JamesStaley wrote:Okay, who posted the video? Thanks for that, but I need story background: WHY are they having to abandon ship?
Alien hackers have screwed with the ship's computer and the warp core is about to explode.
And i notice that they are doing it in a fairly timely, UNHURRIED manner. Crewmen are PATIENTLY standing in line, waiting their turn to be beamed out, so whatever is happening does not have the stress of an "OH MY GOD, THE SHIP IS SINKING, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF" moment (as witnessed aboard the Rodger Young in the Starship Troopers movie).
Agreed, and that's a good thing. Discipline is very good in an evacuation. Especially an evacuation where you're beaming people quickly because it's much harder to beam running people than people who are standing still calmly.
And in the final analysis, it is a hallmark of high military discipline that your troops
stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill...
Guess that when the chips are down, in some major ways Starfleet
isn't an unwarlike unprofessional service.
When I say "En Mass", I mean 500 or more at a time? Does the federation not have troop transports for moving large numbers of men and getting them to where they need to go in a hurry?
The need never or hardly ever arises in the plots of the episodes- I can't think of a single plot that would have gone drastically better if they'd had such a transport ship available. As a rule, you don't
need to beam 500 people simultaneously. Why would you need to do that? As noted, if you're in a situation where you need your reinforcements this second, rather than five or ten seconds from now, you have grossly screwed up your troop-teleporting tactics.
It's like how a WWII paratroop landing doesn't
actually involve ten thousand men jumping out of planes at literally the exact same minute and all hitting the ground at once. The landings are timed and phased, pathfinders go down first, different planes hit different targets at different times. And (this part is important) the troops are
supposed to drop in designated assembly areas so they can rally, sort out the chain of command, and launch organized attacks against the enemy's troop concentrations. You do NOT want to drop your troops literally right into the middle of the enemy where they will start firing and being fired upon from the moment they land. And if your troops are going to take a few minutes to sort out their tactics anyway, it doesn't hurt much to beam teams down sequentially rather than in parallel.
Granted, Starfleet does that kind of thing on a squad level with its away teams, strategically beaming redshirts down so they can aim phasers at the backs of their enemies and whatnot. But doing it with a small fire team is a far cry from doing it with a whole battalion. Try it on that scale and you've got a recipe for complete chaos.
JamesStaley wrote:Precisely my point, Simon-Jester. I'm talking about a 100% PURE MILITARY TRANSPORT who's job it is to fairy Fed troops to whereever they've been told to "Take a stand and die there", not just a large Ent-D type ship with a lot of transporter rooms for beaming six people off at a time, but something that can move PLATOONS/REGIMENTS/DIVISIONS at a time + all of their support gear and weapons. I'm talking about an entire transporter DECK, where everything that is on it is beamed down (and if you're NOT supposed to go......don't be standing on it when it gets activated!)
I'm sure they could build something like that. Though the transporter deck would be compartmentalized since there is
no damn reason to restrict yourself to beaming the troops down in the same order and configuration that you assembled them on the deck. Ever noticed that away teams stand on the transporter pads in a hexagonal pattern... and materialize in exactly the same pattern? Given that there will inevitably be irregularities in the ground (one side of a 50 meter square area probably isn't at the exact same level as the other), given that you probably want any large fighting force to have sentries deployed in a large area
around the core concentration of troops...
There's no advantage to a transporter deck. At most you'd want to transport platoon-sized forces or heavy armored vehicles; anything larger than that would be pointless because it'd be more efficient and versatile to just beam eight platoons simultaneously. In real life, company-sized formations of soldiers never group up as tightly on the field as they'd have to group up on the ship. Even platoons don't, usually.
So a ship like the
Enterprise-D, if it made good use of its cargo transporters, probably
could handle the jobs you'd want a troop transport for. The only difference is that if you had a
dedicated troop transport, it'd probably be an
Excelsior or
Ambassador or some such, with a lot of the crew accomodations, science suites, and weapons installations replaced with relatively spartan troop accomodations and more cargo bays.
Lord Revan wrote:Mean 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.
To be fair, a lot of the Vulcans are pacifists. Noncompliance and passive resistance are more likely to be their concerns than organized, violent resistance.
Although honestly the 2000 figure is just so ridiculous even then that I'm inclined to just ignore it as a writer screwup.
Prometheus Unbound wrote:When I say "En Mass", I mean 500 or more at a time? Does the federation not have troop transports for moving large numbers of men and getting them to where they need to go in a hurry?
Yes, some units able to transport (as in move) up to 30,000 troops at a time*. They can't *beam* that many at once lol. 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.