First time watching Star Trek and have a dumb question: Why don't they just beam up when in trouble?

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fluffydonkey246@reddit

It is usually because the crew are either out of reach, the Enterprise has her shields active, or there is something obstructing the beam. Hope that helps.

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BobBelcher2021@reddit

In The Royale, the away team could be beamed off Theta VIII had they known how to use a revolving door properly. All three of them walk in a circle and go back into the casino.

One of the most ridiculous scenes in TNG.

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fluffydonkey246@reddit

Feels like the writers were on shrooms or something when they wrote the casino episode

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Ahielia@reddit

I feel like they should be desperately working on a solution that allows them to beam in/out while the shields are active. Was it ever mentioned in the show if they were?

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Just wait. There are episodes where people beam in/out while shields are up, and it's just never mentioned or acknowledged. There are also episodes where someone comes up with some technospeak solution that allows them to beam through shields, but just for this one time.

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Used-Gas-6525@reddit

It happens in First Contact (film not episode) too. In the middle of the Borg battle, The Enterprise beams Worf and the survivors of the Defiant aboard. Lowering shields while going toe to toe with a cube is inadvisable to say the least. Especially when it's just a plot device to get Worf back on the Enterprise.

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RadVarken@reddit

It'd be fine if they'd acknowledge directionally of shields. You could be engaging the enemy on one side of the ship while beaming off evacuees on the other.

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st3class@reddit

I noticed in Voyager that I they beam through shields all the time too.

Apparently, it was added to the writers Bible "we can beam without dropping shields now, they fixed that"

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Used-Gas-6525@reddit

Personally, I'm OK with handwaving all the nuts and bolts. It's a fun sci-fi show and not even 'hard' sci-fi at that. The time dilation they would experience going at warp 1 (or warp 9) would be insane. Even at warp one, mathematically, time would pass infinitely slower (or stop, no one really knows) than on earth. Every time they went back to Earth, it would be fundreds if not thousands of years in the 'future'. Also, when they cite the distance in light years, everything completely falls apart. "It's 3 light years away" "Very well, set a course at warp one". That's a 3 year voyage. I can't recall if warp factors are exponential or linear, but either way, nothing makes sense time/distance wise.

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HDM-12345@reddit

Not that warp is consistent or makes any sense, but.... they are travelling faster than the speed of light at warp (they use subspace, not regular space to do this). Things like time-dilation come out of relativistic models of the universe where FTL travel is impossible. We don't know what happens in a universe where FTL travel is possible, so they can make up whatever rules they want about that.

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Used-Gas-6525@reddit

TBF, it's a fictional sci-fi show based on science that does not exist, so they can go whole hog on anything they want. It's nice when they keep it consistent though, which they do with the time dilation stuff (and still happens at sublight speeds, just to a lesser extent. The ISS people come back with their watches behind). Either way, it's not a deal breaker. I'd rather have BoBW with shoddy science than Code of Honor with bang on science as we know it.

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Marquar234@reddit

It could be more likely that there would be a group working on preventing that. You wouldn't want an enemy to be able to beam out family of the crew for hostages. Or beam in a boarding party or a photon torpedo next to the warp core.

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PhysicsEagle@reddit

It seems to me that if shields are ineffective against energy weapons if you know the correct frequency, if you modulate your own transporter beam to match your shield frequency you can beam through without worrying about others doing the same.

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Marquar234@reddit

Assuming that beaming can use just one frequency. There is a huge amount of energy and data bandwidth required to digitize and transmit an object. It may not be possible to do all of that in just one frequency.

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RadVarken@reddit

And transporter beams contain the particles of the person. You really, really don't want some of them to get lost.

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DrJaneIPresume@reddit

Ah, but that would have severe negative consequences for the writers.

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tbodillia@reddit

it's a plot device. If I can beam through my shields and your shields, I can beam a nuke to your bridge. It doesn't matter how armored, how protected your ship is, nuke going off on the bridge kills everybody.

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thesandalwoods@reddit

In the case of yar v vaccine, the crew is out of reach; in the case of q v risk of dying, there is someone obstructing the beam

gif

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

Ohh right I see!, that makes a lot of sense, it did help!

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Entire_Screen_8013@reddit

To answer all further questions, because there would be no show. Why don't they beam up at first trouble. Why not beam up an capture the enemy at first issue. Why not beam torpedoes onto ships after the shields go down. Why not use transporters to reverse death. Why not transfer your conciousness to an android or a hologram. Why doesn't the computer just tell the crew someone has gone missing (it definetly knows...).. lol all fun questions, all poor answers.

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glorpstoppage@reddit

This always kind of bothered me about the Borg episodes too. The crew could beam over to the Borg cube and walk around without any problems. Why don’t they just replicate & beam over a dozen big dirty nukes to various parts of the ship and blow it up?

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Absentmindedgenius@reddit

It's generally considered a dick move.

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SoAnxious@reddit

Why aren't you asking why the central officers are the ones to leave on every missions?

That's the biggest plot hole in Star Trek by far, in a normal military your central chain of command aren't all hitting the front line in the military.

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

That's a good point I hadn't considered lol. Picard just throws himself into every situation, in reality he'd be in his office filing lots of boring reports.

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Sea-Quality4726@reddit

Very early I TNG planning there would be ground and ship specialists. Geordi eventually got a sentence about being the ship's school teacher and then the helmsman, but he was originally a living tricorder for away teams.

This may have gone all the way back to Kirk and Decker for the Phase 2 series.

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man_vs_cube@reddit

My headcanon is that because the Federation is a post-scarcity society, most people live quiet and safe lives on well protected planets. The entirety of Starfleet is composed of near-suicidal thrillseeking lunatics. Imagine a ship where every crew member has the personality profile of a stunt motorcyclist - that's the good ol' Enterprise D.

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RadVarken@reddit

It'd be an interesting show, though hard to be a loyal fan of, if the characters who get themselves killed on away missions are always the highest ranking. Starfleet produces a stream of perfectly capable people who rise through the ranks specifically to earn their place on away missions. Because all of them are so good at their jobs, there's no concern that losing the top guys will crash the mission.

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Marquar234@reddit

Have you seen how Mariner acts on away missions? 😄

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DistanceMiserable591@reddit

This is the "why didn't they fly the Eagles to Mordor" thing that appears in every fandom where there are some supernatural powers. Yes, in so many episodes they could have transported people but then what would the story be? Of course what they'd say every time is that the transporter isn't working due to some interference, because the point of the stories are not just to see how cool the technology is but to serve some dramatic purpose. See the infamous "warp core ejector" for how that just turns into a meme anyways, so if they keep saying it you're just going to be like why does this technology never work.

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RadVarken@reddit

If I remember correctly, the problem with the eagles was that the ring wraiths also fly and since so few things fly towards Mordor the eagles would have been easily stopped. A perfectly fine alternative is that the eagles simply didn't want to. The affairs of man aren't really their concern. But way funnier is to imagine a scene where the topic comes up at the Council of Elrond and someone imagines an invisible raptor with a 30 foot wingspan who has the mental power to bend the wraiths to his will. The scene flashes by, eagles covered in the blood of Hobbits, then the council says "nope".

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

That's fine but my brain naturally picks things apart while I watch, but I don't mind handwaiving things away if it's explained in the show. I like to be invested in the universe

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jasno-@reddit

The majority of the time, the whole plot would be ruined if sensors worked, transporters worked, or comms worked, and in those episodes (which there are many), some interference prohibits it.

You always know it's coming, because you'r like, well, that's an easy problem to solve... Oh wait, there it is, interference

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RadVarken@reddit

In the real world the finest radar can miss something because it's too far away for angular resolution to pick it out, or because it's at the wrong angle, or because a big cloud of birds was in the way. The problem in the story writing isn't the limitations of the tech, it's all the other times it's miraculous and fool proof.

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Marshall_BraveStar@reddit

As a rule of thumb:

When the plot allows for an easy solution via warp, beam, phasers, replicator... there'll always be a technical issue that makes it impossible at the moment.

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HalJordan2525@reddit

This is why transporters were such unreliable technology in the original series: The crew could just leave a lot of dangerous situations.

David Gerrold observed that the TOS transporters were so unreliable, no sane person would ever get into one. So on TNG, the writers guide said they didn’t want stories that relied on transporter problems keeping the crew in danger.

But then the holodeck became the new dangerous maker of stories!

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HariSeldonsIntern@reddit

Plus Data

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st3class@reddit

For the Encounter At Farpoint, they were in Q's fantasy reality. If they tried to contact the ship, they would get nothing. Q is basically all powerful, he can stop a simple transporter if he wanted to.

As for Code of Honor, yes they could have beamed Yar up, but then they would have given up any chance of getting the vaccine.

The transporter can easily break a story if you let it, you have to write around it very carefully.

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LawnJerk@reddit

The transporter can easily break a story if you let it, you have to write around it very carefully.

There are a lot of stories where the transporter saves the day and raises way too many questions for later stories as to why they didn't just use the transporter like they did before. It also causes lots of problems which have given us some great episodes like "The Enemy Within"

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Used-Gas-6525@reddit

And then there's the issue of time dilation. When it comes to both the transporters and anything time related, everything falls apart under close examination. The trick is to suspend disbelief completely.

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st3class@reddit

Yeah, it's actually something that I think Trek does really well, playing lip service to technical explanations that generally are internally consistent, but don't actually go into detail.

For instance, warp drive makes use of subspace fields and bending effects to do FTL without experiencing any temporal effects. Does that mean anything? No. Does it sound plausible? Yes

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

That makes a lot of sense I see, thank you very much for answering.

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pakrat1967@reddit

Yeah the whole "rare vaccine or substance only available on one planet" trope is used way too often in Star Trek. Along with Code of Honor, which by the way is almost universaly considered the worst episode ever. There are at least 2 TOS episodes that also involve obtaining a rare substance from some planet.

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Acedeor@reddit

Cuz plot

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CannedDuck1906@reddit

Ion storms

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JBlitzen@reddit

Not a great episode but they discussed it several times. They could have beamed her back but wanted to preserve the relationship with the culture as well. Their compromise was to be prepared to beam her back the moment anything went too far.

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zeptimius@reddit

"There's too much interference"

Welcome to the future, where we can make a three-course dinner out of thin air, recreate entire cities and planets in a virtual reality environment that's indistinguishable from real life... but can't transmit information if there's some static on the line.

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ElectricPaladin@reddit

"I'm watching Code of Honor…"

Well that's your mistake right there. Why would you do that to yourself?

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tomenjean@reddit

There’s many instances when the transporter technician maintains a lock on the away team to beam them back at any indication of trouble. But in the early episodes this isn’t really done mainly due to the plot, with the Enterprise shields, interference, and many other factors at play, as others here have stated.

Hope you stay with it! Such a great ride.

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mdf7g@reddit

I say this as someone who loves Star Trek very much: the tech isn't the point. It's morality plays in space. The treknobabble is just window dressing; the point is to examine the human condition, so all the scifi machines work exactly as well as the plot needs them to.

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

Oh yes that's definitely the vibe that I've gotten, it's about the philosophy and ethics of the situation rather than any elaborate sci-fi solutions. I really like it so far!

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mdf7g@reddit

I'm so happy for you! I wish I could see it again for the first time.

TNG gets off to a slightly rocky start, but it really finds its footing around season 3. DS9 is also a bit rough at first, and a very different show overall, but once it gets into its stride it's possibly the best of all of them.

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ThreeElbowsPerArm@reddit

honestly I think its got its footing pretty well by season 2

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mdf7g@reddit

Also Code of Honor is literally the worst episode of ST ever made (and that's saying something), so don't give up now, this is the rock bottom. Everyone involved in that episode has said they regret it (as they should, that episode sucks).

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coolfunkDJ@reddit (OP)

Wow, I mean I didn't love it by any means but I wouldn't say it was terrible. For me it was just okay, the whole code of honour thing didn't make any sense at all but I at least liked the scenario of having to place nice in order to save thousands of lives.

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