"And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll teleport you all into space"
Edit: lol guess everyone else had the same thought
Huh, think about it for a second. If they could "emergency transport" anyone anywhere on the ship, why didn't they just beam enemies to outer space everytime they get boarded?
_Captain! Shield is down, we're being boarded!
_Captain to transport room. Emergency transport any life sign on board that's not crew into the warp core / into the brig / into the exhaust port of the propulsion nozzle / into that sun over there / and hold them in the pattern buffer...
I wonder if there are safety processes against that. Given how often we've seen crews being beamed out of ships with no notice in an emergency, what's stopping a rogue transporter chief from beaming the bridge crew into space?
Today; in commercial jets pilots have the rule that there has to be two people in the cockpit to protect against a pilot unaliveing the whole plane.
Oh look Ensign redshirt is missing… and funny thing the transport logs have been erased for a one hour period during the middle of the night. Oh well I guess we’ll never know what happened. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What's the point of the arrival platform he stands in front of if he can just beam anyone to any part of the ship or from any part of the ship to anywhere ?
You can greet people formally, keep them in areas you want she close to their suite and such. You also her prior used to the place and relax. You could have doors to the outside for most rooms in a house/building, buy having a dedicated entry is nice.
They can teleport from the transporter room to another spot and from another spot to the transporter room.
But they also don't need to immediately rematerialize people immediately (the pattern buffer).
My theory is that they eventually learned that they can teleport people from within the ship, to the transporter room, not materialize them, and then send them from the transporter room to wherever they need to go.
So the room is still important in a lot of ways but once they learned they don't have to walk there they stopped bothering.
That's the in universe head canon but as for what actually happened it's more likely to be what the other person said about it just being nicer for the story.
The teleporter pad is also a stationary location relative to the ship that doesn't move around. The teleporter probably has its coordinates hardcoded. A teleporter tech who isn't as much of a wizard as O'Brien is probably relies on that pretty regularly.
O'Brien just happens to be capable of teleporting people to and from arbitrary locations because he's a master of his craft. But if you get your calculus wrong in an emergency you're going to teleport your captain and away team halfway through a bulkhead, or collect a thousand pounds of loose dirt alongside them and only half an ensign.
I think the early seasons had people transported into and out of the dedicated room since the original show had one. Then over the years it was decided that the on screen time wasn't worth it and skipped the transition from transporter bay to where the story was happening.
Excuse me? Excuse me, Replicator? May I speak to you please? I asked for a Mai Tai, and you replicated me a Pina Colada, and I said no salt, NO salt for the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass...
None of those characters we watched and love for years would ever act the way they do here. I know the joke is coworkers are terrible and life is meaningless, but it's too much ennui and nihilism for a fandom dedicated to humanity's adventuring spirit.
I don't have a decade old Tumblr account (that I use anyway) and a time machine to go back and comment on the original posts when they came out; but these reposts I can comment on and also enjoy the amusing commentary of my fellow fans from here on !tenforward@lemmy.world!
The only difference between this and the !truecomics@midwest.social community is they have a dedicated sub for their comic... and about 100 years of marinating. People seem to disagree vehemently about how much stewing is right and proper.
Thank you for offering a reasonable counterpoint. I'm sorry if I came across as rude, of course it's fun to chat with digital strangers about something that occured years ago. This just isn't my type of content. But for you other folks this is your 10k experience for the day. I like the fresh memes and the odd Photoshops that is made here.
I grant you that this is an appropriate venue to discuss O'Brien at Work, but at the same time, we don't need 300+ threads that take up space just like how it did the same thing back in the old reddit Risa days. I liked the series when it came out for the first twenty or so, I truly did. However, the joke just got so old it died, came back and died again more times than Spock, Scotty, Tuvix, and Picard put together.
Seeing the upvotes the post has, I gather I'm in the extreme minority. I hope that in time, the community will grow bored with this craze and move on.