@spacehobo @Aedius @david_chisnall

> When someone is standing in a crowd of 10 people, and a mix of crew and locals are coming up and staying down, the call is always "four to beam up" and *somehow* the transporter operators know which four. How?

I'd also point out the kind of domain-specific machine-learning pattern matching that I've used in the real world to great effect -- 99% of those scenes I can remember, the people who are to be beamed up are standing still and looking slightly upward, in a way that if you saw only a screenshot of the episode you'd probably pretty easily pick out the four people who were supposed to be beamed up.

It would not surprise me to find that (in the fictional world, natch) the computer underlying the transport operator's interface is highlighting a selection of people in a given target zone who are standing in the "beam me up" posture.

Contrariwise, most emergency beam-ups seem to involve either much more specific commands or "all crew in the area, only".