Science fiction is a tricky thing. For Star Trek especially, where the intent isn’t to create action and adventure but rather thought provoking scenarios, the science is a means to an end. A way to hand-wave away the impossible to bring the viewers into an interesting situation.
In that respect, I’m perfectly content with all the hand waving in the world. Need to create a conflict that teleporters could easily solve? Then there’s some kind of background tachyon interference, or there’s some strange gamma radiation, or jamming, or shields. Fine by me; it leads to a lot of throwaway lines that serve no purpose other than to placate the logic centers of the brain, but those logic centers need to be placated, by golly.
Season 2 started out with a great couple of episodes involving a daring rescue of Bajoran prisoners from a Cardassian planet. I felt that the character development and action writing were both very solid. I bring this episode up because when the Runabout reaches the planet, the writers have the teleporter situation to address. Rather than reaching into their bag of teleporter excuses, they explain that the runabout can only beam up 2 folks at a time, and that they don’t know which of the dozen prisoners is the guy they’re after, and that if they start to teleport people out at random, all hell will break lose. That clever bit of writing forced them to land the Runabout instead, and doing so rather artfully advanced the action. I appreciated that they took the time to come up with a reasonable explanation rather than gammyons or something, even though I would have been perfectly content with gammyons.
Now, it’s not like the two-person limitation on the teleporter was explained further. They didn’t have to delve into power restrictions or computer buffers or anything like that. As far as excuses go, it’s as vague as subspace interference, but it works. I don’t really need the explanations to be detailed, just internally consistent with the rules of the universe that the writers are trying to create.
Man, this is way too much attention to be paying to a series that went off the air 15 years ago. I’m sorry folks.
Actually, it’s as simple as square footage. If you look at the transporter in a runabout, it only has two pads (compared the 6 or 8 pads in an Enterprise transporter room), and the niche containing the pads is the size of a small closet.
Now, I just watched a late season 2 episode, “Paradise”. At the end, four people are beamed up to a runabout at once: Sisko and O’Brien, plus two non-Starfleet people. But they stand very close together, with Sisko and O’Brien each holding the arm of one of the others.
I think the issue in the rescue episode you mentioned, aside from the physical capacity of the transporter “room”, was the fact that the Bajoran prisoners weren’t likely to be conveniently bunched up. They were spread all over the labor camp, making it impossible to beam them up en masse, even if the transporter had been capable.
On another note, I also watched the episode Shadowplay, which included a child actress named Noley Thornton. Noley also played the part of Clara in the TNG episode Imaginary Friend a couple years earlier (and holy crap, that kid will be 30 this year). I thought she showed a lot of potential, but checking her resume I found she hasn’t done anything since 1998. Wonder what happened.
I’m sure there’s some explanation in canon that makes perfect sense, but as a kid I could never figure out why they had transporter pads and transporter rooms, since they weren’t ever necessary. That is, you can teleport from point A to point B, where neither A nor B are a transporter pad. Maybe the pad acts like some kind of buffer, and you actually do go through the pad even though you don’t materialize there? But if that was the case, then there’s no need to make the pads human-shaped. Just shove a lot of them into the runabout, stacked like casino chips, and have each one act like a buffer for 1 human sized object to go from the planet surface to somewhere else in the runabout. I dunno. It never really bothered me a whole lot.
That’s all I could come up with. I wish the writers had never used the “beam directly to sickbay,” because I don’t think it was ever story-necessary–or else put in two lines of explanation somewhere. But if fanwank I must, fanwank I will.
Manufacturing, even by replicator, is not free. Transporting two at a time (or four bunched up) must have seemed plenty to Starfleet ship-designers. And the runabouts weren’t meant to carry very many people anyway.
I suppose it’s possible that “point-to-point transport” (the term they used on TNG) requires more processing power than using the pads, kind of like it’s possible to carry a box by hand from one side of a large warehouse to the other, but it’s easier to drop it on the conveyor belt. But if your “warehouse” is simply a small storeroom, a conveyor belt is an unnecessary waste of resources. I don’t recall P2P transport being used anywhere but on a full-sized starship or space station. It could be that a small craft like a runabout doesn’t have the necessary systems in place — it seems to me that a runabout is effectively the “compact car” or “general purpose vehicle” of Starfleet. It’s not a minivan (shuttle) or semi truck (cargo vessel), and it’s not specifically designed as a combat vessel, and under ordinary circumstances there’s no call for mass or tactical transport capability.