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But the transporter can clone people. And de-age them. And store them for decades like a cryogenic pod.

Cloned Commander Riker -> Transporter + Distortion Field
Nervala IV was surrounded by a distortion field that precluded the use of transporters or shuttlecraft. Every eight years, the distortion field re-phased as the planet moved closer to its sun, creating small windows for transporting to or from the surface. In 2361, a massive energy surge in the distortion field that occurred while Lieutenant William T. Riker was beaming to the USS Potemkin caused a transporter accident and the creation of a transporter clone of him, Thomas Riker.


De-Aging was caused by Transporter + Random Spatial Anomaly -> Molecular Reversion Field
In 2369, Jean-Luc Picard, Ro Laren, Guinan and Keiko O'Brien were physically reverted to twelve-year olds after the transporter deleted rybo-viroxic-nucleic sequences from their genes. This presented some difficulties, notably with Picard's ability to command and the O'Briens' marital relationship. There were two options: do nothing or attempt to recreate them using their last fully-formed patterns to replace the missing sequences. Beverly Crusher was hesitant to send them through the transporter again, until they could figure out what had caused the malfunction, fearing they would lose even more and become younger.

Later, it was discovered that a molecular reversion field had penetrated the hull of the shuttle, causing the transporter to register only part of their patterns. Following the upload of their adult patterns, Miles O'Brien successfully re-aged Picard and the others.


As for storing people for decades. So far, that was a Jerry Rig of the Transporter and only had a 50% success rate.
After Scott thanks La Forge and Riker for rematerializing him, he runs over to the transporter console and attempts to retrieve a second pattern, that of Ensign Matt Franklin, but unfortunately, unlike the phase inducer that kept Scott's pattern intact, the phase inducer responsible for doing the same for Franklin's pattern has failed – although Scott has La Forge boost the gain on the matter stream, the pattern has degraded by 53% – too much for him to be rematerialized when the transporters cannot compensate.

Saving Tuvix wouldn't have had any more long-term impact on the rest of the franchise than all the other 'miraculous transporter incident' stories that were put on screen and then promptly forgotten again to keep the transporter concept properly 'grounded'.


As for "Accidental Transporter Splicing" of 2 people -> 1 person (Tuvix Case).
Lysosomal enzymes of an alien orchid were the cause of such an accident in 2372. Tuvok, Neelix, and the orchid were temporarily merged into one being during transport; as the orchid aided microscopic entities in breeding by allowing them to combine with each other, it accidentally caused Tuvok and Neelix to combine when they were broken down into atoms during transport. "Tuvix", as he named himself (or "themselves"), was a complete mixture of the talents of both crew members.

After discovering how to separate the two patterns and retrieve both Tuvok and Neelix, Tuvix protested that such a procedure would be equivalent to murdering him, but the procedure was undertaken anyway, and Tuvok and Neelix were restored.


Every single one of these cases of a "Transporter Accident" had some sort of "Outside Factor" introduced to the Transporter to cause it to work that way.

The Transporter can't normally do those things and there are alot of UNKNOWN Anomalies from outside that cause that stuff to happen. Not exactly easy to research or reproduce.

The only thing close to being reproduce-able is Transporter Stasis thanks to Scotty.

Even then, that's HIGHLY risky because if you have hardware failure, you die.
 
Tuvok and Neelix were dead. The versions of Tuvok and Neelix that came out at the end of the episode were copies of the originals, not the originals. Janeway murdered Tuvix.
 
The first transporter accident has more of a comment than a question.
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What about the orchid? Doesn't anyone considers the rights of the orchid in this? It was part of Tuvix too.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the orchid as Janeway activated the transporter was "Oh no, not again". Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the orchid had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
 
I make fun of "Tuvix" like a lot of fans do. It's an easy target. But the way the whole situation is never again mentioned in the series is just regrettable. Even episodic Trek makes callbacks to important events and you'd think two valued crewmembers being fused into one sentient entity and then forcibly separated again, killing that new entity and forcing Janeway to make a painful decision would be an event that she'd reflect on in a later episode as a turning point or moment of growth. But nope.

On to the next episode.

Those writers couldn't even figure that an ensign is supposed to make lieutenant. You think they could handle actual character growth?

I don't make fun of "Tuvix" at all. Far as I'm concerned, it played out exactly like it should have.

In the end, it's a question of numbers. Why does one person deserve to exist at the expense of two? Either you kill one (Tuvix) or two (Tuvok and Neelix). The greatest good for the greatest number. That's the bottom line.

There are many opinions, ranging from "Janeway did the right thing" to "Janeway committed cold-blooded murder". And everything in between. Because there are no laws regarding such a situation, there's no objective answer.

To lighten things up a little, here. Enjoy my take on how Tuvix could have ended: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/tuvixs-revenge-a-story-in-two-endings.310202/#post-14003191
 
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Would’ve liked to have seen Ro Laren stick around and become involved with Riker,always thought there was some sexual tension between the two and that they were a better match than Riker/Troi
 
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