Transporter Inhibitors

[Pauln6]

These inhibitors seem to be rolled out every 5 minutes to explain why transporters don't just break the plot but surely every ship should have had them fitted all over as standard since Wesley's day? Why else would transporter rooms be needed and how else could ships prevent transporter terrorism?

Edit: This might be more appropriate in the Trek Tech section!

 

[Deks]

These inhibitors seem to be rolled out every 5 minutes to explain why transporters don't just break the plot but surely every ship should have had them fitted all over as standard since Wesley's day? Why else would transporter rooms be needed and how else could ships prevent transporter terrorism?

Edit: This might be more appropriate in the Trek Tech section!

I never understood as to why SF never had transporter inhibitors before this point in time.
Ideally, you'd want the inhibitors to be switched on during red alert to prevent possible problems (such as beaming active warheads onboard, or beaming the crew out of ships into space, etc.).
And if in crisis and the ship needs to evacuate, the inhibitors would still allow the crew to beam OFF the ship (but nothing to come onboard - controlled transporter signal).

 

[Pauln6]

I never understood as to why SF never had transporter inhibitors before this point in time.
Ideally, you'd want the inhibitors to be switched on during red alert to prevent possible problems (such as beaming active warheads onboard, or beaming the crew out of ships into space, etc.).
And if in crisis and the ship needs to evacuate, the inhibitors would still allow the crew to beam OFF the ship (but nothing to come onboard - controlled transporter signal).

Exactly. Without them, every fluctuation of the shields is a massive tactical nightmare. Photon Torpedo was just beamed into engineering. It's been an honour...

The Enterprise Incident would not have been so easy. Carol Marcus could not have been beamed out (although S31 prefix code would cover that). None of this beam me straight to engineering. Use a turbo lift and your legs dammit.

 

[Deks]

Exactly. Without them, every fluctuation of the shields is a massive tactical nightmare. Photon Torpedo was just beamed into engineering. It's been an honour...

The Enterprise Incident would not have been so easy. Carol Marcus could not have been beamed out (although S31 prefix code would cover that). None of this beam me straight to engineering. Use a turbo lift and your legs dammit.

VOY exploited this transporter weakness with the Borg on two occasions.
Once in 'Dark Frontier' to destroy that small scout ship, and the second time in the episode with the Brunali where they returned Icheb to his home planet (they beamed a photon torpedo onto the sphere just as it dropped its shields to pull VOY inside it and dealt moderate/crippling damage to the Sphere).

It makes sense you could do that with the Borg once or twice, but not past that point... plus, the passage of time between those two events was over a year if I'm not mistaken.

Usually, shields offer a good protection against transporters, unless you can match the frequencies which would allow the beaming signal to penetrate it - we have evidence that shields CAN allow transporter signals if you know the frequencies... but lack of inhibitors never made sense during red alert.

Then again, remember that initially, 24th century SF ships were portrayed as having a smart computer system which would also encase intruders inside a forcefield at ANY section.... this ability was progressively seen less and less until it was apparently 'phased out' and things were done either manually, or a new system had to be built to do this (why? its already there).

I'm thinking the writers are conveniently forgetting these technologies for the purpose of 'drama' (even though they should instead adapt the story to FIT with the technology and work with what is established - it doesn't need to take away from the experience at all, just make the story smarter - and of course, if the ship becomes damaged enough, you CAN get away with some of these technological advantages - but as we saw, SF ships can apparrently project forcefields across LARGE missing sections of the hull that was lost in combat even if a ship is heavily damaged).

 

[Pauln6]

VOY exploited this transporter weakness with the Borg on two occasions.
Once in 'Dark Frontier' to destroy that small scout ship, and the second time in the episode with the Brunali where they returned Icheb to his home planet (they beamed a photon torpedo onto the sphere just as it dropped its shields to pull VOY inside it and dealt moderate/crippling damage to the Sphere).

It makes sense you could do that with the Borg once or twice, but not past that point... plus, the passage of time between those two events was over a year if I'm not mistaken.

Usually, shields offer a good protection against transporters, unless you can match the frequencies which would allow the beaming signal to penetrate it - we have evidence that shields CAN allow transporter signals if you know the frequencies... but lack of inhibitors never made sense during red alert.

Then again, remember that initially, 24th century SF ships were portrayed as having a smart computer system which would also encase intruders inside a forcefield at ANY section.... this ability was progressively seen less and less until it was apparently 'phased out' and things were done either manually, or a new system had to be built to do this (why? its already there).

I'm thinking the writers are conveniently forgetting these technologies for the purpose of 'drama' (even though they should instead adapt the story to FIT with the technology and work with what is established - it doesn't need to take away from the experience at all, just make the story smarter - and of course, if the ship becomes damaged enough, you CAN get away with some of these technological advantages - but as we saw, SF ships can apparrently project forcefields across LARGE missing sections of the hull that was lost in combat even if a ship is heavily damaged).

Yeah I agree. The energy required to transport someone is HUGE. There's no way security systems would not be set up to detect that. Enterprise Incident has such massive plot holes that could only be plugged if there was an inside man.

Destabilising the confinement beam might often be enough to kill any attempts at incursion but automatic force fields or those miraculous indestructible Discovery blast door bulkheads should deploy.

I have always felt the writers were very sloppy with the parameters of transporting. If you can just scan someone from orbit and beam them up then so can a cloaked ship. It would have made much more sense if the quantum scanning devices were in the communicators to set up a relay with the transporter pad. Since it would be a simple matter to beam up lost communuators or beam down replacements (never understood why this wasn't standard procedure such as in Miri) it would only have a situational effect but much better than leaving it wide open. Enemies could still tag victims like in Insurrection.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

VOY exploited this transporter weakness with the Borg on two occasions.
Once in 'Dark Frontier' to destroy that small scout ship, and the second time in the episode with the Brunali where they returned Icheb to his home planet (they beamed a photon torpedo onto the sphere just as it dropped its shields to pull VOY inside it and dealt moderate/crippling damage to the Sphere).

It makes sense you could do that with the Borg once or twice, but not past that point... plus, the passage of time between those two events was over a year if I'm not mistaken.

Usually, shields offer a good protection against transporters, unless you can match the frequencies which would allow the beaming signal to penetrate it - we have evidence that shields CAN allow transporter signals if you know the frequencies... but lack of inhibitors never made sense during red alert.

Then again, remember that initially, 24th century SF ships were portrayed as having a smart computer system which would also encase intruders inside a forcefield at ANY section.... this ability was progressively seen less and less until it was apparently 'phased out' and things were done either manually, or a new system had to be built to do this (why? its already there).

I'm thinking the writers are conveniently forgetting these technologies for the purpose of 'drama' (even though they should instead adapt the story to FIT with the technology and work with what is established - it doesn't need to take away from the experience at all, just make the story smarter - and of course, if the ship becomes damaged enough, you CAN get away with some of these technological advantages - but as we saw, SF ships can apparrently project forcefields across LARGE missing sections of the hull that was lost in combat even if a ship is heavily damaged).

Remember, VOY also got robbed that one time when the enemy transported their tech off their ship and a Space-Mugging.

They had to go under-cover to get their stuff back.

Automatic Transporter Inhibitors or Jammers would be nice.

Prevent people and stuff from getting stolen.

 

[publiusr]

I think we saw that in ST II—Saavik energized defense fields—but not full shields…Reliant could gut the Enterprise—but not board her.