How far did Scotty beam them?

[esoteric]

This is something I wondered about since seeing the movie. Lazy Tuesday thought experiment geek-out follows...

Sounds like the maximum warp factor of the alternate universe Enterprise is 8, which, if based on TOS warp factor scale is 512 times c.

Then, estimating the amount of time it took Kirk to crash land, meet Spock, walk 40km north to the station over rough and snowy terrain, and upgrade the transporter, it should be possible to make a rough estimate, no?

Regular walking speed is about 5km/hr (@ 8 hr to the base), but that's on flat terrain. Assuming no large detours and the terrain wasn't overly up and down, let's go 1.5x, or 12 hours to the base. Let's add in an hour to upgrade the transporter, an hour for breaks while hiking, and an hour for other little things like landing on the planet, talking, etc. So, 15 hours of elapsed time.

Using Wolfram Alpha I get a distance of 0.8758 ly.
@ 20 hours, which seems even more likely, it's 1.1677 ly.

So Scotty beamed them around a light year. Lucky he only ended up in the water system. Could be wrong about this calculation, though.

This has some implications for the Star Trek universe. Who needs ships to get around the solar system when you can just beam people everywhere? Why travel between the stars when you could just set up transporter relay stations between the stars where you transport like a skipping stone from one planet to another?

This is the problem with pulling a deus ex machina, that is, using a technological device to solve a plot point. It has ramifications for the universe in which your story takes place.

(As I side note, I also read that Vulcan is.. err... was... errr... both is and was 16 ly from Earth. So it would have taken the Enterprise around 11.4 days to get there from Vulcan...)

 

[Ghel]

This "God in the Machine" moment isn't as bad as some others in Trek. Since "old" Spock entered all of the transporting calculations, he is presumably the only one who really knows how to beam at that kind of distance. Granted, Scotty saw the calculations and it gave him new ideas for transporting, but much like ST IV and the guy with transparent aluminum, Scotty probably would need many years before he could actually reproduce what he was looking at.

 

[T'Girl]

Star Trek in general is infamous for inventing a wonderful piece a technology and forgetting about it the very next episode or movie.

The easy excuse would be that this transporter technique can only be used to target a ship, traveling at warp, directly away from the sender. You can't target a ship at sublight speeds or a planet.

 

[esoteric]

Star Trek in general is infamous for inventing a wonderful piece a technology and forgetting about it the very next episode or movie.

Well that's true, I remember thinking this a lot during Voyager (as much as I did like that series).

 

[Timo]

The above calculations might be erring on the side of caution as regards how fast warp is supposed to be; the tables given in the Encyclopedia suggest implausibly low speeds.

OTOH, the ship was supposedly limited to warp 4 due to all the damage. And we don't know when the ship regained the ability to travel at warp after Nero's attack: before dropping off Kirk, soon after, or long after.

If Delta Vega is in a different star system from Vulcan (as would be suggested by the fact that there's nothing going on there whereas a lot is going on at Vulcan), then the ship had to have regained the ability to do warp 4 before dropping off Kirk. Thus, she probably went to warp 4 right after the drop, too. Still, the distance probably wouldn't be excessive, compared with the Dominion transporters of DS9, or the Ferengi subspace transporter of TNG "Firstborn". A couple of lightyears ought to be okay for advanced late 24th century Federation tech, which is what Spock might have given to Scotty. (For all we know, he only gave Scotty bits and pieces, and removed some of those bits afterwards, thus restoring the timeline so that his new friends from the 23rd century wouldn't overextend themselves and pick up fights with the Borg, or whatever.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

I think I worked it out to be a bit less than a light year using similar rough and ready figures so not stupendously far but still much further by millions of miles than we've ever seen Federation ships perform before. Pad to pad I might have been more forgiving but I'm really not a fan of this.

I'd have been happier if Kirk had been beamed directly to the station under guard where he finds Spock already working with Scotty to modify the transporters in order to beam to the Narada (until Kirk comes along and he changes the plan to something 'safer'). It would still have required them to beam further than normal distances with all the dangers of transporting at warp but would have reduced the distance to something that was less of a departure from Canon.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Enterprise was limited to warp 4 following Nero's attack.

The warp-factor cubed formula has never ever held up in any version of Star Trek, ever. Remember the pilot of Enterprise? They got to Rigel and then Kronos in hours/days at warp five. TOS once got about 1000 light years at warp two. STV got to the centre of the galaxy in hours (as did the cartoon series). DS9 reached any world in the alpha quadrant in hours via shuttle. TOS got back from the rim of the galaxy in Kirk's lifetime.

Fans have bullshitted "fixes" for many of these things over the years, but the irrefutable fact is: Warp speed is however fast it needs to be at the time.


I fully expect Transwarp Beaming to be forgotten in the next movie, and I expect the writers to move the ship at the speed of plot for the duration, too.

 

[sbk1234]

I predict they'll discover that transwarp beaming damages the structure of space, so the Federation will outlaw it.

 

[Pauln6]

Beaming at warp isn't really the issue - it's beaming over huge distances to a location other than a transporter pad that creates the problem. Previously you had to get within weapons range with your shields down - a very sensible limitation by the writers. Now they have left all starships extremely vulnerable to incursion by outside forces. I have no strong objection if this is the case if they have to take the good with the bad. It can't just be a cheap get-out for our heroes. Khan can beam explosives onto your ship from over from a light year away now - get over it.

 

[Timo]

Which is why I might imagine Spock Prime keeping details of the technique secret from these 23rd century people. He would have some vested interest in turning the Federation into a more potent fighting force, but not all that much: he wouldn't want to use the UFP to exact revenge on anybody (Nero's already dead, Spock doesn't hate Romulans), and he doesn't know about any super-enemies that would require the UFP to be stronger than it was in his youth. And giving the Feds an anti-Borg weapon would only encourage them to challenge the Borg.

Really, as far as we know, only Kirk and Scotty know about the trick, and only Scotty might have understood anything about it, and even then Spock Prime might have misled him somehow, or sabotaged something to prevent the trick from working a second time.

Even if Starfleet realized Spock was keeping secrets from them, what could they do? You can't torture secrets out of Vulcans - "Errand of Mercy" proved that much already. A fellow Vulcan might do a mind-meld, but not under the current circumstances.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

Yeah but that only relates to beaming while at warp, not the distance issue, which had nothing to do with Spock. If the distance limitation is only a safety factor that Scotty is trying to overcome (as opposed to scanning or energy limitations) then there is no reason why militaristic races wouldn't send suicide transportees or inanimate objects like simple chemical bombs or an animatter fuel cell whose magnetic interlocks are designed to shut down after a ten second countdown. Removing the distance limitation opens a can of worms that the early writers knew should be kept closed.

 

[Timo]

Could be that the hardware is capable of greater distances with some trickery, which Spock kept secret. Remember how phase cannon got an unexpected order-of-magnitude boost in "Silent Enemy", without major hardware changes? Had the aliens there not interfered, Starfleet might not have come up with the better cannon - and Spock Prime could have time-waltzed in, temporarily and clandestinely increased the power of Pike's or Kirk's cannon tenfold with a little gadget or a line of code, and then just as clandestinely reversed those changes.

We know that transporters and phasers are exactly the sort of future technology where 23rd century Starfleet is barely exploiting the lowermost limits of potential. Other species have demonstrated transporters that span thousands of lightyears! So a century of scientific evolution might perfectly well give Spock an extra order of magnitude to carry in his robe pocket.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

Bleuch - it's possible I suppose but I question how a Vulcan pensioner with no equipment of his own could modify 23rd century equipment in ways an engineer of the era couldn't, particularly when he takes next to no time to do it.

Once again, this is why it would have been more credible to beam Kirk directly to the base where Spock and Scotty have been working on the system for a while.

 

[Set Harth]

there is no reason why militaristic races wouldn't send suicide transportees or inanimate objects like simple chemical bombs or an animatter fuel cell whose magnetic interlocks are designed to shut down after a ten second countdown. Removing the distance limitation opens a can of worms that the early writers knew should be kept closed.

Isn't that "can of worms" still there at previously established shorter distances?

 

[scnj]

The fact that Scotty ended up in the water tank is excuse enough for him to not try it again any time soon. And since just he and old Spock have seen the formula, no villains will be able to try it either. Problem averted.

 

[Pauln6]

At shorter distances, ships can use sensors to scan activity from a nearby ship. Plus phasers and photon torpedoes have (had) much greater range than transporters, so your shields are likey to be up before a potentially hostile vessel is in transporter range. That makes a certain kind of sense to me.

Spock and Scotty are smart but are we to assume that they are so smart that no other scientist in any other species throughout the Alpha & Beta quadrant is capable of working out that you can transport explosives further than 40,000km? It's not exactly going to be hard to work out is it? Trial and error perhaps? It's definintely a different can of worms.

 

[EJA]

I calculated that in order for the NuEnterprise to have gotten to Vulcan in the time it took in the movie, it would have to have been travelling at around warp 9.9997. Not sure how much Nero's attack might have diminished their engines.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: i'm new...

You're mistaking a past-paced, speedily-edited movie for a fast journey. Note that Kirk is in a different outfit between the shuttlebay and the sickbay, and McCoy's in a different outfit between the sickbay and Kirk waking up.

How many TV shows feature people getting across town in the space of an establishing shot? How many DS9 episodes got the crew from the station to any planet in the quadrant in the same length of time?

And that's ignoring Star Trek V, 99% of TOS, Enterprise's trip from Earth to Rigel to Kronos in hours...need I go on?

Oh, and Nero's attack limited the Enterprise to warp 4, which is pretty consistant with the NX-01's journey in "Broken Bow" .

 

[EJA]

Re: i'm new...

You're mistaking a past-paced, speedily-edited movie for a fast journey. Note that Kirk is in a different outfit between the shuttlebay and the sickbay, and McCoy's in a different outfit between the sickbay and Kirk waking up.

At warp 9.9997, the trip would've lasted about 2.6 hours, around the length of time I'd say occured between the Enterprise warping off and arriving in orbit of Vulcan. And more than enough time for McCoy to change outfits.

 

[Search4]

I'm also of the opinion that the Starfleet base would be tracking any nearby ship, and hence know the Enterprise's location, speed, etc. as part of the beaming. So its distance beaming onto a known target at warp, not "some random ship which might have made a course correction or changed speed".