this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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If you think transporter room duty is boring, imagine being the poor ensign assigned to your deck's 2280's era dot-matrix printer in case the captain decides to switch it up. Actually, I think that would have potential to be a pretty good gag on Lower Decks.. The boredom of sitting watching the printer, the suspense of the printer whirring to life... only for it to sloooooooooly print out some inconsequential message
Side note: why are they even using the transporter room at all? Site-to-site transport exists, and the transporter can be controlled from any terminal.
So why, when there's an emergency, do people frantically run to the turbolift, traverse a dozen decks, run along corridors, enter the transporter room and jump unto those little platforms, when they could just beam to wherever they need to go right from where they're standing?
Same question about medical emergencies - why is it not standard procedure to simply beam people to sickbay? Instead, doctors are running along corridors, taking turbolifts up and down and across decks, running some more along corridors, only to arrive at a patient and declare "bring him to sickbay immediately!!!"
My head-canon for this is that site-to-site transport is only safe in ideal conditions.
Don't try to think about actual transporters, the more you think about it the more broken it gets.
I was thinking about it once and ended up at slavery.
Not at Tuvix?
Site to site transport is effectively twice the number of transports. People are doing jobs. It might not be the best for them to immediately be beamed to where they need to go, because they might be doing something important. They're generally transporting a few stationary people one place. Their capacity could easily get overloaded trying to get a bunch of excited, moving people to their stations. If they're having to do it in shifts, and waiting for confirmation from each person that they're ready to go, I could imagine it simply being faster and more efficient to walk or use turbo lifts. Plus, that leaves transporters free for emergencies that may arise, or crew members who really can't get to their post quickly.
As far as medical issues go, I can see a whole lot of reasons it might not be safe to move an injured person, and you also don't want a doctor blindly transporting into an area that might have a danger that just injured someone.
Even just from a safety standpoint, you've just identified that some shit is going down. Why put people in a transporter buffer, where a power surge or failure would mean mass casualties. It's a good standard procedure even if it's only meant to not incentivize an immediate attack specifically designed to kill a massive amount of people transporting around the ship. Why distract the crew members doing important tasks with dozens of people materializing around them? With all the movement on the ship, i'd think it would take exponentially more capacity just to track the surroundings and make sure the area where someone is materializing is empty. I assume the transporter is sophisticated enough to handle all this, but it has to have an impact on capacity.
My best guess is that it's because transporters use radio wave type stuff to move you around, so beeming through too much metal or other substances can be a problem
That was a plotline in Voyager.
There's a bunch of people whose whole job is running around decks of the ship transporting messages which could have been emails.