9.0 Transporter Systems

Extravehicular transportation to and fro is provided by a number of transporter systems, which allow personnel or equipment to be transported at ranges up to 422,000 kilometers in emergencies.

Transport for crew and guests is provided by five personnel transporters located on decks 7, 14 and 17. Two additional personnel transporters, for emergency backup and equipped with their own nanofusion power supplies, are located on deck 2 and deck 17.

Cargo transport is provided by three low-resolution transporters located in the deck 10 & 11 cargo bay complex, and two more located on deck 15. These units are primarily design for operation at molecular (nonlifeform) resolution for cargo use, but they can be set for standard quantum-level resolution, though this would drop the cargo load capability by almost half.

The standard transporter system, or the two emergency transporters provide for emergency evacuation from the ship if the normal system is not available. Taking advantage of the almost total sensor network coverage of the internal volume of the ship, when the Abandon Ship order is given the AI routines within the transporter console processors access the sensor network. When this is accomplished the transporter sensors make use of the internal sensors to acquire lock-on for any life forms located onboard and beam them to wherever is necessary. In this situation the transporters switch over to high-speed, reduced power mode and therefore have a reduced range and reduced Doppler Compensation capabilities. Typical range is now around 62,000 km, depending on external conditions.

Each transporter is given its own pattern buffer tank, a improvement in redundancy over previous models, but has the unfortunate side-effect of taking up a lot more space; advances in materials design have reduced this, but the tanks still take up 13% more room than the shared-tank design used on the Galaxy-Class starship. The emergency transporter protocols are designed to share the pattern buffers to increase the number of people that can be transported at one time; this doubling up of hardware results in a 45% increase in power consumption relative to single-buffer, but the time is halved.

The Camelot's exterior hull incorporates a series of twenty-two transporter emitter array pads. These conformal emitters incorporate long-range virtual-focus molecular imaging scanners and phase transition coils, and STA`s similar to those found in the subspace radio assemblies, though a much finer transmission level is of course, needed; They are all strategically located to provide 360-degree coverage in all axes. There is sufficient overlap of emitter coverage to provide adequate operation even in the event of 55% emitter failure.