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I was watching "The Reckoning" episode and I started to wonder why the transporters were not used during emergency. It looked like routine

1 Scan for life scans
2 Lock on them
3 Beam them out to evacuation ship
4 GOTO 1

However it looked like they haven't used it even for the top-ranking personnel (everyone was moving on foot). Is there any explanation for not using transporters?

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  • 14
    Wow. Are they still using BASIC to write their evacuation procedures in Star Trek times?
    – DJClayworth
    Mar 3, 2012 at 16:26
  • 3
    They've got the numbering all wrong though. What if you have to go back and add lines later. Should have be 10, 20, 30, 37....
    – BBlake
    Mar 3, 2012 at 16:31
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    Such numbering is still used while describing simple algorithms (for example I saw simplex algorithm written in GOTO way).
    – Maciej Piechotka
    Mar 3, 2012 at 20:09
  • @DJClayworth of course not. They'd use Cobol.
    – Andrew Grimm
    Oct 2, 2017 at 1:55

1 Answer 1

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19

Two possibilities come to mind:

  1. They were using the transporters. But the transporters can only move so many people at one time. The station has several hundred people on it at any one time, so rather than everyone standing around waiting for their turn, they decide it would be faster to just walk to the nearest evacuation shuttle/ship.
  2. Today, in any building with an elevator you are told to always use the stairs in case of an emergency. This so so you won't be come trapped should the elevator lose power. There may be similar protocols in place regarding the transporters. But in this case a loss of power wouldn't just mean you'd become trapped (that'd be the turbolift); should the transporters lose power in mid-action the person or people in the system at the time would either be entirely lost, killed, or seriously mutilated.
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  • 3
    +1 for point 2. That seems like the most reasonable explanation.
    – BBlake
    Mar 3, 2012 at 16:32
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    +1 for both possibilities. Possibility #1 accords with the evacuation in the TNG episode "11001001", where instructions over the PA announce which decks should go to which transporter rooms, which decks should go to which physical exits, etc. There it's clearly a matter of speed: it's faster to use both types of egress in parallel.
    – ruakh
    Mar 3, 2012 at 18:05

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