Absolutely. The problem, though, is that Star Trek has veered toward not only trying to give some technobabble explanation for how their technology works but then using it for plot resolution. It not only opens leads to bad writing bit it also opens up up a whole can of worms regarding why their technology is sometimes amazing and can fix anything including resequencing a genome and other times useless and can’t be used even for simple things like treating a maiming injury. It isn’t the technobabble technology that is fundamentally a problem; it is the narrative inconsistency it produces.
Or, in the words of Lt. Tawny Madison:
Gwen DeMarco: What is this thing? I mean, it serves no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway. No, I mean we shouldn’t have to do this, it makes no logical sense, why is it here?
Jason Nesmith: 'Cause it’s on the television show.
Gwen DeMarco: Well forget it! I’m not doing it! This episode was badly written!
Every single member of Star Fleet, except perhaps Troi, understands transporters better than anyone in the real world. The idea that you, the fan, have an insight that hasn’t occurred to the scientists and citizens of the Federation is goofy.
Transporters are impossible. So the way they function is technobabble. The clear intent of the stories are that they don’t kill you.
Not that I disagree with your premise - I trust that in the universe of the show, the transporter is not a murder box. But…
Federation scientists didn’t create the transporter. TV writers did. Writers that probably failed their science classes. (And their creative writing classes, at least some of them…) So, in at least some episodes, the reason the transporter doesn’t make sense isn’t that we don’t understand 24th century tech, but that the writers don’t, either. It’s fair to criticize.
I wonder how much of that was more because the line admirals weren’t usually involved. I mean, whatever Enterprise it was, it was certainly part of some kind of Starfleet sub-unit, even if it’s the “Five Year Mission Squadron 1” or something, and that sub-unit would have a commander that Kirk/Picard would have had some degree of regular contact with. And I’m guessing it was typically boring stuff like personnel reports, logistics, etc… and maybe the occasional order to go here or there and do something.
IIRC, most of the admirals that played plot roles were either outside of their chain of command, and might have been in charge of other aspects of Starfleet, or they were sort of outside the “usual” roles of flag officers, and basically playing a sort of reverse deus ex machina sort of role- (“A wild Admiral appears!”) in order to drive the characters to some certain point for the plot.
My suspicion is that the latter kind was more likely to be ethically suspect if it helped the writer push the plot forward.
Sprung from cages out on Starbase 9
Warp powered, phase reversed, and steppin’ out over the line
Oh, Hoshi, this thing rips the moles from your face
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
Which brings up another use for transporters the writers never thought of.
No matter how the transporter actually works, if you don’t intend that the person being transported survive the trip, it can always be made faster that any transporter that actually is expected to have people live.
So you set up automatic transporters as a defense. When a Borg transports in, before he even fully materializes, your defensive transporter grabs a bubble-shaped area slightly bigger than the Borg drone and sends it out into space. It doesn’t have to “lock on”, and it definitely doesn’t have to remember the pattern.
In practice, you could be looking at the spot where a Borg is trying to beam in, and in a shimmer it’s gone. You might see a bit of visual flutter, and the air pressure in the room drops a small bit. Might even hear a unique mini thunderclap as the air is removed.
What annoyed me the most is that on the rare occasion we saw large-scale fleet actions, they always had a ship captain - usually Picard or Sisko - in command of the entire federation fleet. Not only were situations like that exactly what you needed a line Admiral in command, the commanding captains were also in charge of their own ships. Which is absurd, because you can’t command a ship and a fleet at the same time; they’re both full-time jobs. Nelson didn’t command the Victory at Trafalger, for instance, and Nimitz didn’t command an aircraft carrier at Midway.
Yes, the one time they used it as a weapon. It gave me the idea, (Unlike when Kirk beamed two redshirts into space at warp speed. That must have been a surprise for them, to say the least.)
eta: You really want to be nasty? You beam the drone back inside the cube, but you reassemble him as antimatter.
Even if some creature is making you read the transporter controls wrong…the machine itself should stop you from beaming two people into space at warp speed without massive command authorizations.
I don’t recall many fleet actions, but you make a good point. The writers probably knew nothing about naval fleet battles. It would be easy to make Picard a Commodore, and turn control of Enterprise over to Riker.
Concerning other posts in the thread, for Christ’s sake, guys, they are traveling faster than light, which is impossible.
Before anyone mentions it…my headcanon as to why they have fleet actions at point blank range is because weapons countermeasures have made it nessecery.
Also why only our main heroes seem to have shields in massive fleet battles is because it would be visually annoying to see everyones ship bubbles light up.
I believe the, “lock on” part is where the transporter is targeted, so you’d still have to lock on.
That said, they should be transporting bad guys every time something happens. But they have established transporter disrupters, so maybe boarding parties carry them.
If you’re not willing to buy into the basic premise of Star Trek, well, that’s fine. But to dismiss any show, or criticism of same, because it got one thing wrong, well, then you’ll never enjoy fiction.
Because EVERY episodic tv show gets something wrong. Doctor, cop, lawyer, prison, truck driver, etc-based shows always fictionalize something for the purposes of storytelling. If you’re not a trial lawyer, you’ll never catch all the mistrial-inducing or overturn on appeal errors that Jack McCoy commits, or a medical degree to catch all the things House does that would cost him his license, but believe me, they are there.
I can handle FTL drive. Just don’t tell bad stories with it.
IIRC, that was pretty much canon in Andromeda. That was a sci-fi series back in the '90s that technically wasn’t Star Trek, but was based on Gene Roddenberry’s notes, and in the first season and a half or so under the original show runner, it produced some of the best Star Trek-style episodes of any series. In at least some of the space battles, I recall dialogue about ECM systems being a prominent component of the tactical situation reports.
On the level of personal weapons, there was at least one episode where it was specifically noted in dialogue that Our Heroes wore ECM modules that scrambled the targeting systems on their foes’ weapons. Another episode had a plot point where one of Our Heroes is framed for murder by the Bad Guy remotely discharging a smart-round from their holstered weapon. The weapon is pointing down at the floor, but the smart-round zips up and around and hits the target right in the heart. The clear implication is that in that Trek-like universe, modern weapons are fail-proof, one-shot, one-kill weapons, except advanced ECM defenses mean that everyone winds up resorting to iron sights and Mk I Eyeballs for targeting.
It wouldn’t look near as interesting for fleets to fight at realistic (relativistic?) distances. I believe at Midway the enemy fleets never saw each other.