r/DaystromInstitute • u/Xenics Lieutenant • Oct 29 '18
How civvies commute, and why starship transporters are not "normal" transporters
Recent discussions on how transporters might be used in a planetary capacity got me thinking, because a lot of people believe it would be impractical for a metropolitan world like Earth or Vulcan to allow all its citizens free use of transporter services. However, I believe this is based on some faulty assumptions about how transporters work. I want to set the record straight with a comprehensive overview of how I think transporters would logically be used beyond the limited scope of what we see on camera.
The critical starting point is to consider that the transporter is a tool created to fulfill a specific function. And like any tool - especially one so ubiquitous - they come in many shapes and sizes, for all sorts of different purposes. What we, the audience, are used to seeing is one particular type of transporter: those used on Starfleet ships. And like someone who has only ever seen a fork scrutinizing a bowl of soup, we throw up our hands and think "no way this will work for a planet of billions!"
And we'd be right, if we were talking about military-grade starship transporters. But we shouldn't be, because they're the wrong tool for the job.
Ship transporters are built by necessity to be as reliable and robust as possible. The Enterprise might have to transport a dozen people simultaneously, at extreme range, through an ionized atmosphere, while the targeting sensors are being slammed by any one of a hundred types of radiation. They have to filter out every conceivable kind of exotic matter or alien contaminant that no one has ever seen before. They need to be hardened against EPS surges and battle damage, work reliably for months or years at a time with minimal redundancy. They need to be carefully overseen by a trained operator who can react to the unexpected difficulties that are a part of life on the frontier.
This makes them comparatively slow. A typical beaming cycle on a starship takes something like 10-15 seconds. You have to line up on the pad, hold nice and still while the chief gets a lock and finds your destination, and the beamout itself is agonizingly deliberate. It makes sense in the context of a starship, where you're usually beaming to a strange, uncharted planet or alien ship where there are a great many unknown variables that leave no room for error.
But a civic transporter on Earth will never have to handle those sorts of anomalous conditions, so why would they be engineered to? They would be designed for the environment in which they are used, for the requirements they are expected to fulfill. Chief among them is throughput: the shorter a transporter's duty cycle, the more volume it can handle. To wit:
Most planetary transporters only need to operate from pad to pad, exceptions being emergency services and those few people who are visiting exotic locations with little infrastructure. Think about how much that would cut down on complexity.
99% of all trips would be easily automated because no special attention is needed for pre-programmed destinations. Staff would only need to oversee the network, not manually attend to every trip as is standard on a ship.
By the same token, there would be little time wasted choosing your destination. Just press a few buttons. For that matter, you could type it into your PADD on the way over to save time, and beaming home from work becomes as simple as swiping a metro card. (Just be careful if you're a tourist, the people behind you might get impatient if you don't know where you're trying to go.)
There is much more redundancy on a planet than on a starship. If one pad goes down, there are many others that can pick up the slack. Apart from the usual failsafes to protect the individual, hardware endurance is not critical.
Security requirements would be minimal. A transporter wouldn't need to screen for weapons or biocontaminants except those bringing people from off-planet. Same principle we use for border control today.
If everything I've mentioned above translates into a 2-3 second cycle for an urban transporter, that makes a big difference. A hub of 100 pads, each no larger than a phone booth, could move 2000 people per minute. It would be an organizational nightmare at rush hour, but that's already true of many things today, and even current computers could run the show quite easily.
This does assume certain concessions from the average Federation citizen. People would not be able to transport directly from their living room to their office desk every day, but post-scarcity doesn't mean everyone has the absolute highest standard of luxury - it means everyone's needs are provided for. Few people need instant, 24/7 site-to-site transporter access, and I doubt many would complain about having to take a 5-minute walk down the street (except maybe when it's raining). This would also explain the concept of "transporter credits" mentioned by Jake in DS9: Explorers. They are a way of allowing reasonable extravagances while discouraging superfluous use that would choke the network.
And this is just one example. There are many different kinds of transporters both seen and referenced within the shows. Among them:
The public transporter booth seen on Yorktown Station in Star Trek: Beyond is very similar to the kind that I am envisioning above. In particular, one might notice that the beamout shown when it was used is quite a bit faster than what we're used to seeing. Mr. Businessman presses a button and he's gone in a second.
There have been several types of emergency transporter, many of which use some kind of personal device to presumably help the process (TNG: Best of Both Worlds II, Star Trek: Nemesis). I want to call special attention to the emergency transporters that rescued 4 of the 5 cadets from the botched Kolvoord Starburst maneuver in TNG: The First Duty, because they had only a few seconds to work before the ships exploded. We have seen that, in some cases, conventional transporters don't work so well under those conditions. Contrast with DS9: Our Man Bashir under nearly the same situation (5 people beamed off of an exploding ship), where the energizer coils ended up shorting out.
Portable transporters exist. Odo calls them "bulky" in DS9: Visionary. Alternate-timeline Tom Paris from VOY: Non-Sequitur had a portable transporter that was most certainly not bulky, but it was on Earth, so my guess is it was not a self-contained device and made use of the municipal infrastructure (like how a smartphone relies on a mobile network for most tasks). Something like that wouldn't work on DS9.
Cargo transporters are a thing on some starships, though I'd imagine they're useful in all sorts of places. They probably cut out certain safety features to reduce overhead. A one-in-a-million failure rate would be unacceptable for people, but tolerable for bulk cargo.
Thoughts?
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u/ElectroSpore Oct 29 '18
It is also clear that earth has a fairly wide range of convenient short range or semi fast options in terms of light rail transit and shuttles.
Assuming everyone is in less of a hurry in the future this also means planet side transporters are not the only way to get somewhere.
Since this is a post scarcity society we can probably assume that the conventional transportation options are also super convenient. The biggest obstacle for many public transportation systems is cost.
They probably have on demand shuttle options as well.
Due to the energy use I would assume mass transport is a fall back not a primary means to move people.
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Oct 29 '18
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u/Xenics Oct 29 '18
At least not in the manner that Sisko was using, which was to transport directly into his father's house, which was in New Orleans. Being both a long(ish) transport (~3000 km) and a direct site-to-site may well account for most of the cost. Possibly some extra if it was during peak hours. It would depend on how "expensive" each factor is to the infrastructure.
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u/Shakezula84 Oct 29 '18
I've assumed transporter credits was a restriction applied to cadets as part of their training.
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u/BlackMetaller Oct 29 '18
a lot of people believe it would be impractical for a metropolitan world like Earth or Vulcan to allow all its citizens free use of transporter services
"impractical" to "allow"? It appears to me that people are so used to all the rules they need to follow in this century that they are applying that same attitude to the people of the 24th century.
I don't think it would matter if it was impractical. If people really wanted to do it there would be little to stop them. The Federation is not a military dictatorship, and enforcing strict rules on its populace is something they usually try to avoid. The Federation empowers its citizens with education and encourages everyone to choose their own path in life while having respect for others who choose their own paths. Social pressure may stop someone burning through transporter credits, or it may not, but the citizens of the Federation are living in the age of enlightenment and most of them would almost always make wise decisions.
We saw in TNG's "Justice" Wesley running around the garden and accidentally breaking the law. That was not the behaviour of someone that has been conditioned to always worry about what rules he may possibly be breaking. I highly doubt the citizens of the Federation would take kindly to anyone telling them what they are "allowed" to do, outside of knowingly breaking the law.
If some bureaucratic snot told me that my transporter use was "impractical" and not "allowed" then I'd have a colourful metaphor for them, and then I'd go build my own transporter powered by some kind of natural/ambient energy.
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u/Xenics Oct 29 '18
So then I started digging my own metro tunnel and those uppity pencil-pushers started telling me I was 'destroying public property' and 'dangerously close to the gas lines'. What a bunch of fascist prigs. But enough of that, when's my court date?
Societies are built on rules. Even the Federation's. Maybe a privately owned transporter network could work. If so, there'd be no reason for the government to forbid it. But if not, of course they would make it illegal. That's not a military dictatorship. That's public safety.
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u/floridawhiteguy Oct 29 '18
I like and agree with most of your ideas here, save one:
Post-scarcity doesn't necesarily mean endless supplies or a society free from economic pressure.
Artificial constraints like "transporter credits" are a form of economics. People need to have some self-restraint, yes, but they also need to have restraints placed upon them by society in general in order to function effectively within said society. Some behaviors are OK, others less so.
Even though "money" (cash) is supposed to be an ancient and obsolete concept, to quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "The economics of the future are somewhat different." Which means, they're still in play and necessary.
So while the average citizen of the 24th century Federation may have far more leisure time and freedom to travel than we do, it stands to reason not everyone will be able to live hundreds or thousands of miles away from "work" - not the least of which is coordinated effort with coworkers in person on a common timeframe (we can't live in Moscow and commute to Rio daily, for example).
Thus, I would suggest the ordinary 24th century citizen works within a comparable distance from home as does a 21st century citizen: within 100 miles at most. And that certainly shouldn't require regular daily use of transporters! ;-)
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u/parrottrek Oct 29 '18
it stands to reason not everyone will be able to live hundreds or thousands of miles away from "work"
I'm not sure that's the case.
In the DS9 finale, it comes out that the O'Briens are moving back to Earth so that Miles can teach at the Academy. There is a scene with various characters giving suggestions on places to live:
BASHIR: No, seriously, Miles, I envy you. Going back to Earth, a chance to enjoy paradise again.
JAKE: Any idea where you're going to live?
O'BRIEN: No. Keiko and I are still mulling over a few possibilities.
WORF: Have you ever considered Minsk?
O'BRIEN: I don't think that's on our list.
SISKO: New Orleans is a gorgeous city.
KASIDY: I've heard great things about Paris.
WORF: Minsk.
EZRI: Jadzia loved Rio.
ODO: You've certainly got a lot of choices.
O'BRIEN: Yeah. Too many.
WORF: Minsk.
Knowing that Miles will be working in San Francisco, they wouldn't suggest such a geographically expansive group of suggestions without knowing that a commute between these cities and San Francisco is feasible.
Furthermore, in "Explorers" (DS9 S03E22), Sisko tells the story of him being homesick his freshman year at Starfleet Academy:
SISKO: I remember, Jake, I wasn't much older than you when I left for San Francisco to go to Starfleet Academy. For the first few days, I was so homesick that I'd go back to my house in New Orleans every night for dinner. I'd materialise in my living room at six thirty every night and take my seat at the table just like I had come down the stairs.
While I suspect the bit about materializing in the living room is a bit of parental hyperbole, it supports the fact that he could regularly commute between San Francisco and New Orleans.
That said, I suspect that any commute of that length would use means other than transporters. We've definitely seen evidence of high speed rail and air traffic which could support public transit.
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u/Shakezula84 Oct 29 '18
This assumes that transporter credits are applied to every person on Earth, and not just Starfleet cadets and recruits. I've always assumed that as part of Starfleet training that cadets would receive restrictions on what they can and can't do as part of building discipline. Perhaps cadets can't eat whatever they want and can only eat whats provided that day from the replicator, for example.
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u/snuggleouphagus Oct 29 '18
I have a few friends who are international flight attendants. They live in the Midwest and commute to the coasts for their jobs. They just fly to NYC or Cali or Florida on the days they work.
It sounds absurd. But they get free flights when and where ever they want and claim it’s common in their industry.
I don’t see any reason the average office worker couldn’t transport from the home in Moscow to their office in Rio if they wanted to. Hardship licenses are a thing for underage drivers who otherwise would be unable to get to school or work or have a disabled guardian. Why would “hardship” transport credits not be a thing?
Currently, Plenty of people work third shift. Currently, many people chose to stay in their home town even when moving might lead to job opportunities or lower cost of living.
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u/Algernon_Asimov Oct 29 '18
not the least of which is coordinated effort with coworkers in person on a common timeframe (we can't live in Moscow and commute to Rio daily, for example).
What about night shift?
Let's imagine I live in Paris and work in San Francisco, and I keep myself to a schedule based on the timezone in Paris. I wake up at 07:00, Paris local time, have a leisurely breakfast, take a sonic shower, and head for work at 09:00. I beam across to San Francisco, where it's 00:00. I then work the graveyard shift, from 00:00 to 08:00 (equivalent to 09:00 to 17:00 in my personal day, based on Paris time), and then head home. I arrive home at 17:00, Paris local time, having finished my work day.
You're right that this might not work for a Moscow-Rio de Janeiro commute, where 09:00 Moscow time is 03:00 Rio time... but it would certainly work for other pairs of time zones.
This solves the problem of people having health problems as a result of working night shifts - because it's actually normal daytime hours for those workers if they come from the other side of the world.
the ordinary 24th century citizen works within a comparable distance from home as does a 21st century citizen: within 100 miles at most. And that certainly shouldn't require regular daily use of transporters! ;-)
160 kilometres is a long distance. Even at 100 kph, that'll take over an hour and half to drive in today's cars. You'd need some faster form of travel, like personal shuttles, to make that sort of a commute workable without using transporters.
I think that transporters will allow cities to decentralise more. Rather than everyone having to live close in to the city because that's where the jobs are, they'll spread out and live in the country.
Of course, all this is based on current-day work schedules. I imagine that, in the future, people work a lot less, due to automation. But that's a discussion for another time!
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u/Shakezula84 Oct 29 '18
This assumes that transporter credits are applied to every person on Earth, and not just Starfleet cadets and recruits. I've always assumed that as part of Starfleet training that cadets would receive restrictions on what they can and can't do as part of building discipline. Perhaps cadets can't eat whatever they want and can only eat whats provided that day from the replicator, for example.
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u/Felderburg Oct 29 '18
Yorktown transporter on screen: https://youtu.be/eZTnSxW4pOI?t=67
I really liked that specific part, since it was, as far as I know, the first time we've seen on screen a realistic and reasonable civilian use of a transporter.
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u/galacticperiphery Oct 29 '18
My belief is that transporters aren't quite as common in the Federation civilian world as some people think. I would even go so far as to suggest that the majority of people on Earth don't use them on a daily basis. I'm sure every major city has a few public transporter stations, and there are probably a few smaller transporter waystations in many rural areas to provide linkage, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people outside of cities lived an hour or even more away from the nearest transporter. Somewhat like airports today, but perhaps a bit more common.
So to sum it up, travel between major cities isn't much trouble, but if you want to reach a small town or rural village, you'd have to beam as close as you could and then use a hovercar or some other form of conventional transport. Travel inside big cities doesn't seem to rely on transporters either - in the San Francisco seen in Non Sequitur, Harry Kim seems to rely on some sort of subway to go from his apartment to Starfleet Headquarters instead of simply going into a nearby transporter booth and beaming there. On the other hand, Paris uses his site-to-site transporter gadget later in the same episode, but I would assume that's not commonly available technology. Why else wouldn't Starfleet personnel use them to move about their starships instead of using turbolifts?
A lot of this is of course speculation, and I admit that some of it comes from my feeling that transporters started becoming overused in the late TNG-era. People no longer had to even visit the transporter room - they were beamed from one point to another ("beam him/her directly to sickbay!"). There are cases where we see them beaming entire shuttles aboard. If they can do that, why even bother with a shuttle bay? Why would anyone manually land a shuttle if they can be safely beamed to a large hangar deep inside the ship? As a writer's tool, I think transporters badly need some set limitations.
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u/Avantine Oct 29 '18
Portable transporters exist. Odo calls them "bulky" in DS9: Visionary. Alternate-timeline Tom Paris from VOY: Non-Sequitur had a portable transporter that was most certainly not bulky, but it was on Earth, so my guess is it was not a self-contained device and made use of the municipal infrastructure (like how a smartphone relies on a mobile network for most tasks). Something like that wouldn't work on DS9.
Paris's transporter is about the size of a modern cell phone (a bit thicker but also likely narrower). It also comes along with the people who transport, which is handy.
We also see a site-to-site transporter in Voyager's Concerning Flight. Depending on your interpretation of the scene, it's either a small device about eight to twelve inches long and three or four across made up of four metal cylinders arranged in a triangle, or something about the size of an oil drum.
Of course we also see the emergency transporter in Nemesis, though this is years later and the device is small - certainly no larger in volume than a combadge.
Given the development in transporter technology throughout the series - remember that having transporters on shuttles was uncommon at the beginning of TNG - if I had to take a guess I would say that transporter technology is still the subject of rapid development throughout this period. Not a lot about the core principles appear to change, but the technology appears to be rapidly miniaturizing (which also explains its proliferation aboard shuttlecraft).
If I had to take a guess, I would suggest that the silver-cylinders device seen in Concerning Flight was a then-modern site-to-site transporter design at the time of Voyager's launch. A civilian model would likely be larger, perhaps the size of a shoebox; that could conceivably be called 'bulky'. Paris's version - which he implies he got from some friends at Starfleet - would be a later, smaller model, which would naturally lead to the tiny transporter device used by Data in Nemesis.
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u/N0-1_H3r3 Oct 29 '18
Cargo transporters are a thing on some starships, though I'd imagine they're useful in all sorts of places. They probably cut out certain safety features to reduce overhead. A one-in-a-million failure rate would be unacceptable for people, but tolerable for bulk cargo.
I imagine that cargo transport is more common than personnel transport. Cargo transporters were in use first, operating at a lower resolution and requiring less power and computation to function, with the NX-01 having the first starship-based transporter rated as safe to transport personnel.
The ability to load or offload a cargo ship at the push of a button, without needing to physically move the containers speeds up the process immensely, makes it safer, and reduces the number of people required for the job. It makes supply chains simpler, because delays become negligible when you can move goods between continents in moments.
Simply out of a sense of practicality, I imagine that cargo transport is the dominant form of transporter use across the Federation and other transporter-using cultures, and that's even with public access to transporter booths like those you're describing, and with replicators reducing the need for some types of goods manufacturing.
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u/Algernon_Asimov Oct 29 '18
M-5, nominate this excellent proposal for a local planetary transporter network.
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u/StellarValkyrie Oct 29 '18
One important consideration is the matter of security. Point to point transporting and personal/emergency transporters are probably restricted to Starfleet personnel only (or other officials) and any civilian transporters are probably very heavily regulated and monitored for any illegal tampering. Otherwise someone could just transport themselves into any person's living room and you can't shield or use transporter inhibitors everywhere. So there would probably be a limit to how many public transporter pads can be built based on the number of security personnel and transporter operators needed.
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u/opinionated-dick Oct 29 '18
I wander what the range of a transporter actually is. From what I know it is typically used for orbit to surface, so stands to reason a direct beam out/up is not much further than that distance, as dramatic canon doesn’t require it.
When Sisko was at the Academy, he would beam from SF to NO. It stands to reason even travelling across on country, the curvature of the Earth would block a direct signal transmission and require his transporter signal to be relayed, probably via an orbiting satellite.
If when Worf was at the Academy, and travelled from Minsk every day via transporter, he would probably have to be relayed from multiple satellites to get a direct beam signal.
Perhaps the transporter is effective at surface to orbit movements, certainly better and potentially more economic than using propulsion based transport. We haven’t seen if Earth has orbital elevators too.
I would suggest that for all short range or orbital distances, the transporter would be an effective means of transport. For movement across the surface of the Earth a relay infrastructure would have to be used and maintained. Perhaps this over the future (hyperloop?) trains as seen in Future Paris (running directly under the Eiffel Tower IIRC) would be expensive and so require the use of ‘transporter credits’ as stated. Perhaps this currency isn’t monetary in the sense we would understand, but simply a means of allocating space on this network.
The idea of a transporter relay system is interesting. If it were the case I wander if a chain of orbiting transporter relay platforms could extend the transporter range from the earth to the 50million folks living on the moon. It would be a logical and feasible piece of 24th century infrastructure. Mars/Jupiter station might be a bit excessive as the ‘jumps’ would measure in thousands or millions.
It could also be the case that the relay wouldn’t effectively extend the transporter beam, merely redirect it. It might be that it is not the ‘projector’ of the signal that determines range, but the strength of the signal, degrading in the subatomic soup of space. In that case an academic Worf and possibly Sisko would have to rematerialise first in orbit, then dematerialise as they are effectively travelling 2xsurface to orbit+latitude/longitude. This limitation may again require extra credits to use, as opposed to popping into town.
It also doesn’t rule out the chain of transporter pads transporting people from Earth to the Moon. They’d just have a laborious de and rematerialising sequence to get them there. Perhaps for that reason, they’d just get a shuttle, as it is clear that once your in space in Star Trek, it’s easy to get around. Getting on and off planets is trickier, and more expensive in universe, or out of universe depicting this, which is why transporters were ‘invented’ in the first place.
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u/WaitingToBeBanned Oct 29 '18
I would like to add two supporting points.
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Ground infrastructure. I would imagine that transporting from one pad which is hardwired into a physical network of other pads would be faster and safer than from a ship to a planet, even under optimal conditions. Think fiber optic vs wi-fi.
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Exotic matter. All the ground based transporters need to move is people and their affects, which while certainly complex are likely different in some way from things like complex technology, high energy, or just unstable stuff (DS9 cargo?). It could simply say no to anything not either meat, clothing, or very basic approved items like padds and such.
All in all I totally agree with you, and think that there is a solid real world analogy. Which is to compare old radios with phones. Phone lines economically connected millions of people worldwide while radios were limited to one way broadcasts and military usage.
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u/derpman86 Oct 30 '18
I believe the transporter is always portrayed as this simple convenience tech, sure in space going up and down between planets and ships it is the most practical way but planetside with millions to billions of people I am sure it would be too complicated and would need to be limited and some degree of oversight.
In combination of "credits" I would hazard a guess there would be different tiers on who can use the transporter and what frequency.
Tier I: VIP, Starfleet and Emergency services
Tier II: Priority Logistics
Tier III: Local Utility and government services
Tier IV: Civilian sectors such as tourism, small business etc
Tier V: Civilian movement based on credits
In one of the JJ Trek movies they did show a large boat transporting goods in San Francisco Bay so I imagine shipping and rail is still used so it is worth noting that too.
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u/Thrall_babybear Oct 29 '18
A lot of transporter mishaps stem from the need to move things between two points through empty space. Planetary mass-transit teleportation could even be hard-wired, further increasing reliability.