Transporters for Intraplanetary Travel

[amigocabal]

I have heard arguments that transwarp beaming would make starships obsolete because people could just beam from star system from star system.

So this begs the question of whether airliners and trains and buses are obsolete with respect to long-distance intraplanetary transport. A network of transporters could be installed allowing people to beam from one city to the next.

Is there any evidence transportation within a planet (like Earth) was revolutionized in this manner?

[Baffalo]

We know that Ben Sisko used transporter credits to beam from Starfleet Academy in San Francisco to New Orleans on a regular basis in DS9: Explorers, and I believe it's stated that Tom Paris used to beam frequently from San Francisco to Paris on a regular basis.

[SpottedKitty]

That's Starfleet personnel, though. What about the much bigger (presumably) number of civilians who might want or need to travel more than short distances? I remember way back at the beginning of ST:TMP we saw something like a big shuttle depositing Captain Kirk in a big railway-station-like structure. I'm thinking about a civilian network of shuttle routes, like Trek-era Greyhound buses. That's got to have a smaller energy budget than just beaming everyone everywhere.

[Baffalo]

That's Starfleet personnel, though. What about the much bigger (presumably) number of civilians who might want or need to travel more than short distances? I remember way back at the beginning of ST:TMP we saw something like a big shuttle depositing Captain Kirk in a big railway-station-like structure. I'm thinking about a civilian network of shuttle routes, like Trek-era Greyhound buses. That's got to have a smaller energy budget than just beaming everyone everywhere.

No doubt. The only advantage to using transporters is that it's about as close to instantaneous travel as possible. Now, energy wise, yeah it would make far more economic sense to build a regular network of interconnected trains for city to city transit, with probably major express routes for the big cities (San Francisco to Paris, for example) with smaller local routes radiating out from that so people can get to where they need. Within the city, there's probably an automated bus service for people to ride to get around, if not a subway system in place.


Paris, 2372

We don't see much in the way of private transport, since even that one lone shuttle seemed a bit out of place. In fact, if we look at this picture...


USS Vengeance crashing into San Francisco, 2259

There is very little evidence of airborne traffic moving about, meaning we don't have the tight lanes of traffic as we saw in places like Coruscant. Either the use of private shuttles is very very small, or most people have been switched over to public transit. Given how our own (American) culture has seen a sharp decline in vehicle ownership in favor of public transit and walking, it's not hard to reason that people just use the local transportation for free or a small fee.

[Simon_Jester]

Alternatively, there is almost no air traffic, and virtually all the passenger traffic is moving around at or below street level, or by beaming.

Teleporters really do have a lot of interesting economic advantages for personal transportation, among them that you have full control over when and where you travel, and that as long as the electricity is available, you can't overcrowd or 'jam' the system the way a road or a train station can be 'jammed.'

Assuming that transporter malfunctions are very very rare, there would be a lot of pressure to make them available for mass transit.

[Havok]

Given how easily transporter beams can be disrupted, stopped, blocked, hell probably even intercepted, I would think it would be a piss poor way to travel or transport people. Maybe for military use and shipping, but even that seems to be a sketchy proposition.

[Gandalf]

Given how easily transporter beams can be disrupted, stopped, blocked, hell probably even intercepted, I would think it would be a piss poor way to travel or transport people. Maybe for military use and shipping, but even that seems to be a sketchy proposition.

It's possible that transporting around a single planet might be made less risky by having the signal go along hard wired systems as opposed to wireless ones.

I would think that the big problem is one of the energy it would take relative to taking a shuttle.

[amigocabal]

Given how easily transporter beams can be disrupted, stopped, blocked, hell probably even intercepted, I would think it would be a piss poor way to travel or transport people. Maybe for military use and shipping, but even that seems to be a sketchy proposition.

It's possible that transporting around a single planet might be made less risky by having the signal go along hard wired systems as opposed to wireless ones.

I would think that the big problem is one of the energy it would take relative to taking a shuttle.

Of course, one possible reason hard wired systems are not used is because the lack of a suitable conduit (at least in the 24th century).

Something tells me transporter signals can not be sent via copper wires...

[Gandalf]

What makes you think that the Federation doesn't have sufficient conduits?

Whatever receives transporter information on a ship has to get it to the transporter somehow.

[amigocabal]

What makes you think that the Federation doesn't have sufficient conduits?

Whatever receives transporter information on a ship has to get it to the transporter somehow.

It could be made of some exotic, rare material.

[Darth Tanner]

Something tells me transporter signals can not be sent via copper wires...

Why not when it can be sent wireless through all sorts of strange environments.

Given how easily transporter beams can be disrupted, stopped, blocked, hell probably even intercepted

We only really see this when long range scout ships are exploring strange new worlds... I see no reason they would encounter similar difficulties on long term inhabited planets, and even if it is it would be trivial to simply have it be pad to pad so that you get the signal enhancer effect. Now TOS era did seem to have some safety problems when they were not configured properly as seen in the slow motion picture so maintenance would be an issue on a planet wide transport network.

Now, energy wise, yeah it would make far more economic sense to build a regular network of interconnected trains for city to city transit

Assuming of course that is requires less energy to teleport from A to B compared to moving hundreds of tonnes of train hundreds of miles to cover the same distance. We have no idea how much energy is being used as it defies our physics to explain how much work is actually being done. A society using antimatter as fuel likely doesn't have many fuel concerns either.

[Baffalo]

Something tells me transporter signals can not be sent via copper wires...

Why not when it can be sent wireless through all sorts of strange environments.

I think he's referring to the actual beam itself being best sent through a wireless means as opposed to a wired one because we don't know what the beam consists of. If it's data, then it could, but if it's an actual stream of particles, then I'm not sure they'd be able to, not without a special set of wires running from each pad. In that case, it would make far more sense to simply 'broadcast' the atoms rather than try and get them down a tube.

Given how easily transporter beams can be disrupted, stopped, blocked, hell probably even intercepted

We only really see this when long range scout ships are exploring strange new worlds... I see no reason they would encounter similar difficulties on long term inhabited planets, and even if it is it would be trivial to simply have it be pad to pad so that you get the signal enhancer effect. Now TOS era did seem to have some safety problems when they were not configured properly as seen in the slow motion picture so maintenance would be an issue on a planet wide transport network.

Transporters on starships don't get used as frequently as they would on a planet, at least not all the time. Leave and shore details would likely need to transport a lot of stuff quickly and efficiently, but otherwise there's plenty of downtime. We don't know whether each transporter has a set maintenance cycle that requires them to go offline every X hours or not, but even then there's always the downtime of people not transporting as often when it's local night. There are still some beams going on even then, but not enough you couldn't shut down a pad or two for routine maintenance.

Now, energy wise, yeah it would make far more economic sense to build a regular network of interconnected trains for city to city transit

Assuming of course that is requires less energy to teleport from A to B compared to moving hundreds of tonnes of train hundreds of miles to cover the same distance. We have no idea how much energy is being used as it defies our physics to explain how much work is actually being done. A society using antimatter as fuel likely doesn't have many fuel concerns either.

I'm not so sure about the no fuel concerns, but I'll crunch numbers.

The TGV 2N2 weighs 424 metric tonnes with a seating capacity of 509 and uses 9,400 kW to move, or approximately 22.17 W/kg. At 320 km/h, it could cross the distance from San Francisco to Paris (8948 km) in 27.96 hours, using approximately 9.463E9 Joules of energy.

So, since it takes approximately the same amount of energy to turn a person into energy as it does to convert them back, let's just magically assume the transporter only needs to worry about actually moving the mass of 509 people, accelerating them to around 99% the speed of light in under 1 second, then decelerating them at their point of origin to arrive safely. For simplicity, I'm going to use the difference in weight from the TGV 2N2 again, but only the mass difference between fully loaded and empty (424 tons full, 380 empty, thus passenger mass is 44 tons).

Force = Mass x Acceleration, so 44,000 kg x 297E6 m/s2 = 13E12 Newtons. Since we don't know how far it takes to accelerate the atoms, let's just say that half the journey is spent under this kind of acceleration, and the other half decelerating, meaning that we take our 13E12 Newtons and multiply by 8.948E6 meters for a total of 116.9E18 Joules.

That's a bit excessive, so let's go back and assume that our transporters are wired, and transmit only energy. If that's the case, then converting to and from energy to move that much would take E = 2(mc2), since we need to convert to energy and back from it. So, E = 2(44,000 kg x 300E62) = 7.92E21 Joules.

Uh... fuck. That's a lot of power. It can't be that damned high.

[Broomstick]

I have heard arguments that transwarp beaming would make starships obsolete because people could just beam from star system from star system.

So this begs the question of whether airliners and trains and buses are obsolete with respect to long-distance intraplanetary transport. A network of transporters could be installed allowing people to beam from one city to the next.

Is there any evidence transportation within a planet (like Earth) was revolutionized in this manner?

While on the one hand Trek Tech is so often retarded in application I could see a potential for abandoning virtually everything else for transporter technology, let's take a look at our own civilization:

We simultaneously have train, bus, private vehicle, and air transportation for distance travel for people. For cargo we have road/truck/lorry, rail, and air. Redundant modes of transport make sense, so you can optimize for energy expenditure, speed/time, and overall costs.

Why wouldn't this continue into the future?

[SpottedKitty]

Uh... fuck. That's a lot of power. It can't be that damned high.

If it is, there's another reason I hope actual physical vehicles would be preferred over transporters — the sheer amount of energy being tossed around, and the likelihood of Something Nasty™ happening whenever there's a serious glitch in the system. I can see Starfleet accepting that sort of risk, assuming spaceflight itself is even riskier, but I can't see mass numbers of civilians willing to step on the pad under those circumstances.

I just realised someone upthread mentioned taking a train from San Fransisco to Paris. Not surprising, I suppose, that Trek-era tech would move a transatlantic tunnel (hurrah!) from the implausible to the merely difficult and expensive.

[Borgholio]

I think transporters would simply be the apex of the cost vs speed pyramid. Look at the examples that Broomstick gave, plus a few others.

Ship - most efficient for large amounts of cargo or passengers, but also slowest.
Train - carries less cargo than large freighters and fewer passengers than a cruise ship, but is faster.
Passenger Bus / Truck - less cargo, but is faster.
Airplane - less cargo but is faster.
Transporter - less cargo but is faster.

So basically as a general rule, the faster you go, the more energy you use and the less cargo you can carry. As you move from massive freighters and cruise ships to personal automobiles and airplanes, the amount of cargo or people you can move decreases and the cost per person / pound of cargo increases, but the speed goes up. Transporters would fit in perfectly with existing real-world examples. You can beam a few people or a ton of cargo almost instantly across thousands of miles, but the energy requirements are absurd compared to a cargo shuttle or physically docking the ship and hauling stuff over with a forklift.

[Ted C]

I see no reason why a major planet wouldn't have a network of transporter stations in major cities and on satellites. The convenience of being able to get from San Francisco to Paris in seconds rather than hours would be hard to restrict to just military use.

There is, of course, an energy cost. "The Outcast" indicates that it takes at least a few megajoules to transporter a person. I'm not sure how expensive that would be in terms of futuristic power sources.

[Darth Tanner]

Looking at the pictures of Paris in Trek is weird, there's some sort of giant tunnel under the Eiffel Tower!

Transporter - less cargo but is faster.

Unless you have top of the range cargo transporters and then apparently you can load a freighter pretty swiftly as DS9 says.. although considering the amount of cargo that consists of small boxes I'm not going to take that as too much of a high end example.

[Borgholio]

Unless you have top of the range cargo transporters and then apparently you can load a freighter pretty swiftly as DS9 says.. although considering the amount of cargo that consists of small boxes I'm not going to take that as too much of a high end example.

What's the largest / heaviest object we've ever seen be moved by transporter? Just off the top of my head, back in the 23rd century, Scotty says he's never beamed up 400 tons before in ST-4. So clearly although it CAN do it, even Scotty himself had never done it before. Also, have we ever seen anything be beamed that's larger than the transporter pad itself?

[Broomstick]

I'm pretty sure a Klingon ship of the size used in STIV:TVH does not come equipped with a transporter pad the size of a humpback whale, much less two plus associated water... but then, Klingon transporter tech may be somewhat different than the Federation's and/or have different safety tolerances.

I'd still expect both versions to work on the same physics, though.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I'm fairly certain that DS9 mentions Earth having a planetary transporter grid in Home Front/Paradise Lost, when the President is surprised that Leyton and Sisko manage to beam in to his office because the grid was still down or something.

[Baffalo]

There is, of course, an energy cost. "The Outcast" indicates that it takes at least a few megajoules to transporter a person. I'm not sure how expensive that would be in terms of futuristic power sources.

According to what I found, the most expensive power plants in the United States costs about 33 cents per kiloWatt-hour, or roughly 3,600,000 Joules. That's what it costs today.

I find this questionable because if we could beam someone around for under a dollar, why would we spend money on trains and other modes of transportation? Nostalgia? They must serve some purpose, and the only one that makes any kind of sense would be that transporters take way more power to use, or there's something about them that makes people scared to use them. Maybe after one too many instances of TMP "What we got back... didn't live long. Fortunately."

[Borgholio]

I think this is one of the instances where what is said on screen must be discarded due to it not making any sense whatsoever, such as when Data talks about watts per second.

[Elheru Aran]

I can see transporters being considered a fast but expensive option, while trains cost less but take longer (depending on the train, you could easily have a small number of extra-fast trains and more medium-range and slow trains). As with so much dialogue in ST, you simply can't really square it with physics unless they discovered some kind of unobtainum which allows them to pull off some crazy shit.

[Ted C]

There is, of course, an energy cost. "The Outcast" indicates that it takes at least a few megajoules to transport a person. I'm not sure how expensive that would be in terms of futuristic power sources.

According to what I found, the most expensive power plants in the United States costs about 33 cents per kiloWatt-hour, or roughly 3,600,000 Joules. That's what it costs today.

I find this questionable because if we could beam someone around for under a dollar, why would we spend money on trains and other modes of transportation? Nostalgia? They must serve some purpose, and the only one that makes any kind of sense would be that transporters take way more power to use, or there's something about them that makes people scared to use them. Maybe after one too many instances of TMP "What we got back... didn't live long. Fortunately."

Transporters may have costs beyond just their basic power consumption. Just constructing and maintaining the things may be resource intensive.

[J Ryan]

Didn't one of the scenes in Enterprise that showed the future Enterprise J (yeah I know) feature transporters to move around the ship? This seems to imply that if there was any issue with casual use of transporters it's been resolved if people use them to avoid moving a few decks in an elevator.