Transporter chains

[Unicron]

FASA did mention the idea of a combination transporter/warp engine system, though I can't recall if they originated that idea or not. The idea was that transwarp was supposed to be able to duplicate the interphase in Tholian space from "The Tholian Web" on a much smaller and easily controlled scale, and that the end result would be a more efficient warp system that would basically allow shortcuts through an alternate dimension. Somewhat like how hyperspace works in B5 and some other series rather than making a warp envelope alone around a ship.

 

[Ithekro]

The FASA section on the Excelsior mentions that the "engines operate by capturing the warp envelope in a transporter field and beaming it ahead of the ship to attain the reported warp speeds." It think this was also mentioned in Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, thought the use of this method is to get the ship into interphase where space is smaller and devoid of obstacles unlike normal space or subspace, making the ship faster just because it could go in a straight line across less distance to get to the same point in normal space.

Though in FASA it could also have been misinformation as it mention at the actual working of the new transwarp drives is classified.

 

[Christopher]

The FASA section on the Excelsior mentions that the "engines operate by capturing the warp envelope in a transporter field and beaming it ahead of the ship to attain the reported warp speeds." It think this was also mentioned in Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, thought the use of this method is to get the ship into interphase where space is smaller and devoid of obstacles unlike normal space or subspace, making the ship faster just because it could go in a straight line across less distance to get to the same point in normal space.

Well, that's just gibberish. The same kind of nonsense as Mr. Scott's Guide claiming that the shields scanned some sort of hyperdense solid and projected its hardness outside the ship, or something mind-rippingly stupid like that. The sort of word salad that's about as logical as a magic spell.

 

[Timo]

why did Kirk's crew and Kruge's crew need to activate the transporters at the same time for Kruge's boarding party?

This did not happen. Only Kirk's crew did any activating as far as we can tell. And supposedly this was because Kruge's own transporters were out of action (Kirk's ship did hurt Kruge's!), as we never saw any of the telltale Klingon red glitter in the process.

It confuses matters somewhat that Kruge's boarding party assembles in Kruge's transporter room. But where else should it assemble, on that cramped little ship? On the bridge, where they initially don their gear? That would mean allowing Kirk's transporters to probe into Kruge's most secure facility.

Conveniently, no transporter room set was built for the Klingon ship yet, not for this movie; Kruge's troops were not shown standing on Kruge's platform, or next to it, so we can choose which version to believe in.

In any case, Kruge is the passive player there, waiting for Kirk's signal, and then just telling his team to expect a transport when Kirk sends said signal. It's not a pad-to-pad transport except for the incidental possibility of there being a pad even at the passive end...

What's the deal with Ambassador T'Pel's transport to the Devoras?

The E-D beamed the fake Ambassador to the Romulan ship using standard procedure, expecting no activity from the Romulan end. The process worked without a hitch, and the agent materialized on the Romulan ship. Simultaneously, the Romulans beamed back fake blood.

Our heroes didn't recognize this at first, and even Data's investigation went the complicated route of assuming that the Romulans also grabbed the fake Ambassador with their own beam - even though nothing suggested anything had really gone wrong with O'Brien's own effort of beaming the fake Ambassador.

Examples of incidents where there really is some receiving pad activity even when the transport is initiated by the sending pad are fairly uncommon. ST:TMP is a jumbled mess in more ways than one. But there's also the aforementioned "Dramatis Personae" where a Cardassian transporter finishes the job started by a Klingon machine that blows up in the middle of the process. A red glitter reassembly fails; an amber glitter reassembly subsequently succeeds.

Basically, it would seem that a transporter, any transporter, can turn a person into a blob of "phased matter", existing outside our traditional realm. It takes active effort to keep that person in this alternate, phased realm: fun with diagnostic cycles in "Relics", something very similar in "Counterpoint", etc.

(The "Dramatis Personae" example also rather suggests that "phased matter is phased matter is phased matter": a transporter doesn't create a transporter-specific package, but a generic blob of phased matter, something that can subsequently be manipulated by any phased-matter-manipulating machine and not just those of suitable type or authorization.)

If there's no such activity, the person decays back to our realm - but this process may go wrong in several ways, and if that happens, an active transporter can actually midwife the person back in a controlled fashion. In essence, transporters are machines that can access the phased realm and manipulate things that exist there (even in fairly complex ways) - but for a normal transport, they don't have to do so. They just have to push the person into phased space and send him in the desired direction.

For the transporter chain idea, we could postulate that one way to manipulate the phased package is to give it some extra push in the desired direction, while another is to prolong its phasing. Booster stations could then exist in chains that never rematerialize or otherwise manipulate the transportee - they just push him forward in phased space at an ever-accelerating "speed", possibly defeating the speed and distance limitations of single-transporter operations.

What doesn't fit this picture? Well, possibly ST:TMP. But that's an infamous outlier in any case. And we could argue that what happens there is that Starfleet sends, the Enterprise is passive, and what actually goes wrong is that a power spike unrelated to transporter operations results from the small explosion at Main Engineering and messes up the incoming signal. At that point, Rand has to attempt active recovery of the poor sods in phased space, and this attempt notoriously fails, despite Starfleet "boosting their signal" and then trying to pull back what they sent. It's at first golf with a ball of phased matter, with the Enterprise as the hole; then turns into tennis or volleyball when the Enterprise isn't ready to receive; but soon decays into football grabbing which ends poorly for the pigskin.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

That's a really good summary of the "phased matter" debates which have been bouncing around the BBS for a while now, thanks Timo!

The "disintegrate and rebuild, atom by atom" approach may be what fills the technical manuals, but it really has little bearing on what we saw on our TV screens week after week. Also, as Christopher has pointed in one of his novels - technology and control of atomic structure with that amount of precision would have ended medical science overnight, not to mention numerous other spin-off technologies. It's just too out of place with regard to the rest of the Star Trek world as presented. Something else (i.e. the phased matter principle) is sorely needed.

 

[Albertese]

Very insightful, Timo! I think I agree with your whole phased matter argument. Though I wonder how the episode with Barclay and his giant transporter worms which are really another ship's crew fit in? (I forget the episode's name off the top of my head, and I'm not at home to look it up quickly...)

--Alex

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ "Realm of Fear."

 

[Albertese]

Thanks!

 

[Timo]

Well, the "it's phased matter" model is just handwaving, and intended as such - with the major benefit being that everything odd that happens in "phase space" stays in "phase space", such as violations of conservation laws.

Yet "Realm of Fear" would be another great example of transporters simply sending stuff into this alternate and preexisting realm, and not caring much about what happens to it afterwards. In a system like that, weird creatures have an excuse to naturally dwell in the phased realm. It would be much harder to believe that an ecosystem somehow existed in a closed and completely synthetic system - say, in the carefully constructed code of an email network...

Of course, the worms in the end turn out to be "unnatural", but that's not the first assumption of our anti-hero, and despite his phobias, he does know what he's talking about. It's not as if his colleagues would debunk him outright, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MacLeod]

Something I was wondering about... for very long distance travel couldn't they build a chain of transporters pads? Just keep expanding the distance like telephone wires. If they expended the effort to do this then Starfleet could transport someone from earth to very far away colonies pretty quickly without even needing a ship.

And of course by ~2387 the ability to transport people over interstellar distances had been discovered by Montgomery Scott.

But as others have mentioned by the time of TNG effective transporter range was only 40 000km which would a transport could be done in geo-synchronous Earth orbit, other planets maybe not.

But would it be woth the effort of laying millions of relay stations? what benefits would it bring?

Also how instaneous would it really be, after all to transmit the data from one relay station to another? Can it be sent via subspace or is it limited to the speed of light (or slower).

 

[Christopher]

And of course by ~2387 the ability to transport people over interstellar distances had been discovered by Montgomery Scott.

As I already pointed out, Starfleet was fully aware of interstellar transporter technology as of TNG: "Bloodlines" in 2270. They just didn't use it because the instability and power demands made it impractical. And of course such technology was "discovered" by Starfleet as early as "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and "That Which Survives," even if they didn't manage to achieve it for themselves.

Also how instaneous would it really be, after all to transmit the data from one relay station to another? Can it be sent via subspace or is it limited to the speed of light (or slower).

Transporters do supposedly beam through subspace, which is how they can penetrate solid objects like metal starship hulls and cave roofs. Although that makes it puzzling why the "subspace transporter" of "Bloodlines" is presented as such a breakthrough.

 

[Timo]

Actually, walking through walls is associated with being "phased" in a couple of well-known TNG episodes. OTOH, being phased is not associated with subspace in any of those episodes. To the contrary, "Time's Arrow" shows that indigenous life can exist in a realm that is phased, and "Schisms" shows that indigenous life can exist in a realm of subspace, these supposedly being two completely different things.

Is there anything to link standard transporters with subspace? In "Data's Day", it is established that Starfleet and Romulan transporters and unnamed others operate at a certain "subspace frequency", but that's pretty much it. A paintball gun with a power feeder can have a specific "voltage" associated with it, and that doesn't mean it's fundamentally an electric weapon...

But that doesn't mean one couldn't cross-breed a paintball gun with a taser, so that there's voltage in the power feeder and voltage in the electrocution ammunition that the gun spits out. Perhaps there's a bit of subspace in the standard transporter, unrelated to the main operating principle, and then a completely different application of subspace trumping that in the subspace transporter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

It is also possible that Scotty had come up with the transwarp beaming in the 23rd century, rather than the 24th, but it was classified and Spock only brought it up because his superiors would not longer be able to stop him.

 

[Christopher]

Again: They had it in "Bloodlines." They had interstellar transporters as a major plot point in a TNG episode set 17 years before the destruction of Romulus, and less than two years after Scotty's arrival in the 24th century. And it was a technology that the Federation was already quite familiar with but simply found unsafe and impractical. Why am I the only person who thinks it's obvious that that is the technology Spock Prime gave to Scotty in the '09 movie?

 

[Stevil2001]

I didn't notice anyone disputing you? I think by "discovered" people meant, "got to work on a reliable basis," not, "had once seen someone else do it."

 

[Ithekro]

Perhaps Mr. Scott's version, being transwarp rather than subspace, is faster and longer ranged, but limited to one or two people per transport. It might also not be safe, but Ambassador Spock made no mention of that, and Mr. Scott should know the dangers of his own calculations. That Section 31 seemed to be suppressing the knowledge would fit in with some theories that Mr. Scott got it right in the 23rd century, and told Spock, but both were under orders to not talk about it. (Its classified). Being in another universe, with the need to get things at least somewhat worked out, and by his own admission, Spock was emotionally compromised, he might have said "to hell with classified".

 

[Mytran]

I think disagreement with Christopher was more confined to another recent thread, TBH. However, I for one think it's the simplest explanation for the emergence of the technology, far better than it just appearing in the mind if Mr Scott one day!

 

[Christopher]

Perhaps Mr. Scott's version, being transwarp rather than subspace, is faster and longer ranged, but limited to one or two people per transport.

Here's the thing, though: In the '09 movie, they didn't really use "transwarp beaming" to mean "interstellar beaming." Here's Spock Prime's line:

What if I told you that your transwarp theory was correct? That it is indeed possible to beam onto a ship that is travelling at warp speed?

And then Scotty:

...you're still talking about beaming aboard the Enterprise while she's traveling faster-than-light, without a proper receiving pattern.... The notion of transwarp beaming is like, trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.

So, as defined in the film, it's not "transwarp" in the same sense as transwarp drive ("beyond warp"), but "trans-" in its other sense of "across," from a stationary start to a ship at warp. That's the part that gave it the name, at least as far as the first movie was concerned. (Although there is that earlier stuff about transporters being believed to have a maximum range of 100 miles, but that has to be disregarded, since that's barely low orbit and even NX-01's transporter had a significantly greater range.)

Although, granted, the second movie uses "transwarp beaming" to describe beaming from Earth to Qo'noS, no warp travel involved, so that blurs the definition.

Still, there's no reason the same technology couldn't have two different labels, e.g. cell phone vs. mobile phone. Maybe the general technology is called a subspace transporter in the Prime Universe, but since Spock Prime introduced it to Scotty in the specific context of transwarp beaming (from a planet onto a ship in warp), it ended up being called "transwarp" in general in that timeline.

It might also not be safe, but Ambassador Spock made no mention of that, and Mr. Scott should know the dangers of his own calculations.

We actually saw that it was unsafe, because Scotty materialized in a rather dangerous place. It wasn't the same kind of hazard -- more a matter of the positional error bars increasing in absolute size the larger the distance covered -- but it was at least an attempt to illustrate that transwarp beaming wasn't a perfectly safe and reliable technology, but something you'd only use in extreme cases where the risk was justified.

 

[Pauln6]

It might also not be safe, but Ambassador Spock made no mention of that, and Mr. Scott should know the dangers of his own calculations.

We actually saw that it was unsafe, because Scotty materialized in a rather dangerous place. It wasn't the same kind of hazard -- more a matter of the positional error bars increasing in absolute size the larger the distance covered -- but it was at least an attempt to illustrate that transwarp beaming wasn't a perfectly safe and reliable technology, but something you'd only use in extreme cases where the risk was justified.

I think this is the issue with long distance beaming. It doesn't have to safe, reliable, or particularly accurate if you are beaming in explosives, chemical weapons, or even lumps of asteroid just to damage the ship.

The issue is about the distance at which you can detect your enemy vessel. If you are that far away it doesn't matter if you miss. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

 

[GregroxMun]

The problem with having transporter relays in the solar system, or any inner planets of a star system, is that the planets are constantly moving relative to one another, not to mention the transporter relays themselves. If you had a whole lot of them at one orbital radius, then they would switch out and you could use them. Still probably easier just to use a shuttle, and much much cheaper.