancy there is such a distinction.

Timo Saloniemi