Sounds like Future's End and the scene where they try to beam up Henry Starling
Those Mysterious Transporter Controls
- Thread starter Spock's Barber
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I'm imagining it more as a feedback effect of the annular confinement beam. It isn't that he feels the rock, just that the initial pattern is subject originally to the perfectly flat pad and attendant ACB, and then subject to the new location's ACB, and there's some pushing and shoving because the new ACB is not penetrating the rock.
Frankly, the whole idea of consciousness while beaming is one I'd rather avoid where possible. On the face of it, it's absurd . . . like expecting your computer to work even as you remove components and pathways off the microprocessor.
(Barclay's transporter-monster stuff works if most of his brain is still there. Even Troi and Worf's discussion about being part of a wall can be understood without it, if we merely take her to be dizzy and Worf to be overly literal.)
That said, I was just tweeting about shapeshifter cellular structure perhaps transitioning to a subspace pocket to allow thought while a rock, so if we imagine beaming as a similar idea it’s not completely absurd.
Would this be pushing and shoving of the cloud of disassembled molecules that used to form Terrell's leg? Sounds painful at least and highly destructive at worst!
Indeed it is - which is why the many examples of consciousness and movement shown in the various series beg for an explanation which is not "completely dismantled at the molecular level".
Not to mention the absurd amount of computer storage required for the location of every atom of even one person, let alone the ramifications which would result from that (i.e. the ability to create endless duplicates if you have that information)
If the transporter can beam subjects into open space with the widest possible dispersion (ref. Redjac), then why didn't Kirk do the same to Nomad instead of beaming him into space to explode? Nomad may have had a last ditch circuit breaker to stop its own destruction at the moment of detonation. Then again, a sophisticated machine might also have built-in rematerializer circuits to recover himself from subspace in such an incident, too. It all worked out good in the end in any event.
I missed this one, @Phaser Two's answer is fine, but I'm going to say Mr. Hengist wasn't going to explode on his own, his corpse would freeze and eventually be found by some passing ship and it's US Outpost 31 all over again.
Nomad was going to go BOOM and they didn't need to bother, also, I think trying to spread out that much energy would have been too much for the transporter.
Nope, that's a much better explanation than mine.
One of my favorite things about Star Trek is how smart Kirk was and how fast he could come up with the right solutions. And I don't care how much of that supposedly resulted from Bill pushing for it behind the scenes. With Kirk, Spock, and Scotty, it's no wonder the Enterprise made it through all those hairy encounters and still made it back. The rest of the crew was pretty solid, too.
In my imagination the sliders don´t actually activate the transported per se...as in "on" but when you start moving them (no matter the direction) they activate the transport process and then can be used to fine tune the anual confinement beam in whatever way nessecary. The direction of movement does not matter but the SPEED. I imagine the left one to be for confinement beam energy addage, the middle one to make it narrower or wider and the right one is manual control for the heisenberg compensators.
Hey, I never noticed this before that we saw seven people beamed up at the same time in Season 1 at the end of The City On The Edge Of Forever. The next time more than six people are beamed up will be in Season 3, Day Of The Dove. No more than six people are ever beamed down at the same time during the entire series. They used two sorties in The Apple. I wonder why.
Six of them transporter beam platforms perhaps? Anything more than six might get you trapped in the beam as mixed up atoms perhaps? 
JB
JB
I apologize for what is about to be a long winded post, and please excuse the crudity of these models
I'd like to go with the wormhole idea too, but episodes have also shown pattern buffers and other things to make it seem like it's some form of scanner/printer. the problem with that is if it were so, incidents like Tom Riker would not just be a once in a generaiton thing, you could create a whole army of Tom Riker Redshirts every time you needed a new army to throw at the Klignons. But in the Trek Universe the transporter hasn't been shown to be a murder machine/copy machine, so something along what you suggest must be the case.
So why the sliders, why the "boost gain"? If it is a stable wormhole why would a receiving end problem cause the Sonak and Unknown Victim deaths? that one is REALLY peculiar because transporters have no problem transporting from long distances where there's no pad at all.
So I'm going on a wild tangeant here:
It IS a semi-stable wormhole device but it creates a kind of signal that passes through, with the transportees being literally transported, not copied into qubits, along something akin to carrier wave
in short, it works like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Television system. The people are the chocolate and they are fully conscious. If anyone has ever tried using a very old simply radio design, the "regen", the next part will make sense. Before superheterodynes, and synthesized receivers, dsp and all the other modern stuff, the simple diy radio design of the past was the regenerative, or super-regen. Without getting too deep into the theory, the radio signal is detective, not unlike a simply crystal radio set, but then the resonant frequency is regenerated over and over, causing a weak signal to become very strong until it is able to have this intermediate frequency converted to audio frequency and listened to.
I've built a couple of regens and they are incredibly sensitive (too much.. touch the dial it will go off freq just from the capacitance in your fingertips). My fan-hypothesis is that the 22nd-through-23rd century transporters ARE essentially a kind of subspace regenerative frequency amplifier employing a wormhole creating Woodward Stargate and some kind of carrier signal that has to be tuned and amplified. There's no way a human could tune that kind of circuit better or faster than a machine, but perhaps the sliders are more for making sure the transition is as comfortable as possible on arrival. They might be engaging decontamination protocols as well.
In the event of Sonak's death, Kirk shoved Rand out of the way to do captainy things to save Sonak but there wasn't anything he or Rand could have done. As much as it might seem he was being Kirk the Jerk, Mr No-Win Scenario probably knew those two were doomed and at least jumping in there would allow Rand to remove herself from the controls and not have to witness the horror.
So.. why do space stations and starships have pads for landing on as well as sending? Ever noticed all the wall-wart chargers in your home, and the network lines to your router and the all the wifi signals you see on your computer? You might not notice how much electrical noise your home generates but turn on a sensitive receiver in your home, or just use a frequency counter and it is truly shocking. Modern homes are electromagnetic messes. I suspect a starship would be far worse. Perhaps the receiving "antenna" that the pads somehow are make a much safer and easier place to direct the transporter beam, cutting through that clutter. it also explains why intraship beaming is probably dangerous, resource heavy and only a someone like Captain Lorca would use it casually. Whereas beaming down to the usual rock-pile world is often very easily accomplished.
TLDR: Transporters from TOS and TOS Movie era are wormholes employing regenerative subspace carrier signals.
Now by TNG era it seems more like they are somehow digitizing people before and after transporting them but that's an slightly different mess.
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Kirk's explanation to Lincoln muddies the water a little, but if you assume that Kirk is dumbing it down for Lincoln avoiding advanced concepts and such:
KIRK: An energy-matter scrambler, sir. The molecules in your body are converted into energy, then beamed into this chamber and reconverted back into their original pattern.
On the surface, Kirk is describing a disintegration machine. But maybe not. I think we can expand on each phase of the operation as Kirk describes it.- Energy-matter scrambler is a horrible term, but maybe correct when applied to electronics/radio waves: In telecommunications, a scrambler is a device that transposes or inverts signals or otherwise encodes a message at the sender's side to make the message unintelligible at a receiver not equipped with an appropriately set descrambling device. Whereas encryption usually refers to operations carried out in the digital domain, scrambling usually refers to operations carried out in the analog domain. Now, Lincoln would not know anything about scramblers, but he was familiar with telegraphs which use electronic signals. I think Kirk missed the mark in this case, but he goes on to try to explain what a scrambler is.
- The molecules in your body are converted into energy. "Converted" is not defined. I think Lincoln is as baffled as I am. In my theory, converted could mean they are confined in an energy field and moved into the subspace dimension by some treknobabble device. Probably transtator technology.
- Then beamed into this chamber. "Beamed" is not defined. A light beam is probably the only analogy that Lincoln may connect to. We know we can beamed radio waves and such, but in treknobabble, I think he means beaming through subspace using some unknown carrier wave. The "chamber" is the working end of the scrambler/descramble device described in item 1, above. Each of the six pads in the chamber are probably transtator transmitters and receivers. Lincoln only sees the obvious, you appear here.
- Reconverted back into their original pattern. Like converted above, "reconverted" is not defined. Obviously, it is the reverse on the converted process. "Pattern" is interesting. It may involve the scrambler part of the transporter device were your original converted molecules are transposed (scrambled) for beaming by some treknobabble technology so you maintain your "form" throughout the beam transmission through subspace and back again into our universe at the desired new location. Lincoln's take on original pattern is "me".
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What I love about the transporter sequences in WNMHGB is how they matched the sound effects exactly with Doohan's hand movements. The same button sequence sounds would be used later on, sometimes after just hitting one switch. But in this, it was like playing a musical instrument. So much attention to detail when they had more time to work on it.
Must be weird to be transported!!! Never knowing if you will be reintegrated somewhere else or not? Look at the two crewman who beamed down to Triacus or not as it were or Scotty trapped in the beam for all those years in TNG plus the other people's signal had degraded! Would you know?
JB
JB
Good question. I always thought that human consciousness during transportation ends only after 100% of your molecules are gone, and begins again once your first molecules begin to reform. I could argue on some other percentage less than 100% and more than 0%, respectively for consciousness, perhaps even fading out and in. In between, zip. So, being stored in the buffer passes as no time to the transportee. With Scotty, he sees the transporter room fade out, then immediately he sees the transporter room fade in. If some of his pattern degrades, then he feels sick-ish proportional to the degree of degradation after he's reformed. In Scotty's case, 0.003% degradation; inconsequential. Too much degradation, then you die due to too many misplaced or missing body molecules. I assume you start feeling the problem at about 1% degradation. As for poor Franklin, his pattern's degraded 53%. He's gone.Must be weird to be transported!!! Never knowing if you will be reintegrated somewhere else or not? Look at the two crewman who beamed down to Triacus or not as it were or Scotty trapped in the beam for all those years in TNG plus the other people's signal had degraded! Would you know?
JB
There was that Next Gen episode where Barclay was seeing monsters in his transporter beam ("Realm of Fear"), and from his point of view the process was taking far longer than a few seconds.
Then there's that Enterprise episode where Hoshi imagines an entire day while going through one difficult transport ("Vanishing Point")
I'd probably take the shuttle instead.
Then there's that Enterprise episode where Hoshi imagines an entire day while going through one difficult transport ("Vanishing Point")
I'd probably take the shuttle instead.
This consciousness thing is just something that automatically goes with the territory.
At the heart of the beaming process is the fact that our heroes start out in one body position and end up in another (because, unless they're depicting one of those beaming-from-A-to-B-where-A-and-B-are-the-same-set cases, the actors can't assume an identical pose at B). If the body doesn't fall to subatomic pieces when a limb is moved 4.7 millimeters to the right or an eyelid opened, then the body must exist as a dynamic entity rather than a frozen one. And there's no good reason why a body that keeps on pumping blood and flexing muscles would suddenly stop exhibiting consciousness.
Sure, there may be moments of true discontinuity in the process. But there are also extended moments during which the limbs can move, and during those moments the mind by definition can also wander.
Timo Saloniemi
At the heart of the beaming process is the fact that our heroes start out in one body position and end up in another (because, unless they're depicting one of those beaming-from-A-to-B-where-A-and-B-are-the-same-set cases, the actors can't assume an identical pose at B). If the body doesn't fall to subatomic pieces when a limb is moved 4.7 millimeters to the right or an eyelid opened, then the body must exist as a dynamic entity rather than a frozen one. And there's no good reason why a body that keeps on pumping blood and flexing muscles would suddenly stop exhibiting consciousness.
Sure, there may be moments of true discontinuity in the process. But there are also extended moments during which the limbs can move, and during those moments the mind by definition can also wander.
Timo Saloniemi
Love, love, love this thread.
I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
Makes that transporter toilet concept in the non-canonical Cargo Shuttle blueprints even more dubious.
I think the three levers are the equivalent of Wash's three switches in Firefly. Something for the actor to play with when they're doing something that would simply not look as cool if they just pressed a small unimportant looking button.
As long as they're not the same as the three seashells (back to the transporter toilet...).
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
Makes that transporter toilet concept in the non-canonical Cargo Shuttle blueprints even more dubious.
I think the three levers are the equivalent of Wash's three switches in Firefly. Something for the actor to play with when they're doing something that would simply not look as cool if they just pressed a small unimportant looking button.
As long as they're not the same as the three seashells (back to the transporter toilet...).
In several episodes they "hold" someone in the transporter buffers, not materializing them til later (such as when a security team gets to the transporter room), so it's possible they could sequentially beam people - materializing one group as the next filled the buffers.Six of them transporter beam platforms perhaps? Anything more than six might get you trapped in the beam as mixed up atoms perhaps?
JB
This may also explain how, in the episode where the transporter creates a good and a bad Kirk, James T. Goodkirk steps off the transporter pad and everyone leaves the room, then, with no one at the controls, James T. Badkirk materializes.
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