I’ve posted this on Reddit as well, and apologise if I’ve missed a thread covering this but:
I’m reading through one of the ‘These are the Voyages’ missions and need a bit of rules clarification (which is tricky as the lore is spotty).
What is the range on federation transporters? I’ve seen some mentions that it’s only close range, but this mission (Border Dispute) seems to indicate you can beam well beyond weapons range?
Obviously law is somewhat contradictory too, especially if you count the JJ-Verse as cannon
Maximum effective transporter range in the 24th Century is around 40,000km in various sources, which is a long enough range to beam targets to or from the surface of a planet while in orbit above. Interference and other environmental factors can reduce this range, and transporter range should pretty much always be much shorter than weapons range in any circumstances.
How does that work out in the abstract ranges used in the system?
If they’re meant to be shorter than weapons range, does there need to be an erratta to the ‘Boarder Dispute’ mission in These are the Voyages? (I was probably going to have them send over a shuttle anyway)
Oh, sure; there’s plenty of unusual or theoretical technologies for longer-range transportation. Even as far back as the 2150s, when Transporters were a new technology, the dream of transporting between worlds existed - Emory Erickson, the inventor of the Transporter, experimented with these ideas (at great cost to himself). Both the Borg and the Dominion demonstrate more advanced transporter technology than the Federation does, with greater range and the ability to beam through some forms of shielding.
Still, reliable and routine transporters operate strictly on a planetary scale, at least for the Federation and other Alpha and Beta quadrant cultures.
No use of long-range transporters from the Kelvinverse movies is beyond what we see from the subspace transporters used by the Ferengi in the TNG episode Bloodlines
I’m not overly convinced that transporting from Earth to Qo’nos with a portable transporter device is quite comparable to TNG, but at the very least, I’d prefer to see a few people splattered everywhere, like when you let Janice Rand loose on the transporters, to show that everyone’s warnings about the dangers are not just McGuffin. The dangers posed in ST09 were all to do with transportation at warp, not transporting across a distance of however far a ship can travel at warp 3 in one Delta Vega rotation.
Plus there is the mystery of how Scotty can transport someone over light years but not from the location of a distress beacon a few kilometres away. ;-p
Yeah, clearly Border Dispute needs errata. It says in the rules, Transporter Range is Close Range. Phasers and Torpedoes are Medium and Long Range (IIRC). Border Dispute says they are in Transporter Range, but not weapons range. Clearly wrong.
correct. it was a hardware problem, per the script.the dialog from the scene where kirk finds him in engineering (just prior to the accident)
Decker: I knew it. The transporter sensor was not activated.
[Other background chatter]
Decker: Faulty module.
Scotty: Cleary, put a new backup sensor into the unit.
so basically, an important part of the transporter had failed but had not been detected by the diagnostics, and Decker and Scotty were in the process of fixing it when Kirk arrived.
so if anything you could argue kirk was at fault for interrupting the repair work and delaying replacement of the bad parts.
