Logistics inside a starship--the turbolift

[SoM]

If you're going to spend the time & energy to replicate lifts on-demand, you'd be better installing a network of self-service short-range transporters all over the ship and skipping the lifts entirely...

Or you could skip the transporters and have the ship materialize the required controls, instruments and locations next to the user on demand.

Nah - if you've got people walking around within spitting distance of a matter/antimatter reactor which must be spewing out lethal doses of gamma radiation every second, meaning even a very limited failure of the containing fields (i.e., nowhere near enough to allow antimatter to escape and/or cause a full/explosive warp core breach - just enough of a secondary failure to allow a small portion of the high-frequency EM radiation generated to pass through) would mortally irradiate most of engineering very swiftly... well, there better be a DAMN good reason for not putting it outboard! As such, anyone working in Main Engineering couldn't telecommute. Nor could any engineer who works on stuff in-situ. And I doubt the quality of care in sickbay would be improved by dispersing the patients all over the ship, science labs work better by having them split up in people's quarters, the bridge more efficient if the captain's sat alone, etc.

And that's BEFORE you consider access to recreational facilities like holodecks.

Whatever way, you'd need to move the vast majority of the crew around the ship to some extent, even if a few could purely "telecommute" from their quarters. That's going to involve transporters or turbolifts, unless you just want to make everyone climb the stairs to get fit...

Plus, replicating turbolifts on-demand (a) wouldn't solve the waiting problem - it takes 5-10s to replicate a plate of food or equivalent, already longer than the usual turbolift wait, and presumably would take longer still for something larger & more complex and (b) would open the question of "why bother with turbolifts at all". If you're going to spend the time & energy to replicate lifts on-demand, you'd be better installing a network of self-service short-range transporters all over the ship and skipping the lifts entirely...

They wouldn't necessarily need to materialize out of thin air like the food, but I think there must be some way that they could have enough cars and a logistical situation that would allow them to always have one waiting at every entry. I mean, if they have 300 years to work it ("it" being the essential concept of the elevator), then you'd think they'd be able to solve the waiting problem in that time.

Think of it this way. If we started from the standpoint that turbolifts didn't have a wait, would you be able to come up with a convincing explanation for how it could be done?

I'd go with the idea that they moved cars around the system based on where people were at any given time - so if it looks like someone is heading for the turbolift, the computer moves a spare car to that turbolift station so that it's there before they are, whereas any uncrewed sections of the ship are emptied of turbolifts - combined with having a certain number of busy stations (e.g., bridge) permanently stocked with one or more turbolift cars, with some less busy stations having cars pre-assigned in a similar way only at certain times of the day, based according to prior usage patterns.

Given typical patterns across Starfleet built over time and refined according to internal ship records, they'd be able to match supply and demand to 99+% accuracy - with a bias towards false positives (i.e., having a car ready even if no-one ultimately enters it) over accidentally making someone wait possibly resulting in no waiting at all.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

DonInago,

I don't think you're going to find numbers for how many turbolifts a ship carries...certainly not canonical ones.

Well, I'm wondering if anybody who did any good internal schematics (Robert April, David Shaw, etc) could come up with any ideas for a Constitution-Class

Obviously two lifts can move down the same tube...while the tubes aren't double-wide, much like railroad tracks there are areas where a lift can bypass another if necessary.

Has anybody ever done any schematics where this was covered?

 

[Crewman47]

The one thing I've noticed about Turbolifts from onscreen evidence is that there often taken from one distant point to another, eg Engineering to the Bridge, without any noticeable stop gaps and changeovers but it clearly shows on some official deck plans (which I know aren't completly canon) that turbo routes only travel a certain distance before a user has to transfer to another tube.

I think one example of this is in ST 5 TFF where they take a Turbo from the Hangar Bay to the Bridge in one trip.

 

[Timo]

It would make little sense to build the turboshafts in sections - that'd defeat their purpose, really. Some blueprints avoid the sectioning issue despite the challenges presented by hulls that feature concentric circular corridors. Starnbach's E-D turboshafts for example manage to be continuous, by judiciously linking the shafts on a given deck to the shafts on the decks above and below whenever a corridor blocks horizontal movement.

We don't explicitly see the cabs used by our heroes weaving up and down a lot to get past an obstacle, of course. But then again, they do tend to take lift routes that would be expected to see a lot of use, such as bridge-to-transporter-room. Surely those would be built to be maximally straight, even at the expense of building awkward corridors.

...It's interesting how there never is a direct turbolift connection to a transporter room. The heroes always have to walk at least a short distance to reach the door of such a room. The dramatic reason for this is obvious, but what is the practical in-universe one? Transporters not liking it much if turbolifts rumble past at a delicate moment?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Jack Riley]

I think one example of this is in ST 5 TFF where they take a Turbo from the Hangar Bay to the Bridge in one trip.

You have spoken of this movie. We dare not speak its name!

One thing I noticed in TOS is that the little light indicating movement would sometimes change directions. It would go up/down and then change to left/right. This would indicate that the turbolifts can move horizontally along the plane of the ship. That being the case, I think that the blueprints you reference don't show all of the horizontal tubes due to the 2D reference points used for the blueprints.

Just something to think about.

 

[SoM]

...It's interesting how there never is a direct turbolift connection to a transporter room. The heroes always have to walk at least a short distance to reach the door of such a room. The dramatic reason for this is obvious, but what is the practical in-universe one? Transporters not liking it much if turbolifts rumble past at a delicate moment?

I'd bet something simpler - there's more than one transporter room (the E-D is meant to have quite a few as I recall), and only one turbolift station to serve each group of (all of?) them, rather than one per transporter room.

 

[DonIago]

Perhaps the back corridor which we never see the end of leads to a turbolift?

I still remember Main Engineering apparently having (or not having) turbolift connections in a couple of locations depending upon the episode.

 

[Timo]

It would be a bit odd if nobody using the transporter ever used the more direct turbolift access... But yes, it was relatively seldom that we saw the forward turbolift on the TNG bridge in use, and it was in one episode only that the side door of Main Engineering led to a turbolift (originally, it seemed to not be used at all, and after that single episode which I forget, it led to a Jeffries tube).

The idea of a single lift station serving multiple transporter rooms is pretty neat. Even on Kirk's old ship, there probably were at least four rooms, in pairs to port and starboard (such as shown in some old blueprints) - this would nicely explain why the rooms might have different interiors on different weeks. I mean, yes, they could have painted the doors, and then repainted them in the original colors. But there could also well have been multiple door-color-coded rooms.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TIN_MAN]

On a side note, I always thought of the colorful doors as being color-coded anyway? doors leading to command devision-related facilities would be yellow and sciences blue, and engineering red, etc. The turbo lift doors would/should always be red, being that their maintanance is a fuction of ingineering? Crew quarters and other miscellanious areas would be grey? Anyhow this is the ideal, in theory, if not always in practice?

 

[Mytran]

That was a practise followed fairly closely throughout TOS (although a few of the early episodes occassionally had non-red outer doors for turbolifts). In season 3 a turbolift suddenly appeared in the wall opposite the Transporter Room and it followed the pattern of red doors with a black label above.

 

[FalTorPan]

I don't think you're going to find numbers for how many turbolifts a ship carries...certainly not canonical ones. Obviously two lifts can move down the same tube...while the tubes aren't double-wide, much like railroad tracks there are areas where a lift can bypass another if necessary.

The 1970s blueprints indicated that every turbolift stop had its own car, and when one car travels from Stop A to Stop B, the car originally at Stop B would replace the other car at Stop A.

No, I'm not counting the number of turbolift stops in the blueprints.

 

[DonIago]

You lack dedication!

 

[FalTorPan]

Heh heh. If you happen to have that level of dedication, then count away!

 

[DonIago]

42. Well, that figures.

 

[GambitRealm]

Bumping this old thread to show you guys this :

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[publiusr]

I like the idea of turbolifts also being escape pods--blowing out of the top of the bridge--the last of the evacuated skeleton crew.

 

[ian128K]

An idea I've had running around my head for awhile is that the turbolift shafts should be vacuums, so that the issue of pneumatics doesn't hinder lift operation. That's seemingly contradicted by TNG's 'Disaster', though, since there was no rush of air filling the turbolift shaft when Picard and the kids had to escape. On the other hand, it could be an emergency measure that whenever the turbolift system detects a failure, it mechanically trips something that fills the tubolift shaft with atmosphere automatically. If that were the case, then the atmosphere in the shaft could have been primed by the time they left the turbolift car.

 

[DonIago]

I remember a novel commenting that while the turboshafts didn't contain a zero-gravity environment, it wouldn't have been a bad idea in the event of little things like falling bodies.

 

[ian128K]

I remember a novel commenting that while the turboshafts didn't contain a zero-gravity environment, it wouldn't have been a bad idea in the event of little things like falling bodies.

And if you think about it, where would the grav generators even be in a turbolift shaft?

 

[B.J.]

I'd think that any gravity in the turbolift shaft would be a bleed-over effect from the decks around it.