Transporting Through Shields

[USS Excelsior]

Why not have it so a ship's transporter can be at the same frequency as to what the ship's shield frequency is so they can always beam through them.

Only the same ship would have to know the frequency anyway, and no other ship would be able to use their transporters through another ship's shields.

 

[Wingsley]

Might work, but might not if the shield frequency is being rotated.

Also, when the shields are up, the ship is usually on alert status and counting on security to bolster their defenses. What you suggest might mean sharing the shield frequency number with more personnel (admittedly, an internal issue, but we saw the disastrous results in "Generations").

 

[Timo]

Also, it may simply be that a transporter requires too broad a frequency window to safely get through. And a safely transporter-sized window would be so broad that the enemy could easily find it and punch all sorts of weapons through.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

I can believe that to be true.

 

[Timo]

(Hell, I would hate to trust my life to a signal stream that is being sent through a narrow band, threatened from both sides by the Scylla and Kharybdis of shield noise. Think of crawling through a tunnel lined with razor blades - I'd want lots of clearance! And a wall with a wide tunnel through it is no wall.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[All Seeing Eye]

What I always found silly is why starships cant beam whopping great big ginormous warheads onto an enemy ships shields, saves all that rigmarole of firing it and having it hopefully hit its target, also you dont need anything other than the warhead so you can have an extra large one so its more likely to knock out the shields.

 

[Unicron]

I don't know that it would really make a huge difference, since you still have to knock the shields offline before you can seriously damage the hull. It's the same reason modern military aircraft drop big bombs on their targets, and not simply smaller ones with some form of adhesive so they can stick to everything and be remotely detonated.

I'd say the main reason is it's dramatic. There are some potential technological limits that have been mentioned already, but having the crew being unable to transport someone with their shields up is more exciting.

 

[nil_jones]

I'd say the main reason is it's dramatic. There are some potential technological limits that have been mentioned already, but having the crew being unable to transport someone with their shields up is more exciting.

It also allows for scenes like in "The Wounded," where O'Brien gets to strut his stuff by wedging a transporter beam through the Rutledge shield window. I don't remember the exact lines, but it was something-something milliseconds and it was conveyed in such a way that leaves the viewer (at least, left this viewer) wondering if he can really do it.

Color me a sucker for dramatic effect.

 

[Unicron]

You mean the Phoenix's shield window? It had to do with how the system cycles its energy.

 

[nil_jones]

Unicron said:
You mean the Phoenix's shield window? It had to do with how the system cycles its energy.

Wowsers...I bonered that one, indeed! Should've done more research on the ep....but it was Captain Maxwell....and O'Brien served with him....on the Rutledge.

Okay, no I'm just rationalizing, but I thought it was still a tension-building plot motive.

On that note, if the system power cycles were behind that sheild window, wouldn't enemies have picked up on that and timed attacks accordingly. Presumably, sensors would have to detect that shield window for the Transporter to be successful, but wouldn't enemies' sensors be able to pick up the same thing? Surely a Transporter Beam doesn't "travel faster" than a Phaser/Disruptor blast, right?

Way to go, Starfleet.

 

[Timo]

I'm sure shields are by nature very dynamic things: they simply cannot be built to be static, but instead have to consist of complex overlapping cyclic things with various characteristics, some good, some bad.

What O'Brien achieved would probably not help an enemy destroy the Phoenix in a real tactical situation. For all we know, the technique requires the target ship to remain perfectly still, and to refrain from rotating or otherwise adjusting the shields during the process - and the beamover might take something like fifteen minutes. (There's an intriguing passage describing a similar trick by Klingons in the novel The Final Reflection.)

As for using transporters as weapons... For all we know, phasers are transporters, only rigged a bit differently. According to ENT, human phasers emerge roughly at the same time humans master transporter technology. They also behave much the same vis-á-vis shields. And we hear in VOY and DS9 that phaser beams and their alien counterparts can be used for transporting physical things like poisons or nanomachines.

I don't see much advantage in using a conventional transporter for delivering the destruction, when it in practice works the same way as a phaser beam: it's line-of-sight, cannot go around corners, cannot penetrate shields - and apparently requires more complex subspace trickery than phaser beams do for becoming faster-than-light.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

^ Agreed. O'Brien also had some personal familiarity with the system given his technical training, and there's no guarantee an enemy would be able to exploit that sort of problem.