Why are transporters never used "En Mass"?

[JamesStaley]

Why is it that you never see large numbers of people being transported all at the same time in the Star Trek universe? Is it just because the subject has never come up or been explored in any of the TV episodes or movies?
Seems to me that if you've an an entire regiment of Federation soldiers to move, you's want to be able to transport them EN MASS over to wherever they are going, rather then having to beam the over only in small groups.
But like I just said, this topic has never been officially explored (as far as I'm aware).

[biostem]

There was the special holoship in Star Trek Insurrection, and they used some sort of mass transportation to bring aboard those people with whom Worf's step-brother had hidden/lived with. I presume it's because there's still some manual monitoring being done by the transporter operator, so they try to avoid more than the 3-5 you see in a typical away mission, so they can keep a better eye on things...

[Prometheus Unbound]

Why is it that you never see large numbers of people being transported all at the same time in the Star Trek universe? Is it just because the subject has never come up or been explored in any of the TV episodes or movies?
Seems to me that if you've an an entire regiment of Federation soldiers to move, you's want to be able to transport them EN MASS over to wherever they are going, rather then having to beam the over only in small groups.
But like I just said, this topic has never been officially explored (as far as I'm aware).

0:26


Generations: Scotty tries beaming up 150 people at once in the Nexus

Voyager: Suspending 47 people in transporters to hide them from the telepathy police (or whatever they were - Counterpoint)

Star Trek Insurrection: 600 people meant to be beamed up in one go in the cloaked ship. Happily beamed over the crew of a ship larger than the Enterprise D in 2 seconds in one go.



A standard transporter takes at least 6 seconds to complete its cycle. Each pad can only take 1-2 people at once. Unless you have a dedicated transporter ship (which they do in Insurrection), you're limited by your pads. Enterprise D has 20 transporter rooms - that's 120 people very 6 seconds. With cargo transporters and shuttle transporters you could be looking at 200 per 6 seconds.

I've yet to really see a need where they've had to use that other than 11001001 where... they did, and got 1000 people off the ship in under a minute.

[Prometheus Unbound]

can't edit.


They wont use them for troops (say beaming to the front lines) because of transporter inhibitors - they mention this many times in DS9 ... in Siege of ARwhtever and that episode where Jake and Bashir are on the front lines in season 4 against the Klingons (or season 5?). It's common practice to protect against transporters and do you want want to risk watching 50,000 troops vapourise because someone put Eta Ratiation (or whatever) nearby?

As for beaming them into ships - I'm sure they do. I wouldn't

[Ziggy Stardust]

I've always wondered why they don't take greater advantage of transporters as "storage", so to speak.

That is, instead of keeping dangerous criminals in the brig, why not keep them stored in transporter memory until you reach your destination?

If you need to ferry a bunch of refugees from somewhere, why not keep them all stored in transporter memory so you don't need resources/space to temporarily house them until you get to your final destination?

Even beyond people, when needing to transport large amounts of cargo, you could dramatically increase the storage capacity of a ship by using large transporter memory banks.

etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Why is it that you never see large numbers of people being transported all at the same time in the Star Trek universe? Is it just because the subject has never come up or been explored in any of the TV episodes or movies?

As noted by others, they do manage to beam large groups quickly- they just have to do it six people at a time, in a hurry.

Seems to me that if you've an an entire regiment of Federation soldiers to move, you's want to be able to transport them EN MASS over to wherever they are going, rather then having to beam the over only in small groups.

But like I just said, this topic has never been officially explored (as far as I'm aware).

It doesn't come up very often because the Federation doesn't commonly do massed troop landings. If I were building an assault landing ship in Star Trek, of course, it'd have a huge number of transporters so that I could land hundreds if not thousands of soldiers simultaneously. But normal ships, who only have so many redshirts/Marines/whatever to land at once, don't really benefit from this possibility.

Also, frankly, if you're beaming people into a situation dangerous enough that it matters whether their reinforcements arrive now or ten seconds from now, you're doing it wrong. If you have the power to teleport your soldiers into a combat zone, you use it to teleport them somewhere they can get the drop on the enemy, not smack in the middle of the enemy.

I've always wondered why they don't take greater advantage of transporters as "storage", so to speak.

That is, instead of keeping dangerous criminals in the brig, why not keep them stored in transporter memory until you reach your destination?

If you need to ferry a bunch of refugees from somewhere, why not keep them all stored in transporter memory so you don't need resources/space to temporarily house them until you get to your final destination?

Probably the is a chance of the pattern buffers degrading, causing the people stored in them to end up injured or killed. Being stored in a pattern buffer for weeks or months isn't normal, people only do it if they're seriously worried about being able to survive outside the buffer.

So you don't store refugees or passengers in a pattern buffer; they might die. The Federation wouldn't store dangerous criminals in a pattern buffer for humanitarian reasons. The Romulans, Klingons, and so on probably wouldn't either, because you can't interrogate a datafile in the pattern buffer. And because if a bunch of Klingons or the like decide they no longer care about a prisoner's value "alive and well," they'll just straight up kill you, they won't leave you to rot in a pattern buffer for years. Any prisoner who's worth keeping alive is worth keeping outside the pattern buffer.

As to why they still use the pattern buffers themselves, perhaps it is totally non-dangerous over very short periods of time, but becomes mildly dangerous for significant long-term exposures. I mean, suppose a week of time in the pattern buffer might have a 0.1% chance of causing significant damage. But you could beam up and down on normal operations for your entire career without spending more than a few hours in the buffer- because it's only a few seconds per beaming, so it takes something like 1000 beamings to add up to one hour of exposure time.

Even beyond people, when needing to transport large amounts of cargo, you could dramatically increase the storage capacity of a ship by using large transporter memory banks.

It's pretty easy to make a ship physically larger, whereas transporters are expensive pieces of equipment that require skilled crews to operate. Odds are, a cargo bay is a more economical solution to this problem than a transporter buffer, especially for bulky materials like food or ore.

[Eternal_Freedom]

To elaborate on why pattern buffers etc aren't used for dangerous prisoners, well the Klingons and Romulans would object that it isn't punishment and the Federation would object that it provides no chance to "rehabilitate" offenders (whatever that means to them) for one key reason: no time passes for the person being stored.

Think about it, would you accept the idea of a form of incarceration where the person can serve a 50 year sentence and emerge the other side in the same condition they went in, same physical age, with no perception of the time having past?. That's not a punishment, that's a way of saying "sod dealing with him, he's the future's problem now."

[Elheru Aran]

Regarding pattern buffer storage:

The only real incident that I recall it actually working was when Scotty pulled it off, and it was as much luck as his engineering genius-- he was the only one to survive. I can't say I've ever seen any other episodes where they did it. There's probably a few, I'm sure.

While it could merit a little exploration-- it would be one way to enable 'suspended animation', in a certain fashion-- it would require some serious commitment. Not to mention there's definitely HUGE potential for accidents. Suppose that somehow two (or more) patterns got mixed up while in the buffer, imagine how that would come out. There's enough transporter accidents in ST as it is...

[Eternal_Freedom]

There is also DS9's "Our Man Bashir" where they have to use all the computing resources of the entire station to hold IIRC 4/5 people's patterns for a prolonged period.

[Elheru Aran]

There is also DS9's "Our Man Bashir" where they have to use all the computing resources of the entire station to hold IIRC 4/5 people's patterns for a prolonged period.

I'll be damned if I remember why they couldn't get Scotty's crew out of the pattern buffer. Was it that the patterns had degraded? Possibly it requires a certain capacity in terms of computing resources to actually preserve a pattern for an extended period.

To put it a certain way-- you transport someone from A to B, process "captain.picard.exe" takes up 500mb for a second. Maybe the lights flicker somewhere in storage, someone's game on the holodeck hiccups, but things go pretty normal otherwise. But then say you have to hold "captain.picard.exe" in the pattern buffer for a few days... suddenly that's 500 mb being sucked up, and if the computer runs, say, 700 mb at capacity (yes I know megabytes in Trek lol, whatever, it's an example, roll with it kthxbai), that's going to quite possibly crash the computer due to the sheer mass of the 'program'/pattern being stored/run.

I mean, we've all had to open Program Manager and kill a program running way too much RAM every now and then... that could well be the issue here.

[Eternal_Freedom]

They couldn't get Scotty's friend (it was just one other guy) out because his pattern had degraded by 53% and to quote Scotty "He's gone."

Does bring up a rather worrying thought though, how much "degradation" is deemed to be fatal? Because I'm unconvinced about transporters at the best of times, but the idea that I could be re-materialised with 20% of my body degraded in some way is not an appealing one.

[SpottedKitty]

The only real incident that I recall it actually working was when Scotty pulled it off, and it was as much luck as his engineering genius-- he was the only one to survive.

<nod> IIRC he sticky-taped a set of test routines into a loop that was normally done just for a few seconds, and never with a live person in the pattern. I think Geordi had a line where he said normal shipboard transporters weren't supposed to be able to do that safely. And it nearly didn't work — the non-survivor had severe pattern loss to the point where he wasn't recoverable, and even Scotty had a little bit of pattern loss, which I suppose explains his slightly loopy behaviour for half the episode...

[Elheru Aran]

They couldn't get Scotty's friend (it was just one other guy) out because his pattern had degraded by 53% and to quote Scotty "He's gone."

Does bring up a rather worrying thought though, how much "degradation" is deemed to be fatal? Because I'm unconvinced about transporters at the best of times, but the idea that I could be re-materialised with 20% of my body degraded in some way is not an appealing one.

The question is *where* the degradation is. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a bit of the 'pattern' is actually in preserving memories and mental capacity. They might consider it acceptable to bring someone out of a pattern buffer that can't remember how to tie their shoes or where pants go on the body, because at least they're still alive and not horribly mashed up.

It does make one wonder how many people get their heads fucked with going through transporters on the regular...

[Lord Revan]

I'd suspect that it's a case that if the pattern isn't too degraded the transporter system can compensate for the missing peices by looking at the existing data, so person might have some gaps in his/her memory but would alive and well for the most part. It would also explain why if the pattern degrades too badly the person is deemed dead, there's not enough data to counter the missing information so to quote Star Trek:the motion picture "what we got didn't live long, thankfully"

[Simon_Jester]

To elaborate on why pattern buffers etc aren't used for dangerous prisoners, well the Klingons and Romulans would object that it isn't punishment and the Federation would object that it provides no chance to "rehabilitate" offenders (whatever that means to them) for one key reason: no time passes for the person being stored.

Think about it, would you accept the idea of a form of incarceration where the person can serve a 50 year sentence and emerge the other side in the same condition they went in, same physical age, with no perception of the time having past?. That's not a punishment, that's a way of saying "sod dealing with him, he's the future's problem now."

The idea was that this could be used for transport from one facility to another, under circumstances where escape would otherwise be likely.

While it could merit a little exploration-- it would be one way to enable 'suspended animation', in a certain fashion-- it would require some serious commitment. Not to mention there's definitely HUGE potential for accidents. Suppose that somehow two (or more) patterns got mixed up while in the buffer, imagine how that would come out. There's enough transporter accidents in ST as it is...

Plus, they already have suspended animation technology in Star Trek.

The question is *where* the degradation is. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a bit of the 'pattern' is actually in preserving memories and mental capacity. They might consider it acceptable to bring someone out of a pattern buffer that can't remember how to tie their shoes or where pants go on the body, because at least they're still alive and not horribly mashed up.

It does make one wonder how many people get their heads fucked with going through transporters on the regular...

Again, it may well be that long-term buffer storage is degrading in ways that short-term buffer storage is not. Also, as noted, you could have an entire career in Starfleet, beaming up and down to and from places ten thousand times, and still spend total less than a day in pattern buffers. Given that it is even remotely possible for a jury-rigged transporter to keep someone in buffer for decades with at least some faint prayer of survival... I'm liking those odds on normal operation.

I will note that having your biochemistry and cell structure 'degraded' isn't necessarily any less bad than having it happen to your brain. Probably easier to fix, though.

[madd0ct0r]

Yeah, cosmic rays could flip a lot of bits. If ST data storage is sufficiently small scale in terms of spatial volume, than a single cosmic ray does more damage. How many bits would be needed though? I've always assumed that for baseline humans there's some cheating (reset blood velocity rather than calculate the exact movement of each molecule in the areas allocated for blood, for example)

[JamesStaley]

Okay, who posted the video? Thanks for that, but I need story background: WHY are they having to abandon ship? 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).
I will admit that it has been a while seen i've seen any Star Trek, and i'm sure I missed quite lot of it, so I may not be as well-versed or as "up-to-date" on it as some of you.
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?

[Batman]

It's from the s1 episode '11001001' and the occasion is an expected Warp core breach due to the containment field failing. As they can apparently tell how long that will take with some accuracy (as happened numerous times throughout the series) they weren't in that much of a hurry.

[Crazedwraith]

Okay, who posted the video? Thanks for that, but I need story background: WHY are they having to abandon ship? 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).

I'm reasonably sure that that's the kind of response you try to train out your crews. A Disciplined, orderly evacuation is desirable over blind panic.

The Starship Troopers movie is not a great example of Militar SciFi would work.

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?

Did you not read the thread? They panned to beam up 600 Baku in a reasonable short time scale in Insurrection. In fact, iirc we actually see them scooped up a dozen at a time when a transport inhibitor goes down.

The Federation probably does have troop transports. But we never see them because that's not what the shows are about. Aside from a few seasons of DS9 and even then we followed one station/small warship's crew. Not the routine army deployments.

[JamesStaley]

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!)

[Lord Revan]

there's rarely reasons to transport such numbers of men in a short notice. Either you have space superiority and it's more safe to simply send shuttles if ground forces are needed at all and if you don't have space superiority bringing dedicated transports is risky at best.

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.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Okay, who posted the video? Thanks for that, but I need story background: WHY are they having to abandon ship?

The ship is inside a starbase and for (at the time) and unknown reason, the warp core is going to explode in a short amount of time. They have approximately 4 minutes to evacuate the entire ship, pilot it out of space dock bypassing nearly all safeties, and go to warp to get away from the station.

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).

Well, if you mean like on a hollywood film with everyone panicking - this is meant to be a well trained Starfleet crew who have gone through numerous simulations - even the civilians will have gone through a THOROUGH orientation and safety thing upon boarding.

If you prefer a more panicked version, here's what happens when it is a "literally seconds away" event and they don't have anywhere to beam to.




And even there, whilst it's a bit more energetic and more catastrophic (as they have no where to escape to, in particular - they know there's a missile that'll blow up the sun and they can't go to warp this time), they're fairly ordered.

That's what a trained crew is meant to do. 11001001 was a "perfect" case worst case scenario - all power was up, easy access to escape area and nothing to stop an orderly mass transport evacuation.

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.


*Presumably* the Federation has managed to put two and two together and yes, they'll have the ability to project stuff from orbit to any location they want, but they won't ever beam them directly into battle if they can help it, as the transporters are susceptible to interference from the enemy - transporter dampers, transport inhibitors, scattering fields, dampening fields etc. And we know this as we saw it at least twice in DS9 outright stated.


* DS9, Rules of Engagement and DS9 Waltz

[Tribble]

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?

[Q99]

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.

[Simon_Jester]

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.

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.

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.

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.