Star Trek

Here's a question that's been bugging me for a while. If transporter technology is so good in the Federation, why don't they use it as a weapon? You could pretty easily destroy an enemy starship's fighting potential before the battle's even started if you lock on to the command and engineering staffs of said starship with your transporter and send them directly to the core of the nearest star.

And there's nothing I've seen watching pretty much every series except Enterprise (because I'm not that fond of self-abuse) to say that it couldn't be done if your opponent isn't expecting it.

Heck, if you've got enough supporting vessels, you could pretty much send an entire enemy starship crew on a very short, hot and terminal voyage, using their transporter rooms as the dispatch mechanism.

Surely they could get their shields up first right?

Only if they've picked you up on active systems. And even then transporter beams seem to be able to bypass shields, (at least I seem to recall watching episodes showing that) If you're doing it from stealth, the first clue that your opponent has yanked you off of your comfy starship would be the infinitely short time you have to notice that you are being cooked at gas mark infinity.

edit.

Just thought of another wee wrinkle. What if in combination with the other tactic, you transport a few armed photon torpedoes straight into the middle of the enemy ship, triggered to go boom as soon as their sensors detected either enemy emissions, or their precise position in the enemy ship?

edited 28th Jun '15 8:28:49 AM by TamH70

From what I've read, boarding crews wear some sort of prevention devices so that they can't simply be beamed off the ship - it is possible similar systems exist with regard to crew members and ship components in general. Also, a transported object must first be energized and put into the pattern buffer, and the energy of a loaded torpedo could be a bit too hot to handle like that.

In general, battles involving Federation starships that aren't against a technologically equal civilization like the Klingons or Romulans tend to be curb-stomps anyway, whether won or lost. Even balanced matches usually end when one side loses its shields, so the tactic rarely comes up as useful in the first place.

No, it's firmly established that shields block transporters unless you're using some kind of phlebotinum that the Federation doesn't have. Why the Klingons and Romulans never do it, I don't know. Probably for the same reason they don't fire weapons while cloaked, which I recall being technical impossibility.

And earlier I realized there's a legitimate reason for Seven's heels. Well, it relates to someone else in the Jurassic World thread telling us to put the heel complaints to rest there. Since the heels do add height, they can make an already tall woman even taller. When Seven lost her implants, she lost a lot of the scare factor she had going for her. If she wanted to put more distance between herself and others, she might have gone for the heels to keep seeming superior.

Transporters and Replicators are the kind of magical technology that could easily overwhelm a standard sci-fi show just by its premise, but are used for more mundane tasks like a glorified taxi and instant lunch.

It is standard that shields block transporter beams, but shields also operate on certain frequencies that potentially allow them to bypass it, a la Generations.

Ways to beam through shields:

• Use a subspace transporter (these really should have become more common once invented, since they also give you a range of like light-years)

• Ascertain the refresh rate of the shields and time your beam-in accordingly

• Ascertain the energy frequency of the shields and modulate your carrier wave to match

• Have someone on the inside sabotage the shields

I wonder whether the new timeline affected stuff from before Spock arrived in the past that were already affected by stuff that would have happened after he arrived, thanks to previous time travel.

Like the last few centuries or so of Guinan's life.

edited 29th Jun '15 12:03:37 AM by KnownUnknown

That would actually be a great in-universe explanation for why anything from architecture to starship design looks different even before Spock's arrival. With all the time-travel Starfleet captains regularly get involved in, it makes sense the entire timeline would develop differently.

I think the reason why transporters may not have been used as weapons in the Star Trek shows is that barrages of photon torpedoes and fricking Beam Spam weapons are far more telegenic to the average viewer.

No real officer in a space-faring navy with the access to that technology would really care about that kind of thing. He or she would just want to win the battle as fast and as ruthlessly as possible in order to minimize the casualties on their own ships.

I compare the use of transporters in combat and other obvious tactics to the fact that all the senior officiers are those to beam down on dangerous planets: there is not logical reason to do it apart from Rule of Cool or Holding Back the Phlebotinum.

We can always Fan Wank some explanations, though.

edited 29th Jun '15 4:09:36 AM by C105

I've always assumed that transporter range was shorter than weapons range. Also, you can only send so many troops by transporter and the enemy ship will certainly have countermeasures up after detecting a transport even if you surprise them at first. Anything important will probably be very well guarded, so it's not much better than a suicide mission for the boarding party.

I still hold that First Contact changed the timeline, and the depiction of any era between 2063 and the late 2300s is different from how it would have been before the Borg temporal incursion.

I lifted that from Shatner and the Reeves-Stevenses' explanation for why the Mirror Universe is so tightly bound to the Prime universe's fate, though Enterprise asserted a completely different origin.

Well, the transporter in that Abrams film has a scarily long range. So much so that a lot of fans screamed and threw their rattles out of their prams because of it.

And I wouldn't be transporting my troops into the enemy ship, I'd be sending theirs into the heart of the nearest sun.

If I were a Starfleet captain, and more practical-minded than most of them seem to be, I'd use passive measures to analyze the enemy crew patterns, which should be possible with the technology available in the Trek verse, and then lock onto them before they could blink, obviating any chance of them raising their shields, (which does take a considerable time in the Trek verse - it isn't instantaneous by any means), using a mass transporter capability which has been seen in-show (in both the original series and in Voyager), and then they go bye bye.

If I didn't want the ship intact, I'd then transport in the armed photon torpedoes - (given that it's already been done in the Voyager episode, "Dark Frontier", there's precedent established in-series for that), and watch it blow to hell.

Sources are here:

http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Transporter

and here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek)

Thankfully Stargate's shows decided to run with the tactic of beaming in tactical bombs to blow shit up. TNG was just too . . . tame(?) for that kind of thing. "We don't use underhanded tactics to win our battles! We stare down our enemy and give them a chance!"

Everyone points out two things about Cloaking: it makes no sense that the Klingons would use it, because there is no honor in sneaking; and it makes no sense that the Federation would not use it, the only reason they don't (aside from a fantastically one-sided treaty) is because the production staff didn't think the good guys should sneak.

I think one of the things the Dominion War introduced was a projectile gun that fired bullets which could beam themselves through walls.

Klingons do a shitty of job being Klingons though. Like 90% of Worf's episodes are him dealing with that.

The Klingon's were an Expy of the USSR and (unfortunate implications ahoy!) an expy of the Yellow Peril villains most 60's TV audiences grew up with. Ditto the Romulans (expy of Red China and sneaking around in their cloaked ships).

So of course they had cloaking devices. Then the TNG staff turned the Klingons into Space Vikings and the cloaking device was kinda off.

As Bashir stated in Way of the Warrior: "Where is the honor in hiding to ambush?" Worf simply stated that there is more "honor" in victory.

edited 29th Jun '15 10:19:12 PM by TairaMai

As the favourite author of every fucking British schoolteacher of the subject of English, John Steinbeck, said:

“If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.”

Fair fights are for sparring and competitions. Only fools fight real wars fairly. The main reason the Viet Nam war went as it did was because the U.S. government held back, using restrictive rules of engagement that didn't allow our soldiers to fight efficiently or effectively in the jungle. Had the air force been allowed to bomb more effective targets, north Viet Nam would have collapsed into a broken down mess that couldn't come back to take over the South.

In-Universe the Federation doesn't have cloaking tech because of the Genesis Device. They knew that if they had both, EVERYONE would dogpile on them as quickly as possible to take such power out of their hands.

"The Pegasus" establishes that the reason the Federation doesn't cloak is because they have a treaty with the Romulans saying they won't from their very first war with them.

I don't know enough about Kirk or Janeway to really get an idea (though the one OS movie I did see implied that cloaking tech, or at least good cloaking tech, only came around when he was much older), but Picard at least wouldn't have much use for something like that in most situations because he's a diplomat and an explorer (and an idealist) and rarely attacks first because that's simply not his job.

I feel like the only thing Picard would consistently use cloaking for is to run away from bad situations (which, admittedly, the Enterprise could've used quite a few times in Next Generation).

If I were going exploring, I'd keep the cloak on most of the time, just in case something came around that we wanted to study peacefully.

So I got sent here from Ask The Tropers.

Was anyone here in the Star Trek fandom in the 80s? Did Chief O'Brien have a Fan Nickname before he was named on screen?

All right, I'm watching Way of the Warrior. This is not a drill.

Actually, I think the show became itself back at "Improbable Cause". But this is where it hits the gogogo button.