The 22-Man Transporter

[Wingsley]

Quoting "The Making of Star Trek", written by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry in 1968, about the TOS Transporter mechanism aboard the Starship Enterprise:

A maximum of six people can be beamed by the main operational transporters at any one time. These transporter rooms are circular in shape, and are controlled from a nearby console by a transporter officer and a technician. There are eleven personnel and cargo transporter stations aboard the vessel. Four are the main operational stations, two are cargo transporters, five are emergency personnel transporters which can handle twenty-two people each but involve a risk factor at such power loads and are limited to use in ship-abandoning emergencies.

Has anyone other than Franz Joseph ever tried to envision what the 22-man transporter room would look like?

There are probably a couple of ways that the first sentence of that quote could be interpreted. One would be to say that the Enterprise as a whole starship could only transport six people, one-way, at a time. The other interpretation would be that each room has a maximum capacity of six people at a time. Comments?

Did TNG or any other TREK ever try to envision a large, emergency transporter? I don't remember any.

 

[DonIago]

I'd read that as, "The main transporters each have enough pads for six people."

I think Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise depicts the emergency transporters on the refit E. Unsurprisingly it's a bunch of pads with one control console.

What would be the point in having a 22-man transporter room if they could only transport six people one way at a time? (confused)

Anyway, I don't believe emergency transporters were ever depicted in any of the series. TNG did an evacuation in the episode with the Bynars, but only standard transporters were shown.

 

[Wingsley]

Here is a link to a scan of the page from FJ's 1975 Tech Manual, depicting the 22-man transporter. (Thanks to Cygnus-X1.) Note that the "materializer" chamber is not enclosed as we always saw with the 6-man units. I don't have a problem with the layout of the pads or the overall shape of the room. I do think that the control console is not oriented properly. There's also a curious lack of any other consoles in the room. I also think that "the chamber" should be at least partly enclosed as we saw with the 6-man stations.

YMMV, but I'm of the feeling that if a Federation Starship was in a hurry and had to drop off a larger-than-normal landing party or other team on a planet, base or ship, the captain would probably order the expedition members to report to one of these emergency transporter rooms to disembark as a single organized group instead of using multiple 6-man stations. Let's say that a warptug (like a Ptolemy-class starship) was dispatched with a supercargo-crew of engineering specialists and a cargo pod filled with supplies, equipment and spare parts to repair a derelict Federation Starship adrift at a known point on the frontier in deep space. The warptug proceeds at maximum warp with its expedition to deep space to find the other ship adrift, and the warptug's orders are to drop off the team, recover the other ship's sick and injured, and return to starbase immediately while the expedition team repairs the drifting starship and gets it underway. I can see 22-man transporters being used there, especially if they're in a hurry.

I could also see Captain Kirk using a 22-man station to send down a large team to a research station on a planet. If, say, an expedition had over 12 persons and they wanted to use at least a couple of pads to send down equipment or expeditionary supplies, a single 22-man transporter station would seem ideal.

 

[Mr Silver]

The 22 man transporter resembles the Regula 1 transporter seen in TWOK.

 

[Wingsley]

I suppose it does, doesn't it?

 

[SchwEnt]

And I wonder why is it 22?
Not a 20 person transporter, not 24 or 30. Why 22?

What is the significance of that number in regards to transporters?

 

[Wingsley]

If you look at the FJ drawing I posted a link to above, it would seem to mesh with the hexagonal arrangement of pads and yet be space-efficient in the room's internal arrangement. I would also imagine that although it should be theoretically possible to design a system with any number of pads, maybe 22-man was seen as a practical balance between expedient evacuation and power consumption.

 

[Captain Robert April]

I'm more interested in who told Whitfield about the thing in the first place.

As for how it's set up, I'm thinking that a 22-man transporter that's only used in dire emergencies, while a nice idea, is a big waste of space during the course of the ship's mission. More likely, I think we'd be looking at the transporter pads being covered with deck plates normally, the console being stowed in a nearby closet, and the space being used for something else during normal duty. Probably rec rooms or ship's mess.

Then, when the fecal matter impacts upon the oscillating air circulation device, pull up the deck plates, drag the console out of the closet, and you're ready to start evacuating the ship in a matter of minutes.

 

[JarodRussell]

And since we've seen that you can beam two people on one pad, it's actually a 44 person transporter.

 

[blssdwlf]

Yeah. Didn't "Day of the Dove" show the Enterprise beaming up 9 people at once to a 6 person pad? (They materialized 4 and then 5.)

 

[CoveTom]

Add to that the fact that, at least from TNG onward, we see site-to-site transports possible without the use of a transporter pad. The question then is whether or not the transport is being routed through a pad's circuitry, even though the person never materializes there, and therefore is still limited to six people at a time, or whether it is somehow independent of the pads.

 

[scotpens]

In “The Tholian Web,” Scotty says only three transporter frequencies are working, therefore only three persons can be transported at a time. Presumably each pad uses a different frequency to keep the transportee’s atoms from being scrambled with someone else’s.

Yet in “The Cloud Minders,” Kirk and Plasus materialize on a single transporter pad with their hands around each other’s throats. And in Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales, Dr. Gillian Taylor hitches a transporter ride by grabbing onto Kirk just before he beams up.

Obviously there was an improvement in transporter technology. Or is it possible there was a continuity problem in Star Trek?

Naaaah, couldn’t be.

 

[Wingsley]

I'm more interested in who told Whitfield about the thing in the first place.

As for how it's set up, I'm thinking that a 22-man transporter that's only used in dire emergencies, while a nice idea, is a big waste of space during the course of the ship's mission. More likely, I think we'd be looking at the transporter pads being covered with deck plates normally, the console being stowed in a nearby closet, and the space being used for something else during normal duty. Probably rec rooms or ship's mess.

Then, when the fecal matter impacts upon the oscillating air circulation device, pull up the deck plates, drag the console out of the closet, and you're ready to start evacuating the ship in a matter of minutes.

The way it's written, it seems to come from Roddenberry. A kind of executive producer's "because I said so".

The "wasted space" argument is a very logical one. One could say the same about other ship's facilities though, like separate briefing rooms and rec rooms, or other redundant facilities aboard a starship.

It could be that only one or two of these rooms would be kept fully operational and "ready" all the time, and the rest would be decommissioned to be used as staging areas, training rooms or cargo transporters/holds. As I see it, there's a tiny bit a wiggle room there to allow for the 22-man stations to serve double-duty as cargo xport stations as well. FJ's drawing of the 22-man station, while I say it needs improvement, looks quite a bit more like TOS than his drawing of a dedicated cargo export station.

 

[Captain Robert April]

In “The Tholian Web,” Scotty says only three transporter frequencies are working, therefore only three persons can be transported at a time. Presumably each pad uses a different frequency to keep the transportee’s atoms from being scrambled with someone else’s.

Yet in “The Cloud Minders,” Kirk and Plasus materialize on a single transporter pad with their hands around each other’s throats. And in Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales, Dr. Gillian Taylor hitches a transporter ride by grabbing onto Kirk just before he beams up.

Obviously there was an improvement in transporter technology. Or is it possible there was a continuity problem in Star Trek?

Naaaah, couldn’t be.

I think it has to do with how much power can be fed through those pads before they go all poofy like in "The Doomsday Machine". On a normal day, when nobody is shooting at you and there isn't some interdimensional anomaly making the circuits all figgelty, yeah, one pad can handle two patterns (although if you take another look at Kirk and Plassus, they both materialized with their feet on separate pads, and that's the main factor).

 

[jimcat]

Hi Wingsley (and everyone else),


Reading the original reference, I can't help thinking that the idea is to keep everything vague enough that when there are more than six people to transport, people can't say "why not just use more than one transporter room?" since they only had the one, balanced against the need for a ship to be evacuated, as specified in "The Doomsday Machine" and implied very strongly in "This Side of Paradise". I'm not sure this is terribly helpful in getting a rational explanation for "real" transporters, but based on a "limits of sets and budgets" approach, I'd guess that there are normally only six transporter "channels" available, since offhand I can't think of any time where more than six people have been materialised in the transporter room simultaneously. There's the option to beam people out in greater numbers in an emergency, and to transport two people to one pad if they're engaged in a big fight, but six is the usual maximum. My explanation is that it's why there are definitely more than one six-person transporter on the ship, but often "the transporter" is referred to as if there's only the one room.


What has always bothered me is the assumption that "emergency transporters" would remove the need for escape capsules, and I can't see how anyone travelling in a spaceship would think that was a good idea. I'm also intrigued by the cargo transporters. Why do we never see them? (Cost, obviously, but why isn't Dr Van Gelder's crate sent as cargo?)


Then I began thinking about "The Enemy Within" and decided that transporters weren't something that lent themselves to logical explanation. I hope something in all this rambling has been of use.


Timon

 

[Pauln6]

I think the Refit plans (from memory) show 4 6-man transporter rooms in the saucer plus a 2-man unit on the bridge. There was also one 6-man unit in the engineering section plus the cargo and emergency transporters.

The transporters would certainly not negate the need for escape pods (if you are not close enough to a safe destination) but would add a layer of redundancy. One assumes that during a red alert off-duty crew go to emergency and damage control stations so they will be spread around the ship at all the key areas (including full teams manning the secondary bridge and auxiliary power) rather than just concentrated in the saucer.

I'd always assumed that the 22-man pads were emergency transporters with lower safety protocols that would only be used where the situation demanded it - i.e. abandon ship.

 

[T'Girl]

Well, the combination of the regular and the emergency transporter could beam down 134 people at a time, only three transporter "pulses" just about emptys the ship out.

What do you think, about one minute?

 

[DonIago]

I doubt you could even move the people onto the pads in one minute.

 

[Timo]

TNG "11001001" portrays a fairly realistic use for transporters: various platforms distributed all across the ship (probably mainly for purposes of internal logistics) suddenly all become part of an integrated system of at least 20 evacuation points, possibly operating through just a very limited number of actual emitters or perhaps even working through a cable connection to the starbase. A thousand people could indeed be evacuated in minutes with a system like that.

Quite possibly less than half a dozen of these transporters are capable of actual independent ship-to-shore operations in the general case, though. A smaller ship might not have that many internal logistics platforms, thus calling for specialized evac units. But those, too, might be wired to only operate through the limited resources of the standard transporter rooms, and would not be of any help in situations where the standard rooms get damaged - an absolute dramatic necessity for certain types of plot.

Of course, there's always also the option of beaming people out without using pads at all. In TNG, site-to-site is supposed to be a breeze. Whether TOS would be a different thing, we don't really know.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

I doubt that TOS-era Federation Starships had any finesse like the TNG-style "site-to-site" beaming abilities. Spock seemed to express reservations about "intraship beaming" in "Day of the Dove", and that process involved beaming off pads.

One could argue that the absence of any 22-man transporters in on-screen TOS entirely negates the possibility of their existence, of course. But then again "the absence of evidence does not imply the evidence of absence". And Whitfield & Roddenberry's TOS book seems to make it clear Kirk's Enterprise does indeed have 22-ma stations on-board.

FWIW, I have no problem with the 22-man emergency personnel transporter stations being melded with cargo transporter stations. In other words, there are no separate "personnel transporter" and "cargo transporter" stations. All transporters must be general-purpose stations. In "Dagger of the Mind", maybe the six-man station was being used to exchange cargo with Tantalus V because this particular transporter room is located in close proximity to one of the Enterprise's cargo holds. Maybe if there were significantly greater amounts of cargo being exchanged they would've used one of the 22-man stations instead.

I would expect the 6-man stations to be the transporter rooms of choice in most situations. I say this because a 22-man station, being capable of beaming much larger payloads at a time, must use controls geared to higher volumes. Kind of like the difference between digging a small ditch with a little backhoe as opposed to an industrial-sized extra-large trackhoe; sure you can use the larger machine, but it would be a waste of time and effort to operate the oversized, overkill machine.