Transporters in the nuVerse [SPOILERS]

[Flake]

I hate the transporters in nuTrek and this is solely down to the writing of Kurtzman, Orci and now Lindelof.

First of all, Transwarp beaming. Now there is nothing new here because it is now 4 years old, it was used in ST09 and I hoped it would never be spoken of again. I hoped it would be consigned to the dustbin like other amazing Trek feats like slingshotting around the sun to travel back in time and a cloaking device the size of a backpack that allows you to pass through solid matter. There are many many such examples of things like this in Trek that the writers invent or tweak something one week or one movie to allow their script to work and never return.

Now we all know the only reason Transwarp beaming exists is because the writing team of Kurtzman and Orci for Star Trek 2009 needed a way to get Kirk and Scotty back on the Enterprise with help from Spock Prime. So they invent Transwarp beaming ! yay! Ignoring the fact that Transporters are mostly used for short range hops and going against everything we have ever seen in Star Trek. (There are some examples of long range beaming in Trek but nothing on the order of light-years? Am I right?) - The implications of being able to beam from one star system to another are vast. What is the range of this thing? Why bother with starships at all? Or shuttles? Or anything? Just set transwarp beaming points all over the federation and you can be anywhere in a flash, literally! Why send a ship with torpedos when you can just beam the torpedos onto the enemy planet and explode them remotely? All of this just so the writers can write the script they want, fuck everything else and forget everything from the last 45 years. We also are aware that any transporter can be retrofitted to transwarp beam with a few equations from Spock Prime. Its a piece of cake. Just so their script would work... remember?

Unfortunately its back in 'Into Darkness' where Harrison uses a portable Transwarp beaming device to beam from a jumpship shooting the shit out of a building in San Francisco all the way to Qo'Nos, a planet god knows how many light-years away. Damnit. OK. Its in Trek and its here to stay, fantastic.

What will they invent next?

Now there are other issues with the transporters in nuTrek and particularly Star Trek Into Darkness. The writers seem to use it regularly to write themselves out of a sticky situation... sometimes its working, sometimes its not. Now we find that someone cannot beam up... but you can beam down! Right next to the person you want to beam up! Thats a new one as well! Again Trek gadgets used like never before. You can be on the bridge and beam 72 targets automatically, fantastic!

I think transporters need to be sent back to basics rather than be a magical device one moment and a malfunctioning piece of shit the next just to serve your script.

 

[Pauln6]

Agreed. My issue with transwarp beaming is that I simply don't see how it could work the way it does in the movie without a serious amount of collateral technology (how can the signal travel faster than a subspace signal - which can take hours or days to reach its destination; how can it travel over longer distances than a subspace signal without specially designed subspace relays (Scotty used standard Federation communication relays in the comic and Harrison I assume must have hacked Klingon communication relays but a transporter signal contains a hell of a lot more data than a subspace communication); how can the annular confinement beam retain the integrity of a signal without something extra to power the beam; since scanners don't have that kind of range (quite often they don't even detect a ship in visual range) and they can't even beam up a person who is moving too much, how can a person not die if they are beaming over light years without a receiving pad to aim for). It should be a death sentence and it irritates me that they hand waved that away with a 'ooh this is soo dangerous but we'll use it and succeed anyway' line.

My personal prefernce would be to go back to something like Blakes 7. You need a localised quantum scanner to beam back (usually a communicator or belt monitor) otherwise the ship will have to rely on the pattern that it stored when you were sent down - complete with memory loss. The whole system is on shaky ground - well shakier than the concept to start with.

As it is, beaming weapons of mass destruction long distances is all too easy. Beaming light years without a receiving pad is risk free (unless the target is at warp). It's easier to beam onto a ship at warp than it is to beam up somebody who is moving around. Go figure.

 

[Johnny]

I hadn't even thought about the speed it travelled. But it did cross my mind that if you can't get a lock on where you want to be then how on Earth can you be sure that you'll end up there. The speed difference and the constant change is distance must be astonishing.

I find that a lot of films nowadays, not just Star Trek, have been covering up inconsistencies by not really going into detail and pushing them through while in a fast paced scenario so you don't really pay much attention. You don't notice until you stop and think. If you're going to make a film then make it a smart one or not make it at all...

Saying all that, some of the exposition was worse that a technical detail!

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I hoped it would be consigned to the dustbin like other amazing Trek feats like slingshotting around the sun to travel back in time

That was used at least three times.

1. Tomorrow Is Yesterday
2. Assignment: Earth
3. STIV: The Voyage Home

It was also mentioned in Time Squared.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

Fans seem completely happy with 10 mile long starships, so transwarp beaming between solar systems probably goes hand in hand. "It's because of Nero."

 

[Gojira]

Incredible and implausible technobabble and devices has a soild tradition in Star Trek.

 

[Phily B]

I kinda liked how it was confiscated in the latest movie from Scotty, but turns up in S31. Kinda links with how S31 used to be able to beam people over lightyears and disappear.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Nothing wrong with transwarp beaming, IMO. It's technology from the future. That they didn't forget it shows continuity, something Trekkies usually appreciate.

They even plausibly wrote it out of our heroes hands in this film - confiscated from Scotty by S31. Really, the only place said technology will be a "problem" is the novelverse. And I'm sure they'll think of something. At the very least...

Spoiler: Indisinguishable From Magic

With canonical evidence that transwarp beaming can take you at least as far as Earth to Kronos, it just means Scotty could rematerialize anywhere after his beam off the exploding USS Challenger.

(how can the signal travel faster than
a subspace signal - which can take hours or days to reach its destination

Only in the episodes and movies where said communication is not instant, which are wildly inconsistant and contradictory in Trek canon. In this film's version of Trek, Kirk phoned Scotty in San Francisco from the Enteprise at the Klingon border and Spock phoned his older self on New Vulcan from Earth orbit. No delays.

But even if Khan beamed himself off Earth and rematerialized on Kronos three days later, so what?

 

[throwback]

In Assignment: Earth, the Assigners used a transporter to transport Gary Seven 7 a thousand light years to Earth. Using information from the series "Enterprise", Qo'noS was within a ninety light years of Earth.

 

[ROBE]

Transporters are something I would scrap if I was doing a total reboot of Trek, they are like a Viking long boat carrying a mobile/cell phone.
They are too magical.

 

[Commishsleer]

How is transwarp beaming less credible than the normal beaming from one place to another without a receiving chamber. Its all made up - if Abrams et. al wants it to work, then it works.
You had Gary 7 'teleporting' across the galaxy and people didn't put up their hands in horror.

Of course its a stupid idea for Star Trek because getting stranded on a planet is one of the excitement mechanisms of the franchise. Now when people are in trouble half-way across the galaxy, then all Starfleet has to do is beam in a marine force based on Earth.
Problem over.

Actually why have ship at all - just beam everywhere.

They have the same problem with the replicator. If you can replicate anything, why grow crops, trade or build anything. Basically that aspect of the replicator is mostly ignored - thank goodness.

 

[Pauln6]

In Assignment: Earth, the Assigners used a transporter to transport Gary Seven 7 a thousand light years to Earth. Using information from the series "Enterprise", Qo'noS was within a ninety light years of Earth.

I think it would be possible if you have sensors that can scan across the galaxy or at least from one star system to another (or you can open a wormhole, like Stargate, and scan the other side of the wormhole for a safe landing site). If you can do that though they you could just beam the Klingon emperor off his homeworld or, even easier, beam weapons of mass destruction to get rid of that pesky ship at the edge of your space before it even knows it's in danger. It a really, really poorly thought out technology and sheer arrogance to suggest that only humans would come up with it.

Lame.

 

[Pauln6]

How is transwarp beaming less credible than the normal beaming from one place to another without a receiving chamber. Its all made up - if Abrams et. al wants it to work, then it works.
You had Gary 7 'teleporting' across the galaxy and people didn't put up their hands in horror.

Of course its a stupid idea for Star Trek because getting stranded on a planet is one of the excitement mechanisms of the franchise. Now when people are in trouble half-way across the galaxy, then all Starfleet has to do is beam in a marine force based on Earth.
Problem over.

Actually why have ship at all - just beam everywhere.

They have the same problem with the replicator. If you can replicate anything, why grow crops, trade or build anything. Basically that aspect of the replicator is mostly ignored - thank goodness.

I agree that the concept of beaming back from the planet without a communicator or other localised device is silly and they could make the loss of a landing site or the loss of communicators far more significant if they were sensible. Transwarp is worse though because of the scanner issue. There is plenty of canon to indicate that Federation sensors don't have the range to scan that far.

Replicators are an issue but in TOS ships didn't have unlimited power so they didn't have full on replicators and they don't keep shields up all the time. They had protein synthesisers and probably replicator light in the form of advanced 3d printers.

 

[Commishsleer]

And if Scotty invented transwarp beaming then why didn't Picard know about it?

Come to think of it why didn't PrimeSpock use transwarp to transport himself to Romulan space with the red matter to save Romulus? You bastard Prime Spock. No wonder Nero hates you :shakes walking stick in the air:

OK maybe there's some limitation on it. Or maybe Scotty showed Spock the formula but didn't actually build the transporter. But if Khan did, then no doubt Spock could.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And if Scotty invented transwarp beaming then why didn't Picard know about it?

Because Scotty only perfected his transwarp beaming formula years after "Relics"

Come to think of it why didn't PrimeSpock use transwarp to transport himself to Romulan space with the red matter to save Romulus? You bastard Prime Spock. No wonder Nero hates you :shakes walking stick in the air:

Because of the danger factor - first time they used it, Scotty almost died. He described transwarp beaming without a recieving pad as "trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse."

OK maybe there's some limitation on it. Or maybe Scotty showed Spock the formula but didn't actually build the transporter. But if Khan did, then no doubt Spock could.

It's all software, like the modifications in TNG's "Birthright" or DS9's mirror universe episodes. Think back to all the crazy stuff transporters have done over the years without any changes to the default hardware...

-splitting Kirk into good and evil halves
-beaming into a parallel universe
-making a copy of Riker
-De-ageing Picard, Ro, Guinan and Keiko to children
-Making Hoshi into a ghost
-Merging Tuvok and Neelix into Tuvix
-Unmerging Tuvix... months later!
-Beaming across time in Deep Space Nine
-De-ageing Pulaski and curing her disease
-De-ageing Kirk and Spock in the cartoons
-Re-ageing the bridge crew after an alternate reality de-aged them in the cartoons.
-Beaming across space and time several times in TOS
-The Dominion had a transwarp beaming equivalent in DS9 and used it several times
-People getting lost in the beam, only to be seen by Barclay as floating monsters during teleport.
-Scotty spending 70 years dematerialized inside a transporter.
-The transporter inventor's son becoming a ghost that mutilated people when they touched him. He spent 18 years like this.


THEY are why transwarp beaming is no big deal whatsoever, and perfectly consistent with the Trek universe. I can only imagine the reaction if they dared resuse one of the other ideas above

 

[ROBE]

Don't get me started on Replicators!

 

[Cid Highwind]

I think the problem here is not just the question whether this tech is less or more magical than any other Trek tech - the problem is that it just isn't good story-telling to allow such über-tech.

(And, yes, inventing an easy method for time travel and forgetting about it next week wasn't good story-telling, either. Just because Trek writers were lazy decades ago doesn't mean they need to keep being lazy today.)

I could accept the transwarp beaming of ST09: it could be explained as still being somewhat "short-distance", they could have hacked into internal sensors for greater precision and even then, there was some targeting error being shown. All of that was not the case with STID's transwarp beaming - and to add insult to injury, there wasn't even a good internal motivation for Harrison to beam to Qo'noS. The only motivation seems to be external - he needs to end up there so that Admiral Robocop can continue his plans of provoking war with the Klingons.

At times, it seems as if the script for this movie was written backwards: at some point, the characters need to be at some location - so an earlier scene brings them into position, whether there's probable motivation for them to act that way or not. This is lazy storytelling, and magical long-range transporters are just one of many products of that.

 

[mos6507]

I'm okay with long-distance beaming as long as it's unreliable. Too few people have died (on screen) from transporter accidents. It would seem the most risky form of transport would be a sub-space/transwarp or ship-to-ship-at-warp and that would be the main reason why it isn't in common use. That way they can use it as ex-deus-machina of last resort--with a palpable risk that one or more of the crew will get scrambled like in ST:TMP or lost completely.

 

[ROBE]

Beam weapons, artificial gravity and starships with warp capability are all okay.
Other things are too "magic".

 

[Cid Highwind]

That is still not the point...