Transporters

[Elit3]

Transporters were an extremely abusable deus-ex mechanic in every science fiction they were ever used in. So broken that most science fiction authors sent more time explaining why they couldn't be used to fix every conceivable problem than they did explaining how they worked.

• Want to go jump from Earth to Mars? Why warp when you could transport.
• Need to escape the ship that's about to blow? Emergency Transporter to the rescue!
• Hostile boarders? Not a problem, just transport them into space.
• Want to board a ship? Why breach the hull or air lock and fight through a ships security personnel when you could just transport on to the bridge full of lightly armed officers.

And of course it only gets crappier as you expand on the absurdity of it all

• Who needs freighter pilots when we can just transport cargo to any in system planet??
• If we can send people and freight, why not whole ships?
  
• Hell why even have ships or orbital turrets, we can just transport nukes directly on board! ( Ex. Star Gate Atlantis )
• Or just transport the enemy crew off their ship and into space!
• Or hell why stop there, lets just transport their whole ship into a massive ship scrapping device.

Transporters are, will always be, and always have been a really poorly designed plot device for science fiction writers out of ideas. Surely Star made pilots are better than that!

Those are a lot issues, with solutions;

For a start, planets are so close together it wouldn't take that long to move between them anyway.

Who freights from a planet to a planet? It's always sector to sector.

Transporters could only beam one person at a time, so the boarding party beaming somewhere to a bridge would be mown down in seconds, before reinforcements arrived.

>Transport nukes aboard
>There are no nukes.

You'd need an enormous ship with a stupid amount of power to do that.

There could always be a core protection. Preventing people beaming in from a certain radius of it.

 

[NeonSturm]

Maybe you are only able to transport about 4..6* 100kg each 30 seconds and require an entire room + Naquada-Generator / WarpCore for energy.
Or you use your ship's multi-purpose energy capacitors (shared for weapons, drives, whatever linked to it for extra power)

I think the best idea to balance them is to either require a straight line (like a "astro beam" which places a person on impact) or a point-to-point transfer between two teleporters.

• You can transport someone on the surface of a ship's or planet hull, but not beyond that.

You have a maximum distance from a planet's orbit to the surface of mountains if the planet has more than average amount of radioactive particles in it's atmosphere.

If the planet has shields, active jammers (vs transport), ... the maximum distance decreases. If you transport someone 25m into air, he should die (or for the case you use parachutes, he can not come back without shuttle).



It will be a real time-saver. Not because of speed, but the docking procedure and navigation may take more time than a simple shortest-path.

 

[Elit3]

Maybe you are only able to transport about 4..6* 100kg each 30 seconds and require an entire room + Naquada-Generator / WarpCore for energy.
Or you use your ship's multi-purpose energy capacitors (shared for weapons, drives, whatever linked to it for extra power)

I think the best idea to balance them is to either require a straight line (like a "astro beam" which places a person on impact) or a point-to-point transfer between two teleporters.

• You can transport someone on the surface of a ship's or planet hull, but not beyond that.

You have a maximum distance from a planet's orbit to the surface of mountains if the planet has more than average amount of radioactive particles in it's atmosphere.

If the planet has shields, active jammers (vs transport), ... the maximum distance decreases. If you transport someone 25m into air, he should die (or for the case you use parachutes, he can not come back without shuttle).



It will be a real time-saver. Not because of speed, but the docking procedure and navigation may take more time than a simple shortest-path.

Agreed. As long as the Dev team handle something like this correctly, it could work very well.

 

[Elit3]

This seems to be my most controversial thread yet.