Transwarp Beaming Impact on Star Trek novels

[datalogan]

Has anyone discussed the implications of the long-distance transwarp beaming seen in the 2009 Star Trek movie?
This thing is huge!
The ability to use transporters over intergalactic distances is way beyond Federation technology we've seen in any time. This was well established in TOS episodes Assignment: Earth and The Gamesters of Triskelion, as well as TNG episodes like Bloodlines over a hundred years later.

Certainly in the new timeline created by the movies the Federation now have the technology, at least 100 years before they would otherwise reasonably get it, there are bound to be major changes.
Remember when the Federation and the Klingon Empire goes to war in Errand of Mercy? If the Federation had transwarp beaming technology they could beam warheads onto military targets from light-years away. Makes short work of the Klingons.
They same would be true of almost any threat.
Even if regular shielding works against this type of beaming, you can’t keep your shields up all the time.
Certainly it would be a devastating weapons for months/years until the foe adjusted.
And what about non-military aspects. No need for that quadrotriticale to be shipped through Deep Space Station K-7 to Sherman’s Planet where it would be unnecessarily vulnerable to Klingons like Arne Darvin when you could just transport it from a planet a few solar systems over.

And the impact on the original Roddenberry timeline is also an issue. Even if Spock Prime from the 2009 movie didn't come from the timeline we have been reading about in recent books, certainly whatever timeline he came from they had transwarp beaming invented by 2387. Say Spock Prime came from the "ST: Online" timeline and all the other books we have been reading come from a different timeline (that I will call Destiny since it's a timeline where that significant event has happen, which may not have happen in the Online timeline or Spock Prime's timeline). There is still a Montgomery Scott in the "Destiny" timeline. Probably he's close to discovering transwarp beaming.

This would/should have a huge impact on new novels put out. Scotty invents transwarp beaming and everything changes. We already have slip-stream drive, which is changing what we think of as the limits of explored space, changing the size of the Federation's grasp dramatically. And now we have Scotty's transwarp beaming.
Remember in A Singular Destiny where the Federation is trying hard to get supplies from one planet to another? Now transwarp beaming will allowing all the weary planets left trying to survive after the Dominion War and Borg Blitzkrieg to send supplies amongst themselves far easier. And certainly it will have military aspects on any conflicts between the Federation and the Typhon Pact, etc.

This is huge. I would like to see it dealt with in soon-to-be novels. Has there been any discussion about this?

 

[F. King Daniel]

We saw similar and dangerous long-range "subspace beaming" as far back as Next Gen's "Bloodlines". However, STXI's transwarp beaming wasn't just over long distance, it was from a relatively still start on Delta Vega to a ship moving away at warp 4.

I personally think it's something both versions of Scotty were experimenting with in the 2250's without success, and Scotty Prime finally got it working properly after his TNG-era resurrection.

I'd love to see other STXI concepts, like Red Matter, crop up in the novels, too. The alternate future of DS9's Millenium trilogy featured the Guardian of Forever's planet being destroyed by a Grigari "singularity bomb", which absorbed the planet and surrounding war fleets. Sounds familiar.

 

[pookha]

in trek lit an odd form of it goes back as far as blish's spock must die. it didnt work out that well either.

really we see in the movie the damn thing is pretty dangerous considering what happened to scotty.

 

[JB2005]

It could be that it was just another expression for subspace transport and has similar deletirous effects if used repeatedly...

 

[Christopher]

I'm with KingDaniel on this one. It isn't a huge, transformative revelation at all, because it's nothing we haven't already known about since "Bloodlines" was aired in 1994.

LAFORGE: We think he's using some sort of subspace transporter to beam aboard the Enterprise.
PICARD: My understanding is that such devices were impractical.
DATA: The Federation abandoned its research in the field because the technology was found to be unreliable, as well as energy intensive.
LAFORGE: In order to transport matter through subspace, you have to put it into a state of quantum flux. It's very unstable.

http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/274.htm

The only thing different about "transwarp" beaming, as the name implies, is that it allows transport from normal space to a ship in warp. (A completely different use of "transwarp" than in "transwarp drive"; the latter is using trans- in the sense of "beyond" while the beaming process is using it in the sense of "across.") But that could be seen as a logical outgrowth of the technology to beam through subspace.

So this is a technology that's known to exist, but is too dangerous to be used under most circumstances. However, in the '09 movie, given that Earth's survival was in danger, Spock Prime deemed the circumstances desperate enough to use the technology. And as with most million-to-one chances undertaken by Kirk, Spock, and friends, it worked. But that doesn't mean it would be safe or sane to use it as a matter of course.

 

[BillJ]

Best to just forget it...

 

[JB2005]

To be fair it was pretty unreliable tech...they tried to get to the Enterprise and ended up in a brewery...

Mind you, the guy who invented it being a scotsman...

 

[datalogan]

Wow, you guys are great. Thanks for the great responses. I've been talking to people about this for years now and posting about it on other sights for almost a year now and you all quickly came up with ideas that none of us had remembered.

I do remember the long-range transporter in Spock Must Die. I completely forgot about that until you reminded me. Maybe some of Scotty's transwarp/subspace beaming experimentation?

I remembered the long-range subspace transporter from Bloodlines, but I had forgotten the important lines from La Forge about how the technology was already known, unstable, unreliable, and energy intensive. That certainly takes away most of the advantages I was linking to the "new" technology. Unstable and unreliable, so you probably don't want to transport people that way regularly. Energy intensive, so even cargo transportation could be done more effectively with ships than with subspace/transwarp beaming. And known because Scotty and others had presumably experimented with the technology prior to 2369, when that episode takes place.

I guess that just leaves me back to wishing ST09 had found a better way to get Kirk back on the Enterprise besides "inventing" and using transwarp beaming. As Christopher L. Bennett points out, "this is a technology that's known to exist, but is too dangerous to be used under most circumstances. However, in the '09 movie, given that Earth's survival was in danger, Spock Prime deemed the circumstances desperate enough to use the technology. And as with most million-to-one chances undertaken by Kirk, Spock, and friends, it worked. But that doesn't mean it would be safe or sane to use it as a matter of course." I guess Scotty just happen to be on Delta Vega with a surplus of extra energy (because it's energy intensive) and luck (because it's unstable and unreliable). Annoying.

Oh, let's not forget that they used subspace beaming again later in the movie when they beamed Kirk and Spock from the Enterprise (near Saturn at the time) onto the Narada (which was in orbit of Earth at the time). Clearly extending the range of "normal" transporters used in Star Trek. And both of these uses of the "unreliable" technology have no real consequences. (The fact that Scotty transports into a water pipe is not a real consequence of the technology in use; their coordinates were just a little off because Spock was guessing on the exact location of the Enterprise.) What I mean by consequences is that no one died, or lost a body part, or got horribly mutilated, or developed genetic deficiencies (presumably). 4 people beamed and no real consequences. Seems like pretty reliable technology to me. I could argue that this is important because obviously the beaming tech that Scotty and Spock came up with here is tons better than any "unstable and unreliable" subspace beaming La Forge knew about in 2369.

But, you know what. I'm not going to. Because, really, I didn't like the technology in the first place. I was just nervous about it's implications. I want to forget about it just as much as everyone else seems to.

But even with all that being explained away by La Forge in Bloodlines, we still might have to worry about the technology as an occasional weapon. Who knows when the Typhon Pact might try and send a bomb through subspace transporter over a few light-years to hit a target. (Assuming the cold war were to heat up, etc.) Maybe that's how they took out Utopia Planetia in Zero Sum Game? When you are using long-rang transporters as a weapons, I think, you tend not to worry as much about the "unstable, unreliable, and energy intensive" aspects of it.

Also, the link between the singularity bomb in DS9's Millenium trilogy and red matter is great too. I never understood why the ST09 movie didn't just call it a singularity bomb in the first place. It better explained the science of the weapon without the incredibly hokey "red matter" crap.

 

[Pauln6]

There are several separate but linked issues. Firstly you have to separate transwarp beaming which is inherently dangerous due to the warp field from long distance, subspace beaming, which has its own issues. It is actually ludicrous that Scotty's broken down base would have had the technology and power to beam such a long distance using only a shuttle system let alone onto a ship at warp. One issue in his favour is that as they were beaming from a Federation base onto a Federation ship, they would have been able to lock onto its transponder (and the ship was about a light year away if we guess a reasonable amount of time for Kirk to wake up, walk to the base, interact with Scotty, and for Spock to work out the necessary equations).

Essentially, the odds of suceeding were so small that this should never be used again. Beaming onto the Romulan ship from a few million km away is less of an issue but I would say the issue isn't the beaming, it is the scanning. You can't just beam somebody into a ship (especially a ship that doesn't even have safety rails on it perilously narrow walkways) so you would first have to scan its interior for a safe zone (or use the ship's own transporter pad as a receiver but I'm guessing these are firewalled to prevent such incursions). This kind of scanning is detectable. Personally, I would have thought beaming a few dozen stun grenades (or real grenades) onto various locations such as the bridge would have been just as useful, less detectable, and a lot safer generally (subject to avoiding blowing up the red matter but then blasting the ship carries that risk too).

The real game changer is beaming cargo and weapons over long distances. It obviously isn't viable to travel with shields raised all the time otherwise you would only ever lower them when beaming your crew around. It may be energy intensive but you can now forget about travelling light years to deliver that vaccine. Forget about decloaking your bird of prey, just beam weapons onto your opponent's ship from a light year away.

I agree that in a 2 hour movie there were other more sensible ways to resolve this issue. If Kirk had been beamed to the base's brig under guard the ship would still have been relatively close by the time he's interacted with Spock and the issue becomes far less silly. This would have the double effect of removing the need to stumble across Spock in a random cave (shudder).

What's stranger is that Spock thinks it's worth trying to rendezvous with the fleet who are too far away to help Vulcan in time. At warp 4 any distance he travels is negligable since they will be travelling at warp 9. He's better off sending a message to the fleet and letting them come back to meet him under their own steam while he repairs his ship.

 

[Stevil2001]

For some reason, people just don't beam weapons around in Star Trek. This is canonically established in that Voyager episode where they do it to the Borg, and the Borg have never, ever seen it happen. It's just not/can't be done.

 

[Scout101]

Which is silly, because it's one of the most obvious applications of that device...

 

[Christopher]

^It's always bugged me that the Borg are shown to be unfamiliar with any strategy until Starfleet uses it, as if they've never confronted anyone else but Starfleet. Logically, they must've encountered almost every possible defense at some time in their past. Also, we've been told (in "Scorpion") that the Borg don't innovate or imagine, so how can they so quickly devise defenses to weapons they've never encountered before? That's contradictory.

So what I think is that the Borg have encountered all these things in the past, and also have assimilated knowledge of how to defend against them, but they just find it inefficient to maintain defenses against all of them at once. After all, they don't care in the least if they have to sacrifice a couple of drones or the occasional ship in order to identify what type of threat they're confronting, any more than you or I would be troubled to sacrifice a few cells so a doctor could run tests on them to identify an illness. Once they've noticed, "Hey, that scout ship in sector 32176 just got blown up by a beamed-in torpedo," only then do they access their files on Beamed-In Torpedoes, Defenses Against and activate the necessary shielding protocols until the threat is past. And then, once they're no longer being attacked by ships trying to beam torpedoes into their cubes, they dismantle the defenses until the next time they need them.

As a rule, the reason beaming weapons doesn't work is because ships in combat have shields raised. Typically the Borg don't use shields until after an initial attack, for the reasons discussed above. They don't anticipate, they only react. Other species, those who have imagination and value individual lives (if even just their own), pre-emptively raise shields before going into battle, to defend against all the destructive things that could be done with a transporter beam.

 

[Pauln6]

As a rule, the reason beaming weapons doesn't work is because ships in combat have shields raised. Typically the Borg don't use shields until after an initial attack, for the reasons discussed above. They don't anticipate, they only react. Other species, those who have imagination and value individual lives (if even just their own), pre-emptively raise shields before going into battle, to defend against all the destructive things that could be done with a transporter beam.

I agree, each Borg cube has a limited amount of local memory so maybe there is a delay while they download the information needed to defend aginst a particular threat from the hive mind archive.

I think you have hit the nail on the head with the transporting weapons issue. If the range of transporters is limited to a few hundred thousand km then shields are going to be raised normally before a ship can transport weapons - this is the traditional approach. If the range is now a few light years then that's a whole different ball park. You would have no visual confirmation of any craft that showed up on your sensors and smart enemies could lay 'transporter mines' that might not even show up at long distances at all (powered down platforms that just contain sensors, a transporter, and stock of bombs to beam at or inside any ships that enter the area and don't have the right transponder signal). Unless ships start raising shields a lot more often outside combat situations (which is not the traditional approach) they become vulnerable to long distance attack.

 

[Christopher]

I think you have hit the nail on the head with the transporting weapons issue. If the range of transporters is limited to a few hundred thousand km then shields are going to be raised normally before a ship can transport weapons - this is the traditional approach. If the range is now a few light years then that's a whole different ball park. You would have no visual confirmation of any craft that showed up on your sensors and smart enemies could lay 'transporter mines' that might not even show up at long distances at all (powered down platforms that just contain sensors, a transporter, and stock of bombs to beam at or inside any ships that enter the area and don't have the right transponder signal). Unless ships start raising shields a lot more often outside combat situations (which is not the traditional approach) they become vulnerable to long distance attack.

What you're overlooking, though, is that transporters have to scan their targets in order to lock onto them, and those scans are detectable. At close range it might be doable with a passive scan, but across light-years it would have to be an active scanning beam and a rather powerful one. Why the Enterprise sensors didn't detect the necessary scan from Delta Vega in ST'09 is unclear, but it stands to reason that if ships did start getting targeted by subspace-transported bombs, the fleet would upgrade their sensors to detect an incoming pre-beaming scan/lock and would be able to raise their shields before the beam-in began.

 

[BillJ]

Why the Enterprise sensors didn't detect the necessary scan from Delta Vega in ST'09 is unclear, but it stands to reason that if ships did start getting targeted by subspace-transported bombs, the fleet would upgrade their sensors to detect an incoming pre-beaming scan/lock and would be able to raise their shields before the beam-in began.

Maybe the 'blind-folded' part indicates there is no scan involved in trans-warp beaming...

The notion of transwarp beaming is like, trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.

Perhaps they simply target based on the course and speed of the intended target... and hope like hell there were no corrections along the way.

 

[Christopher]

^That is what the novelization of ST'09 says -- that Spock Prime extrapolated the Enterprise's most probable course, position, and speed.

 

[BillJ]

^That is what the novelization of ST'09 says -- that Spock Prime extrapolated the Enterprise's most probable course, position, and speed.

I own the novelization... but never got around to reading it. Perhaps I should.

 

[Pauln6]

Space is huge! Suggesting that they successfully beamed onto a vessel at warp because Spock correctly guessed the direction, EXACT speed, location (of the ship), and safe spot inside the ship is just bonkers. The only answer that makes any sense is that Q helped and you have no idea how much it pains me to even consider that as an explanation.

Conversely, you don't need to be precise if you are beaming weaponry. Inside the vessel is best, and it doesn't matter if the bomb ends up partially in a wall - that might even work better - but in the path of the vessel can cause damage too.

 

[BillJ]

Space is huge! Suggesting that they successfully beamed onto a vessel at warp because Spock correctly guessed the direction, EXACT speed, location (of the ship), and safe spot inside the ship is just bonkers.

I agree. But they wanted to make the film as dumb as possible for the Average Joe.

If I was the Average Joe I'd have been insulted.

 

[Christopher]

Space is huge! Suggesting that they successfully beamed onto a vessel at warp because Spock correctly guessed the direction, EXACT speed, location (of the ship), and safe spot inside the ship is just bonkers.

Yes, space is huge, but NASA and JPL are able to compute exact rendezvouses for space probes that won't reach their target points for years. Indeed, they often have to compute multiple precisely targeted encounters, where the speed and trajectory and position have to be exactly right each time, to gradually get a probe onto the necessary course to rendezvous with some distant planetary body. Space is huge, but math is precise.

And by the same token, a starship's course from one star system to another would have to conform to fairly precise parameters in order to achieve rendezvous. It wouldn't be a random thing. If you knew the coordinates and trajectories of the origin and destination worlds and the standard warp velocity that would be used in that situation (which would probably be maximum safe velocity), you could calculate the expected trajectory of the ship pretty precisely. Given that Spock's by-the-book younger self was in command, it was a safe bet that he'd be hewing closely to the textbook course and velocity. And so long as you knew the precise time of its departure (which is something Spock Prime might've gotten from his mind meld with Kirk), you could calculate its position in space at a given moment with a fair degree of precision. As for its internal configuration, that's another thing S' could've gotten from the meld.

True, getting it within a margin of error of four meters is stretching credibility, but we have to make some allowances given that we're talking about Spock here. His reputation makes us more willing to suspend disbelief, even if objectively we can see how unlikely it is. Just as we can accept that Robin Hood will always be able to split the other guy's arrow in half even though the best archer in the real world could only be that precise a fraction of the time (and it would be physically impossible to split an arrow that way anyway unless it were hollow-shafted, which is how they faked it in the Errol Flynn movie).

Conversely, you don't need to be precise if you are beaming weaponry. Inside the vessel is best, and it doesn't matter if the bomb ends up partially in a wall - that might even work better - but in the path of the vessel can cause damage too.

But you have to have advance knowledge of the vessel's course, destination, time of departure, procedures, etc. in order to be able to extrapolate its course accurately without scanning it. Spock Prime had that information at his disposal because of his familiarity with Starfleet procedure, his familiarity with local space, and his access to Kirk's memories. Someone trying to target an enemy ship from a distance probably wouldn't have access to the same kind of inside information, and thus targeting the ship by guesswork rather than scanning would probably be unachievable.