Transwarp Beaming Impact on Star Trek novels

[BillJ]

But wouldn't someone have to know where exactly in the Laurentian system the fleet is, in order to calculate the course the Enterprise would take? If the Laurentian system is the size of our own system: wouldn't that be one hell of a large variable?

I doubt a third year cadet would know the exact whereabouts of the fleet.

 

[Christopher]

On an interstellar scale, the diameter of a star system isn't all that large (assuming the rendezvous point was near the inner planets rather than way out in the Oort cloud). If the system is, say, three parsecs away, then an uncertainty of three AUs (450 million km) in position would ony translate to an uncertainty of one arcsecond in trajectory.

I'm not saying it makes perfect sense, of course. As with many things in many, many, many movies, it stretches credibility for the sake of drama. That happens every time a car blows up after crashing in an action movie, something that's next to impossible in real life. It happens every time a movie hero smashes through a window without sustaining severe lacerations and passing out from blood loss, or gets a chair smashed over his head without sustaining a life-threatening concussion. Movies and TV shows are full of profound improbabilities and utter impossibilities that we take in stride because we are willing to suspend disbelief. It doesn't have to be perfectly real, it just has to be rationalized enough that we're willing to accept the conceit for the sake of the story.

 

[Pauln6]

While I agree that Christopher's rationalisation goes some way to providing an explanation, credibility is stretched beyond believability because of the variables. Spacecraft flying within our solar system are using precise mathematics because that is what the vessels have been designed to do but even then if an unforeseen event necessitates a minor course alteration, even at sub-light speeds, all hell can break loose and slingshots can go badly wrong.

There was a significant time lapse between Kirk landing and Spock making his calculations. Kirk didn't know the precise coordinates for the rendezvous (presumably the fleet will be signalled and will meet Spock along the way) nor does he know the exact speed of the Enterprise when the ship left nor whether repairs have been able to change that speed. The ship needs to be scanned to determine these variables (especially the warp frequency). Spock's calcualtions will be needed to factor in where the ship will be in the time it takes the transport to take place but he needs scanners for his starting point.

The only times we've ever seen a transporter used without scanning the target location first is when people are being sent to linked transporter pads - that I could have believed - or retracing a transport to pre-existing co-ordinates (TWoK or Menage a Troi).

Ships can tell when another ship is locking weapons and they can tell when they are being scanned. Raising shields at this point would be standard practice for a ship although they might score a pass here because a ship at warp might assume nothing unusual about being scanned by a federation outpost and would not believe that it was possible for the outpost to transport while they're at warp. It's the distance that bugs me more than the warp issue if I'm honest, although the warp issue makes the need for scanners even more important.

I do also agree that modern movies do take more and more ridiculous liberties for the sake of action these days. In how many films do professional marksman miss the upright hero but hit either the ground or narrow railings nearby? Greedo managed to miss Han Solo sitting at a table two feet in front of him (Han shot first dammit!).

 

[datalogan]

I think we're getting a little side-tracked.
I'm not as upset by the improbability of Spock correctly programming the transporter (as far-fetched as that is) as I am by the fact that he had a working, reliable long-distance transporter to use in the first place. Later-on uses of the technology can get better, more reliable coordinates to use. But the transporter itself worked flawlessly. If Spock's coordinates hadn't been off a little, Scotty wouldn't have even gotten wet.

And as for the issue of scanning your target before you send a bomb to it, what about planets? There are plenty of good military (and terrorist) targets located on land-based sites that are well known. Planetary rotations are well known. As is the location of Starfleet Command and the President's Office or the shipyards, etc. These can be targeted from lightyears away at any time without a sensor scan to give away the enemy.

 

[Christopher]

Well, as stated in "Bloodlines" (assuming that it is the same technology), it requires putting the transported object in a state of quantum flux that's very unstable. "Unstable" is not a good thing for a bomb to be. If that instability sets in before you've successfully beamed it away, it could ruin your whole day.

Also, it's unreliable. Maybe there might be occasional value in using an unreliable method of delivering ordnance, but I think most governments or other entities involved in aggression would prefer a more dependable system.

 

[David cgc]

And as for the issue of scanning your target before you send a bomb to it, what about planets? There are plenty of good military (and terrorist) targets located on land-based sites that are well known. Planetary rotations are well known. As is the location of Starfleet Command and the President's Office or the shipyards, etc. These can be targeted from lightyears away at any time without a sensor scan to give away the enemy.

I assume any place worth hitting would have shielding to ensure only the most authorized of transporter beams got through.

 

[Pauln6]

I don't think we can place too much stock in the rhetoric. Officers carry phasers and grenades regularly and nobody ever worries about them blowing up. There may be anecdotal evidence that anti-matter can't be transported though (Voyager might contradict this). There has also never been any suggestion that certain areas are automatically shielded although I agree a lot of problems in the past would have been avoided if ships had even the most basic security in engineering so I'd argue that it was very sensible.

In my own little story I wanted to reign transporters in rather than give them a wider remit so nobody can be transported up without a communicator or belt monitor signal. The odds of dying on a long distance transport are so great that if I ever considered allowing long distance transports at all (unlikely) I'd be inclined to roll percentage dice from my D&D dice set for success for each transportee and see how keen captains of vessels are to use it after they have to amputate a few limbs to free crewmen from bulkheads etc. I'd also drain the whole transporter system of power following such an unusual use.

 

[BillJ]

There may be anecdotal evidence that anti-matter can't be transported though (Voyager might contradict this).

Anti-matter was transported in the episode Obsession (TOS).

 

[Pauln6]

Thanks! So I guess quantum fluctuations must be within acceptable safety norms. Start beaming those torpedoes onto ships travelling at warp!

 

[Christopher]

Beaming antimatter aboard was a plot point in the animated episode "One of Our Planets is Missing." And of course on VGR we've seen (or at least heard references to) entire shuttlecraft beamed aboard, complete with their miniature warp engines, which presumably contained antimatter.

But that's normal transporter use, which is a proven, stable, safe technology. One can't extrapolate from it to the kind of long-range subspace transporter we're talking about here, which is deemed too unstable and unreliable to use safely. If you can't trust it to beam people, you'd be crazy to trust it to beam antimatter.

 

[Pauln6]

Yes but I suppose that's the problem of opening the Pandora's box. Subspace beaming is always going to work if the writer wants it to so the inherent risks become diluted somewhat. For example the method was used four times successfully in the space of one day in Trek 09 (Scotty's minor mishap notwishtstanding).

Further, if you have an automated transporter, the inherent risks of blowing it up due to an accident are less of an issue in a resource rich 24th century. And I'm sure stable chemical explosives could do a lot of damage, especially if beamed in near the engines, nacelles, or anti-matter storage.

 

[SD70ACe]

There's no evidence whatsoever that the transwarp beaming in STXI was the same as subspace beaming, especially since not a single mention was made of any detrimental effects. It's simply a new advanced technology.

 

[Pauln6]

Possibly, but that is even harder to justify without the intervention of Q.

 

[Christopher]

Yes but I suppose that's the problem of opening the Pandora's box. Subspace beaming is always going to work if the writer wants it to so the inherent risks become diluted somewhat. For example the method was used four times successfully in the space of one day in Trek 09 (Scotty's minor mishap notwishtstanding).

But by the same token, a potential new weapon isn't going to be developed if the writers don't want it to be. There have been countless new technologies introduced in Trek over the years that could've had profound, fundamental impact on the status quo in the universe, but generally they're rarely used beyond the episodes where they're introduced, because it would change things too much. (For just one example, how come Starfleet doesn't use kironide injections to give its officers telekinesis every time there's a crisis?) Even when a new weapons/defense technology is introduced, like metaphasic shields or quantum torpedoes, it's quickly reduced to being treated no differently from the technology it replaced. For all their alleged power, both photon and quantum torpedoes are often treated essentially as cannonballs from a story-logistics perspective.

So there's no need to worry about a new technology transforming the status quo in a fundamentally disruptive way. Because the writers won't develop a technology unless there's a legitimate story use for it.

There's no evidence whatsoever that the transwarp beaming in STXI was the same as subspace beaming, especially since not a single mention was made of any detrimental effects. It's simply a new advanced technology.

But treating it as a different technology adds new complications and questions. Since they basically work the same way, it's simpler to assume they're the same thing. And it's desirable to do so, not only due to Occam's Razor, but for the reasons suggested in this thread. This technology that the filmmakers threw in merely as a convenient plot device has potentially staggering implications if it actually works reliably. It could ruin storytelling if it becomes possible to get out of any crisis just by beaming someone across a few light-years. Transporters have always been a problematical story device because of their deus ex machina potential, so anything that limits their abilities is a good thing dramatically. And interstellar transporters are so powerful that the problem is compounded exponentially. Thus, it is very, very desirable for a storyteller to find reasons why this technology would not be used in most circumstances.

And "Bloodlines" gives us a technology that's essentially equivalent -- and that already has a built-in explanation for why it usually isn't used. So the problems raised by the introduction of transwarp beaming are handily solved if we assume it's the same technology as "Bloodlines"' subspace transporter. No, there's no concrete evidence of that, but it's desirable on many levels. Now, if we were talking about objective reality, it would always be wrong to place what we wanted to believe above what could be demonstrated by the evidence. But we're talking about fiction, about entities that are made-up to begin with. So the best interpretation is the one that best suits the needs of storytelling.

 

[Pauln6]

Very well said. I suppose it could help if they showed it being used unsuccessfully in a crisis as well - blowing up the transporter or killing the transportee. That would be an important lesson for Kirk to learn - that high risk activities don't always pay off.

 

[SD70ACe]

It does indeed have staggering implications. As does the obscenely fast warp drives in STXI, TARDIS interiors, and other technological strangeness. All of this stuff was put in there for new audiences, and they'll just have to work around that.

 

[Christopher]

As does the obscenely fast warp drives in STXI...

Largely an illusion created by editing. There's a gap of several hours between going to warp and Chekov's briefing, as indicated by the fact that McCoy has changed into his uniform and Kirk awakes from his sedated slumber seemingly moments after he first passed out. But it's edited to give the impression of no passage of time for the sake of pacing.

And it's not like we haven't had arbitrarily fast warp drives in Trek before. "That Which Survives" had the Enterprise covering over 1000 light-years in mere hours, though that's a year's travel by Voyager standards. ST V had the center of the galaxy reachable in minutes instead of decades. First Contact had the Enterprise seemingly get from the Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth in minutes (though that could've also been an editing trick). And remember all the complaints about "Broken Bow" and NX-01 getting from Earth to Qo'noS in four days?

Warp drive works at the speed of plot. That's nothing new.

TARDIS interiors

The TOS shuttlecraft interior set had a higher ceiling (and a larger aft compartment?) than the exterior mockup, and at one point in "The Galileo Seven" it seemed to have a rear exit corresponding to nothing visible on the exterior. The TMP rec room was too high to fit in the part of the saucer where it was supposed to be. The TMP engine room had a forced-perspective corridor appearing to lead much farther forward from engineering than would be physically possible without passing through the deflector dish and into open space. The Ten Forward set in TNG couldn't proportionally fit into the rim of the saucer of the original 6-foot miniature and its windows were too large, so they actually had to redesign the ship's proportions in the 4-foot miniature to make the saucer rim two decks thick and add accurate Ten Forward windows. The Delta Flyer had a whole large aft compartment that couldn't possibly fit into the exterior of the ship, and the exterior didn't seem to have a door on it anywhere. Not to mention the mystery of how the Flyer, Neelix's fair-sized cargo ship, and a fleet of shuttles fit into Voyager's single shuttlebay, or where the mysterious "shuttlebay 2" was on a ship with only one hangar door. The E-A in ST V had a turboshaft over 100 decks high, and the lowest deck of the E-E in Nemesis had a catwalk over a seemingly bottomless shaft.

All of this stuff was put in there for new audiences, and they'll just have to work around that.

Just as the old audiences have been working around the equivalent inconsistencies in Trek for the past 45 years.

 

[SD70ACe]

Exactly my point. That's just the way the new stuff works, we don't need to shoehorn it into the old series' rules when there's no evidence thereof. Awesome examples you cited, by the way.

 

[Christopher]

Exactly my point. That's just the way the new stuff works, we don't need to shoehorn it into the old series' rules when there's no evidence thereof.

It's not about "evidence." We're not trying to discover or analyze something that really exists. We're trying to take a fictional universe created by many different people with conflicting ideas and goals and try to make their fragmented inspirations work as a coherent whole. It's not about what can be "proven," because it's all a bunch of colorful fibs anyway. It's about what makes the most plausible fib. And consistency helps make a story credible.

And no, "just the way the new stuff works" is the diametric OPPOSITE of my point. My point is that the "new stuff" is not fundamentally different from the "old stuff." It's just a continuation of the same "stuff." Or rather, the "old stuff" is just as full of contrivances and inconsistencies and arbitrariness, it's just that we've had more time to rationalize and homogenize it in our minds. So there's no reason the "new stuff" can't be folded into the same illusion of a cohesive whole, just as each new iteration of "new stuff" in the past has eventually been merged with the whole.

That's our job as tie-in writers, to treat it all as one cohesive reality. You may not "need" to "shoehorn" anything in, but I and my fellow tie-in writers do need to reconcile it all as much as we can. And since this is a thread about the impact of transwarp beaming on ST novels, well, there you go.

 

[SD70ACe]

That's our job as tie-in writers, to treat it all as one cohesive reality.

Don't you mean two realities?

You may not "need" to "shoehorn" anything in, but I and my fellow tie-in writers do need to reconcile it all as much as we can. And since this is a thread about the impact of transwarp beaming on ST novels, well, there you go.

Has it been established in any novels yet where and when Scotty created transwarp beaming? (Perhaps in SCE, post-"Relics"?) That's something else that leads me to believe it's not the same as subspace beaming. They'd already done it in TNG, but Scotty is credited as the inventor. You'd have thought they'd at least mention that.