Transporters as Weapons

[C.E. Evans]

It would help if the show didn't keep redefining how replicators work. When they were originally introduced, they said you needed a model of what you were building, and then the machine replicated it from pure energy. At another time, they said it took "goo" and reformed it to what you wanted. Again, we were at the mercy of the whims of the script writer.

I operate from the pure energy model (with a need for raw matter of an indiscriminate nature, because it isn't going to matter once it is shifted on the levels the replicators works at, collected by the ram scoops), because the goo model doesn't make sense to me. Since writers differ, I can choose my canon.

I don't know where the pure energy concept comes from. It seemed a given that replicators always took some form of stored away raw matter--either organic or inorganic--and then rearranged its molecules to create a finished product. I think any energy used would be in the conversion process of raw matter into finished products.

The "goo model" would pertain to replicated food. It would be the organic raw matter that replicators use to recreate various meals. Some of it could be recycled when people go to the toilet, but naturally not all of it.

Matter collected from the ramscoops would be ideally for replenishing the ship's deuterium fuel supply, IMO.

 

[Trimm]

I agree with the notion that the replicators require some sort of biomass to create stuff, the transporter tech involved would be needed for rearranging some generic organic material into steaks and coffee.

 

[Timo]

Rationing in VOY may have been more a disciplinary measure than anything else - after all, Janeway was running a pirate ship, essentially, with a crew that agreed to obey her for purely selfish reasons rather than out of fear of timely reprisal from a powerful "mother organization".

But rationing probably was introduced originally for reasons other than energy consumption. For one thing, replicators were broken: intense use might have made repairs difficult, or consumed spares faster than new ones could be replicated, etc.

I could easily see replicators working in a number of different modes, the more advanced ones kicking in when simple beaming of food goo from tank to plate doesn't suffice. Energy consumption can be an issue, but in advanced modes only, when there's lots of intricate manipulation and perhaps some E=mcc creation going on ("The Child", say). Simple replication of standard dinners cannot be energy-intensive as such, or else people (at least aboard Voyager) would be told not to replicate their plates and forks along with the food!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Silvercrest]

Starfleet, the Romulans, the Klingons, etc, would have, of course, also upgraded to multi-layered multiphasic shielding that prevents this when it is up and working right

the transporter takes a fair amount of power to operate, and is useless against anything behind shields.

Maybe the potential for transporters to be used as weapons, whether by beaming something onto / into or out of a person or ship is why shields block transport, because they are designed to prevent that happening.

That assumes the person who designed the shields knew about transporter technology. Otherwise whenever you're fighting a brand-new enemy, you could beam through them because they weren't designed that way.

Anyway, as I've said before: There are ways around the "unable to beam through shields" problem. Just beam fifty photon torpedoes simultaneously right outside their shield perimeter, set them off, and see how well they deal with THAT. And then do it again.

 

[Go-Captain]

I feel like transporters have an awesome potential for weaponization. Beam a grain of sand into an artery and cause a heart attack. Beam out someone's lungs. Why haven't we seen more weaponized transporting? What are some possible issues a transporter wielder might face?

In a fan fiction I once read, the author decided to play with the setting and make phasers transporter based. It handily explains how phasers can vaporize people without causing a huge explosion centered on the target. Stun and heating are supposed to be based on delivering energy into the target by way of beaming, and piercing is just beaming a section of a person out.

The "goo model" would pertain to replicated food. It would be the organic raw matter that replicators use to recreate various meals. Some of it could be recycled when people go to the toilet, but naturally not all of it.

Matter collected from the ramscoops would be ideally for replenishing the ship's deuterium fuel supply, IMO.

The goo explains not just the food, but regular objects like cups, and handily fits into the chemical synthesis limit regular replicators have in regard to being unable to replicate certain drugs. The goo is likely a melange of all sorts of base elements, and the replicator rearanges those elements into desired chemicals. But, there must be an error rate in the replication of those chemicals, so very complex drugs, or drugs which simply must be perfect to avoid harming people, fail replication. The noted flavor difference of replicated food in comparison to cooked food also supports this, as it is a matter of chemicals.

It's worse if what is actually happening is the replicator is picking up the wrong elements and trying to fit them into incompatible bonds, but it's also possible that is the actual limitation.

That might also explain why latinum is replicator proof. It can be beamed, so that's not the issue. Maybe it's not an element, but a chemical so complex that no replicator can form it from scratch. It's easy to imagine that some day the Ferengi economy will collapse due to a flood of counterfeit latinum.

 

[Sgt_G]

I don't know where the pure energy concept comes from.

The very first time they showed the replicator on ST:TNG, like the third or four episode of the first season. Gordi had some little model of the device they needed and told Pichard that the warp drive would be off line for hours as they needed that much energy to convert to build the full-size machine. I took that to mean the replicator was converting energy to matter. Maybe you saw it differently.

Either way, wouldn't replicator technology completely eliminate trade and destroy the economy? Why grow crops or manufacture goods if this little machine can provide all your needs?

 

[Ithekro]

Some people like the real thing. Some people like making things with their own hands. And somethings are to large to build all at once. You can replicate the partsm but you still need to put it together.

But the economy? Our present day model? Totally destroyed. Something in its place? Probably. What is it? We don't know. We have people who call it bullshit and people who hold that what we saw was what we saw. A utopian style replicator based economy with basically unlimited power supplied by a mix of energy types (solar, fusion, antimatter, others probably). It works somehow.

 

[Timo]

That might also explain why latinum is replicator proof.

It's not a requirement, though. That is, the plot doesn't require latinum to be unreplicable. It could be just as common as the organic material used for making hundred-dollar bills - and the thing is that it is made into those bills, which have value solely because they are coded to have it. Replicate a million hundred-dollar bills perfectly, and what you have is a hundred dollars and lots of paper to go to toilet with, because you have also replicated the serial number perfectly.

Latinum as a currency comes in standardized form, which could easily be coded for its value, the value being in the code rather than in the latinum. But latinum (or rather, gold impregnated with this naturally liquid substance for greater aesthetic value) is a nice medium for printing the codes onto - after all, it's pretty enough for brooches.

How is the code inserted? We know that a stash of liquid latinum carries the value, so it's not anything as crude as printed serial numbers. But it could be a chemical code, something easily readable by appropriate scanners but also something you can taste (like Quark does) for the simple application of deciding whether a cheap little slip of the stuff really is GPL rather than a crude forgery.

That assumes the person who designed the shields knew about transporter technology. Otherwise whenever you're fighting a brand-new enemy, you could beam through them because they weren't designed that way.

Might be. Or then shielding is a generic technique, based on a single convenient natural phenomenon in all cases and cultures, and the phenomenon in itself automatically fouls up the entire "bandwidth" required by the transporter, any transporter, quite regardless of tuning issues. A bit like steel blocks light regardless of the color of the light or the thickness of the steel or the method by which the steel was made; the latter attributes only affect how the steel blocks swords or bullets.

It then becomes a much simpler rat race of more powerful transporters burning through shields, and more powerful shields blocking the transporters again. But it might well be that transporters are always less efficient at piercing shields than dedicated beam weapons are (makes sense, I think, especially if transporters are the same thing as phasers, only tuned for a more complex task when phasers concentrate on piercing power) - and no culture builds shields too weak to withstand the death rays of its current enemy, so transporters are still automatically no-no. It's only in cultural mismatch situations such as UFP vs Dominion that the rat race is handily won by one side, at least for a number of rounds.

drugs which simply must be perfect to avoid harming people

Now there's the big problem - anything we eat might need to be perfect in order not to be poison. Get cinnamon slightly wrong and you kill the entire crew at Christmas. Or at least give them enough stomach pains that Koloth can come over and take the ship as a Christmas present for the Emperor.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Richard Baker]

On Star Trek-Enterprise on the Show 'E2' you have two versions of the ship fighting each other. They were using transporters as a weapon removing critical parts of the other ship to cripple it.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I don't know where the pure energy concept comes from.

The very first time they showed the replicator on ST:TNG, like the third or four episode of the first season. Gordi had some little model of the device they needed and told Pichard that the warp drive would be off line for hours as they needed that much energy to convert to build the full-size machine. I took that to mean the replicator was converting energy to matter. Maybe you saw it differently.

If replicators are similar to transporters, then it would be a case of matter being converted to energy and then back to matter again. The primary difference would be that with a replicator, the matter would be reconfigured into a different item, with the energy required to do so being dependent on how big and elaborate the final item is.

Either way, wouldn't replicator technology completely eliminate trade and destroy the economy?

Only if everyone had a replicator and valued replicated items the same, IMO.

Why grow crops or manufacture goods if this little machine can provide all your needs?

Probably because there are still people who value the real thing (Anticans aren't fond of even the idea of replicated meat, for example). For all we know, there could be many people who regard replicators as "those vile things used on starships."

 

[Pauln6]

On Star Trek-Enterprise on the Show 'E2' you have two versions of the ship fighting each other. They were using transporters as a weapon removing critical parts of the other ship to cripple it.

I think Trek fudges energy requirements too often and rejuvenating dylithium crystals in TNG fudges it even more. Transporters and replicators would be astonishingly energy intensive. Every ship on a deep space exploration should ration their use realistically. More common use of mundane transportation makes more sense if there are energy limitations.

NuTrek screws with this concept to such a degree for the sake of plot contrivance that you have to give up trying to explain it. If it is possible to transport a living being over several light years safely onto a ship at warp or another solar system, it would be child's play to cripple or destroy a ship as long as you have detected it on your sensors. Just beam away chunks of it before it can react or beam out as many life forms as you can detect and keep your new shiny ship for yourself.

Of course, this would lead to an arms race whereby all ships have shields up all of the time (and why don't they since this is less energy intensive than replicating lunch for 1000 people and there are no energy restrictions anyway). What that does is limit dramatic tension.

They should have placed very restrictive limitations on transporter use very early on so that communicators or some other form of local pattern enhancer is needed to beam anything up from a remote location. So you might beam something down/in but sensors on ships could detect this intrusion and raise shields and/or suspend the incoming signal automatically (hence the use of transporter pads for safe transit). There would also be a limit on how much energy you could transport so weapons would be limited. You want to invade, use shuttles. No beaming photon torpedoes, although chemical explosives could still be used, they would have limited application against futuristic vessels.

One silly thing in NuTrek was the notion that a small team could infiltrate the Narada when in fact the Narada's internal sensors should pick up the intrusion and they could raise shields while deactivating the drill long enough either to beam an overwhelming security force to the exact location or just beam the intruders straight to the brig.

 

[Ithekro]

According to Quark, gold pressed latimum is used as their means of exchange so that transactions would not have to be done with an eyedropper. The gold is basically worthless to his species. It is just a easier way to move the liquid money in pre-measured amounts. They still weigh it to be sure, and know the proper sound it should make.

 

[Richard Baker]

Didn't one book establish the reason for gold pressed latimum was used for currency was it was one of the very few things that could not be replicated due to some weirdness in it's structure. IIRC the book's plot centered on trying to solve this problem and it resulted in a very good counterfeit which could fool detectors for a limited amount of time...

 

[Go-Captain]

Some people like the real thing. Some people like making things with their own hands. And somethings are to large to build all at once. You can replicate the partsm but you still need to put it together.

But the economy? Our present day model? Totally destroyed. Something in its place? Probably. What is it? We don't know. We have people who call it bullshit and people who hold that what we saw was what we saw. A utopian style replicator based economy with basically unlimited power supplied by a mix of energy types (solar, fusion, antimatter, others probably). It works somehow.

Replicators would cause a pretty much straight shot to what ever is coming next after the service industry, since it's replacing manufacturing.

The way I see it is, the world already has Intellectual Property, so companies like Coca Cola, and Apple have products which, regardless of how they're made, they're still the product of Coca Cola or Apple. Make it in a factory, replicate it, it's all the same. Replicators make ideas themselves the valuable asset (which is already the case), while manufacturing is now a trivial investment.

Manufacturing on large scales becomes more like renting storage from a cloud storage service, or like buying processing time on a super computer. Very large companies might still have their own replicator based manufacturing capacity, but small companies will purchase time from replicator services, much like how a company with an idea would hire a manufacturer's services. The hurdle for new companies and inventors becomes much much lower.

More people can try their ideas for physical objects, because the cost of manufacturing should be almost meaningless with replicators. Because it is all much cheaper, the movement for open source objects will become larger and more practical.

In real life, I see replicators having IP management software built in to prevent pirate manufacturing. The cost of objects will be the cost of the licenses, and those will be pegged to factory manufacturing costs for a long time. The actual cost will be similar to aluminum, which costs only as much as the cost of the electricity to make it.

In Star Trek, I imagine Earth having a vast library of open source objects, including foods. I also imagine them having eliminated IP and patents. People make things for the same reasons video game mod communities make things. It's because what they want does not exist and they will get prestige.

Didn't one book establish the reason for gold pressed latimum was used for currency was it was one of the very few things that could not be replicated due to some weirdness in it's structure. IIRC the book's plot centered on trying to solve this problem and it resulted in a very good counterfeit which could fool detectors for a limited amount of time...

It's canon that latinum cannot be replicated. It's in an episode or two.

 

[Timo]

Except it isn't.

Indeed, there is no episode or movie of Star Trek that would establish anything as beyond the capabilities of the replicators. At the very most, there may be moments where a character confesses "I cannot replicate this material/object", this in no way establishing that somebody with greater resources would be similarly hobbled.

Specifically, latinum or gold-pressed latinum is never declared irreplicable. Neither is dilithium. Or antimatter. Certain drugs get the "I can't do this" treatment, and certain things are replicated less than perfectly when we would expect the maker to aim for perfection (say, the Romulan forgery in "Data's Day", or the Federation one in "In the Pale Moonlight"), but that's about it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JES]

Sure, transporters could be used as weapons. Sure, you could beam out the lungs of the crew, or beam out their life support system, and take sadistic pleasure in the thought of them suffocating, or knowing that they'll be helpless as they due to carbon dioxide build up and the loss of climate control. You could even beam the escape pods and shuttlecraft into space, so they're trapped, knowing they are doomed.

But really, using transporters as a weapon is no more efficient than the Death Star; a terror weapon with which to terrify any who might challenge you, or simply because you're sadistic, and nothing more.

It would take a lot less energy and processing power to simply use weapons to destroy life support, even if you could first beam away the shielding, then play havoc with your new victims.

I see no point in using transporters as a weapon, unless you have a lot of energy to burn, and wanted to torture and kill someone horribly. In which case, you have a number of options open to you that will make your prisoners wished you simply destroyed your ship.

 

[USS Triumphant]

It then becomes a much simpler rat race of more powerful transporters burning through shields, and more powerful shields blocking the transporters again.

More powerful transporters, AND/OR, possibly just finer tuned to specifically burn through the shield frequency? Seems like a possible avenue to exploit, if you can know the frequency to cancel it out.

 

[Go-Captain]

I see no point in using transporters as a weapon, unless you have a lot of energy to burn, and wanted to torture and kill someone horribly. In which case, you have a number of options open to you that will make your prisoners wished you simply destroyed your ship.

Beam warhead into ship, done. That's all it takes, Voyager even did it in an episode where they accidentally destroy a Borg scout ship, having intended to merely disable the ship. The only issue is shields, but that is not a real issue.

The folded-space transporters in TNG were completely unstoppable by shields, though the system eventually proved traceable, allowing its use to be stopped only by a counter attack. Their only weakness is they cause cellular degeneration on a genetic level, which is a non-issue in transporting munitions to a target. The whole device was a 4 m x 1 m column, and could cause multiple transporter rifts in rapid succession.

If folded-space bombs were standard weapons, the designs of starships would have to be radically altered to a highly decentralized design using a cell like structure of ship grade shields and armor used internally. Every ship would need multiple folded-space transporters, and magazines, and the command crew would have to be both more redundant and spread through the ship more evenly.

It's a small step toward imagining every bomb having its own folded-space transporter rather than relying on a centralized system.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

NuTrek screws with this concept to such a degree for the sake of plot contrivance that you have to give up trying to explain it. If it is possible to transport a living being over several light years safely onto a ship at warp or another solar system, it would be child's play to cripple or destroy a ship as long as you have detected it on your sensors. Just beam away chunks of it before it can react or beam out as many life forms as you can detect and keep your new shiny ship for yourself.

That's one of those things that only SOUNDS easy. In actual practice it probably wouldn't be.

Transwarp beaming has a lot of potential as a sabotage/assassination weapon, used on a very small scale, under ideal circumstances with a lot of intelligence overhead and premeditation. Somewhere in the Abramsverse, if you dig deep enough you will probably find at least one instance of Section 31 or the Tal Shiar using a transwarp beaming device to snuff out some uppity Klingon general and make it look like an accident. It's an interesting kind of trick, but it's hardly a silver bullet.

Of course, this would lead to an arms race whereby all ships have shields up all of the time

I'm not convinced they don't. Starships run with navigational deflectors as standard practice, and space is full of cosmic rays and charged particles that are difficult to shield against effectively.

It seems to me that the ubiquity of basic navigational shielding is one of the reasons transporters prefer to beam people from one transporter device to another; that's just easier and safer with all other things interfering. Sophisticated Starfleet transporters probably have some kind of ECCM devices that can penetrate low-level shielding nine times out of ten, but high-level shielding is either too hard to penetrate or too dangerous to try.

They should have placed very restrictive limitations on transporter use very early on so that communicators or some other form of local pattern enhancer is needed to beam anything up from a remote location.

Which is another thing I liked about the Abramsverse transporters. They depict the beaming process as a lot less "push the energize button and there he is" and a lot more "Have to keep the transporter beam perfectly focussed on that target for like eight seconds or nothing much will happen." Apparently all the various tricks for increasing transporter's efficacy -- including transwarp beaming -- are really just complicated mathematical algorithms that make targeting easier.

One silly thing in NuTrek was the notion that a small team could infiltrate the Narada when in fact the Narada's internal sensors should pick up the intrusion and they could raise shields while deactivating the drill long enough either to beam an overwhelming security force to the exact location or just beam the intruders straight to the brig.

First of all, "internal sensors" in this context basically means surveillance cameras and intrusion alarms on hatches and consoles. Narada is a mining vessel, so its internal security is probably geared around preventing theft and keeping the crew from accessing materials without authorization. OTOH, Starfleet's "internal sensors" aren't much better, so Narada's security seems pretty standard (if you think about this, modern Naval vessels operate more or less the same way; security isn't monitoring the ship's internal spaces, just its equipment).

Second of all, again, Narada is a mining ship; it's crewed by a bunch of Romulan factory workers who are NOT, in fact, ninjas. There are probably two or three people on the entire ship who are actually trained to operate a transporter system, and they only have civilian training; the rest of the crew probably knows as much about transporter operations as YOU do.

This assumes, of course, that the Narada actually HAS a working transporter system. This isn't known for sure.

I see no point in using transporters as a weapon, unless you have a lot of energy to burn, and wanted to torture and kill someone horribly. In which case, you have a number of options open to you that will make your prisoners wished you simply destroyed your ship.

Beam warhead into ship, done. That's all it takes, Voyager even did it in an episode where they accidentally destroy a Borg scout ship, having intended to merely disable the ship. The only issue is shields, but that is not a real issue.

It kind of IS an issue since nine times out of ten you have to take the enemy's shields down before you can beam anything onto his ship. Strictly speaking, if you've managed to get into transporter range and your intended target still hasn't raised his shields, it's usually easier to just phaser him to death.

The Borg are the exception to this rule because they don't bother with shields. Under normal circumstances, even beaming a warhead onto their ship wouldn't make a difference because they would just regenerate and come after you again. Even Voyager's destruction of the Borg probe was an ACCIDENT; the point of beaming the torpedo was to hit them at a critical spot that couldn't be targeted accurately from outside the ship.

On some level, this is basically a simplified boarding action, which starships already do.

The folded-space transporters in TNG were completely unstoppable by shields, though the system eventually proved traceable, allowing its use to be stopped only by a counter attack. Their only weakness is they cause cellular degeneration on a genetic level, which is a non-issue in transporting munitions to a target. The whole device was a 4 m x 1 m column, and could cause multiple transporter rifts in rapid succession.

Good potential for a terrorist weapon. Probably expensive. And in the Federation, also probably illegal.

If folded-space bombs were standard weapons, the designs of starships would have to be radically altered

Or they could just come up with a countermeasure that would nullify the advantage of space-fold bombs. Like they did when photon torpeodes and phasers were invented.

It's a small step toward imagining every bomb having its own folded-space transporter rather than relying on a centralized system.

That's another silver bullet solution, though. It's an interesting trick you can use if your enemy hasn't seen it before and hasn't come up with a defense. The thing is, if the technology for the space-fold transporter is so simple that a pissed off Ferengi can buy it on the black market, the countermeasure probably isn't that complicated either.

And the 20bn credits you just spent retrofitting all of your starships for the new golden age of space fold bombs? Ooops.

 

[Go-Captain]

Good potential for a terrorist weapon. Probably expensive. And in the Federation, also probably illegal.

It was sufficiently easy to obtain that terrorists got it without anyone caring. No one raises cost as an issue at any point, besides which the Federation as a whole has to be materially richer than any single planet terrorist organization, and until that episode the method of beaming had been thought a failed theory, so it was not illegal. It's also never brought up again, so it cannot be said to have been made illegal.

If folded-space bombs were standard weapons, the designs of starships would have to be radically altered

Or they could just come up with a countermeasure that would nullify the advantage of space-fold bombs. Like they did when photon torpeodes and phasers were invented.

I just described the counter measure in accordance with what we know of the weapon. In the episode it was impossible to stop using any known defenses other than direct attack, and that fact cannot be ignored.

It's a small step toward imagining every bomb having its own folded-space transporter rather than relying on a centralized system.

That's another silver bullet solution, though. It's an interesting trick you can use if your enemy hasn't seen it before and hasn't come up with a defense. The thing is, if the technology for the space-fold transporter is so simple that a pissed off Ferengi can buy it on the black market, the countermeasure probably isn't that complicated either.

That was a subspace transporter, and a completely different technology.

Stopping a beam out is not the same as stopping beam in, and in that episode the deflector specifically could not stop beam-in. So it is not a one trick pony as either transporter system would necessitate a complete redesign of defenses, since conventional defensive arrangements have been stated multiple time to be ineffective against these two exotic transporters.

Claiming it is easy to obtain further invalidates the point of being hard to access as a limiting factor.

And the 20bn credits you just spent retrofitting all of your starships for the new golden age of space fold bombs? Ooops.

Everything has a cost, and as a military organization if the defenses of their ships are no longer sufficient then they will upgrade them to something which is sufficient.