Why can't the transporter be a weapon?

[Vandervecken]

A strong enough one should simply be a disintegration beam. You could set for maximum dispersion, as was done with Nomad. It would have the advantage of annihilating an entire ship/object in a single hit, all the time. It'd just have to get through shields, like any weapon. Plus, if you wanted to capture the enemy and later rematerialize them, you could, although maybe not the entire crew successfully, but it's a battle, you're not sending love notes, who cares?

And why stop at ships? How about destroying moons, whole planets, even stars? In theory, all you need is enough power, right? And maybe you don't even need that--I'm not even sure the transporter would be so energy expensive, even on the titanic level of a star.

And I can't see any reason at all why it can't be weaponized against individuals, but this is hardly needed--phasers are probably better at the personal weapon level.

So--why not?

 

[urbandefault]

Something like a Tantalus Field?

 

[Amaris]

A strong enough one should simply be a disintegration beam. You could set for maximum dispersion, as was done with Nomad. It would have the advantage of annihilating an entire ship/object in a single hit, all the time. It'd just have to get through shields, like any weapon. Plus, if you wanted to capture the enemy and later rematerialize them, you could, although maybe not the entire crew successfully, but it's a battle, you're not sending love notes, who cares?

And why stop at ships? How about destroying moons, whole planets, even stars? In theory, all you need is enough power, right? And maybe you don't even need that--I'm not even sure the transporter would be so energy expensive, even on the titanic level of a star.

And I can't see any reason at all why it can't be weaponized against individuals, but this is hardly needed--phasers are probably better at the personal weapon level.

So--why not?

Because it wasn't in the script, and every episode of Star Trek would have been 30 seconds long:

"Romulans attacking, sir!"
"Transport a section of their shields away."
"Done, sir."
"Transport their Commander into space."
"Done, sir."
"Transport their life support module into their warp core."
"Done, sir... the Romulans have been defeated."
"Warp us out."

[end credits]

 

[dub]

I can see a TMP-like transporter accident being studied and then used as a method of a long, painful execution in the mirror universe.

 

[Richard Baker]

It has been used as a weapon before- in 'E-Squared' they used it to remove selected parts of the alternate Enterprise crippling it in combat. It also had the advantage of keeping things usable instead of just destroying them so they had leverage to negotiate.
Voyager also used it as a weapon of sorts, beaming a live photorp on to a Borg vessel destroying it from the inside.

Beaming entire ships would take an incredible amount of energy they way things have been established, but a special vessel with a dedicated warp core just for the high power transporter and a massive buffer would be an interesting combat option. One of the limitations is that people have to beam at the quantum level to be safe, but if your goal is to just wreck havoc then who says you can't just beam random pieces of crew and structures away?

 

[Commishsleer]

I think its a mistake to make transporters so powerful in Star Trek.

Since in later series and in nuTrek you can practically beam from anywhere to anywhere I wonder why you know the Klingons or Ferengi or Romulans etc don't just beam bombs or a deadly virus aboard the Enterprise in order to win.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The same reason they don't use any of it's other abilities - like xeroxing an army, curing all illness, de-ageing, moving through time and parallel universes, beaming super-long-range...

 

[Vandervecken]

The same reason they don't use any of it's other abilities - like xeroxing an army, curing all illness, de-ageing, moving through time and parallel universes, beaming super-long-range...

The super-long range think is nuTrek and Scotty's own invention; even in nuTrek it's not yet common tech...not really considering it here, I was thinking of the main ST universe, although, as dub wrote, it could be a torture/execution device in the mirror universe, and heck, I'd think the Terran Empire would see its weapon potential right off.

The other uses of the transporter DO seem like cheats to me, but this thing is actually first a disintegration device, and second a re-integration device. (You'd better believe I'd never use it, either. I'm not keen on being killed and then replaced by a similar-to-the-nth-degree copy every time I travel.)

 

[T'Girl]

Janeway beamed a torpedo into a Borg ship, but only beamed a torpedo once in the entire seven year series.

 

[Anwar]

The other ship is always moving, and has shields that usually block or interfere with the Transporters. It's hard to use the transporter on something so big and something that's always moving as well.

The torpedo trick worked because the shields were down on that Borg probe, and also it was a tiny probe ship.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The same reason they don't use any of it's other abilities - like xeroxing an army, curing all illness, de-ageing, moving through time and parallel universes, beaming super-long-range...

The super-long range think is nuTrek and Scotty's own invention; even in nuTrek it's not yet common tech...not really considering it here, I was thinking of the main ST universe, although, as dub wrote, it could be a torture/execution device in the mirror universe, and heck, I'd think the Terran Empire would see its weapon potential right off.

Very similar long range "subspace beaming" was used in TNG's "Bloodlines", it too was just a software mod. The Dominion used it too, as did myriad TOS races (and in nuTrek, it's an invention of Scotty, post resurrection in "Relics", given to his younger self by Spock)

 

[urbandefault]

Scotty did sort of use the transporter as a weapon against the Klingons in "Tribbles."

 

[Vandervecken]

The other ship is always moving, and has shields that usually block or interfere with the Transporters. It's hard to use the transporter on something so big and something that's always moving as well.

The torpedo trick worked because the shields were down on that Borg probe, and also it was a tiny probe ship.

Isn't it equally hard to hit a moving ship with phasers? Of course I accept that shields need to be pierced/brought down, as with almost any Trek ship-to-ship weapon.

And couldn't a transporter beam have a wide-field setting? (very wide)

Also, I see Trek ships fire on each other from fairly static positions often.

And if you COULD use it against something like a star or planet, movement would not come into play at all. And with a number of planets, just transporting out deep section of crust would be a huge blow, if there's active magma beneath (and there would be on most class Ms).

 

[PhoenixClass]

Well, with a planet, if the goal is to just cause massive destruction, it seems inefficient in time and energy to use a transporter. There are plenty of powerful explosives that can be used to wreck a planet.

Hell, Earth has tens of thousands of them sitting around already. And that's with our level of technology. A matter/antimatter explosion is even more powerful, not to mention whatever quantum torpedoes do.

 

[Kevman7987]

All I know is that I wish they used the transporter and/or the fact they're in space as a weapon. Think about how less often the Enterprise would have been hijacked if they either just beamed the boarders into space or opened a door and let them be blown out of the ship?

That's where Star Trek misused their technology, they ignored the most violent applications. Way more often enemy aliens should've died from sudden decompression. They needed to die that way.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Star Trek had a habit of writing itself into corners where if technology available in one episode was used in other episodes or if the full implications of that technology were considered, it would break the universe.

There is another thread that points out you can pretty much destroy a planet just by taking a big rock and hurtling it at the planet at near light speeds.

Also, take Rom's self replicating mines. Just set them to replicate themselves every millisecond.

This would be kind of like writing a program with the code:
while(true) fork();

Only your CPU is the universe.

 

[Ro_Laren]

It is a weapon in a way... you can always beam your enemy into space (as long as their shields are down)!

 

[maneth]

Something very like a transporter was used in A Taste of Armageddon to simply disintegrate people and kill them that way.

 

[Melakon]

They resembled transporters in appearance, but we don't really know how they worked, except for Kirk theorizing it was a disintegration machine. There could have been a trap door in there dropping them to the sea for all we knew.

Oh yeah, Anan calls them disintegration machines earlier in the show. I just watched that last week, and it's one of my favorites. Memory loss is a terrible thing as one gets older.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

You could set for maximum dispersion, as was done with Nomad.

Nomad was simply beamed into deep space:

[Transporter room]

NOMAD: Error.
KIRK: Scotty, set the controls for deep space. Two ten, mark one.
SCOTT: Aye, sir.
NOMAD: Faulty!
Ready, sir?
NOMAD: Faulty!
KIRK: Nomad, you are imperfect!
NOMAD: Error. Error.
KIRK: Exercise your prime function.
NOMAD: Faulty! Faulty! Must sterilise. Sterilise,
KIRK: Now!
SCOTT: Energising.
(They observe the satisfying explosion on a monitor.)

You're thinking of Redjac/Hengist in "Wolf in the Fold":

[Transporter room]

KIRK: Deep space. Full power. Widest angle of dispersion. Maintain.
KYLE: No need to get excited, Captain. I'll do it.
(They lay Hengist on the pad.)
KIRK: You do it, Spock.
HENGIST: Everybody die. You'll all suffer.
(He is beamed out.)
KYLE: You didn't have to shove me, Mister Spock. I'd have gotten round to it.
(McCoy and Scott enter, with big grins.)