What is the Transporter Room for?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but, at least in the post-1980s Trek series they seemed to be able to beam to and from anywhere, so what was the purpose of going to stand in the transporter room?

 

You also still have to have a place where the actual transporter machinery resides and can be accessed for maintenance, etc. Site to site is also more energy intensive and carries more risk of error.

 

A receiving room for when it's not appropriate to beam people directly to the bridge, observation room, or sickbay.

 

The transporter room also provides a nice place to welcome dignitaries. Transporting straight to their quarters or the conference room wouldn't be the same.

 

I'd just as soon retcon site-to-site transport capability completely out of the Trekiverse. It's weird enough that you can beam to some place that doesn't have receiving equipment.

 

...But given that, wouldn't it appear natural to be able to beam from a place without equipment, too? I mean, you always do that when getting back to your starship anyway.

The major advantages to having a transporter room are IMHO

1) the machine, the operator and the clients are all within eyeshot of each other, and can sort out "incidents" with the minimum of fuss.
2) the transportees can get organized, gear up, agree on a story, and then beam down.
3) anybody or anything beamed up ends up in a known, secure location.

Naturally, 2 and 3 don't require a transporter room. Any room of suitable attributes would be good enough, even if transporter machinery were elsewhere. And 1 could work even if the machinery were elsewhere, and only the operator and the transportees shared a room. But it does help if the operator can access the machinery as directly as possible, and there's little or no penalty to it...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I always thought site-to-site really meant site-to-transporter room-to-site.

 

That's the way I look at it too, that the transporter room is at the center of all transporter operations. The only time it wouldn't be is if another transporter room is handling everything, IMO.

 

Site to site is two separate operations, beam into the buffer - beam to the destination. It would be the same with beaming an away team between two planetary locations. With the march of technology, the future Enterprise F may never use the transporter platform, there will be one somewhere on the ship - adjacent to the machinery - but the crew/actors will never stand on it. The landing party could beam down from a briefing room or from sick bay.

With the exception of the two pads in operations, did DS9 even have a formal transporter room?

 

Which isn't what I'm talking about. IIRC, the whole thing about transporters and shields is that the shields interfere with the transporter beams, therefore the ship has to lower shields to beam you places. This means there is some physical mechanism somewhere on the ship that is used as an emitter for confinement beams and the particle streams that transport persons and materials from one place to another.

So how the hell do you transport someone to a location INSIDE your own ship? Even assuming the confinement beams can reach through anything, this is to expect us to believe the transporter system can beam anything to anywhere in a 360 degree sphere around the transporter room. If this is the case, it defeats the entire purpose of HAVING a transporter room, since you could place the device anywhere on the ship you wanted and have all the transporters operated by a bridge officer much like weapons and shields.

 

More probably, it's anywhere around the transporter emitter, which may be located where the modelmakers and tech folks say it is, on the outer hull rather than inside the transporter room.

Doesn't change your argument, of course. The need for the transporter room would change when site-to-site is introduced. Not go away, since the staging and confinement area function would still be useful, but change. Is there any remaining functionality to the pads in the 24th century? Do they for example provide some special services that are rarely needed and thus don't stop our heroes from doing site-to-site where such services would be unavailable? Hard to tell. But we could just as well assume so, to justify the pads.

Of course, site-to-site is still very rarely done in TNG, from which we may infer it imposes special requirements on something: the hardware, the operator, the support resources. Perhaps the time has not yet come to eliminate the pads? Perhaps the technology will be mature enough in the 25th century only?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I can echo Newtype's concerns with the transporter. It's always bugged me. Even under the more plausible explanations (which still are not plausible) it would require retarded energy and probably still blow up whatever you were aiming the beam at.

I mean, a transporter is a particle beam. Those things hurt.

Unless it uses that "phased matter" stuff.

Anyway, my guess about the transporter room is, besides what others have mentioned, is to give a noncom something to do.

 

There was a site-to-site transport of a sort in the the TOS episode "The Cloud Minders". Scotty commented that Plasus was pissed off when he materialized for a half second or less on the pad during the beaming process.

 

Transporters have always been there to allow the writers more freedom to tell Trek stories... and for SFX people to have less work to do.

 

Didn't Kirk call beaming from the transporter room to engineering where the Klingons were a "site to site" transport...as in beaming from the transporter room to a site in the ship. This use is reused in TNG's The Game, when Wesley wrote a site to site transporter program that beams him from a corridor to the transporter pad.

 

And then there's the redundant safety measures incorporated into contemporary transporters (as Geordi talked about with Reg). Utilizing the pads would reduce risks, since the transporter room is a dedicated area and uses the pads to help stabilize rematerialization (just as pattern enhancers are sometimes used in the field). Site to site transport effectively removes a layer of safety precaution, since you can't control the environment where someone beams into - for example, someone wants to dump a barrel of toxic waste on your rematerializing crewmember; or maybe it's just a highly-trafficked area. If you're beaming, you have no control over environmental conditions.

 

The word used in "Day of the Dove" was "intraship transport".

And Spock expressed his concerns like this:

Which makes some sense, but not a lot. If transporters aren't routinely capable of pinpoint accuracy, then how can our heroes avoid being materialized ankle deep in local bedrock? Why should vertical accuracy be different from horizontal accuracy?

Probably Spock was merely expressing a minor concern rather than a major one, but didn't have the verbal flexibility to tell one from the other...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The thing Scotty said in XI might be a clue: "never transported from 2 locations onto one pad before". So I guess that's not an easy thing to do. Therefore, the members of an away team, rather than being picked up from multiple locations on the ship, gather at the pads and get sent like a single package.

 

Makes sense. Even if the ship has targeting sensors to spare, and can track every single crewman individually (sounds likely), it might be that other parts of the transporter will have difficulty coping with transports from different locations. After all, if Abe beams up from Chicago and Buzz from New York, Charlie at the controls will have to manage two different sets of state of motion. Abe and Buzz will have different linear and angular momenta wrt to the ship, different distances of beaming, perhaps different states of motion vs. the planet's surface, too (Buzz might be driving or something). Some of the hardware might never be able to cope with that, at least in the earlier eras.

Timo Saloniemi