The only time we've REALLY seen a planetside transporter facility is at Starfleet HQ in "Contagion". Typically, fleet policy seems to mean that you have to beam to another active transporter whenever possible. So, where the transporter facilities down on Starbase 11 in "The Menagerie"?
Also, you'd think that beaming places would be restricted. Sisko used to beam right into his New Orleans living room from San Francisco during his early Academy days. Assuming N.O. had one, shouldn't he beam there? And if you didn't have to, why didn't Picard just beam straight to his house in "Family"?
Hmm...
As for the number of transporters - in a novel based on Captain Kirk (think it was one where he had retired) it was stated that civilian transport was not as advanced as that of Starfleet's. It took days even weeks to travel across the solar system instead of days . . . or something like that. I'll try and dig out the book. Think it was Ashes of Eden . . .
(also, Mark I believe you meant to say the episode 'Conspiracy', not 'Contagion'...? ;-)
Someone please check this fact...
LaForge insists in "Realm of Fear" that transporters are the safest form of travel. This need not directly mean that they are the most used, back on Earth - after all, air travel is the safest form today, but partially exactly because it ISN'T used all that much.
Yet I could see Earth dwellers using transporters far more frequently than Starfleet heroes. Ordinary people would use home or communal platforms in one end and gigantic rapid-throughput terminals near malls and parks and stadiums and whatever draws the crowds in the 23rd-24th century. Privileged folks would have armbands like the one Paris had snatched in "Non Sequitur", for effortless site-to-site. And instead of transporter chiefs and "energize!"'s and pattern buffers and emitter arrays, there would be streamlined automation and hardwired connections from pad to pad.
If this sort of system was in place, then many people would probably prefer *not* to use it. It's a great incentive to take a walk when you know that if your feet get tired, you can beam back to your armchair instantly. If you have to haul groceries, just let the system haul them for you and go take a walk in the meantime. If you want to visit gramps at Palo Alto, you take the scenic route for the thrill - the maglev train or the airship. Only the dull commuting would be done by the transporter.
Things like subways would probably be retained as historical curiosities, in addition to serving as active means of public transportation. A romantic ride on a horse-drawn carriage in Vienna, a scenic tour of San Francisco aboard one of those rustic air trams... The thing that would probably disappear would be "roads through nowhere" - highways between cities etc. People would skip the roads when going from city to city, using either hovercars or public transportation.
Timo Saloniemi
And I dont think mass transit (shuttles, trams & trains) would be around quite so much if everyone could transport easily
If you were Joe Q. Public in the 24th century, and you needed to get across town, it probably would be much easier to use mass transit (subway or train or somethin) or a vehicle to go there, rather than take a vehicle to a transporter station.
Although it seems likely transporters are commonly used to get OFF the planet, i just cant see the justification of using one to get AROUND the planet, unless you are trvelling cross continentally, as Sisko did (and it seems that they limit usage, possibly because it creates inefficiency to have a lot of people transporting for dumb reasons all the time)
Still, I think a transporter in every garage sounds quite reasonable. Remember that we are not speaking starship transporters: these would be completely different machines, probably slaved to a central unit and lacking any user-adjustability. Instead of an independent station, there would be the barest essentials and a long solid cable leading to a transporter system hub.
And a lot of it would be site-to-site in the TNG era, too. So all you would need would be that "Non Sequitur" bracelet and a big government-operated machine hidden somewhere beneath the city or in orbit.
Something like that would probably be a lot easier to do than designing and building a starship transporter. We had trains long before we had automobiles, and telephones long before radio transceivers, even though the former seemingly required a greater infrastructure than the latter. When the infrastructure is "allowed" to be bulky and immobile and centralized, the operations themselves become smoother and cheaper and simpler.
Timo Saloniemi
However, I don't know if site-to-site transporting would be as common as you think. When Sisko was discussing with Jake how he always beamed into the dining room for dinner, he seemed to emphasize the point that his parents didn't make anything of it. He could have been emphasizing the entire "I'm in the Academy but I'm beaming home for supper," but he also could have been emphasizing that "I'm not only beaming home because I'm so homesick but I'm beaming right into the dining room."
I guess I'm just looking at this from an etiquette point of view. I would consider it very rude for my parents to just beam into the entry foyer of my house. I'd be willing to bet that secretaries may not enjoy random people just beaming into their offices as well. Uninvited guests and all that. I can see transporter units set up on street corners much like we have telephone booths today. You can still get fairly close to your destination, but, damn it, you need some exercise!
quote:
It's been a while, but didn't Voyager's "Non Sequitur" give the implication that there were subways in use? I have a vague recollection of Harry Kim walking past one of these entrances.
[ September 20, 2001: Message edited by: Harry ]
Also remember, this is a utopian society where people take the time to smell the roses and do things the long way because the have the time and are unafraid. I would imagine that there are people who walk or take conventional transportation simply because they prefer it. Transprters may be an "in case you need it" kind of feature.
It's also possible that use of transporters has been restricted from individual use for security reasons. There's the possibility that only liscened facilities can operate these. They may even all be Starfleet operated.
I dont say 'i drove right up to my dads driveway' i say 'i drove home for dinner' if it was really that common he wold have just said 'i beamed home for dinner' not 'i beamed right into the living room' he was trying to point out he did an odd thing because he was a homesick kid, and not everyone beams around the country.
BTW, one of the first novels to come out after TMP (The Abode Of Life) had a society where transporter travel was as common as phone calls. The Enterprise had a hard time beaming down a landing party because there was so much transporter traffic going on on the planet. That's another factor to consider: the bandwith necessary for widescale transporter usage.
"Your limbs have made an illegal operation and will be shut down."
I'll list some things i would like that they probably have on an aircraft carrier right now: a helicopter; massive radio transmitter/recievers& high speed satellite linkups, global positioning; neat hats with pins on them.
I could get some of those things if i had more money, but i dont think that every person in america would be able to have all of them at once
The smoothest and most logical way for things to run is to consider planetside transporter systems like a planetwide subway system. There are stops at every significant enough location (and there would be a lot of them) and it would be possible to beam manually, away team style to anywhere on the planet as a special case.
Obviously, Starfleet would receive a special ability in the use of transporters as far as would be needed. This would be regulated by the Terran Local Government and the Federation Government. Reason for the Terran Local is that it seems to me that we often confuse the Federation Council as the ruling body for the UFP with whoever runs Earth. The Whitehouse runs the Federal Government, not the District of Columbia.
Deciding on whether to use a transporter or not seems to be a matter of time. Would it be simpler to go to a transporter facility (would there be lines to wait in in the utopian future?) or go to a shuttle facility (probably more shuttles than transporter pads on Earth) and fly it to Fiji or orbit or wherever. Or take a subway from San Fran to NYC or Tokyo, etc. Or a hovercar across town.
Finally, I'd think there would be transporter enhancer satellites in orbit and at Lagrange points so that it would be possible to beam from Earth to Mars or other places in the inner solar system or even whole solar system. The beaming might be twice (or more) as long, but hell, seems like an easy think to do.
Does that make sense?
(edit: written after a long night of drinking)
The state of art of communications and computing devices in the military is typically abysmal compared with what the civilians have available. There's a much greater need for standardization and independence from complex fixed support infrastructures, and then there's a double inertia of manufacturing the sort of robust stuff that has no civilian market value, and accepting NIH tech in general.
I guess holotech is also far more advanced in the civilian world than aboard starships or starbases, and Starfleet is only now realizing the full possibilities - holo-decoys, training simulations etc. This is a technology that is obviously commercially attractive, and less obviously militarily so.
Transporting could also fall into this category. If at first you needed a machine the size of Pentagon to transport a person, you'd use it dirtside and possibly forget about shipboard applications for a goodly while - but you *would* use it dirtside, because teleportation is commercially attractive once safe. When starships would get their first teleporters, their development would probably branch into completely different directions, creating "tanks" instead of "sedans". There could be later convergence if civilians found "SUV" style transporters perversely attractive, but in general, a civilian transporter would be a completely different beast. The military would have no use for the "sedan" transporter, and might neglect technologies related to "sedan-like" transporter operations.
Timo Saloniemi
quote:
Finally, I'd think there would be transporter enhancer satellites in
orbit and at Lagrange points so that it would be possible to beam from
Earth to Mars or other places in the inner solar system or even whole
solar system. The beaming might be twice (or more) as long, but hell,
seems like an easy think to do.
I'm not sure I'd want to risk a very long range transport like Earth to Mars, if for no other reason than beam dispersal. I remember reading in high school that a laser beam the width of a pencil will spread out to roughly half a mile in diameter by the time it reaches the moon. A transport from here to Mars is about 140 times as far; can you imagine how far the matter stream would spread out over that distance?
I think the key to transporter usage on a wide scale would be economic viability. Would there be enough of an incentive to send passengers using a transporter versus more conventional means? As i stated in my earlier post, for Starfleet its more resonable to beam down personnel rather than land a starship.
I use passenger transport as my example because I don't believe quantum resolution transporters would be economically viable in shipping cargo. It makes much more sense to simply replicate what you want where you are, rather than manufacturing at point A and beaming to point B.
quote:
I use passenger transport as my example because I don't believe quantum resolution transporters would be economically viable in shipping cargo. It makes much more sense to simply replicate what you want where you are, rather than manufacturing at point A and beaming to point B.
Depending upon power availability. Remember, shit costs energy. Does it take less energy to transport things using cargo transporters or to use that energy to store an energy pattern and then transfer that energy pattern from computer memory to reality. Choosing one above the other must be a case by case basis.
Re: Earth-Mars transporters.
Voyager fucked up Mars. 
In the future, Mars will be the North America of the solar system. There could be over a billion people living on her and there will be an entire civilization based there. But above all it will be terraformed. It will be green and blue and white and NOT red.
But thats a different thread entirely; my point is that Mars will be such a center of Sol culture/population/commerce/etc. that working out a reliable and effective transporter would be a very useful thing to have. Its not just Earth in the Sol System. Earth is the city and the rest are like the suburbs in the Trek universe. Having a reliable transportation system between Mercury/Venus/Earth/Mars/Asteroid Belt/Galilaen moons/Titan/and maybe even out into the outer moons and the Kuiper Belt would be extremely economical.
Getting back to the thread's subject, it's probably less power-intensive to transport cargo at a molecular resolution than a quantum resolution. With the former, a less perfect pattern needs to be stored. That means less stress on the computer and machinery which equals less power consumption. However, would it still be economically feasible to chose transporters over freighters?
For interplanetary transporters to work, you'd definitely need a satellite system or booster relay system in place. I think you'd probably lose too much of the beam integrity without them. However, the booster relay chain would have to be immense. Earth and Mars revolve around the sun at different rates. Therefore, it'd be possible for the two planets to be on opposite sides of the sun. Imagine all of the boosters that'd be needed by doing that.
For the interplanetary transport of cargo, I still think that freighters would be the choice. Beam the cargo up from the planet, take a short hop to the next planet, and then beam it down. I just don't think that transporters would be a very good method.
Geordi says thats its safer to use a transporter in a couple of transporter accident(!) episodes, 'Datas Day' & 'Realm of Fear'.. and maybe 'The Next Phase' too.
But remember, statistically, in our century its safer to fly than to drive.
but
a) When you fly you do it in groups with a highly trained professional doing it for you
b) Flying short distances is a ridiculous use of resources, so driving is more efficient and can be done personally
So i suggest that these are paralells.. statistically it is safer to transport than it is to shuttle (esp. if Chakotay pilots)
but
a) transporting needs a professional doing it for you (i.e. not everybody can run your own pad, just like not everybody flies your own plane
b) transporting short distances is a waste of resources and shuttling is more beneficial, and can be done personally (like a 'flitter' like everybody has in the novels)
i started a new thread for terraforming and mars
"I remember reading in high school that a laser beam the width of a pencil will spread out to roughly half a mile in diameter by the time it reaches the moon."
That's a technological limitation. We just can't make a laser better than that (or whatever the actual figure might be). That doesn't mean, in the future, someone couldn't make a laser that stays much more in line. And Trek's idea of the annular confinement beam would probably be even easier to keep cylindrical.
Mars could probably be terraformed by Trek tech, but I can't think of a NEED to do so. Terraforming is for people who cannot travel to the stars, or who can but happen to live in a galaxy where each and every star does NOT contain class M planets, most of which harbor no native life that would hold a credible previous claim or would otherwise hinder colonization.
Or then terraforming is for people who want to show off. Or for people who desperately need a food source right next to their own planet. Trek does a lot of showing off, but Earth isn't suffering from hunger and does not need a farming world next door. And whoever wants to leave Paradise for some reason is free to do so aboard a warpship that will take him far, far beyond Mars.
Transportation is indeed best equated with air travel, I guess. But the argument that professionals run the aircraft and that individuality is suppressed sound hollow to me. Surely "private" commuting is a step to the worse, while commuting by buses or trains that are run by professionals (sometimes by remote control) liberates you from a need to pilot a vehicle or park it or take care of it. I can easily see a role for transporters-operated-like-subways in commuting, in addition to transporters-operated-like-airliners in long-distance planetary travel.
Use of transporter relays probably presents safety hazards or it would be more aggressively pursued in interplanetary applications. But I don't think the range of a Starfleet shipboard transporter ought to be representative of transporters in general.
There are cars that are faster than an Abrams tank, airliners that take aboard more people than an F-15, houses that offer better accommodation than an NBC-secure bunker. I trust there could be superior-ranged civilian transporters as well, through tradeoffs the military is not willing to make. Perhaps Earth transporters use landlines instead of beams, and a long enough landline can take the signal across a million kilometers, not just X0,000? Perhaps one could run a landline to a geostationary anchor and an outreeled relay beyond that, and reach the Moon that way?
Timo Saloniemi
Transporters are found in every city, or near every major public utility/rec area/etc. I think a Transporter Center would be as common as US Post Offices. Every little town has one, and in between you have little private run establishments, like Mail Boxes Etc. So, in every city you have a free to the public government run Transport Center, which would have a person there operating it like on the show. Then, you may have many other small Transport Centers, like Transporters Etc., located near stadiums, parks, train stations, etc. These would be fee based, costing a couple credits.
At the Starfleet Academy, each student gets an allotment of "transporter credits", and can use these at his or her (or its) discretion to transport home, go on a short trip to Jamiaca, or whatever. This is what Sisko was talking about.
Then, for short trips within or between cities, you have maglift trains and hover cars. This is what we saw when Kim was walking down the street and what we saw in All Good Things at Cambridge (or whatever school that was).
There are also aircars, for fast transit across continents, for those who don't want to get there instantly for whatever reason. Perhaps it is free to transport up to so many times a month, but after that the government begins to charge you (to pay for the system...they still cost *money*, or power (the two are interchangable), to operate). For that reason, people wouldn't just beam around all the time. There would be a finite source of power for every to beam about, so the government would place cost-restrictions on the populace. This would force the general public to use the maglev and the air transit system.
Of course, the rich folks, whatever that means in a Utopian society, would and probably could have their own pad installed in their garage. Why not? Michael Jackson has a theme park and most stars have their own jets!
That's just my two cents...
Lance
TheTrekker's Officer's Bible
www.thetrekker.org
::Draws a little line between A and B::
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: Stingray ]
*Picard shoots a phaser beam out his right eye in a battle with Soren in Generations*
Fans: THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE! He can't shoot a phaser out his eye!
Says another: Yes he can, this is fiction!
*sigh*
Lance
www.thetrekker.org