rescue rope maneuver

[varek]

I hope I am posting this suggestion in the correct forum. Please forgive me if it should be elsewhere, instead.
Without spoiling a fantastic book, let me generalize by saying that this idea is to create a chain of vessels--shuttles, runabouts, workbees, etc.--to form a Rescue Rope System (RRS), to help evacuate personnel, including androids, from an endangered vessel or dangerous location, if the main ship's transporters are damaged or otherwise inoperable.
All the ship's auxilliary craft could stretch themselves out in a line, with those capable of transporting several individuals aboard interspersed with the others, at their limits of transport. That way, this chain of vessels could transport people from the dangerous situation up the chain, from vessel to vessel, until they are safely aboard the main ship.
The smaller craft, which cannot transport anyone aboard themselves, would help to anchor the transporting vessels in place.
After everyone has been rescued, the chain of vessels could return to the main ship.
What do you think?

 

[Finn]

Why? This doesn't make any sense

And you need to pay attention to what others were saying in your previous threads about this kind of topic.

 

[Melakon]

This is about the 4th or 5th thread you've started on this topic, and I'm not sure you got any of them in the Trek Tech forum like I originally suggested. I told you in the first thread to ask a moderator to move it for you, instead you started a new thread in another wrong forum. And now you're back here again in General.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think it's a clever idea (works even better if someone's in a space suit, and beamed from edge of transporter range to edge of transporter range to edge of transporter range... etc), but kind of moot with Scotty's transwarp beaming formula.

 

[MacLeod]

Well if you read some of the non-canon tech manuls the escape pods can often link up togther. There has to be a reason for a system to exists so to take it one step further

If the main ships transporter systems are down, what's wrong with using the independant transporter system that many shuttlecraft have (the writers of the shows/films forgot about this function).

If you are talking about another ship rescuing the crew of another ship, how likely would it be that the transporter systems of both ships failed and if it was for some spacial anamoly then using the independant transporter systems on shuttles would be affected as well. There is also the fact that in theory as seen in ENT the ships could simply dock to one another allowing people to walk between the two. If it's do dangerous to do that it's also likely to dangerous to create a bridge between the two using ships.


If use KDID's theroy of transporting from ship 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc.. why not just move the main ship into transporter range?

B5 used something similar to what you are describing in the S2 episde "A Distant Star" where an Explorer Class ship got lost in hperspace, and B5's starfury stretched out from the jump point becon so they could find it. So Starfury 1 locked on to the B5 jump gate beacon, SF 2 locked onto 1, SF 3 locked onto 2 and so on. But the mechanics of the B5 universe are different from Trek's.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

This is only useful if the shuttles have longer transporter range than the main ship.

One variation of this I do see as possibly useful is if you make a series of super-enforced probes just barely big enough to fit a man. Armor, minimal life support, a transporter and nothing else. So you could launch them into nebulae and and rifts and such to get to places the main ship can't safely get to.

 

[1001001]

Moving to Trek Tech.

 

[Timo]

If the main ships transporter systems are down, what's wrong with using the independant transporter system that many shuttlecraft have (the writers of the shows/films forgot about this function).

In VOY "Future's End", the heroes used what they called "emergency transporters" for a beam-up at point blank range: they had to get to within 10 kilometers of the target. They did so with their entire starship, but the terminology "emergency transporters" and the idea of short range is familiar to us from "Best of Both Worlds" as applying to shuttlecraft... It seems likely, then, that Janeway used shuttle transporters on this occasion.

Alas, the transporter problems in "Future's End" were not due to a phenomenon that would obviously only hit the mothership and spare the shuttles; in theory, the shuttles could have been affected by this temporal rift thing, too. But it's just as possible that they were not, what with them being safely inside the hangar and all.

ST:NEM is a different case, as the ship and the shuttles are all immersed in the spatial anomaly that disrupts communications. It's quite possible that once the ship's own transporters go down, any short-ranged emergency system is way too weak to deal with the anomaly, explaining why shuttle transporters were not considered in the attempt to beam troops to the Scimitar or to beam Picard back.

But then there was this collar-pip transporter that ultimately saved Picard... If that worked, why not bigger and better things like shuttle units? Here we could always argue that the pip was no transporter, but merely a new type of beacon, a way of defeating the sensor problems. So perhaps the E-E lost transporters because she lost main transporter sensors - but the beacon circumvented that problem and allowed Picard to return.

Small, deployable beacons would appear to be a very good idea in rescue operations in general. We saw them in action in ST:INS, too, deployed by flying drones (and perhaps Starfleet reverse-engineered some of those tags to come up with the ST:NEM pip?). Those drones might be the fast and economical way to achieve this "daisy chain" or "rescue rope" thing in the TNG era, being much easier to deploy than actual shuttlecraft.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JarodRussell]

It reminds me of the intergalactic Stargate bridge they introduced in Stargate Atlantis. Because a normal Stargate couldn't make the distance between Pegasus and Milkyway, they placed 30 or so individual gates between those galaxies. The travelers get dematerialized on one side, then they get send from matter buffer to matter buffer until they end up at the final gate which rematerializes them.

Stargates and Trek transporters work basically the same way, so...

 

[MacLeod]

If the main ships transporter systems are down, what's wrong with using the independant transporter system that many shuttlecraft have (the writers of the shows/films forgot about this function).

In VOY "Future's End", the heroes used what they called "emergency transporters" for a beam-up at point blank range: they had to get to within 10 kilometers of the target. They did so with their entire starship, but the terminology "emergency transporters" and the idea of short range is familiar to us from "Best of Both Worlds" as applying to shuttlecraft... It seems likely, then, that Janeway used shuttle transporters on this occasion.

Alas, the transporter problems in "Future's End" were not due to a phenomenon that would obviously only hit the mothership and spare the shuttles; in theory, the shuttles could have been affected by this temporal rift thing, too. But it's just as possible that they were not, what with them being safely inside the hangar and all.

ST:NEM is a different case, as the ship and the shuttles are all immersed in the spatial anomaly that disrupts communications. It's quite possible that once the ship's own transporters go down, any short-ranged emergency system is way too weak to deal with the anomaly, explaining why shuttle transporters were not considered in the attempt to beam troops to the Scimitar or to beam Picard back.

But then there was this collar-pip transporter that ultimately saved Picard... If that worked, why not bigger and better things like shuttle units? Here we could always argue that the pip was no transporter, but merely a new type of beacon, a way of defeating the sensor problems. So perhaps the E-E lost transporters because she lost main transporter sensors - but the beacon circumvented that problem and allowed Picard to return.

Small, deployable beacons would appear to be a very good idea in rescue operations in general. We saw them in action in ST:INS, too, deployed by flying drones (and perhaps Starfleet reverse-engineered some of those tags to come up with the ST:NEM pip?). Those drones might be the fast and economical way to achieve this "daisy chain" or "rescue rope" thing in the TNG era, being much easier to deploy than actual shuttlecraft.

Timo Saloniemi

True but emergency transporters could just as easily mean a way of quickly evacuating the ship and they were really designed to beam people off the ship, rather than onto it. So perhaps the targeting scanners weren't as advanced as in the main transporter.

But haven't we seen people transport up from the surface to a shuttle in orbit. True we don't know the altitude the shuttle was at, was it only a few dozen kilometer's up a few hundred, geostationary orbit?

If i were being cynical I would say the reason as to why they didn't use the shuttle transporter systems in things like NEM is they hoped the audiance wouldn't notice. Sure you can say that's it's down to the enviroment, the shuttlebays too damged to launch a shuttle etc.. But wasn't there a line in NEM about the transporters being offline, no doubt due to battle damage.

But a series a beacons say about the size of a probe to act as relay stations is a bit more workable than manned ships.

 

[Timo]

True but emergency transporters could just as easily mean a way of quickly evacuating the ship and they were really designed to beam people off the ship, rather than onto it. So perhaps the targeting scanners weren't as advanced as in the main transporter.

I'm not sure what good mass evacuation transporters would do if they had such a short range. Or would it be a case of them being able to shove people 1,300 klicks away from a dying ship, but only being able to recover somebody from 10 klicks?

But haven't we seen people transport up from the surface to a shuttle in orbit.

Runabout transporters can pull off that trick, but TNG shuttles weren't shown doing anything like that. I don't recall exact VOY references, either, but I gather they might be out there...

Timo Saloniemi