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The air tram. What the hell was the point of this? It's like taking a city bus in the sky, when you COULD take a public transporter to get where your going? And forget seat belts for saftey. They didn't even put in any frackin seats! The composite metals and alloys were worth more than what they got when they built these things. Could NEVER understand the point. In Enterprise, these things would at least have make sense, but by TMP time?

What is the most useless TOS-TMP ship YOU'VE ever seen?

The Romulan BoP from BoT.

Deepcrush wrote:The Romulan BoP from BoT.

I had some trouble with that episode. I ASSUMED that defense outposts would have superior shielding and a stronger structure than a starship, yet the BoP was able to generate enough power to destroy these outposts with just one blast.

The BoP put out a lot of power. My guess would be that those stations hadn't been upgraded since after the romulan war.

Mark wrote:The air tram. What the hell was the point of this? It's like taking a city bus in the sky, when you COULD take a public transporter to get where your going? And forget seat belts for saftey. They didn't even put in any frackin seats! The composite metals and alloys were worth more than what they got when they built these things. Could NEVER understand the point. In Enterprise, these things would at least have make sense, but by TMP time?

What is the most useless TOS-TMP ship YOU'VE ever seen?

If you read Graham's write up on the Air Tram he offers a reason for its use, ie secure facilities which use transport blocking such as SF Headquarters...

KuvahMagh wrote:

Mark wrote:The air tram. What the hell was the point of this? It's like taking a city bus in the sky, when you COULD take a public transporter to get where your going? And forget seat belts for saftey. They didn't even put in any frackin seats! The composite metals and alloys were worth more than what they got when they built these things. Could NEVER understand the point. In Enterprise, these things would at least have make sense, but by TMP time?

What is the most useless TOS-TMP ship YOU'VE ever seen?

If you read Graham's write up on the Air Tram he offers a reason for its use, ie secure facilities which use transport blocking such as SF Headquarters...

I did read it. And no offense to Graham, as I really respect his opinion, it stills seems weak. Do you really need a ride around SF HQ??? How lazy ARE people. A turbolift would be ALOT quicker than a mass transit ship. And if the facility is THAT big, then you could have site to site transporters, like a pad in bulding A with another in building C. Cannot do an open transport, but from inside and one pad to another shouldn't be a problem. And what if you hit some turbulence as these are atmospheric craft? People would all end up on there butts. Just seems silly to me.

Transporters always seem to have problems with moving large volume of people. They're fine if you want to send a few people or a small parcel to a distant destination quickly, but they'd probably break down in a few minutes if they had to handly rush hour traffic. The difference is probably similar to that between aircraft and ships. There's probably also limitation on how many transporters you can have active in a given area - I expect that in large numbers the signals would end up jamming each other.

Do we ever even see the interior of the air tram? In the film, all we see of the interior is when the door opens to allow Kirk and passengers to disembark. There could very well be seats in there that we didn't see.

The transporter blocker thing was about the best I could come up with!

It makes sense to me, just there are no fly areas around stratgeic resources, if you can't selectively block then you have to block everything otherwise something might get through that you don't notice until its too late. It seems perfectly reasonable for me at least to have SF HQ, Federation "Capital Building" and such with these Blockers then a large "Train/Bus" depot where mass people can beam in, be cleared through security then depending on where they are going hop on this thing. It makes particular sense when you consider San Francisco, I mean you the Academy & HQ plus you probably have design and Engineering Facilities, Auxiliary Training facilities, SF Transient Quarters... the list goes on and on. To secure such an area you likely need large scale equipment thus the whole area is blacked out.

I'd imagine that most high-security places would have transporter blockers as standard. It's only common sense. Thus the air trams make sense.

Thats what I mean, if we treat SF HQ and such as being in a modern military base which makes sense then you can include all of your support facilities, housing for visiting officers, medical facilities, possibly the Academy as well would be there too, that could cover a wide area so a single Entry point via Transporter then splitting off on the Tram to your specific destination works for me...

Mark wrote:

Deepcrush wrote:The Romulan BoP from BoT.

I had some trouble with that episode. I ASSUMED that defense outposts would have superior shielding and a stronger structure than a starship, yet the BoP was able to generate enough power to destroy these outposts with just one blast.

I think the idea is that those plasma torpedoes had to use up some of their plasma to maneuver a/o accelerate. Against a stationary target, you wouldn't have to degrade the yield by using up some of your payload, unlike against a starship.

Yeah, the Enterprise was able to run away from the torpedo, the station could not. BTW, was it destroyed in one shot? I thought it took a few. I mean, when the Enterprise was in communication with the outpost, there was damage and fires, which would suggest at least on attack. Then the outpost was destroyed.

Agreed, that outpost held out for some time on its own. Why didn't they have any weapons?