How is it that the Aegis translocator beam structure is compatible with 23d transporter hardware and software?
Can't you ask that question about virtually every pad-to-pad transport we've seen from an alien ship? Most of the times someone beams over from another ship, they're implicitly leaving from their own transporter to arrive on the Enterprise's (or DS9's, or whatever), unless they specifically call out that the aliens of the week don't have transporters. And that'd arguably be more complex than what happens in "Assignment: Earth," since it'd be a synchronized operation between both transporters (though the hero ship always seems to initiate the operation, weather they're sending or receiving), while the Enterprise just picked up an incoming beam and materialized it. Apparently, matter transmission works on broadly similar principles no matter the technology, power, or range involved, and it's trivial for different systems to interoperate. That seems to be the case with a lot of technology in Star Trek, honestly. My guess is that that has as much to do with coming from a time when audiences and writers were less tech-savvy, so compatibility problems wouldn't be something on their radar. I have a similar theory about why in early TNG, you could create a holodeck program just by saying the name of a random book, whereas in late DS9 and VGR, it was made clear that people had to actually develop these simulations, and it was a little too "magic" for the computer to be able to take an arbitrary narrative, cross-reference everything in it, and use it to build an interactive adaptation with a fully realized branching storyline and three-dimensional (in the literary sense) characters instantaneously. I doubt the Dixon Hill novels went into detail about the kind of traffic on the street, or whether secondary characters were prone to existential dread about the nature of reality after seeing a couple gangsters walk out of a door and evaporate.
It would be easy to surmise that transporting is less about technology and more about a phenomenon. It suffices that you figure out how to "phase" stuff; once phased, it goes through walls and travels through space, and can be nudged and prompted by any arbitrary make or design of machinery. There isn't a "frequency" or a "coding" involved: you either are phased or then not. Put a load on wheels and you immediately lose specificity to how you can move it: hook it to a lorry, a tractor, a Morris Mini, a dozen donkeys, rig a sail if you wish. Still doesn't mean the putting-it-on-wheels part would be trivial, and different cultures would devise their own different solutions for forklifts or whatnot. But even those solutions might well be interchangeable, or at least it would always be easy to pull somebody else's package down from the wheels (even if sometimes damaging or destroying the wheels). Timo Saloniemi
Oh, as for Dixon Hill specifically, I imagine Picard spent months of his free time perfecting the holostory before first daring to try it out. He was savoring the moment, deliberately staying out of the lowbrow simulations his fellow officers were enjoying. AND taking care to write the adventure as unpredictable and "self-detailed", because what fun would it be to wade through a book he already knew from cover to cover, from blow to brass-knuckled blow? And still he took a historian and an android with him to proofread what he wrote... Timo Saloniemi
Not certain about this. If you were only sending information on the object without the matter, there might be a finite number of ways to create the data stream. Now add thesctual object as a matter stream.it cannot be just a bunch of atoms but also organized. For Alpha Beta quadrant powers, I could see a small number of varatiins due to spying. The Aegis system should be far advanced and not as compatible or incompatible with 23d century tech.
But my conviction is that the bunch of atoms can only ever be organized in a single way: the way that preserves the object. Reg Barclay is Reg Barclay whether phased or not, with his heart in the right place, with two good hands, with (most of) his marbles where they should be, etc. The machinery that achieves the transition from one Barclay to the other may vary. The two end states are always the same, though, and the process is hardware-agnostic exactly because the thing being processed never varies. If transporters indeed are software machines (moving people and objects reduced into packets of data), then there can never be any compatibility problems. After all, software in Trek is automatically universally compatible, because of the Universal Translator. The UT can demonstrably always hook up to everybody else's communications datastream/software, interact with it, and extract the underlying information content. This amazing tech should be applicable to everything else software/data-based, too. Basically, we see UT tech in such non-communications action often enough, beginning with TOS already: our heroes press a button in their tricorders, and an alien or ancient or analog machine goes beep and does their bidding... Timo Saloniemi
Lots of ways to misasassmble objects and people via transporters. Without exact locations and states for each atom/proton neutron electron/quarks, etc you just get maybe a mass of matter coherent or not. UT is for languages not decoding matter and datastreams. Why would you build a transporterfor multiple encodings if the intent is to only use it for one's people and objects? Maybe early Federation transporters are compatible due to spying totech exchanges? Why earlier ones?