Warp Capsule

[Crazy Eddie]

But transporters really are the preferred method of moving everything.

Obviously not, since the ship has five different airlocks, a gangway, and a shuttlebay directly adjacent to a cargo bay which, as we are watching it, has several cargo haulers moving in and out of it (and even the EXISTENCE of those cargo sleds is indication enough that transporters are not the normal mode of transportation for those crates). This is yet another case of design logic AND plot logic hinting at the transporter system being far from the "do it all" transportation device Fandom makes it out to be.

To be sure, transporters seem to be the most convenient way of making a relatively small delivery from a starship to a planetary surface. It's quick and efficient, like the vacuum conveyor thing at a bank's drive-through window. But those same banks (usually) have a teller counter inside, and some of them even have vaults and safe deposit boxes that aren't served by the conveyor system.

Likewise, there are at least six different modes of transportation for me to get to work, all with varrying degrees of expense and convenience. I can call a cab, I can call Uber, I can take a bus, I can walk, I can ride a bike, or I can drive my car. I've used all six of them at on time or another, some far more than others. The fact that these other options continue to exist is evidence enough that no one mode of transportation accomplishes everyone's needs all the time.

Too bad that the logistics behind a typical docking hatch are even more pitiful than next to a transporter pad! We see awkward flights of stairs, cramped corners, narrow catwalks...

In the cargo bay, there's a big fat turbolift not five meters from the airlock; I don't think that's a coincidence. Besides which, with an antigrav platform, you can just heft the entire package over the rail and then guide it to the floor with a remote control. If it's not being put immediately into storage, you chuck it on the turbolift and simply deliver it to the Captain's quarters where he quietly squirrels it away with the REST of his porn.

Have you really never thought about why the torpedo bays would have airlock hatches built into them? All those torpedoes have to get aboard SOMEHOW, and it's probably not not via transporter.

Stuff in Cargo Bays only helps paralyze Klingon security officers. It must get to the end user somehow.

Assuming the end-users are somewhere aboard the ship, this is the part where the quartermaster and the deck hands have to go and unpack those huge containers and distribute the parcels inside to where they're supposed to be.

Assuming the end users are at the ship's destination, they pretty much just sit there until the ship arrives in orbit and the workbees and shuttlecraft come to unload those crates through the shuttlebay doors (same way they loaded them).

Transporters are not useful for EITHER of those tasks. In fact, beaming the parcels separately into the transporter room in smaller packages would actually make a lot more work for the crew, as they now have to pack and store all those containers only to eventually unpack them again when they're needed. Loading the entire bundle in one massive bulky container saves them this step, and probably helps avoid the usual mistakes of stock being mishandled or miscounted or otherwise misplaced.

And this before one considers that there are UNDOUBTEDLY technical and procedural reasons why a massive cargo transporter would be an inconvenient way of loading that material onto the ship. I suspect -- and have suspected for a long time -- that it has to do with the TMP Enterprise not actually having multiple transporter systems; that THE transporter is a single device with a discrete emitter and targeting assembly, not unlike a tractor beam or a phaser bank, and that the Enterprise possesses one primary transporter and a second seldom-used device as a backup.

It likely isn't the most convenient way to move people and cargo, it is simply the FASTEST, and is preferred when speed is more important than comfort (e.g. almost every episode of TOS we've ever seen).

There, the sort of hilarity Crazy Eddie suggests would probably be very welcome!

But didn't he MATERIALIZE standing up? I can't netflix the episode for some reason...

 

[Timo]

Obviously not, since the ship has...

...But makes no use of, which is where the "preferred" thing comes in. Transporters do everything. Other features sort of just exist in case.

To be sure, transporters seem to be the most convenient way of making a relatively small delivery from a starship to a planetary surface.

Or from ship to ship. And that's just the thing: these are the transfers being conducted the most often, major resupply being a rare thing that happens offscreen. And it happening offscreen is our evidence that it is a rare thing, because our main heroes do get involved even in transfers they have little business messing with, such as stupid little cargo crates in "Dagger of the Mind".

In the cargo bay, there's a big fat turbolift not five meters from the airlock; I don't think that's a coincidence.

Ditto at the transporter rooms. Anything involving turbolifts, corridors and the like is already limited to handling the small crates we see handled by the transporters. It's as if somebody had standardized on a convenient size...

Have you really never thought about why the torpedo bays would have airlock hatches built into them? All those torpedoes have to get aboard SOMEHOW, and it's probably not not via transporter.

The docking port there is really inconvenient for the purpose, involving twists and turns and whatnot; while real-world subs are notorious for having mindboggingly inefficient means of bringing torps aboard, a starship could simply have an internal elevator bring up packages of these from the vast cargo holds. Or even individual torps; we don't know where exactly the magazines are physically located.

OTOH, torps certainly are part of the "conveniently man-sized" object category that is easily handled by transporter...

It likely isn't the most convenient way to move people and cargo, it is simply the FASTEST, and is preferred when speed is more important than comfort (e.g. almost every episode of TOS we've ever seen).

My point exactly: fastest is what the crew needs 99% of the time. Cargo shuttles fail to exist because of this. Futuristic forklifts is what they have instead, for the pierside resupply jobs, but those are quite separate from what the crew needs during a mission.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

...But makes no use of

"No use?" We see them use the airlocks to access the ship not less than FOUR TIMES. Twice in TMP, again in TWOK and TVH. Years later, we see Picard being ferried aboard the docked Enterprise-D by Tasha Yar; still more years later, we have the DS9 crew EXPLICITLY declaring a preference for having visiting ships actually dock at the station instead of having personnel come aboard by transporter.

Come to think of it, the only time Kirk uses the transporter to come aboard a docked USS Enterprise is when he intends to steal it. We now have eight different films where he shows a clear preference for shuttlecraft. This is either an AMAZING coincidence, or it's a standard procedure.

Ditto at the transporter rooms.

Not in TOS. Or TMP for that matter, with the even narrower corridors that definitely aren't large enough to handle those cargo containers.

The docking port there is really inconvenient for the purpose, involving twists and turns and whatnot...

We've never seen the inner plan of that airlock complex. It's just as likely -- and probable -- that the compartment just behind that hatch contains a loading elevator that leads straight to the torpedo magazine.

My point exactly: fastest is what the crew needs 99% of the time.

No, fastest is what the crew needs in the field, in orbit of a planet that doesn't have a regular shuttle service or can't get a ship to rendezvous with them in less than an hour. The transporters save them a lot of time at the expense of WAY more power consumption, maintenance hours, personal risk and logistics support. Basically, it's like parachuting out of an airplane vs. actually landing first (which Starfleet actually does quite a bit of when the transporters aren't working).

When the Enterprise ever goes some place that has an actual orbital dock facility, shuttles and travel pods are the way to go. Why travel by parachute when you've got a perfectly good runway?

Cargo shuttles fail to exist because of this...

Cargo shuttles fail to exist because the producers lack the budget to build them. When they DO NOT lack said budget, shuttles actually become the PREFERRED method of hauling cargo.

Which actually makes a certain amount of sense, considering the whole reason transporter were introduced in the first place is because Rodenberry couldn't afford to build a landing craft or repeatedly film scenes of the Enterprise OR the shuttle landing on a planet. Use of the transporter was a budget saver; as soon as they could afford to use shuttlecraft, they did.

Could be the same in universe? Transporters are the "low budget" means of shipping goods where anyone who can afford to (and has time to spare) still prefers to use shuttlecraft.

 

[Timo]

"No use?" We see them use the airlocks to access the ship not less than FOUR TIMES. Twice in TMP, again in TWOK and TVH.

But never in TOS. Which makes one wonder whether something actually changed when those docking ports "became visible" in the refit.

The thing is, though, every one of the TOS movie instances involved the transfer of people, without any luggage. So again the scant evidence suggests that transporters would be the go-to tech for cargo (although again the evidence is so scant that it's really worth zip).

Not in TOS. Or TMP for that matter, with the even narrower corridors that definitely aren't large enough to handle those cargo containers.

There's no internal handling the containers no matter what. But in TOS, you just walk out of the room and to the nearest turbolift - whose location varies from episode to episode, but there's no pressing reason to disbelieve in one where it goes in the TNG revamp of the set.

We've never seen the inner plan of that airlock complex. It's just as likely -- and probable -- that the compartment just behind that hatch contains a loading elevator that leads straight to the torpedo magazine.

The thing here is that there's no real room for a "complex" there. The place is a physical bottleneck, hopefully accommodating two torpedo bays side by side (even though there's no room for that in reality), but even with one such bay essentially doing its damnedest to block turbolift or staircase access. Should it really be choked up worse by a combined personnel/torpedo supply route?

Thankfully, we can see there's some space between the torp deck set and the outer hull, as what lies beyond the door as seen from inside is not the travel pod interior. But it's not a set of side doors, either, alas.

fastest is what the crew needs in the field

My point exactly.

in orbit of a planet that doesn't have a regular shuttle service

But why should this matter? The ship has her own shuttles - and of those, we know that they make no use of the docking ports, nor do they include any cargo variants (that is, models with doors for cargo larger than what we see beamed). Shuttles just plain aren't useful, in Starfleet thinking.

(Heck, despite the vast bay of the nuShip, even there no cargo variants are embarked that we'd know of. As soon as the ship gets rid of Academy vehicles, it settles on TOS style, personnel-only craft. No doubt there are vast arrangements for workbee- and gangway-based starbase logistics, too, but what Starfleet uses "out there" is pretty much consistently set in stone.)

The transporters save them a lot of time at the expense of WAY more power consumption, maintenance hours, personal risk and logistics support.

I really doubt there's more evidence for transporters being power or maintenance hogs or risk factors than there's for shuttles being that.

Cargo shuttles fail to exist because the producers lack the budget to build them. When they DO NOT lack said budget, shuttles actually become the PREFERRED method of hauling cargo.

Except not - that craft is incapable of carrying "cargo" other than man-sized things (even the floor hatch here is tiny, in contrast with the Academy barge), and in fact never carries any save for the single torpedo in that single instance.

Shuttles do carry personnel a lot, in every show. But generally only across great distances or above Earth. Why the latter? Because there's so much transporter activity at UFP Capitol that Starfleet can't afford the bandwidth?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

...this before one considers that there are UNDOUBTEDLY technical and procedural reasons why a massive cargo transporter would be an inconvenient way of loading that material onto the ship. I suspect -- and have suspected for a long time -- that it has to do with the TMP Enterprise not actually having multiple transporter systems; that THE transporter is a single device with a discrete emitter and targeting assembly, not unlike a tractor beam or a phaser bank, and that the Enterprise possesses one primary transporter and a second seldom-used device as a backup.

I've suspected something similar for a long time - there are obviously different Transporter Rooms dotted around the original Enterprise (since they vary in appearance so much) but only one is active at any given time (presumably due to the high level of maintenance that their delicate systems require). Naturally the crew know which Transporter Room is active at any given time at the start of their duty shift - even if you're not sure, the turbolift will take you there upon voice command; simple!
A single transporter emitter also corresponds nicely with the entire transporter system going down in episodes like Enemy Within.

It's also worth noting that even the mighty Excelsior had only a single Transporter Room active at any given time (Scotty's voice command to the turbolift just before he leaves to steal the Enterprise)

It likely isn't the most convenient way to move people and cargo, it is simply the FASTEST, and is preferred when speed is more important than comfort (e.g. almost every episode of TOS we've ever seen).

Makes sense to me!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But never in TOS.

The amount of stuff we didn't see in TOS and couldn't have seen because of budget limits is so massive that this is not even a meaningful point.

There's no internal handling the containers no matter what.

Right, the containers just sort of tilt themselves into the cargo bay by osmosis...

The thing here is that there's no real room for a "complex" there.

Of course there is. It's a space three to four meters wide and an undefined length running exactly parallel to the torpedo room. That's room enough to fit a REAL torpedo room, the oversized loading/handling/inspection room of the TWOK set not withstanding.

But why should this matter?

For precisely the same reason that navy ships actually pull up to the dock instead of having their crew jump onto rafts and float to shore. Or why aircraft carriers near friendly ports do not normally embark new crew-members by fetching them with helicopters.

Shuttles are EXTREMELY useful, in some cases more so than transporters. But they are designed to be versatile, robust, reliable, easy to repair. Civilian craft optimized for transporting cargo or personnel over short distances are designed with different tolerances in mind and can actually do that job much better than a Starfleet shuttlecraft for a fraction of the cost.

This is why workbees exist. This is why cargo sleds are pulled by workbees and not by travel pods. Most importantly, this is why standard shuttlecraft do not have airlock ports. Those ports are for specialty functions: loading and unloading of personnel and parcels, embarking and disembarking EVAs, and docking with short-term visitor craft (couriers, taxis, and ships too big to fit in the shuttlebay).

(Heck, despite the vast bay of the nuShip, even there no cargo variants are embarked that we'd know of.

Yes there are. We got to see several "flying forklift" type spacecraft moving crates in STID. Presumably some of those crates were the new torpedoes being loaded; either way, they were a pretty obvious homage to the workbees of TMP.

Except not - that craft is incapable of carrying "cargo" other than man-sized things (even the floor hatch here is tiny

The floor hatch is a easily two meters square; it's big enough to load or unload anything that will fit into the actual shuttle. There's also the question of the rear hatch, which we've never seen open in canon.

A similar issue is the Type-6 shuttles of TNG and the Galileo of TFF. Both shuttles (being basically the same design) have that big and huge drop door in the back of the ship, which again allows you to load and unload anything small enough to fit inside the shuttle itself. The Type-7 supposedly has this same feature with its side doors, which -- while we never see them open --supposedly allow the shuttle to empty its contents completely, regardless of size.

And again, these are multipurpose do-all shuttlecraft, the Starfleet equivalent of a Seahawk (which ALSO isn't used for cargo most of the time). If you're looking for the Starfleet equivalent of a Sikorski sky crane, look no further than the Danube Class, whose cargo-carrying capacity is EXPLICITLY given as one of its principle functions.

Shuttles do carry personnel a lot, in every show. But generally only across great distances or above Earth. Why the latter? Because there's so much transporter activity at UFP Capitol that Starfleet can't afford the bandwidth?

Because transporters are not a comfortable or civilized way of going anywhere unless you are in a really BIG hurry. It's the "rocket-powered express mail slot" of the 23rd century. This, after all, is a society that has normalized ballistic reentry without the aid of a spacecraft as a recreational sport (and an insertion tactic mundane enough that three green cadets can try it on their very first mission). IOW, transporters are a dangerous and extreme option for a society that doesn't mind living dangerously.

 

[Timo]

The amount of stuff we didn't see in TOS and couldn't have seen because of budget limits is so massive that this is not even a meaningful point.

It really is a point we cannot ignore, as it's the greatest force in the Trek universe! The very fact that transporters exist depends on the issue of budget limits, say.

Right, the containers just sort of tilt themselves into the cargo bay by osmosis...

We have seen how the containers arrive. We sort of see how they depart, too - as Khan's hut is a container bundle with the workbee spine still attached. We never see them handled internally beyond that point, though. But the flat floor on which some of them are stowed on the E-nil is conveniently arranged so that each individual container can be opened and its contents moved elsewhere by, apparently, wetware.

It's a space three to four meters wide

Or then one meter wide, depending on where you place the existing set.

Shuttles are EXTREMELY useful, in some cases more so than transporters. But they are designed to be versatile, robust, reliable, easy to repair. Civilian craft optimized for transporting cargo or personnel over short distances are designed with different tolerances in mind and can actually do that job much better than a Starfleet shuttlecraft for a fraction of the cost.

And now enter the transporter, which does the job even more cheaply, with less maintenance and fewer personnel, and much, much faster. And safer.

Which makes it rather understandable that 99% of personnel transfer in Trek takes place via transporter and not via helicopter, sorry, shuttle. Those clumsy ve-hi-cles apparently appeal to visiting dignitaries the way horse-drawn carriages do today...

Yes there are. We got to see several "flying forklift" type spacecraft moving crates in STID.

So, no cargo shuttles. Because as you just said yourself as regards airlocks, "shuttles" are different from harbor hardware.

Whether workbees can haul cargo from orbit to surface and back is unclear. Khan's hut proves that workbee spines can make the trip down, but we never see how this happened - workbee attached? Antigravs? Parachutes? Just a cargo transporter moving the whole bundle down, the spine being there to provide electric bussage?

The floor hatch is a easily two meters square; it's big enough to load or unload anything that will fit into the actual shuttle. There's also the question of the rear hatch, which we've never seen open in canon.

The floor hatch of the ST:ID shuttle is barely big enough for Spock to squeeze his armored shoulders through, thus no improvement over the side door. There is no rear hatch.

The big barge from STXI has two side doors and apparently a third, equally narrow aft door; that's the baby with the big floor hatch. She's apparently not embarked aboard starships, though. The other Academy shuttle, likewise not part of the ST:ID team, has a big aft door with two inset "paradrop" doors and would be excellent for cargo. Of course, all she ever hauls is people.

And again, these are multipurpose do-all shuttlecraft, the Starfleet equivalent of a Seahawk (which ALSO isn't used for cargo most of the time). If you're looking for the Starfleet equivalent of a Sikorski sky crane, look no further than the Danube Class, whose cargo-carrying capacity is EXPLICITLY given as one of its principle functions.

And that's the very point - there is no dedicated cargo craft, and transporters are the go-to solution for hauling cargo except at ports.

As for the Danube, we have never seen her carrying any cargo, and she doesn't have any doors or hatches appropriate for the role anyway - you couldn't even bring one of those silly blue barrels aboard without site-to-site transporting.

Because transporters are not a comfortable or civilized way of going anywhere unless you are in a really BIG hurry.

What's the discomfort? A shuttle is something you have to board, fighting for the window seat, sharing your seat row with the smelly Bolian, then being rocked about for untold minutes until reaching a destination where getting your craft safely parked takes ages, after which you can walk through utility spaces filled with stage smoke before you again reach civilization. A transporter just gets you from here to there.

IOW, transporters are a dangerous and extreme option for a society that doesn't mind living dangerously.

Whatever the rationale, they are the preferred option anyway, as we can see. Shuttles seem to be ignored by the society in general.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

Obviously not, since the ship has five different airlocks, a gangway, and a shuttlebay directly adjacent to a cargo bay which, as we are watching it, has several cargo haulers moving in and out of it (and even the EXISTENCE of those cargo sleds is indication enough that transporters are not the normal mode of transportation for those crates). This is yet another case of design logic AND plot logic hinting at the transporter system being far from the "do it all" transportation device Fandom makes it out to be.

Maybe some people confuse TNG with early material. In TNG every cargo hold has a transporter, be it a single large pad, or eight pad transporter. By that period, transporting a group of a few hundred people in one action is doable, I think the Enterprise-D beamed up 300 colonists in one shot. Even Voyager transported more than a hundred Klingons in one shot. I think 300 people would be about 24 tons per beaming.

Beaming every 5 seconds could bring aboard 100,000 tons in about 6 hours. 12 hours, with 10 second increments, is more realistic.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And that's the very point - there is no dedicated cargo craft

Of course there is. That's what the workbees are for. And Enterprise carries several of them in storage for when it needs to move that cargo in bulk.

As for the Danube, we have never seen her carrying any cargo

Off the top of my head, Chief O'Brien's runabout was carrying photon torpedo warheads in "Tribunal". And there are two separate occasions where the runabouts are used to transport medical and agricultural supplies.

Specifically: the runabout is DESIGNED to carry four large cargo containers in its midsection which are themselves very similar to the TMP containers carried by workbees. Not only does this canonically confirm the existence of heavy-lift auxiliary craft in the Trek universe, it's also convenient in that the Enterprise-D has at least one runabout on board.

What's the discomfort?

Doctor McCoy's constant complaints are not just him being a whiney bitch. There is a physical sensation associated with transporters that some (likely most) people find disorienting and/or deeply disturbing. At a guess, considering the energies involved, it's probably very much like the pins-and-needles sensation of having your leg fall asleep, except it happens everywhere at once and lasts for the entire transport cycle (6 seconds each way).

Most people just deal with it because they're in a hurry, or they've been beamed so many times they're desensitized to it.

Whatever the rationale, they are the preferred option anyway,

Unless the ship is in port or in a place that has a major orbital facility, and the crew is not pressed for time.

Shuttles seem to be ignored by the society in general.

Shuttles and/or airlocks have been shown to be the go-to method of boarding a docked starship in literally every incarnation of Star Trek we have ever seen. The one and ONLY time a transporter was used instead was the time that James T. Kirk boarded the Enterprise with the intention of stealing it.

Going down the list:
STXI: Most if not all of the crew boards via shuttle
STID: Most if not all of the crew boards via shuttle, as do the torpedoes
TMP: Travel pod and warp sled - Transporters are used later because their departure schedule has been advanced due to a planetary emergency
TWOK: Travel pod
TSFS: Transporter - Middle-of-the-night illegal beaming at gunpoint
TVH: Travel pod
TFF: Standard shuttle
TUC: Slightly bigger shuttle
TNG: Tasha Yar takes Picard to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft in "All Good Things."
DS9: Almost every ship that visits DS9 docks there instead of just beaming people aboard. The single notable exception is the Klingon fleet in "Way of the Warrior" which has so many ships that not all of them CAN dock (but so few Klingons actually come aboard it's possible they made a rotation out of it)
ENT: The transporters work just fine and they use shuttles ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY.

Again and again, it remains the case that transporters are the preferred method of rapid transit IN THE FIELD. They're not appropriate for port use, and probably aren't the preferred method of civilian travel either.