Medical Emergency, beam the patient directly to Sickbay!

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2004-03-02 11:40am

Okay, maybe this has been discussed before, but it's started to really nag at me.

In countless Trek episodes we've seen the Doctor (or whomever) find somebody unconscious or bleeding, whatever (in bad shape) and click his combadge and yell "Medical emergency, beam the patient directly to sickbay!"

Then they rush (ER style) around in sickbay trying to save the patient who usually dies or turns into a monster, etc (ie: they are too late to stop whatever it was, unless it's a main character).

What I don't get is, why don't they just hold the patient in the pattern buffer and then setup sickbay at their leisure? They could save all kinds of time and even do a diagnosis on their "pattern" since they apparently are able to do all kinds of microanalysis on a person as they're being beamed (look at their DNA, remove weapons, "bio filters" for certain pathogens, etc)?

It seems a lot of needless deaths, suffering and monster changes could be prevented if they just used some common sense with the Transporters.

On a side note, I've wondered this.. are "site to site" transports risky or not? In early Trek shows it seemed like beaming from one place to another inside the same ship was considered "risky" (though it always worked), whereas in later shows this seems to have been forgotten.

Most notably on Enterprise, they've started to almost routinely be beamed from one part of the ship to another during some action sequence, but if the transporter's in Kirk's time had trouble with this, how can Archer's ship handle it even easier, since the tech is supposedly more primitive? (Is the ship being smaller a factor?)

If transporters were to ever work in "real life" I would think that the way to do it would be from one transporter pad to another, but that's me. I guess if they did it that way they'd never get to beam down/up from planets.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-02 11:44am

far as the not holding the patients in stasis via transporter? i've heard some explanations about pattern degradation, and that they can't do it for very long without risk of losing the pattern. although considering how many times the writers have used the transporter to save the day, eh. i just chalk it up to writer gaffes.

with TOS, transporter technology wasn't nearly as advanced as it had later became in TNG. site to site was something that was rarely if ever done, and they didn't have the advancement in targeting sensors to do so reliably.

with Enterprise. . . .well, they already have so many continuity fuck ups as it is, i wouldn't take anything that show says as canon.

FOG3 · Post by **FOG3** » 2004-03-02 12:03pm

Considering Scotty survived by keeping himself ina transport buffer for a ridiculously long time crashed on the Dyson Sphere I'd think they should be able to hold the patient a while. Of course, you could also ask why they don't just fix them up when they go through the transporter.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-02 12:07pm

keep in mind scotty was an engineering genius. not just anyone could've figured it out.

Tribun · Post by **Tribun** » 2004-03-02 12:19pm

Ehhh...in one TOS episode, the one with the alien that feeds off agression, Scotty simply asked if they should hold the Klingons in the buffer for the time of the flight. (They were already ther, and Scotty wanted to know if he should rematerilize them)

So it is not impossible.

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2004-03-02 12:51pm

Tribun wrote:Ehhh...in one TOS episode, the one with the alien that feeds off agression, Scotty simply asked if they should hold the Klingons in the buffer for the time of the flight. (They were already ther, and Scotty wanted to know if he should rematerilize them)

So it is not impossible.

It's not impossible, it's just that they risk pattern degradation. During TOS, they didn't care much for Klingons, so the death of several klingons by pattern degradation wouldn't have been so important when weighed against the lives of the crew.

Thag · Post by **Thag** » 2004-03-02 02:39pm

Didn't the TNG episode with Barclay and the transporter worms give a limit of something like 30-45 seconds before the pattern begins to degrade?

HappyTarget · Post by **HappyTarget** » 2004-03-02 04:02pm

Most notably on Enterprise, they've started to almost routinely be beamed from one part of the ship to another during some action sequence, but if the transporter's in Kirk's time had trouble with this, how can Archer's ship handle it even easier, since the tech is supposedly more primitive? (Is the ship being smaller a factor?)

While I haven't seen the last handful of Enterprise epps, in all the others, they haven't used TNG+ style site to site beaming. They have used transporter pad to site on ship beaming however, which should be just as easy if not easier to do than transporter pad to planetary surface beaming.

And site to site beaming shouldn't really be all that difficult if one does it logically. Beam UP to transporter pad, then beam TO new destination. TOS doesn't need a pad to beam up from a planet, so site to site beaming shouldn't be all that hard.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-02 04:06pm

small problem. a planet is a relatively stationary object (compared to a ship). in TOS the sensors weren't refined enough to compensate transporting within a ship due to the fact that a ship is always in motion within space, so the coordinates will always be changing, and with mistakes a person could materialize inside a bulkhead rather than on the floor.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2004-03-02 04:50pm

FOG3 wrote:Considering Scotty survived by keeping himself ina transport buffer for a ridiculously long time crashed on the Dyson Sphere I'd think they should be able to hold the patient a while. Of course, you could also ask why they don't just fix them up when they go through the transporter.

Don't forget that the other guy Scotty put into the transporter buffer with him died because they did lose his pattern.

Luke Starkiller · Post by **Luke Starkiller** » 2004-03-02 07:38pm

Darth_Zod wrote:small problem. a planet is a relatively stationary object (compared to a ship). in TOS the sensors weren't refined enough to compensate transporting within a ship due to the fact that a ship is always in motion within space, so the coordinates will always be changing, and with mistakes a person could materialize inside a bulkhead rather than on the floor.

Except that if you are on the same ship then the position relative to the transporter should be even easier since no parts of the ship should be moving relative to any other parts.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2004-03-02 09:02pm

In the DS9 episode "Dr. Bashir I presume?", the transporter was damaged mid-materialization so the patterns of the crew were stuck in the buffer. Eddington warned that the patterns would start to degrade only a few minutes later.

CDiehl · Post by **CDiehl** » 2004-03-02 11:25pm

I have never understood why Starfleet hasn't developed this technology as an emergency measure to deal with a disaster, or as a means to carry extra cargo or supplies. I'm sure a cargo transporter connected to a computer designed to hold a person's or item's transport pattern for a long time would do the trick. Failing that, why not use the transporter trace pattern, which is kept on file on a ship or base, to reconstitute the body of a sick or injured crew member? In Unnatural Selection, Dr. Pulaski was restored to her normal body from a dying, decrepit one, with her memories intact, through the use of the trace. As a result of this episode, we must presume a transporter trace is effectively a reset button for your body.

Thag · Post by **Thag** » 2004-03-03 12:03am

Pseudo-Starfleet has at least. In the Elite Force games, the Hazard Team guys carry items in a personal transporter buffer. Unfortunately, regular Starfleet hasn't caught on yet.

Sarevok · Post by **Sarevok** » 2004-03-03 02:25am

Eliteforce is what starfleet should have been like with realy good ground weapons.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-03 12:08pm

Luke Starkiller wrote:
Darth_Zod wrote:small problem. a planet is a relatively stationary object (compared to a ship). in TOS the sensors weren't refined enough to compensate transporting within a ship due to the fact that a ship is always in motion within space, so the coordinates will always be changing, and with mistakes a person could materialize inside a bulkhead rather than on the floor.
Except that if you are on the same ship then the position relative to the transporter should be even easier since no parts of the ship should be moving relative to any other parts.

err. . .as far as my understanding of transporter technology goes, it uses spatial coordinates to target its beam, not the relative location of objects, so the ship would be consistently moving through space at a much quicker rate than a planet would, and therefore be much more difficult to get a stable fix on where to beam it.

that's one of the reasons it's so hard to transport during warp and they need to match their velocities exactly, and why it's easier to transport down to a planet or another transporter pad rather than intership beaming.