Why are transporters never used "En Mass"?

[WATCH-MAN]

[...]Romulans intended to take over Vulcan with only around 2000 troops (they said over 2000) so it's likely be between 2001 and 2999 either way that's pitifully low number of troops which suggests large ground battles between huge armies aren't really a thing in trek.

How many Romulans do you think were on board those three ships?

The Romulans themselves did not gave a number.

• • • • • • SELA:
        Actually, three Vulcan ships, Captain. The Enterprise is only aware of the one we stole from Qualor Two. We have been following your investigation. It has forced us to make some minor changes. One of them, a message sent in your name, ordering them to stay where they are.
        
        • • PICARD:
        The moment those Vulcan ships appear in the Neutral Zone, the Enterprise will move to intercept.
        
        • • SELA:
        In that event, the Enterprise will be given more important matters to attend to. In the meantime, Ambassador Spock will be telling his people to welcome the peace envoy. And when they do, our forces will seize control before anyone realises what has happened.
        
        • • PICARD:
        Do you seriously believe that the Federation will not immediately intervene?
        
        • • SELA:
        Of course it will, and we're fully prepared for it. But we will be there, entrenched, and it will be very difficult to get us out once we are. Reunification will become a fact of life.

Only after the three Vulcan ships were destroyed by an Romulan Warbird, LaForge said that there were over two thousand Romulan troops on board those ships.

• • • • • • LAFORGE:
        Romulan warbird decloaking alongside the Vulcan ships.
        
        • • RIKER:
        Red alert.
        
        • • RIKER:
        Advise the warbird to withdraw from Federation space, and tell them to leave the Vulcan ships where they are.
        
        • • WORF:
        The warbird is powering up its forward disruptor array.
        
        • • RIKER:
        Ready phasers.
        
        • • LAFORGE:
        There were over two thousand Romulan troops on board those ships.
        
        • • TROI:
        They destroyed their own invasion force.
        
        • • RIKER:
        Rather than let them be taken prisoner. Stand down Red alert.

As English isn't my native language, I had to look up what the exact meaning of troop as the singular of troops - not trooper - is.

According to the Oxford dictionary, troop is a noun and means

1. (troops) Soldiers or armed forces: UN peacekeeping troops (as modifier troop) troop cuts
2. A cavalry unit commanded by a captain.
   1. A unit of artillery and armoured formation.
   2. A group of three or more Scout patrols.
3. A group of people or animals of a particular kind: a troop of musicians

According to Wikipedia, a troop " is a military sub-subunit, originally a small formation of cavalry, subordinate to a squadron. In many armies a troop is the equivalent element to the infantry section or platoon."

Again according to Wikipedia, infantry section consists of 8 - 12 soldiers and a platoon of 15 - 30 soldiers.

If this is correct - and a Romulan troop consists of e.g. twenty soldiers, two thousand Romulan troops would amount to fourty-thousand soldiers.

But maybe a Romulan troop consists of more than of what a typical terrestrial infantry section or platoon consists.

[Prometheus Unbound]

The most we know they can do is 600 people in Star Trek Insurrection (planned) or possibly more for the entire crew of a sona ship which is about twice the size of a sovereign class ship. So could be 400, could be a thousand, no idea.

Although as I understand it, the 400 and 600 people were a large number of individually small transports, in parallel across many transporter rooms, each of which cycled several times.[/quote]

The 600 people were all meant to be beamed up at once.

They managed many hundreds of Sona later on in the film (when they beam Ruafu and his entire crew to the transport ship at once). I was saying we don't know the crew compliment for sure - though the ship is nearly twice the size of the Enterprise E so....

All we know in insurrection is the *plan* was to beam up 600 people simultaneously. Then later they beamed up an unknown number simultaneously (but would be in the 100s or low thousands, given the size of the ship?)

[Prometheus Unbound]

If this is correct - and a Romulan troop consists of e.g. twenty soldiers, two thousand Romulan troops would amount to fourty-thousand soldiers.

You're not wrong about the words - LaForge should have said "2,000 troopers" if he was referring to how many people there were. However in common parlance, "troops" is used as "troopers" - "we got a squad of troops 5 miles away" ... which makes no military sense but 99% of people will know what it means anyway.

I like your way of looking at it - that a Troop could be more than 1 person - because yeah, 2,000 is pathetic. Even if the Vulcans are pacifists (and we know from Ent they will use deadly force), 2,000 is pathetic. A couple of starships should be able to "rescue" Vulcan from that.

Now if it's 2,000 TROOPS of troopers, and it's 40,000 soldiers, as a first strike that ain't half bad. Having 40,000 armed soldiers beam into your capital without warning - yeah that'd work.

[Crazedwraith]

[...]Romulans intended to take over Vulcan with only around 2000 troops (they said over 2000) so it's likely be between 2001 and 2999 either way that's pitifully low number of troops which suggests large ground battles between huge armies aren't really a thing in trek.

How many Romulans do you think were on board those three ships?
The Romulans themselves did not gave a number.

As English isn't my native language, I had to look up what the exact meaning of troop as the singular of troops - not trooper - is.

According to the Oxford dictionary, troop is a noun and means

1. (troops) Soldiers or armed forces: UN peacekeeping troops (as modifier troop) troop cuts
2. A cavalry unit commanded by a captain.
   1. A unit of artillery and armoured formation.
   2. A group of three or more Scout patrols.
3. A group of people or animals of a particular kind: a troop of musicians

According to Wikipedia, a troop " is a military sub-subunit, originally a small formation of cavalry, subordinate to a squadron. In many armies a troop is the equivalent element to the infantry section or platoon."

Again according to Wikipedia, infantry section consists of 8 - 12 soldiers and a platoon of 15 - 30 soldiers.

If this is correct - and a Romulan troop consists of e.g. twenty soldiers, two thousand Romulan troops would amount to fourty-thousand soldiers.

But maybe a Romulan troop consists of more than of what a typical terrestrial infantry section or platoon consists.

I like this explain away. Especially in a Vs context. It's the same logic that explains the 3 million 'units' of clones not being 3 million individual troopers in Star Wars.

[Solauren]

Simply put, it's a matter of computer capacity.

Transporter units take several seconds to function, and have a limited capacity. IIRC from the support material, 6 - 10 people is the normal max for a transporter. The only ships I could see having that level of transporter function in canon would be planetary assault ships.

Heck, even the old FASA Star Trek RPG (which the authors had been told was canon, and were reassured that for a long time), a Klingon Assault Transporter could only transport 2000 or so troops down in 10 - 15 minutes (mind you, that included support material, weapons, and a mix of tanks....)

So, for the Romulans to clear out 2000 or so troops, they'd need 600+ transporter rooms set up to do that. During which time, one of their state of the art ships would be without shields, and very vulnerable to an attack from the Federation flagship.

They had a choice: Abandon those ships, blowing them up in the processed (and later going 'rogue operation, we executed them, you can thank us later'), or try to evacuate them while trying to fight of the Enterprise (and probably reinforcements from Vulcan) without shields.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Where are you getting that it's crazy computer capacity?

If you're referring to the DS9 episode, it's because their patterns were ACTIVE in the buffer - it was a mid-cycle transport that got put on hold. Their original ship blew up. The transporters hadn't been fed the info and had no where to receive it - it was if they were in RAM, so to speak. So it created a ... .TMP or .DMP file of them which used up all the computer's memory (HDD) space - all other systems pretty much went off line.


Voyager's had .. 47? (it's usually 47 in Trek) people in suspended transporter stuffs for hours at a time - just "suspended" not "active". Don't ask me the difference.

At no point has CPU power or something similar been an issue stated with transporters - I mean look, a 6 man pad can beam up 2 whales and 400 metric tons of water. That's a lot more than 6 people

And we've seen them transport 36 people at once using an old cardassian supply ship in Return to Grace.

Scotty beamed up 47 out of 150 people in one go using the Enterprise B (and that wasn't even working properly).


You don't need 600 transporter rooms to beam 2000 people in 15 minutes! lol?

Utilizing Site to Site methods, 2000 people, 12 seconds a pop, 120 at a time (Enterprise D) that's 200 seconds if the computer's set to automate it.

And that's just an exploration ship designed to evacuate 5,000 or 10,000 people at max capacity. A fully designed Transporter Transport Ship (heh) should be able to do 1000 at a time or more I'd have thought??

Runabouts only have two "pads", but can beam up 5 or 6 people at once.

[Prometheus Unbound]

It's also one of the more energy-intensive things a ship can do, I'd figure. Doing 1-8 at a time is no big deal. Doing thousands is a huge drain even on a warp core.

you can get single use transporters that will fit in your hand. Scaling that up, I don't think a warp core would have stress doing it. Not compared to warping spacetime.

[Prometheus Unbound]

in "11001001" was it ever stated how many crew members were on board the E-D when they evacuated? It's possible a significant portion of the crew were actually in the Starbase on shore leave and there was only a skeleton crew on board the E-D.

Also. wasn't there a gangway connecting the E-D to the Starbase?

No it wasn't and yes there was. But you note my maths is based on a full crew (1000 give or take) and 20 transporter rooms (as mentioned in the episode clip).

6 seconds a cycle (12 in a site to site transport), 20 rooms, 120 pads, 1000 people.


50 seconds. That's what the ship is capable of. Obviously people need to GET to the transporter rooms. But even using site to site, that's 100 seconds to clear the ship. That ain't bad.

[Elheru Aran]

It's also one of the more energy-intensive things a ship can do, I'd figure. Doing 1-8 at a time is no big deal. Doing thousands is a huge drain even on a warp core.

you can get single use transporters that will fit in your hand. Scaling that up, I don't think a warp core would have stress doing it. Not compared to warping spacetime.

I think it's obvious the issue with transporters isn't energy use, it's computer processing ability. In an emergency situation where they have to transport a large number of people out, I imagine the computer pauses or completely stops a large number of nonessential processes in order to free up RAM (so to speak) for the amount of data that 'transport.100.people.exe' takes up. So to speak.

[Prometheus Unbound]

I think it's obvious the issue with transporters isn't energy use, it's computer processing ability. In an emergency situation where they have to transport a large number of people out, I imagine the computer pauses or completely stops a large number of nonessential processes in order to free up RAM (so to speak) for the amount of data that 'transport.100.people.exe' takes up. So to speak.

But when has that ever been a problem?

One DS9 episode which had "active" patterns (i.e. they were conscious) as they were not fully dematerialised when their ship blew up. DS9's pads took over and completed it but something something (power loss? something exploded?) and it had to dump their *active* patterns into the computer to simulate their brain functions.


Other episodes/films have showed:

Voyager using people in "transporter suspension" (not active - and I keep making this distinction because it's important and I'll go into more in a bit) - it was a colony of telepaths plus all the vulcans and betazoids on the crew in Counterpoint. It was at least a cargo bay full of people and I think it was 47.

ST4: They beamed up 400 tons of water plus two whales. In a Klingon scout ship. On Minimal power. On rebuilt from scratch by scotty systems with half federation and half klingon tech. On a ship designed for 12 people. 400 tons of water (well, 50 feet by 12 feet by something feet - that's a HELL of a lot more atoms / matter that the computer had to account for and that did fine.

And again - single use hand held transporters are a thing - if something the size of your hand can hold a human pattern and beam it end to end - a ship that's 400 meters long can fit 100,000 of those units of memory and power or CPU or whatever - and keep them in systems that are more than single use.

No - it's not a power thing, it's not a CPU thing and it's not a memory thing. The only reason we don't see it is we don't ever see the need. The most we've ever needed to see was 600 people in Insurrection - and it wasn't approached as a problem, it was just a throw away line - it's no big deal.



I keep saying active and suspended because Scotty made the distinction in Relics. He took his pattern (and Matt Franklin's) - the active pattern, and locked them into some sort of diagnostic loop which made it "suspend" them until the power ran out - for 75 years.

Active patterns seem to take up lots of memory or CPU - see Our Man Bashir (DS9). Normal suspended operations (most of the time people freeze in transport) - the actual pattern can ... well, how much does a Replicator pattern take up? Or a full consciousness? Moriarty's took up something the size of a tennis ball. And the Countess Regina too. Data's is a chip in his head. Storing a "fully functioning consciousness" doesn't seem to be a capacity or CPU issue.

And power? Raw power? Well they have handheld units. Single use, yes, but again tennis ball sized... on a ship that's 400m long, it can fit millions of them for "power".


It's not CPU, it's not memory and it's not power.


It's not not needed. Except for Federation Troop Transports which can carry 30,000 people (or groups of 3-6 of them can carry 30,000 people). I'm sure those do have lots of transporters - why on earth wouldn't they?

[biostem]

The "Transporters as long-term storage" thing just doesn't make sense to me - the amount of infrastructure you'd need to ensure proper integrity of the patern over that long of a duration would more simply be met with a cryo-stasis system. I mean, Scotty basically needed an entire ship's systems to do it, and then that was just for himself.

Now, if the pattern for non-living material is simpler enough, and the mass you are trying to store was far in excess of the necessary transporter equipment, then it may pay off - if 10 tons of transporter equipment could reliably store 1000 tons of non-living goods, then it may be worthwhile.

[Elheru Aran]

IIRC, when it was done with Scotty, he didn't have any other means on hand to build a cryo-stasis unit, and that's assuming he knew how to do so in the first place; they were in a bad place and he didn't have any other means of saving himself and his mate. With Bashir, Worf et al. on DS9, it was an emergency move due to the peculiarities of the holodeck.

As for ST4: The majority of that transport was water, which would've been treated as a reasonably inert organic substance. No mind or memory to preserve. Just brute-force atoms, same-ish as a replicator. Whales, while big, are also a lot more discrete matter than humans are proportionally; their minds and memory would be smaller, and less complex to store while transporting.

My basic hypothesis is that the primary difficulty of matter transportation is in preserving the mind and 'soul' (for lack of a better term) of the person transported-- their accumulated memories, experience, and psychology. I have no idea how they detect and code that, but I can see it taking up a pretty good chunk of active CPU space. The rest of the body is merely meat and bones for the most part and could be disassembled and reassembled with considerably less care.

With this in mind, the largely self-maintaining computers of Federation starships likely perform a certain amount of processor prioritization when transporter activity is detected. The course of a normal transport is nothing spectacular-- a number of people are transported from A to B, processor cycles spike momentarily, everything goes normally after that point.

Even when transporting a large number of people, prioritization still helps keep other things going on board the ship, as do independent processors throughout the ship. The key point is that they're being transported rapidly, and while processor usage spikes, it's very rapid spiking that doesn't last long.

It's when you see transporter patterns being held for a long time that you see issues spring up. 'Our Man Bashir' and 'Relics' probably being the best example there. I frankly can't speak about the Voyager example as I've never seen that. Anyway, we've all experienced that massive slowdown when you start a high-capacity program and everything else on the CPU hits a wall. I submit that in extended situations, you see a similar consumption of CPU capacity that then requires either large amounts of computer space to absorb the slowdown or an extended power supply that permits the situation to be worked out without 'crashing' and losing the patterns.

As for the actual size/amount/capacity/whatever of Federation memory technology... DS9 isn't a Federation station, it's quite possible that Cardassian/Bajoran technology is simply not up to Federation spec. Relics happened with a craft that was generations older than the Enterprise-D. Cant' comment on other incidents. Data is a special case; highly advanced home-brew technology crafted by a near-literal mad scientist. He's also an android, a mechanical being, and similarly holodeck programs that become self-aware are also (more or less) non-human. It's quite possible that their programmed 'minds' take up less space than organic 'minds' because they're simply organized in a far more efficient manner-- less wetware, less spread-about functions.

Frankly though what this devolves to is pretty much just straight up speculation on the specific capabilities of Federation computers, something that's never truly expanded on in either the films or the shows. Obviously they're capable of handling large amounts of speedy transportations on an emergency basis, and obviously they can handle regular transports without any but the occasional issue. The really tricky situation is when they have to maintain transporter patterns for an extended period, rather than dematerializing at point A and re-materializing at point B almost immediately afterwards.

[biostem]

There was also that episode of Voyager, while not the exact same scenario, where the EMH doctor uploaded a woman's mind, who was suffering from the phage, into the computer, while he worked on her body... while that was apparently that system's intended use, he had to keep her in the computer longer than the system was meant for, and she started to suffer some degradation...

[Simon_Jester]

I think it's obvious the issue with transporters isn't energy use, it's computer processing ability. In an emergency situation where they have to transport a large number of people out, I imagine the computer pauses or completely stops a large number of nonessential processes in order to free up RAM (so to speak) for the amount of data that 'transport.100.people.exe' takes up. So to speak.

But when has that ever been a problem?

One DS9 episode which had "active" patterns (i.e. they were conscious) as they were not fully dematerialised when their ship blew up. DS9's pads took over and completed it but something something (power loss? something exploded?) and it had to dump their *active* patterns into the computer to simulate their brain functions...

No - it's not a power thing, it's not a CPU thing and it's not a memory thing. The only reason we don't see it is we don't ever see the need. The most we've ever needed to see was 600 people in Insurrection - and it wasn't approached as a problem, it was just a throw away line - it's no big deal.

Duration seems to be more of a problem than scale. Beaming lots of people or hundreds of tons of random seawater or huge animals is at least doable, but that doesn't automatically translate into keeping stuff recorded in storage forever.

Active patterns seem to take up lots of memory or CPU - see Our Man Bashir (DS9). Normal suspended operations (most of the time people freeze in transport) - the actual pattern can ... well, how much does a Replicator pattern take up? Or a full consciousness? Moriarty's took up something the size of a tennis ball. And the Countess Regina too. Data's is a chip in his head. Storing a "fully functioning consciousness" doesn't seem to be a capacity or CPU issue.

Consciousness may be much easier to store in an efficient program than in an inefficient format that has to physically store the location and composition of every cell in your brain, plus its current electrical state, in enough detail that you can cycle through a transporter hundreds if not thousands of times without people noticing the difference.

I'm pretty sure Data's CPU doesn't function by emulating every atom in a human brain (or worse yet a whole human body).

[Prometheus Unbound]

Duration seems to be more of a problem than scale. Beaming lots of people or hundreds of tons of random seawater or huge animals is at least doable, but that doesn't automatically translate into keeping stuff recorded in storage forever.

why would they want to record stuff forever?

I'm just replying to the OP - "why don't we see transporters used "en mass"" ? - and I'm pointing out we do, several times, and know they're capable of it. Then added some maths to back up what I said.

Consciousness may be much easier to store in an efficient program than in an inefficient format that has to physically store the location and composition of every cell in your brain, plus its current electrical state, in enough detail that you can cycle through a transporter hundreds if not thousands of times without people noticing the difference.

I'm afraid I have no idea where this tangent is going

I say again - the only time we've heard of an issue of resources stopping beaming (other than when the power is out, I mean) is Our Man Bashir - which was a big outlier as I've outlined above. Voyager can happily keep tens of people in transporter suspension for hours on end without issues. There's no CPU issue storing those people. There are no memory issues. There are no power issues.

Other than Our Man Bashir. Which was not a normal beam situation.

[Simon_Jester]

Duration seems to be more of a problem than scale. Beaming lots of people or hundreds of tons of random seawater or huge animals is at least doable, but that doesn't automatically translate into keeping stuff recorded in storage forever.

why would they want to record stuff forever?

Others proposed it.

I commented on it.

Consciousness may be much easier to store in an efficient program than in an inefficient format that has to physically store the location and composition of every cell in your brain, plus its current electrical state, in enough detail that you can cycle through a transporter hundreds if not thousands of times without people noticing the difference.

I'm afraid I have no idea where this tangent is going

Data's brain can store the consciousness of an android as smart as a human. This does not prove that a computer the size of Data's brain can store the transporter pattern of a human being (or an android).

If anything it would prove the opposite. A computer that stores the computer that stores Data's consciousness would have to be more powerful than Data's onboard computer. Perhaps orders of magnitude more powerful... and it is already implied that Data's computer brain is in advance of normal Federation hardware.

I say again - the only time we've heard of an issue of resources stopping beaming (other than when the power is out, I mean) is Our Man Bashir - which was a big outlier as I've outlined above. Voyager can happily keep tens of people in transporter suspension for hours on end without issues. There's no CPU issue storing those people. There are no memory issues. There are no power issues.

As I recall, Voyager also has some kind of exotic advanced computer systems not found in other Starfleet vessels of the other TV series...

[Prometheus Unbound]

As I recall, Voyager also has some kind of exotic advanced computer systems not found in other Starfleet vessels of the other TV series...

It had bio neural gel packs which replaced some of the isolinear rods. It speeds up data transfer (essentially a bigger BUS). Doesn't help with computation.

And never brought up as a reason they can suspend people in transport.

[Panashe]

In TOS Day of the Dove, it was possible to separate Humans from Klingons while beaming the group aboard and materialize only the Humans, while "storing" the Klingons in some fashion in the transporter mechanism. Chekov seemed to imply that the Klingons could be stored indefinately.

In Errand of Mercy, from eight Klingon vessels in orbit, "... several hundred men have appeared near the citadel." This statement came less than a minute after the Klingons entered orbit.

While never seen, supposedly the TOS Enterprse had a number of emergency transporters intended for ship evacuation, with more than 6 pads. Going from the FJ blueprints of 134 total pads, you could beam down a 1000 soldiers in 8 transport cycles. Approximately 3 or 4 minutes? Not bad for a single ship.

[Prometheus Unbound]

In TOS Day of the Dove, it was possible to separate Humans from Klingons while beaming the group aboard and materialize only the Humans, while "storing" the Klingons in some fashion in the transporter mechanism. Chekov seemed to imply that the Klingons could be stored indefinately.

In Errand of Mercy, from eight Klingon vessels in orbit, "... several hundred men have appeared near the citadel." This statement came less than a minute after the Klingons entered orbit.

While never seen, supposedly the TOS Enterprse had a number of emergency transporters intended for ship evacuation, with more than 6 pads. Going from the FJ blueprints of 134 total pads, you could beam down a 1000 soldiers in 8 transport cycles. Approximately 3 or 4 minutes? Not bad for a single ship.

12 seconds per transport cycle in TOS - so 8 cycles ... 90 seconds, give or take?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Re: the Holoship in Insurrection, 2 things that I must point out:

1- The ship was equipped with 14 long-range transporters.
2- It was just the bridge crew that was beamed over- when they realised something was wrong it didn't take the remaining crew long to storm the bridge.

The thing with the transporter suspension seen in Counterpoint is that after repeated use, some of the individuals' health began to deteriorate in the form of cellular degradation, so it became clear that they had to find another method.

Scotty's method for hiding in the transporter was only feasible because of something called a "phase inducer", one of which had failed, meaning the other pattern couldn't be rematerialised.

With "our man Bashir", it was stated that the crew's physical bodies ended up on the holodeck, while their neural patterns were complex enough to require the computer capacity of the entire station.