The World of Star Trek...

Of course the primary benefit of the transporter was budgetary and the secondary benefit was dramatic -- that the action could begin more quickly without having to depict ships landing on a planet each week. I don't think Gerrold felt the transporter was a bad idea, just that it hampered the drama when every time danger was encountered Kirk could simply beam back to the ship "so fast the air would crackle". I haven't read the book in decades but the phrase from Gerrold, "Scotty save my ass!" also rings a bell. Of course the franchise has more and more lazily danced around this for decades, culminating with the farce in NEM where Stewart wanted to drive a dune buggy on the planet's surface so the writer inserted a throwaway line about an ion storm interfering with the transporter.

Warped9: Since you've been reading the book -- how did Gerrold address the aforementioned issue with the transporter concept?

 

What Gerrold was referring to was that to prevent Kirk from high-tailing it back to the ship he had to be overpowered or knocked out or prevented somehow from contacting Scotty and yelling, "Scotty, get my ass outta here!" So to prevent the transporter from being an easy escape the gimmick becomes "Kirk getting overpowered once he beams down" or some variation thereof.

 

So did Gerrold offer a solution to this, or an example of "good writing", other than just "don't have Kirk get overpowered once he beams down"? You about have me ready to dig out my old copy of the book but it'll just be easier ordering another copy off of Amazon...

 

Basically that is what Gerrold said.

That aliens had to be either

A) So primitive that they hit Kirk over the head and take his communicator so he can't call for beam out.

B) So advanced that they can block the communicator and/or the transporter.

Basically, the transporter is but one example of what might be called "capability creep".

That is a big problem with science fiction. A special capability is established for a particular reason (in the case of the transporter to streamline storytelling in moving the characters) but it quickly becomes very obvious that the same capability would have so many other applications that it would radically alter the show.

Lets put it this way. If a starship had a transporter with anything like the capabilities it has in Star Trek, then therer are a whole host of things you would not need.

You wouldn't need a shuttlebay with big doors as you could just beam a shuttle and crew out into space and back again. No shuttle would have the same complexity as a human body. You wouldn't need torpedo tubes. Heck you probably would not need so many shipboard corridors as you could beam within the ship.

I know, supposely intership beaming was not doable in the OS era, but that was a ridiculous restriction. If you can tell the position of every atom in the human body then you certainly have enough precision to avoid beaming someone into a bulkhead.

 

His view was basically about how a gimmick could arise unintentionally from how something is established early in the show.

Actually I recall reading how it was GR who thought it a good idea that a person needs their communicator for the ship to lock onto them to be transported rather than having the transporter able to beam them up at any time.

The real solution is simply not to write Kirk or whomever into that situation repeatedly. Having Kirk stay on the ship and sending a dedicated landing party would be a start. But then we're back to writing a different kind of story than the audience half expects.

Any gimmick can be reused if it's done sparingly, but if it appears to be done too often then it becomes a tired cliche. Alas sometimes it only has to happen once or even not at all. How many times have some people made cracks about Kirk always making it with the green alien chick when in fact it never actually happened...until ST09. ST09 played on a long held though entirely unfounded cliche that a lot of people accept as having happened sufficiently enough times in the original series.

Or Kirk driving a computer crazy with illogic. It actually happened only once in "I, Mudd" and Kirk had the entire crew helping him. In every other instance Kirk either used relentless logic or just flat out destroyed the computer. But it's a long held cliche that everyone "knows" happened all the time.

Hmm, you know this could be a thread in itself...

 

But it would have much higher interatomic binding energies, so there should be a difference. It should be much harder to dematerialize the denser, stronger materials in a shuttlecraft, just as it would be much harder to burn it or vaporize it or puncture it with a weapon. Those are all about breaking the bonds between atoms and molecules, and the stronger the bonds are, the harder it is to do any of those things. Shuttlecraft hulls would be designed to withstand re-entry heat that would largely vaporize a human body. So logically they should be much harder to dematerialize with a transporter. So it would be perfectly reasonable to posit that a transporter can handle something with the material strength and density of the human body but would be unable to beam up a particularly dense or strong material like a spacecraft frame or hull.

Not to mention that a transporter that can disassemble such strong materials as easily as it can disassemble an ugly bag of mostly water has another unintended capability: It would be the ultimate disintegrator ray. It would be a weapon so potent as to render phasers and torpedoes obsolete (since it can actually work through walls). Since the transporter on Voyager was able to beam up shuttlecraft, that meant it had that level of destructive potential, but that was ignored.

Now, that's silly. Just because a technology exists, that doesn't mean it's automatically the best way to do something. Transporters use power, after all -- no doubt a great deal of power. It would be stupidly inefficient to waste all that power beaming people from room to room because they were too lazy just to walk a few meters. Not to mention that it would be crazy to let a Starfleet crew be that lethargic. They're military personnel who may be called to action at a moment's notice, so they need to stay physically active. This is part of why huge aircraft carriers don't have personnel elevators.

But that wouldn't solve the problem, because no matter who beams down, it would still be necessary to contrive a way to keep them from beaming up to the ship and easily avoiding danger.

The best approach, I think, is to structure the story so that the protagonists don't want to just beam away -- where they could easily escape but choose to stay in harm's way because they have an obligation to complete their mission, or because leaving would make things worse.

Aren't you forgetting Marta from "Whom Gods Destroy?"

And I think you're taking the meme too literally -- the "green alien chick" is more a synecdoche for Kirk's space-babe conquests in general.

Splitting hairs. It was still his plan, his strategy.

Still, the underlying principle is basically the same: exploiting the computer's rigid, inflexible thinking, trapping it in a contradiction it can't resolve.

 

I gave examples already. Lots of submarine films do it. It doesn't take a deft touch, it just means watching some movies and shows that have done it right and seeing how they did it. Mostly, it's editorial.

Calling out the TMP Stupid Laborious Version scene of the energy bolt attack isn't a fair example because—frankly—that cut was designed to fill out a special 3-hour TV movie timeslot with commercials, and no editor worth his salt would have used half of the stuff they crammed into that sequence to pad it out.

 

I thought it was for damage control access. But you've got to admit that it makes little sense for the captain to have to walk and take turbolifts all the way from the cargo bay on deck 21 to the bridge with Red Alert sounding and an enemy ship attacking when he should just be able to hop on to a transporter pad.

 

The point isn't about how long it takes, but about how the physics and scale of combat are depicted. Realistically, the ships wouldn't be close enough together to see them both at the same time, and they or their projectiles would be moving too fast to get a good look at them, so a space battle wouldn't be something that could be conveyed visually, except by people in one or both ships reacting to what they saw on their tactical displays. And since shock waves can't propagate through vacuum, a near miss wouldn't rock the ship or have any visible impact at all, though depending on the weapon it might send hazardous radiation sleeting through the crew's bodies (in which case you could indicate danger by having a radiation alarm go off on the bridge).

Although in my latest Star Trek novel I managed to explain the phenomenon of a ship trembling under a near miss as a result of the extreme heat of the weapon flash-vaporizing the surface layer of the ship's hull, sending a concussive shock through it. Which actually kinda makes sense, though it wouldn't be as pronounced as what's often shown onscreen.

That's why, on real naval ships, personnel are generally berthed close to their duty stations. Besides, you're thinking about it from the perspective of normal schlubs like us, not fit, conditioned military personnel for whom climbing 20 flights of stairs at high speed is relatively easy. (My source for all this is writer/producer Zack Stentz, a Navy veteran, in discussion threads back on the fan boards for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, on which he was a story editor. There were long discussions about why the Andromeda didn't have elevators, and he explained the logic of it based on real Navy practice.)

Another reason they don't use elevators or the like on Navy ships is because they're bottlenecks. If the ship is hit and the power goes out, or there's structural damage that warps the elevator shaft, then the elevator gets stuck, not only stranding anyone in it but blocking other people's access to where they need to be. Turbolifts are a useful dramatic convenience for letting characters have private conversations, and a filmmaking convenience to imply movement through a huge ship without needing to build a lot of sets, but in practice they're a pretty bad idea. And it should be obvious that relying on transporters in a battle situation is an even worse idea. Not only would they demand huge amounts of power that you'd need for shields and weapons, but if the transporter systems took damage while you were in mid-transport, you could be horribly killed.

 

^Very good post. Well reasoned and well explained.

Though in regards to Andromeda I thought they were shown to have antigravity "lift tubes" or something to that effect. Basically elevator shafts without the elevator cars.

And wasn't the Andromeda Ascendent built by an equine like race (horses) which is why they had lots of ramps?

 

I think so, though I don't think the cheapo production could ever afford to show them.

In theory, but humans and other humanoids had been part of the Commonwealth for millennia by that point and the ship was certainly designed with them in mind. (And the Vedrans were supposed to be more like centaurs, but when the cheapo production finally got around to showing one, it looked more like a blue giraffe-woman.)

 

Watching TMP and some of early TNG you can see some of Gerrold's ideas realized. You get an even better idea reading his Star Wolf books. Indeed The Voyage Of the Star Wolf is one of my favourite SF novels. The followup The Middle Of Nowhere isn't bad, but not quite as good and drags in places. The last book Blood And Fire I haven't read yet although I have it on order.

Although I had a modest interest in SF by the end of the '60s and early '70s Star Trek help foster a greater interest in other science fiction, particularly SF literature. But Trek also got me interested in all sorts of things beyond SF. Often when something scientific or historical or political that I didn't really understand would be referenced in the show I'd make a point of going to the library to learn more about it.

 

Figure I'll give this a read. It was ninety-nine cents on iBooks, so I really have nothing to lose.

 

First episode Chris. First scene with Dylan

 

Oh yeah.

 

It's been years since I've read the book as well (though I recently dug out my early 70s copy along with "Making of 'The Trouble with Tribbles'" and a reprinting of "The Making of Star Trek" from the same time).

What I remember was Gerrold's phrase about "concept becomes format and format becomes formula". Basically, one starts with a set of ideas that serve as the "concept" for a show. That "concept" then will dictate or at least steer the overall "format" for the show, or, how the stories are told. But "format", if not varied can devolve into "formula", basically, the same story repeatedly told to the point the outcome came be readily guessed.

Again, it's been, well, at least twenty years or more since I thoroughly read those books, so it's quite possible I've misremembered Gerrold's intent about that phrase.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

Regardless of the quality of the execution and the reasons for the inclusion, the point is that we did (on ABC first, home video later, and I've even seen the SLV a couple of times in theaters) see such a scene on screen (and therefore canonically). Although the shots were absolutely reinserted to pad out the running time for a television slot, they almost certainly were not scripted and shot for that purpose in 1978. I agree the shots were overlong, unnecessary, spoiled the pacing of an already slow-moving film, and poorly reinserted in the scene -- probably by ABC or Paramount, but almost certainly by nobody associated with the original production. Editorial concerns aside, the sound mix is a patchwork as well (with background audio looped several times over so you can hear the impact multiple times before it actually happens). Since the sound mix was not complete, Ramsay / Wise probably removed the shots pretty early on after principal photography was completed. Adding to the sketchy nature of the overall editing job on the SLV, later in the film the infamous unfinished shot of Kirk's EVA is also reinserted, with studio rafters clearly visible (BTW the whole Kirk EVA scene is notably absent from theatrical prints of the SLV). But before giving too much credit to the original editorial team, remember they also removed the "Spock tears" scene for the theatrical cut, which is almost unanimously regarded as a welcome readdition to the SLV and DE (and not in a purely fanwank way; it's very well-written and arguably integral to the plot -- if somewhat redundant and expository). The entire post-production team deserves a lot of slack though; they were so pressed for time.

Now, I've seen no evidence that Gerrold's input (directly or indirectly) led to the scripting of the ABC/SLV version of the scene, but either intentionally or coincidentally it does reflect many of his ideas (aside from, as I noted, the electrical discharges inside the ship). Gerrold certainly had direct input into "The Last Outpost" scene though, and given how much Phase II / TMP stuff translated over to early TNG, it's reasonable to conclude that he did influence the V'ger attack scene.

 

Actually, we can go back much further for this kind of scenario, "Balance of Terror" and the plasma weapon fired at the Enterprise. Only one discharge, but brother, they way it played, you really get the feeling this weapon could vaporize the ship. Which, of course, was inspired by the sub warfare sequences discussed earlier.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

I'd guess coincidence, because it's standard evasive maneuvering fare from naval movies.

 

The prime directive also prohibited the landing party from just beaming up or saying things like behold, I am the arch angel Gabriel. But how do you all feel about transporters on the bridge and an AI aboard the next show?