Oskuro wrote:As I said in that other thread I started because I'm an idiot who can't read, it is possible there are limitations that have simply not been explored in the movie. Some ideas off the top of my head:
1) Unacceptable lack of accuracy: As in "scotty teleported into the water treatment system". It could stand to reason that, due to the distances involved, it is impossible to "aim" the teleporter (no sensor feedback) so it would be extremely risky to use. It could be inferred that Khan went to Khronos beforehand to either plant a beacon of some sort or to find a spot to aim to and do some pre-calculations.
Alternatively, he may not have cared where he ended up on the planet. If he shows up half a mile from where he's supposed to, that still serves his purposes. If he shows up in midair, well, maybe he had a parachute or a jetpack or something; he seemed quite well prepared.*
And if the system were so unreliable that you had a serious risk of winding up
inside the ground... well, have we ever actually seen people beamed into a solid object in Star Trek? I suspect it's physically impossible, but could be wrong.
Besides, there's the one point of evidence that Spock was confident he could operate the transporter accurately enough to at least get Kirk and Scotty
onto the Enterprise in the first place. If it had a known accuracy limit of, say, a hundred meters... well, there'd be a good chance of accidentally beaming them into space outside the ship.
*[Come to think of it, remember that bazooka-like energy weapon he used to shoot down an attacking Bird of Prey? That is the one hand weapon I can remember seeing in any Star Trek related fiction that
explicitly operates in the same general range of firepower as the largest typical ground-based Star Wars weapons. I would not want to be in an AT-AT taking fire from a squad armed with those things, though the armor might shrug off the bolts.]
This limitation wouldn't preclude a kind of "stargate" system with fixed transporter emplacements for interplanetary travels, but would make it difficult to use tactically (In the first movie the enterprise was moving along a known path at a constant velocity, while a ship in a combat situation could have a more erratic movement pattern).
It would still be effective for inserting special forces to sabotage key installations (commandos don't care if they materialize half a mile from their infiltration point, assuming the infiltration point was chosen intelligently). It would still be effective for beaming powerful weapons as a form of strategic bombing (transwarping a thermonuclear bomb would still produce a blast of radius much greater than any plausible error in the beaming technology).
2) Prohibitive Cost: The first instance of the transwarp beaming is performed with "off the shelf" teleporters, but we are never made aware of the effect this use has on them. It could be entirely possible that the strain actually burns the involved circuits thus making them a "one use" tech, which would drive up costs considerably. Or maybe the energy requirements are simply prohibitive for constant use. Combine that with the aforementioned lack of precision, and it could quickly drive up the cost/benefit ratio.
True, although if it's being used as a delivery vehicle for a powerful enough strategic weapon, the sheer amount of 'boom' it will cause is enough to justify a lot of expense to deliver it. ICBMs aren't cheap either, but we don't hesitate to use them to deliver nuclear bombs.
Tribble wrote:At any rate, seeing as virtually all the evidence with regular transporter use demonstrate that Federation transporters do not go through enemy force's shielding, and there is no evidence to suggest that transwarp beaming would be any different, on the balance of probabilities transwarp beaming will not work through Star Wars shielding. In which case, while it might let the Feds launch the occasional surprise attack on unsuspecting targets it certainly isn't a game changer.
When Scott and Kirk first beam to the
Enterprise in the movie, are you saying that the
Enterprise's shields are down?
Batman wrote:And I was quantifying the likely cost of doing so, i.e. an Empire that blew up a fucking Core World just to make a point and scare the rest of the Empire into sitting down and be good can probably throw ships at the AQ until the heat death of the universe without it being a noticeable leave alone serious drain on their resources.
This is the same Empire that, if we are to believe the EU, started ignoring
entire polities like the Hapan because the number of ships it was taking to subdue them didn't justify the price.