I feel like transporters have an awesome potential for weaponization. Beam a grain of sand into an artery and cause a heart attack. Beam out someone's lungs. Why haven't we seen more weaponized transporting? What are some possible issues a transporter wielder might face?
Transporters as Weapons
- Thread starter DavidGutierrez
- Start date
Indeed. My never-written fanfic that I've successfully avoided writing for the last 20 years 
would have featured ships with what I call Scramblers. After all, if the problem with trying to beam through shields is that you can't get a proper lock and items end up as mangled slag, who cares?... if your transporter target is your enemy's computer core or warp containment or.... 
Starfleet, the Romulans, the Klingons, etc, would have, of course, also upgraded to multi-layered multiphasic shielding that prevents this when it is up and working right - build a better sword, build better armor... lather, rinse, repeat, as it has always been.
would have featured ships with what I call Scramblers. After all, if the problem with trying to beam through shields is that you can't get a proper lock and items end up as mangled slag, who cares?... if your transporter target is your enemy's computer core or warp containment or.... Starfleet, the Romulans, the Klingons, etc, would have, of course, also upgraded to multi-layered multiphasic shielding that prevents this when it is up and working right - build a better sword, build better armor... lather, rinse, repeat, as it has always been.
Oh yeah! I totally forgot about the Vidiians!
But, even that was treated as a novel new approach to transporter technology, despite most of the species we had seen before in the various TV in carnations having easy access to regular transporters.
There's the example of the Vidians of course, and also the TR 116 from DS9's Field of Fire. I seem to recall also an example of Voyager beaming a photon torpedo onto a Borg ship, might have been Dark Frontier. I suppose the biggest reason from a Treknological perspective that you don't see transporters used as weapons more is that by all indications, the transporter takes a fair amount of power to operate, and is useless against anything behind shields.
In the game Star Fleet Battles, there are Transporter Bombs ... space mines you can beam out and hope your enemy flies their ship into. Of course, they can see that you activated your transporter, so you have the option to beam out a dummy mine to fake them out, and/or you can roll the real T-Bomb out the shuttle hatch so they don't see it coming.
But before you ask: no, you can NOT beam the mine inside the enemy ship.
You can, however, beam over a squad of Marines to do a hit-&-run raid to sabotage the enemy ship (but neither ship can have the shields up (on that side) at the time).
But before you ask: no, you can NOT beam the mine inside the enemy ship.
You can, however, beam over a squad of Marines to do a hit-&-run raid to sabotage the enemy ship (but neither ship can have the shields up (on that side) at the time).
Actually it appears that transporters take almost no power to operate. They are among the very last systems to fail (gravity being the last) when power gets scarce; they are available at all flight modes of all Trek spacecraft, from large to small. When the Klingon BoP in ST4:TVH loses power, the two things least affected are the transporter and the cloaking device...
However, it also appears that shields do stop transporters quite categorically. It's not a matter of scrambling the process but of blocking it. And if you manage to bring down the shields of the enemy, why fiddle with transporters? Much better options are now available to you for destroying him, forcing him to do your bidding, and so on.
It might be that transporters still are weaponized - and indeed are the principal weapon of Star Trek. They are called "phasers" and they do the very same thing: using "phasing" technology, they make targets disappear in a flash of light. They just concentrate on the mission-essential, and don't sweat things like reassembly. (But they can do that, too - DS9 and VOY both have examples of the phased beam transporting substances or nanodevices from gun to target!)
Timo Saloniemi
Maybe the potential for transporters to be used as weapons, whether by beaming something onto / into or out of a person or ship is why shields block transport, because they are designed to prevent that happening.
They do provide a challenge to beaming:
1. If the sensors and the transporter beam are powerful and precise enough, beaming can go right through as if the shields aren't there.
2. If the computer running the transporter can be coordinated with the computer running the shields, then it is possible but difficult to beam right through the shields. (Obviously, this is a lot more likely to apply to "friendly" beaming than anything else.)
Both of those assuming that the goal is to beam an intact person or object, rather than just grabbing something and mangling it.
3. Conversely, if the shields (especially multi-layered shields) and other ECM meant to disrupt sensor operation and beam coherence are strong enough, transporting becomes impossible to even attempt, even just for destructive purposes. You can't mangle what you can't touch.
Indeed. My never-written fanfic that I've successfully avoided writing for the last 20 years
I wonder if the Tantalus device is something simpler, but cleaner...
As far as the enemy trying to get in from the outside goes, yes, they do...
...Unless that enemy is either insanely advanced (Q and the like) or then the Dominion. Although with the Dominion, one never knows: is it technological superiority, or just a Founder down at Engineering sabotaging your attempts at blocking the transport?
Timo Saloniemi
Transporters are shown to be at least somewhat power intensive. In TWOK, Scotty only "barely" has enough power for transporters when they reach Regula, and the transporters are later not available when Auxillary power fails. In TVH, power is definately an issue for the transporter when Scotty attempts to retrieve Chekov and Uhura from the carrier.
Somewhat tangently to the transporter/power issue, on Voyager they often note that replicator use is rationed. Replicators are based on transporter technology.
Yep, but pretty much no matter what, replicator rationing on a working starship that isn't in battle or performing some sort of active heavy transporter operations (like a planetary evac) is stupid. Those engines produce enough power to run everything else more or less as a side-effect of generating a warp field, and the raw materials are collected as a consequence of just flying through space. It would be like keeping your dog from sticking his head out the window of your truck and enjoying the wind because you're worried you need to ration wind because you've only got a quarter tank of gas. It just doesn't work that way, if you've got an engineer half awake and worth having.
Replicator rationing may have less to do with power requirements and more to do with the amount of bulk food stuff (in the form of organic sludge probably) available to replicate stuff with. Normally, a starship (even one on a deep-space exploration mission like the original Enterprise) could probably "stock up" at a starbase at regular intervals, but for a vessel completely on its own like the Voyager or the Olympia, it might have to be more conservative than a ship within easy reach of a store.
It would help if the show didn't keep redefining how replicators work. When they were originally introduced, they said you needed a model of what you were building, and then the machine replicated it from pure energy. At another time, they said it took "goo" and reformed it to what you wanted. Again, we were at the mercy of the whims of the script writer.
I operate from the pure energy model (with a need for raw matter of an indiscriminate nature, because it isn't going to matter once it is shifted on the levels the replicators works at, collected by the ram scoops), because the goo model doesn't make sense to me. Since writers differ, I can choose my canon.
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