Transporters as Weapons

[Crazy Eddie]

Hmm OK I think maybe you are trying too hard to talk in absolutes. While I agree that many stories would not work if the Enterprise or enemy ships had half decent security I don't think that's an excuse to say security HAS to be incompetent and that the characters should assume that it will be (didn't space hippies take over the Enterprise ffs? That's just embarrassing)

But see, even calling that "incompetence" is still making a lot of assumptions about what sort of technology they OUGHT to have for security purposes. The limitations to what their technology can do are almost certainly practical in nature:

Internal sensors cannot actually differentiate one life form from another or, for that matter, one PERSON from another;

Only doors to secure locations have access controls, and this would probably include officers' private quarters, engine room, torpedo bay and impulse deck (not much else). It doesn't seem to include the bridge for some reason, but that's probably because anyone badass enough to to threaten the bridge crew isn't going to be stopped by a password lock;

Normally, anything close enough to beam someone aboard your ship will show up on your sensors before they have a chance to do that. If you can't see it on your sensors, you probably shouldn't worry about it (unless, of course, there's a 24th century Starfleet gunship cloaked off your bow and using a known exploit to beam several officers in vintage uniforms onto your ship for reasons unknown, hint hint).

Computer systems have access controls that depend on mechanical tokens and safeguards in order to prevent an outside source from remotely compromising those controls with electronic warfare attacks (this is stupendously common in Star Trek) and therefore a person physically sitting at a console would find it surprisingly easy to override that security if they knew where to look.*

It just seems to me that you're assuming a lot of capability that SHOULD be there but that you haven't given any real thought to how that capability would really work or how it would help/hinder normal operations in a way that would make those security measures way more trouble than they're worth.

Since we are talking about transporter use as weapons we should look at the scientific leaps of WWII where each side was racing to improve both offence and defence to outwit the other. Given the catastrophic potential of transporters it is ludicrous so suggest that in 200 years, vessels can't detect, flag, or even pre-empt unwanted incoming signals?

See above: if you're close enough to an enemy ship for him to beam something nasty onto your bridge, you probably already have your shields up anyway. I would even go so far as to suggest that blocking transporter signals is something deflector shields were modified to be able to do for precisely this reason; that earlier generations of them probably didn't have this capability and that more advanced transporter systems are capable of penetrating at least some modern deflector arrays (as Chief O'Brien demonstrated perfectly when he boarded the Phoenix)

And even in this case, it's a tradeoff. The modified deflector shields come at the cost of a starship not being able to beam down or up without lowering its shields. Clearly that inconvenience is far outweighed by the added security of preventing any boarding parties from coming aboard your ship in the middle of a battle.

Scotty utilized site-to-site transport using Klingon transporters in STIV and a gangster was sent site to site in a Piece of the Action.

But never from a random location inside the ship to a random location outside the ship; in order to beam something off the ship it becomes necessary to put that thing on the actual transporter pad.

You're also suggesting that transporter operation is somehow trivial enough that you can zap someone away at the touch of a button. Transporter chiefs are highly trained and specialized in their task for a reason. Using a transporter to eject a hostile intruder would be a bit like the crew of a NOAA vessel using a robotic arm lift to knock a hijacker off the deck. Yes, it's something that's perfectly dooable in a pinch, but it's probably not something any sane person would add to the ship's security policy.

I believe that the Enterprise detected the Ilia probe's incursion in TMP. That might have been partly because she was smoking hot but if so, one has to wonder how the ship flagged it as an intruder and not just a temperature anomaly, the suggestion being that Chekov had cameras installed in all the shower units...

Again, probably because somebody noticed the tall leggy plasma-energy creature strutting around on C-deck and hit the alarm just as the probe turned and ducked into Ilia's quarters.

The Enterprise is not specifically designed to notice when intruders are smoking hot; that's Kirk's job.

On the one hand, I applaud their desire to limit technobabble but on the other I lament the way they mashed real world science to fit their plot and the way stupid ideas appear smart because everybody else is more stupid.

I keep wondering what "real world science" you assume they are supposed to have but don't. There isn't a naval vessel in existence that would AUTOMATICALLY detect the presence of an unauthorized person on the premises just by virtue of their being there.

Biometric identification and token-based security measures have their own limitations, but employing them over EVERY SQUARE INCH OF THE SHIP would be both a prohibitively expensive in terms of execution cost and computing power and would, in the end, fail to solve the actual problem of hostile boarding parties since anyone who tries to board a starship already knows that they cannot TAKE OVER the ship without the crew's cooperation (coerced or otherwise). Command codes and computer lockdown and such prevent that easily enough. The goal of an intruder is to trick the crew into logging you in to the computer and allowing you access to sensitive files (see also "Tom Riker") which is more about social engineering and bullshit artistry than technology.

The weak link of any security system is the people running it, and nobody has yet invented a technology that will prevent a security guard from being taken in by a bullshit artist.


* For your information, this is basically true of every security booth or checkpoint at every public transit station you have ever been to; every computer, every vending machine, every door in the station can be unlocked using a set of keys in a little drawer under the security guard's desk. Drawbridges, tollbooths and yes, TSA security stations at airports do the same thing. This practice is not particularly problematic since 99% of potential security risks have no idea that the keys to circumventing security of the entire site are never more than five feet away from them.

 

[Timo]

Is your life a work of fiction?

As far as you're concerned, it is.

Okay, so let's proceed from that assumption. Who writes "The Amazing Story of Crazy Eddie"? If it's anything like Star Trek, Crazy Eddie doesn't write it, nor do any of the other characters (they don't exist, after all). Willy Writer does. But halfway through the season, he gets replaced by Wanda Wannabe, and then there's this spinoff, "The Young Crazy Eddie Chronicles", written by Indy Pendant. Each of them has great ideas about what sort of a family Crazy Eddie might have. But since Indy Pendant writes the episode that establishes Crazy Eddie is the sole child of a heroic fireman and a master criminal accountantress, and his "family" is in fact but a bunch of British airmen and -women in the hiding, and this does not contradict anything written earlier on, then there you have it. Your family identity, that is.

Even the nuMovies are now in a process of having the key imagineers replaced. Background assumptions are outdated in that process, unless put into onscreen fact.

Which is why he never got anywhere with it in 25 years.

So here you go, trying to rationalize something that did not happen with rather feeble excuses, ones that rely on massive assumptions contrary to intuition and Trek fact. This warden keeps a 10 km alien starship all to himself for 25 years, in orbit of a famous gulag planet that somehow has 47 warbirds standing by for a breakout attempt? He wouldn't get just an eyepatch for that, but a whole-body amputation. And not 25 years after the fact, but more like 25 hours.

First of all, did it never occur to you that if the Klingon Empire was going to try and dissect a ship they stole from a wandering alien in deep space, Rura Penthe would be EXACTLY the place they'd want to do it?

Judging by what we saw of the place in ST6 and ENT, that sounds quite unlikely.

The whole point of that place is that it has no resources. There's some mining going on, but it's inefficient manual labor for punitive purposes. Even the personnel there seem to be on a punitive assignment. The dregs of the Klingon society and its captives are not going to be given any role in prying out military secrets.

Second of all, the "Borg Technology" angle was used pretty thoroughly in IDW: they couldn't dismantle the ship because every time they took a piece out it self-destructed and the missing piece "grew back" in its place.

But there is no Borg tech. Nero wouldn't have it before Romulus blew, and Nero got sent to the past at most minutes after Romulus blew.

Given the catastrophic potential of transporters it is ludicrous so suggest that in 200 years, vessels can't detect, flag, or even pre-empt unwanted incoming signals?

Hmm. I'm pretty sure that a century after WWII, we still won't have a defense against nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

And it's not 200 years. Transporters have been around for longer than that - humans are just late players in that particular game. If effective detection measures were a) possible, b) practicable and c) necessary, they would exist before Erickson made his first experimental joint transport of an assistant and a common housefly. They don't appear to exist even two centuries after that fact.

I guess a role might be played by the fact that transporting is so easy to block by shields. But this conflicts with that other Trek fact, of it somehow being unwise and extremely exceptional for starships to keep their shields up for any length of time.

Scotty utilized site-to-site transport using Klingon transporters in STIV

...And we never learn why, as it was so counterproductive to their efforts. But if transporters work by phasing the user to another realm and then allowing him to decay back to our universe at a set distance, then a transporter beam failing halfway in the process might have this site-to-site effect.

Crazy Eddie's list for possible practical limitations in intruder control is intriguing:

Internal sensors cannot actually differentiate one life form from another or, for that matter, one PERSON from another

Or rather, they probably can, but only if used on a resources-intensive mode that is seldom worth the hassle. That is, there might be a need to bring additional hardware into play to distinguish Spock from Romulans, or women from men - or then a need for extra computing time, or waiving of personal rights. Doable things, but things that come at a price.

Only doors to secure locations have access controls, and this would probably include officers' private quarters, engine room, torpedo bay and impulse deck (not much else).

It seems Lenore Karidian had free access everywhere simply through the use of her personal charms. I doubt Kirk gave her the codes to his cabin, and I'm certain he didn't give her the codes to Engineering, but I'm sure she could have sweet-talked and smiled her way to both locations if codes were not a factor. Not if such codes did exist!

It doesn't seem to include the bridge for some reason, but that's probably because anyone badass enough to to threaten the bridge crew isn't going to be stopped by a password lock

Do we actually hear of a lock, like, ever?

The heroes are able to lock doors at special command. The default setting for all doors nevertheless appears to be "unlocked". Some doors trigger alarms at use, mainly ones that would seldom see any use, authorized or unauthorized; the shuttle hangar is one of those. People breaking into that facility generally are either renegade Starfleet personnel or master criminals, so they can be assumed to be capable of picking all locks (hence we don't know whether those doors are locked or not) - but they by the same token ought to be capable of bypassing alarms (and since they don't, we can speculate that there are no locks but there are alarms, and actual burglary aboard starships is in fact much harder to do than one would think, even for renegade Starfleeters or supercriminals).

Normally, anything close enough to beam someone aboard your ship will show up on your sensors before they have a chance to do that. If you can't see it on your sensors, you probably shouldn't worry about it (unless, of course, there's a 24th century Starfleet gunship cloaked off your bow and using a known exploit to beam several officers in vintage uniforms onto your ship for reasons unknown, hint hint).

OTOH, the one thing where sensors might do a good job is springing an alert in conditions where nothing else interesting happens. If there is a lot of action, sorting out an intrusion might be difficult to do. But if there are no major fluctuations to status quo, sensors should have an easy time noticing minor things such as doors being opened out of pattern, energy signatures appearing when nobody is running heavy machinery such as phaser cannon or shield generators, or hot hand weapon signatures popping up.

Computer systems have access controls that depend on mechanical tokens and safeguards in order to prevent an outside source from remotely compromising those controls with electronic warfare attacks (this is stupendously common in Star Trek) and therefore a person physically sitting at a console would find it surprisingly easy to override that security if they knew where to look.*

Definitely so, especially on the short term. OTOH, that is a threat that doesn't require supertech or an "arms race" to countermand: security can always be tuned to be extremely sensitive to override attempts, as there just aren't that many legit situations that could trigger a false positive. People getting stunned for trying to enter their own cabin without wiping their feet, and then getting reprimanded for getting stunned, would quickly learn to follow procedure - and that would make life extremely difficult for burglars. Starships don't need to cater for customers of the type found on malls or banks or similar security sites; they can boss around, hurt and humiliate their customers all they want.

The modified deflector shields come at the cost of a starship not being able to beam down or up without lowering its shields.

Funnily enough, Trek still doesn't have good examples of it being impossible to beam personnel down through shields. Even in modern Trek, the concern is always about recovery of the away team in case the beamdown backfires.

in order to beam something off the ship it becomes necessary to put that thing on the actual transporter pad.

Not in TNG, though. Things often leave the Enterprise bridge at least...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

There must have been time between the destruction of Romulas and Nero hunting Spock, as he needed to have time to tattoo himself with tattoos of sorrow and loss. This would give him time to find survivors wouldn't lead him to whatever secret storage planet was holding Borg tech and refit the ship for combat. He'd then find would that Spock was coming and go to get vengeance.

The comic version has the refit of Nero's ship as a response to the invasion from the Klingon Empire, which uses the opportunity to take over Romulan space (as seen in the Q anti-time future and potentially other 2390+ timelines). His now supership was able to take on 24th century Klingon warships as well as cripple the Enterprise-E that was responding to distress signals (which is why the Enterprise wasn't able to save Spock this one time).

 

[Timo]

There must have been time between the destruction of Romulas and Nero hunting Spock, as he needed to have time to tattoo himself with tattoos of sorrow and loss.

Nope - no reason to think those tattoos were for sorrow and loss. That's simply how cool Romulan miners always decorate themselves.

He'd then find would that Spock was coming and go to get vengeance.

There's no "Spock was coming". Both Nero and Spock saw Romulus die, from point blank range. Nero because he said so. Spock because he "only had minutes" after the loss of Romulus to deploy his red matter which created the timehole - and immediately after that creation, Nero pounced on him, because this pouncing led to them both falling into the hole.

The way the characters describe the events leaves no time window whatsoever for Nero to "react" to the loss of Romulus, except by deciding to immediately chase the Vulcan whom he catches green-handed at the site of the crime.

Moreover, if the reaction is immediate, it also means everything happened in the Romulan home system, which is the scientifically plausible way for supernovae to cause destruction of the sort seen...

But the consequence of all this is that comic concepts such as "Borg weapons" or "sorrow tattoos" or "Nero officially representing what remains of the Empire" must be thrown to the wastebasket. Whether the rest (such as LaForge building the Jellyfish) ought to go there, too, is a matter of personal taste...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

Hmm. I'm pretty sure that a century after WWII, we still won't have a defense against nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

And it's not 200 years. Transporters have been around for longer than that - humans are just late players in that particular game. If effective detection measures were a) possible, b) practicable and c) necessary, they would exist before Erickson made his first experimental joint transport of an assistant and a common housefly. They don't appear to exist even two centuries after that fact.

I guess a role might be played by the fact that transporting is so easy to block by shields. But this conflicts with that other Trek fact, of it somehow being unwise and extremely exceptional for starships to keep their shields up for any length of time.

...And we never learn why, as it was so counterproductive to their efforts. But if transporters work by phasing the user to another realm and then allowing him to decay back to our universe at a set distance, then a transporter beam failing halfway in the process might have this site-to-site effect.

OTOH, the one thing where sensors might do a good job is springing an alert in conditions where nothing else interesting happens. If there is a lot of action, sorting out an intrusion might be difficult to do. But if there are no major fluctuations to status quo, sensors should have an easy time noticing minor things such as doors being opened out of pattern, energy signatures appearing when nobody is running heavy machinery such as phaser cannon or shield generators, or hot hand weapon signatures popping up.

Definitely so, especially on the short term. OTOH, that is a threat that doesn't require supertech or an "arms race" to countermand: security can always be tuned to be extremely sensitive to override attempts, as there just aren't that many legit situations that could trigger a false positive. People getting stunned for trying to enter their own cabin without wiping their feet, and then getting reprimanded for getting stunned, would quickly learn to follow procedure - and that would make life extremely difficult for burglars. Starships don't need to cater for customers of the type found on malls or banks or similar security sites; they can boss around, hurt and humiliate their customers all they want.

It's a good point that other races have been using transporters for a lot longer than humans and yet none of the mainstream races invented long distance transporting until Montgomery Scott. Beaming at warp I can buy - it's bonkers - but not long distance transporting.

Very sensible security and safety protections are available today: security cameras, motion sensors, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors etc. If ships utilised even these simple things sensibly their security would not seem so dumb to me. I do realise that we are straying into Worf territory here i.e. the heroes or villains are going to get around the security for the sake of the plot but then even Worf managed to beat some people up occasionally.

Transporters lock in on subspace communications signals. The Enterprise monitors, downloads, and decodes incoming subspace signals. It's all Uhura does. How is it they can detect subspace communications signals but not the subspace signal of a transporter? And why is it that security alarms can detect an increased infra-red signal but not the far greater energy required to reconstitute a person?

Internal transporting was not used in TOS allegedly due to the 'pinpoint accuracy' required. I would have preferred something more along the lines of 'due to the subspace fluctuations caused by the presence of warp engines'. This would mean that you could only transport onto another ship to THEIR transporter pad. What a simple, sensible limitation that would have been

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Okay, so let's proceed from that assumption...

But since Indy Pendant writes the episode that establishes Crazy Eddie is the sole child of a heroic fireman and a master criminal accountantress...

If and when that episode gets written, the backstage material from the previous writers gets retconned. That hasn't happened here.

More importantly, you don't get to supply your INTERPRETATION as canon just because nothing on screen explicitly contradicts it. Producer's intent trumps fridge logic no matter how ingenious your logic may seem.

So here you go, trying to rationalize something that did not happen with rather feeble excuses, ones that rely on massive assumptions contrary to intuition and Trek fact. This warden keeps a 10 km alien starship all to himself for 25 years, in orbit of a famous gulag planet that somehow has 47 warbirds standing by for a breakout attempt?

I know, right? It's almost as if the Klingons live in some sort of vast military dictatorship in which mid-level bureaucrats are allowed to control private armies in their own personal fiefdom, left mostly to their own devices so long as they pay tribute and unwavering loyalty to the Empire.

Like THAT could ever happen.

Judging by what we saw of the place in ST6 and ENT, that sounds quite unlikely.

The only thing we ever saw was the prison on the surface. I'm not presently of the opinion that most planets in the galaxy really are only five or six miles in diameter, despite Star Trek's tendency to portray them that way.

The whole point of that place is that it has no resources.

It has a DILITHIUM MINE. That's pretty important resources. More importantly, if you're MINING dilithium you're obviously EXPORTING dilithium, which means Rura Penthe has a port. This probably means a space station in orbit (or two, or three), possibly a refinery, and likely even a dry dock where the refined dilithium can be used to overhaul the engines of visiting ships.

The dregs of the Klingon society and its captives are not going to be given any role in prying out military secrets.

Of course they're not. They just get to sit there and watch while all the important work is done in orbit by people who get paid WAY more than they do.

But there is no Borg tech. Nero wouldn't have it before Romulus blew, and Nero got sent to the past at most minutes after Romulus blew.

Well, the IDW portrayal indicates Narada was fitted out by the Tal Shiar several days after Romulus' destruction; the cascading blast wave from Hobus was intercepted by Spock on the cusp of Federation space, which is about where Nero intercepts him.

Definitely so, especially on the short term. OTOH, that is a threat that doesn't require supertech or an "arms race" to countermand: security can always be tuned to be extremely sensitive to override attempts, as there just aren't that many legit situations that could trigger a false positive. People getting stunned for trying to enter their own cabin without wiping their feet, and then getting reprimanded for getting stunned, would quickly learn to follow procedure - and that would make life extremely difficult for burglars. Starships don't need to cater for customers of the type found on malls or banks or similar security sites; they can boss around, hurt and humiliate their customers all they want.

I think it would be bad for morale if officers realized they were likely to get stunned by automated phaser turrets if they entered their password incorrectly by accident.

Also, knowing Star Trek as we do, we realize this is probably a bad idea in the long run since any attempt to automate that kind of response would ALMOST CERTAINLY lead to the computer achieving sentience/going crazy/being taken over by a hostile force that then uses the automated system against the crew.

Kirk: "Computer, disable automatic protection for helm controls now!"
Computer: "Unable to comply. User session is still in progress."
Kirk: "Wait... Chekov's still logged into the helm console?"
Computer: "Affirmative."
Kirk: "And you stunned Bailey because he tried to use Chekov's console while he was still logged in?"
Computer: "Affirmative."
Kirk: "But Chekov didn't log out because you stunned him for missing the capital letter in his password."
Computer: "Affirmative."
Kirk: "Computer, can you please log Chekov out so we can change course away from that giant black hole in front of us?"
Computer: "Affirmative. Please enter Ensign authorization code. Password is case sensitive and accent-specific."
Kirk: <attempting Russian accent> "Ensign authorization code. Nine five victor victor t--"
ZAPPP!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There's no "Spock was coming". Both Nero and Spock saw Romulus die, from point blank range. Nero because he said so. Spock because he "only had minutes" after the loss of Romulus

His exact words were "I had little time..." He never mentions minutes.

That could mean he arrived several days later and got ahead of the cascade just in time to keep it from hitting the Federation, or it could mean he caught up with it at a critical junction and the opportunity to act was slipping away.

There's also the fact that most of the background material has been fully adopted by STO and some of the Novelverse, which basically makes it semi-canon until explicitly contradicted on screen. Remember, the Abramsverse producers changed the rules on that and THEY consider tie-in materials to be canon, which includes videogames and comics.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Very sensible security and safety protections are available today: security cameras, motion sensors, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors etc.

None of which actually prevent robberies. Why do you suppose that is?

If ships utilised even these simple things sensibly

They do. In fact, that's exactly how Kirk and Scotty got caught trying to sneak into the Enterprise.

Transporters lock in on subspace communications signals. The Enterprise monitors, downloads, and decodes incoming subspace signals. It's all Uhura does. How is it they can detect subspace communications signals but not the subspace signal of a transporter?

Because transporter beams run on a tight-beam, point to point nature; you don't actually detect the beam, you detect any energy that reflects from objects the beam interacts with.

The fact that you're able to beam someone down without exploding him like a marshmallow means a transporter beam has a VERY small amount of divergence and not a lot of scattering even as it passes through atmosphere and solid objects. Frankly, it's kind of amazing they're able to detect them at all.

Internal transporting was not used in TOS allegedly due to the 'pinpoint accuracy' required. I would have preferred something more along the lines of 'due to the subspace fluctuations caused by the presence of warp engines'.

You would prefer a bullshit technobabble explanation to a relatively practical one that can be partially mitigated by a person of exceptional skill being at the controls?

 

[Timo]

Transporters lock in on subspace communications signals

Well, such signals occasionally help. But transporters can lock onto anything from lifesigns to skeletal mineral traces.

And the track record of our heroes in noticing, let alone pinpointing, the signals of adversaries inside or near their own starship is spotty at best. There's an awful lot of signal traffic going on in all probability, making things difficult for the appointed cerberus. And the foe can always go for an obscure channel - "E-band" or whatnot worked for the Romulans in "Mind's Eye".

More importantly, you don't get to supply your INTERPRETATION as canon just because nothing on screen explicitly contradicts it.

Which is why those comic artists have no leg to stand on. (Except, of course, where they blatantly contradict canon - then their leg is solidly in the cement and the fish have a feast.)

It's almost as if the Klingons live in some sort of vast military dictatorship in which mid-level bureaucrats are allowed to control private armies in their own personal fiefdom

...And the Klingon who controls 47 warbirds chooses to be the warden of Rura Penthe? :rotfl:

I'm not presently of the opinion that most planets in the galaxy really are only five or six miles in diameter, despite Star Trek's tendency to portray them that way.

Yet this is why Rura Penthe is Rura Penthe - there's nothing to escape to.

Why wouldn't Trek planets be one-horse towns? It's not as if they have had millions of years to grow a population. People arrive in a colony ship, settle on top of a desirable patch of land, and enjoy it. Even if the enjoying includes breeding, that won't cover the planet in trailers and graffiti any time soon.

It has a DILITHIUM MINE. That's pretty important resources. More importantly, if you're MINING dilithium you're obviously EXPORTING dilithium, which means Rura Penthe has a port. This probably means a space station in orbit (or two, or three), possibly a refinery, and likely even a dry dock where the refined dilithium can be used to overhaul the engines of visiting ships.

But all of that is still in contradiction of the fact that Rura Penthe is inescapable solely because there's nothing to escape to. USS Mathias Rust can enter transporter range with impunity, too.

It's a gulag. The hordes of prisoners there "mine" with futuristic toothpicks, as contrasted to a Federation dilithium mine from the same era that can be successfully run by just three people in frontier conditions. Whether any dilithium is actually extracted is debatable; whether any of it is good enough for use is dubious; whether its shipping out involves any sort of infrastructure at all is unlikely (Childress and pals had none in evidence).

If there also happens to be a secret reverse-engineering base somewhere nearby, then that's just poor planning, and wholly extraneous to the established data.

Well, the IDW portrayal indicates Narada was fitted out by the Tal Shiar several days after Romulus' destruction; the cascading blast wave from Hobus was intercepted by Spock on the cusp of Federation space, which is about where Nero intercepts him.

Which is one way to speculate. A better way is to say that there was no Hobus, as the visuals of the movie show that the star that blows is right next to the planet soon established to be Romulus. In that scenario, Spock doesn't just fiddle with the fringe of the effect, but snuffs it out at the very center, right after the explosion.

Spock has "our fastest ship" between his legs. How can Nero intercept it except at the juncture where it is not yet going anywhere? And why would it be going nowhere several days after the fact?

I think it would be bad for morale if officers realized they were likely to get stunned by automated phaser turrets if they entered their password incorrectly by accident.

And that's the point: the beatings continue until morale improves. Warship crews can be taught to behave, and ITRW they indeed do. That doesn't apply to poor soldiers only, either: anybody working in a deadly environment learns to respect the rules soon enough, including the ones that annoy.

Also, knowing Star Trek as we do, we realize this is probably a bad idea in the long run since any attempt to automate that kind of response would ALMOST CERTAINLY lead to the computer achieving sentience/going crazy/being taken over by a hostile force that then uses the automated system against the crew.

This system actually has the least odds of going down that way. After all, its existence minimizes the need for security arrangements (because legit users all behave), meaning the actual response doesn't need to be particularly destructive or active. A system tasked with differentiating ill-behaving crew from enemies would need much, much more complexity, autonomy and authority.

That could mean he arrived several days later and got ahead of the cascade just in time to keep it from hitting the Federation, or it could mean he caught up with it at a critical junction and the opportunity to act was slipping away.

Or something else altogether, yes. But such wriggling doesn't help: Spock and Nero still need to meet, and odds are literally astronomically against them meeting at a random location. That is, Spock could meet a random Romulan miner at a random location, but he can only meet Nero at the Space Zero, if Nero is a person who saw Romulus blow with his own eyes and specifically has the hots for Spock as the consequence.

Of course, the comic also tries to dream up a Spock/Nero connection from the time before the explosion, which takes some doing, what with Spock being an enemy scientist-diplomat and Nero being a miner. But the movie features no such connection. Nero knows Ambassador Spock by sight, from the chest up, as if through a starship viewer, and that's it. He doesn't even express any knowledge of Spock's role in the destruction of Romulus until after capturing the bastard.

There's also the fact that most of the background material has been fully adopted by STO and some of the Novelverse

Which is about as useful as saying that the Klingon hybrid model has been fully adopted by FASA and some of the Novelverse. Especially as STO and Novelverse are at mortal odds in most issues (as are FASA and Novelverse - but that's not the fault of the Novelverse alone, but a wider issue with noncanon).

None of which actually prevent robberies. Why do you suppose that is?

Because human rights were invented just a tad before automated lethal defenses were.

Frankly, it's kind of amazing they're able to detect them at all.

Agreed in principle - but it's odd that there is no system homing in on the very distinct visual and auditory signature of a transporter!

I mean, we have that today: automated systems raise hell when spotting the unique scent of an explosive or even the not-so-unique shape of a bazooka or a known terrorist face. OTOH, we know that the classic transporter telltales can be camouflaged rather trivially ("Devil's Due" calls this "parlor tricks"), yet no military bothers. What gives? It's not as if false positives ought to be a problem there.

You would prefer a bullshit technobabble explanation to a relatively practical one

Umm, there's nothing practical about pretending that transporters lack pinpoint accuracy. Regardless of the distance involved, they never err by even a single centimeter.

We might appeal to something akin to myopia, with the system having a "zone of no transport" a hundred meters around the transporter room. But the technobabble can't get much simpler than that without contradicting the inherently simple, intuitive and/or well-established characteristics of the device.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

Very sensible security and safety protections are available today: security cameras, motion sensors, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors etc.

None of which actually prevent robberies. Why do you suppose that is?

If ships utilised even these simple things sensibly

They do. In fact, that's exactly how Kirk and Scotty got caught trying to sneak into the Enterprise.

Internal transporting was not used in TOS allegedly due to the 'pinpoint accuracy' required. I would have preferred something more along the lines of 'due to the subspace fluctuations caused by the presence of warp engines'.

You would prefer a bullshit technobabble explanation to a relatively practical one that can be partially mitigated by a person of exceptional skill being at the controls?

Ha ha. Yes. Because they are both bullshit. You need pinpont accuracy no matter where you are beaming to. That planet and everything on it are moving pretty damn fast and let's not get into beaming at warp being as difficult as shooting a moving bullet while blindfolded blah blah.

One of the cool things about the novelisation of STIII is that they actually give a reason for Uhura remaining behind. She knows that Starfleet security will detect an unauthorised transport and the only way the others are going to get away is if she uploads a bug to scramble communications for a few brief seconds (to prevent Starfleet using the pre-fix code to shut the ship down I think). She's been working with Starfleet communications has laid the groundwork already using her insider knowledge.

She also knows that Starfleet security will be beaming in to investigate in a very short space of time so once the bug is activated she beams out again. She knows that it won't take them long to check where she has beamed to and she knows that she can't beam directly into the Vulcan Embassy so she beams some way off to try and give herself some time to lose the security team on foot and then reach her destination i.e. by moving away from her beam point so it isn't immediately obvious where she is or where she's going.

Neither party looks stupid but Uhura's insider knowledge helped her to be smarter. I do think that those efforts to show an awareness of the potential security issues and planning ways to get around them do make Uhura look a lot smarter and a lot cooler than the hand wave we had in the movie!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Which is why those comic artists have no leg to stand on.

To be sure, they're standing on the writers'/producers position that the comics are canon unless contradicted. This differs from the stance of previous Trek producers...

And that's all that really needs to be said. Abrams considers it canon. Your choice to disagree is really just a personal preference at this point.

And the Klingon who controls 47 warbirds chooses to be the warden of Rura Penthe?

You probably have that backwards: the governor of Rura Penthe managed to amass a fleet of 47 warbirds. He's done well for himself, it seems; you don't see the governor of Krios with his own warbird fleet.

You should also consider that more than a few of those ships are probably the personal vessels of his top commanders. It's less likely that those ships belong to Rura Penthe's fleet than it is that those ships belong to the top ranking military officials and/or families that run the place.

Yet this is why Rura Penthe is Rura Penthe - there's nothing to escape to.

Not on the surface, no. But you've got to wonder why they bother to put up this huge electromagnetic shield to prevent transporter beaming if there's never anything in orbit capable of beaming them out.

Also, how exactly did the warden in TUC know that Kirk and McCoy were beamed aboard a Federation ship? Did he track the Enterprise in orbit with his tricorder? Or did he ask traffic control to run a trace on the transporter signal and have one of the tracking officers realize "Holy shit, that's a Federation ship!"

Why wouldn't Trek planets be one-horse towns?

Because that's retarded.

But all of that is still in contradiction of the fact that Rura Penthe is inescapable solely because there's nothing to escape to.

Not on the surface, no. That's the whole point: nothing can survive on the surface long enough to be rescued by anyone, at least not without help.

Also, Rura Penthe is not famous for being inescapable. It's famous for being horrible. Martia tells Kirk "no one has ever escaped from Rura Penthe." Aside from the fact that she's obviously wrong, she's also a liar.

It's a gulag.

Which, coming from a Klingon, means absolutely nothing.

If there also happens to be a secret reverse-engineering base somewhere nearby, then that's just poor planning

I don't see how. Slave labor on the surface, salvage yard in orbit. You might be tripping yourself up with the assumption that the Klingons immediately recognized the Narada's military potential when they captured it; the ship may not actually APPEAR all that advanced from their point of view, and aside from its powerful weapons, it probably isn't.

Which is one way to speculate. A better way is to say that there was no Hobus...

Whatever.

You would prefer a bullshit technobabble explanation to a relatively practical one

Umm, there's nothing practical about pretending that transporters lack pinpoint accuracy. Regardless of the distance involved, they never err by even a single centimeter.

They can err by several METERS, actually, as long as that is comfortably within their targeting margin. If they only have to target your body within 3 meters, then that's enough to hit a stationary target with some really advanced targeting protocols. But a randomly moving/running target on the surface would screw that up under most circumstances.

A spotlight doesn't have to have pinpoint accuracy either, but it needs to be accurate enough to catch someone in the beam. I'd rather say "spotlight is hard to aim" than "spotlight is encountering interference from photon dampening magnetic monopolar field emanating from the ship's nuclear reactor."

 

[Timo]

To be sure, they're standing on the writers'/producers position that the comics are canon unless contradicted. This differs from the stance of previous Trek producers...

And that in itself is a nice reminder that believing them is building on sand. Trek producers (and writers, and directors) come and go, and they don't respect the ideas of their predecessors. Except when it comes to onscreen continuity, most of the time.

And that's all that really needs to be said. Abrams considers it canon. Your choice to disagree is really just a personal preference at this point.

It would be at any point. And it would be a safe bet at any point, too. Abrams is gone already!

You probably have that backwards: the governor of Rura Penthe managed to amass a fleet of 47 warbirds. He's done well for himself, it seems; you don't see the governor of Krios with his own warbird fleet.

So governing Rura Penthe is what a person in possession of 47 warbirds would choose to continue to do? It must be really comfortable to command all of those ships from atop that soapbox...

In any case, Rura Penthe doesn't have 47 warbirds, not in ST6 or ENT. It has no warbirds at all. Sure, we can drop the name (since the name-drop was one of the things cut from the movie) and merely try and insist that "a" prison planet was involved. But why would this other prison planet have a fleet of ships at hand, either?

And for "at hand", I refer to the explicit timeline. An hour separates the "47 warbirds" incident from Spock's arrival. With the incident being after the arrival, during which Nero was already on the loose and in full control of his mining rig! Basically nothing associates the warbirds with Nero's purported "escape" in the aired movie.

Because that's retarded.

Merely consistent. The advanced technology of the day (to wit, dirt-cheap interstellar travel) combined with the advantageous astrography (limitless Class M worlds, probably due to terraforming by countless ancients) allows for luxurious colonies of 500 pleasure farmers. So the Trek universe is justifiably full of those.

Slave labor on the surface, salvage yard in orbit.

That's a very, very strange thing to do, an assumption that requires extraordinary proof. Why keep getaway vehicles stored in orbit of a slave labor resource? You can't use that labor to salvage the vehicles, or there will be getaways or worse. You really want to put maximum distance between the vehicle and the person who claims to be honestly telling you that this red button here allows for the main computer contents to be read!

They can err by several METERS, actually

Well, erring by more than six feet down will certainly leave no trace of the failure...

But no. Transporters can't err by as much as a centimeter, or they'd kill Kirk in every episode. Sure, Kirk can move his body, including his feet, while in transport, so he can dodge a rock and assume a heroic rather than an awkward pose when touching down. But he can't do squat if Scotty is placing him neck deep in bedrock, or if he and a tree cannot agree on the right of presence.

The room Kirk did beam into in "Day of the Dove" was no more cramped than the rooms he beamed into in, say, "Corbomite Maneuver" or "Enterprise Incident" or "Patterns of Force" or... Well, it's pretty darned difficult to think of a wider space other than the open-air platforms of "Wink of an Eye", "Mirror, Mirror" and the like! Even location-shoot beam-downs often took place alarmingly close to trees and rocks.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

To be sure, they're standing on the writers'/producers position that the comics are canon unless contradicted. This differs from the stance of previous Trek producers...

And that in itself is a nice reminder that believing them is building on sand.

Well I'm not building on your personal head canon, if that's your preference. The producers no the material better than you do, so I'll take their word for it.

So governing Rura Penthe is what a person in possession of 47 warbirds would choose to continue to do?

Why not? It seems to be working pretty well for him.

In any case, Rura Penthe doesn't have 47 warbirds, not in ST6 or ENT. It has no warbirds at all.

It probably does. Just doesn't have them sitting around doing nothing, guarding a prison that "nobody escapes from." You don't need warbirds for that.

And for "at hand", I refer to the explicit timeline. An hour separates the "47 warbirds" incident from Spock's arrival.

Where are you getting "an hour"? Nobody gives a time frame for either event except that they seemed to have happened within a day or two of each other.

Slave labor on the surface, salvage yard in orbit.

That's a very, very strange thing to do, an assumption that requires extraordinary proof.

The Nazis V2 rocket program was supported mostly by slave labor. I don't see the Klingons being that much more pragmatic.

But no. Transporters can't err by as much as a centimeter, or they'd kill Kirk in every episode.

Why? The beam is several meters wide, and whatever gets caught in it materializes or de-materializes. You don't even have to have the whole person IN the beam, just "a piece" will do and then you can bring the rest of him back usually.

 

[Timo]

The producers no the material better than you do, so I'll take their word for it.

Actually, I doubt there are many people involved in Trek production that would know "the material" anywhere near as well as the average TrekBBS nutcase. But that's neither here nor there, as the very concept of "the producers" is the flawed one here. As said, TPTB come and go - they have no staying power. And if there is any driving force behind a producer, writer or director inserting a creative contribution to Star Trek, it is to be different from what has been done before, by others.

Just doesn't have them sitting around doing nothing, guarding a prison that "nobody escapes from." You don't need warbirds for that.

In that case, Rura Penthe doesn't "have them". Their connection to that place would be tenuous at best - and I challenge you to invent a Nero-induced timeline alteration that would put 47 warbirds at intercept range of the gulag in STXI when lack of intercept was the defining criterion of ST6 and "Bounty".

Nobody gives a time frame for either event except that they seemed to have happened within a day or two of each other.

The timeframe is exact: we get two "zulu time" quotes from Starfleet personnel, one establishing that the timestorm aka Spock's arrival took place at "2200 hours" (thus necessarily within 24 hours of the Chekov announcement that establishes this, or he'd mention the day, too), and the other establishing that the Klingon prison planet sent a message about there having been an attack that cost the Klingons 47 warbirds at "2300 hours last night". And the wording makes it clear that this was the time of the attack, not of the message (which the Klingon might arguably have delayed sending to his superiors, although here we learn he did not delay it by much).

(At best, one might argue for those being at 2300 hours of day D and 2200 hours of day D+1, with Chekov making the PA and Kirk making the mention of Uhura's words at later than 2200 hours of day D+1. But some time must have passed since even the 2200 hours, because it was only after this that the fleet was launched towards Vulcan...)

The Nazis V2 rocket program was supported mostly by slave labor.

It involved no expertise on the part of the laborers (meaning basically none of the first couple of thousand V2s produced were workable!). Sure, such a force could pull apart alien starships. But no, it couldn't "salvage" them, let alone "help reverse engineer" them.

The beam is several meters wide, and whatever gets caught in it materializes or de-materializes.

The beam isn't a centimeter wider than Kirk - as no dirt on which Kirk is standing is ever carried with him. Conversely, Kirk never sinks into a pit several meters wide created by the beam.

No matter how you twist it, the aim involved in beaming is at least centimeter-accurate - and as our heroes never get "floor burns" or lose their soles, it's probably millimeter-accurate or better. Thus there should be zero obstacle to aiming Kirk into a known space inside his own starship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Just doesn't have them sitting around doing nothing, guarding a prison that "nobody escapes from." You don't need warbirds for that.

In that case, Rura Penthe doesn't "have them"

Of course it does (well, did). They just weren't being used for guard duty. They were being used for whatever it is the local authorities at Rura Penthe do other than run a prison on a glacial asteroid.

The timeframe is exact: we get two "zulu time" quotes from Starfleet personnel, one establishing that the timestorm aka Spock's arrival took place at "2200 hours" (thus necessarily within 24 hours of the Chekov announcement that establishes this, or he'd mention the day, too), and the other establishing that the Klingon prison planet sent a message about there having been an attack that cost the Klingons 47 warbirds at "2300 hours last night". And the wording makes it clear that this was the time of the attack

Kirk doesn't know what time it happened; Uhura never told him (or rather, Gaila) what time the attack took place, and she never told him anything except that the ship was Romulan. He gets "2300 hours" from the fact that that's what time it was when Uhura kicked him out of her dorm; for all he knows the message was was received at 1600 hours and she's just now getting home from an intelligence debriefing.

The Nazis V2 rocket program was supported mostly by slave labor.

It involved no expertise on the part of the laborers

Neither does dilithium mining.

And stop changing the subject. You just suggested that there's no way the Klingons would have a slave labor operation in the same general location as a high-tech engineering facility. Here's one historical datapoint that, yes, they might, especially if Rura Penthe also has a frontier shipyard in orbit that is a major consumer of all that dilithium. Shipping traffic to and from there is also common enough that Klingon listening posts don't think there's anything weird about a freighter flying there without a flight plan with an operator who speaks very bad Klingon in a funny accent, let alone local traffic control who has so many ships on their screen they totally fail to notice a Federation starship pulling into orbit.

The beam is several meters wide, and whatever gets caught in it materializes or de-materializes.

The beam isn't a centimeter wider than Kirk

Not the way they're depicted. Spock says as much himself in "the Mark of Gideon"

SPOCK: Your Excellency, even with intricate machinery as delicately balanced as ours, there is still a margin for error which must be dealt with. It is possible that Captain Kirk materialized on some other part of Gideon.

It's clear that transporters will beam people and the objects they're carrying back to the ship, but that is clearly not a matter of precision. It is, rather, a feature of the transpoter's resolution and its ability to pull objects into the beam that are closely connected in some meaningful way to the object they're trying to beam.

From "Obsession":

(transporter sparkles, cycles... nothing)
SPOCK: Reset. Energise.
CHEKOV [OC]: All decks, stand by. Shock waves.
(The ship is shaken, and still nothing appears on the transporter pad.)
MCCOY: Do something.
SPOCK: We are, Doctor. Cross-circuiting to A.
SCOTT: Got them. A piece of them, anyway.
SPOCK: Cross-circuiting to B.
MCCOY: Crazy way to travel, spreading a man's molecules all over the universe...
(Kirk and Garrovick appear)

This is not a precision operation here. This is more of a "boost the gain until the static goes away" operation. As I said upthread, it probably has more to do with the transporter doing some kind of quantum tunneling trick between between two points in the transporter beam. The transporter doesn't care who you are, how big you are, what you look like or what you're carrying; if your in the focus, you're coming, even if a tall blonde woman just happens to leap into your arms at the exact moment you start to energize.

No matter how you twist it, the aim involved in beaming is at least centimeter-accurate

Going by Mark of Gideon, the parameters for beamdown can be anywhere between a couple of meters to a kilometer. Beaming up probably has finer tolerances, but that still means that you could beam up a landing party by hitting them with a transporter beam some ten meters in diameter at the focal point.

Which Kirk explicitly tells Spock in Day of the Dove:

KIRK: Mister Spock, we have guests. Adjust transporter to wide field. Beam up everyone in the target area.

The Enterprise isn't hitting the landing party plus intruders with nine separate beams. It's hitting them with ONE beam, which takes all nine of them aboard. It doesn't require centiemter precision (although that's certainly possible if you've got the skill). It simply requires a really good idea of where its target is.

 

[Pauln6]

No matter how you twist it, the aim involved in beaming is at least centimeter-accurate

Going by Mark of Gideon, the parameters for beamdown can be anywhere between a couple of meters to a kilometer. Beaming up probably has finer tolerances, but that still means that you could beam up a landing party by hitting them with a transporter beam some ten meters in diameter at the focal point.

Which Kirk explicitly tells Spock in Day of the Dove:

KIRK: Mister Spock, we have guests. Adjust transporter to wide field. Beam up everyone in the target area.

The Enterprise isn't hitting the landing party plus intruders with nine separate beams. It's hitting them with ONE beam, which takes all nine of them aboard. It doesn't require centiemter precision (although that's certainly possible if you've got the skill). It simply requires a really good idea of where its target is.

I think that you are possibly using rather loose language to justify a more specific point. The scanners can have a wide field while the transporter beam itself can have a very narrow, precise field.

Actually, beaming up every living thing in an area is one of the problems I have with the evolution of the Trek transporters. The transporter should only really work if you have a localised quantum scanning device to relay the necessary information to the ship from the start point i.e. a communicator or bio-belt or transporter tag. If you can just scoop up everything from orbit and let the ship sort out whether you want to keep them or return them, I think far too many Trek plots should have been resolved in a very short space of time.

We also had wide angle stun beams fired from orbit. Equally lame.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No matter how you twist it, the aim involved in beaming is at least centimeter-accurate

Going by Mark of Gideon, the parameters for beamdown can be anywhere between a couple of meters to a kilometer. Beaming up probably has finer tolerances, but that still means that you could beam up a landing party by hitting them with a transporter beam some ten meters in diameter at the focal point.

Which Kirk explicitly tells Spock in Day of the Dove:

KIRK: Mister Spock, we have guests. Adjust transporter to wide field. Beam up everyone in the target area.

The Enterprise isn't hitting the landing party plus intruders with nine separate beams. It's hitting them with ONE beam, which takes all nine of them aboard. It doesn't require centiemter precision (although that's certainly possible if you've got the skill). It simply requires a really good idea of where its target is.

I think that you are possibly using rather loose language to justify a more specific point. The scanners can have a wide field while the transporter beam itself can have a very narrow, precise field.

But it DOESN'T have a narrow, precise field. Even in TNG we have "The Last Outpost" where the entire away team materializes scattered all over the place because the energy dampening devices scatter the transporter field. This didn't actually KILL them, it just changed the location where they finally materialized (and Geordi materialized upside-down with his foot inside of a rock).

Actually, beaming up every living thing in an area is one of the problems I have with the evolution of the Trek transporters. The transporter should only really work if you have a localised quantum scanning device to relay the necessary information to the ship from the start point i.e. a communicator or bio-belt or transporter tag. If you can just scoop up everything from orbit and let the ship sort out whether you want to keep them or return them, I think far too many Trek plots should have been resolved in a very short space of time.

Except how many times have they actually needed to DO this? It's very rare that somebody actually bothers to force Kirk and crew to beam them aboard the Enterprise under threat of violence; Day of the Dove is a really great example. Kirk probably should have done the same in "By any other name" but I suppose the Kelvans' technology would have been good enough to make that too risky.

I would imagine that some primitive transporters would have to just beam up everything in a ten meter sphere of the target area, including ground, grass, rocks, trees, people, everything. More advanced ones can scan everything in the target area and sort out their individual patterns, and then the transporter chief simply selects which patterns or aggregates of patterns correspond to the things he wants to transport. An automatic setting can probably easily identify living beings and/or their clothes and uniforms so they can be selected at the touch of a button, but you don't necessarily know who or what you've just beamed aboard until that person actually materializes.

We also had wide angle stun beams fired from orbit. Equally lame.

Nothing lame about that. Actually orbital strikes should be a lot more common in Star Trek than we've been seeing. It's a very effective thing to call down a starship's heavy phasers on a bunch of assholes who think they're in charge just because they've got the high ground (this used to be one of my favorite "Say hello to my little friend!" moves in Star Trek: Online").

 

[Pauln6]

Going by Mark of Gideon, the parameters for beamdown can be anywhere between a couple of meters to a kilometer. Beaming up probably has finer tolerances, but that still means that you could beam up a landing party by hitting them with a transporter beam some ten meters in diameter at the focal point.

Which Kirk explicitly tells Spock in Day of the Dove:
The Enterprise isn't hitting the landing party plus intruders with nine separate beams. It's hitting them with ONE beam, which takes all nine of them aboard. It doesn't require centiemter precision (although that's certainly possible if you've got the skill). It simply requires a really good idea of where its target is.

Even in TNG we have "The Last Outpost" where the entire away team materializes scattered all over the place because the energy dampening devices scatter the transporter field. This didn't actually KILL them, it just changed the location where they finally materialized (and Geordi materialized upside-down with his foot inside of a rock).

I would imagine that some primitive transporters would have to just beam up everything in a ten meter sphere of the target area, including ground, grass, rocks, trees, people, everything. More advanced ones can scan everything in the target area and sort out their individual patterns, and then the transporter chief simply selects which patterns or aggregates of patterns correspond to the things he wants to transport. An automatic setting can probably easily identify living beings and/or their clothes and uniforms so they can be selected at the touch of a button, but you don't necessarily know who or what you've just beamed aboard until that person actually materializes.

We also had wide angle stun beams fired from orbit. Equally lame.

Nothing lame about that. Actually orbital strikes should be a lot more common in Star Trek than we've been seeing. It's a very effective thing to call down a starship's heavy phasers on a bunch of assholes who think they're in charge just because they've got the high ground (this used to be one of my favorite "Say hello to my little friend!" moves in Star Trek: Online").

The amount of memory required to transport quantum patterns of that many living things in a wide angle beam would be astronomical. The initial scan might be a wide angle but the subsequent quantum scan and the transport confinement beams aren't. They would be narrowed down following the previous scan.

I think this highlights one of the silly things about transporters in Trek that they have to scan every atom of what is being beamed up but have very little capacity to analyze that data. We see people hiding in containers; romulans posing as vulcans, genetically altered people, Kirk posing as a klingon, and so on. They can detect an energy signature of a weapon in a beam that is pure energy but not the DNA pattern of what is being beamed?

I think in the effect in Last Outpost was largely deliberate. The odds of the beams being scattered like that randomly and nobody ending up inside an object, the ground, or falling from a dangerous height seem pretty slim. There are a lot more ways to die when being transported than not dying. Hasn't anyone seen the Fly?

I meant that having the capacity to stun a city block from orbit is lame because it SHOULD get used - all the time - by everyone!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The amount of memory required to transport quantum patterns of that many living things in a wide angle beam would be astronomical.

And yet a Klingon bird of prey was able to do this with two humpback whales and four hundred tons of seawater.

Besides, I don't actually think the transporter "stores" the pattern in any sort of memory medium. I think the pattern ITSELF is a quantity that is being manipulated by the transporter. A really simple example is a noise canceling headphone: the electronics don't have to record the sounds of everything that's going on around you, they just have to re-transmit a 180 degree phase shifted version of whatever they're hearing. The phones themselves have very little capacity for storage and recording, but they can easily isolate certain noises and make them disappear.

The transporter, also, probably cannot "store" the wave function that makes a particular person or a group of persons, but it can MANIPULATE that wave function to make several sets of them jump from one location to another. It doesn't have to store your pattern, just "summon" it via quantum tunneling.

Don't be so quick to superimpose TNG concepts on TOS technology. I don't think there is any kind of "data flow" going on with transporters. I think that down its most basic function what they're basically accomplishing is the warping of space on the quantum scale, causing molecules and structures to "jump the gap" between two distinct locations based on some quantum mechanical trickery: the transporter beam alters your wave function so that all of your molecules are a superposition of "transporter room" and "surface of delta vega" and you are technically in both/neither of those places until the wave function collapses and you turn out to be in the transporter room after all.

I think in the effect in Last Outpost was largely deliberate. The odds of the beams being scattered like that randomly and nobody ending up inside an object, the ground, or falling from a dangerous height seem pretty slim.

Geordi materialized inside an object AND fell from a dangerous height. Actually considering that it took Riker some time to regain consciousness after beaming down, I wonder if he didn't initially materialize 20 feet off the ground and plummet face-first into the soundstage... er... I mean... into the dirt.

I meant that having the capacity to stun a city block from orbit is lame because it SHOULD get used - all the time - by everyone!

True that.

 

[Sgt_G]

Besides, I don't actually think the transporter "stores" the pattern in any sort of memory medium.

Remember the episode when Doctor Pulaski got old, "Unnatural Selection", and they wanted to pull her pattern out of the buffer to filter the virus out of her system .......