^ Which has been the way many episodes in Trek work. Has there been any tech in Trek that hasn't malfunctioned and which hasn't contributed to a story?
Which was a dumb and nonsensical idea. How can a transporter function after it dematerializes itself? I prefer to believe that it was more just a remote control for the Enterprise's transporters. Yes, those transporters were said to be down, which was why the portable unit was necessary, but maybe it was just their control systems that were damaged, not the mechanisms themselves.
Well it was one-use, so I suppose vital circuitry was left behind. Over in the novelverse, New Frontier: Double or Nothing gave Calhoun a similar device which could be used repeatedly but (IIRC) only beamed short distances.
I still don't buy it. The energies and computing power involved in transporting someone are immense. I can't believe a device the size of a lapel pin could do it. That throws out any pretense of science and reduces Star Trek to magic. It's hardly the first time the franchise has done that, but I always hate it when it does.
Yeah, I think it's quite magical too. Another reason I think of Trek as light sci-fi that sometimes traverses into fantasy.
And it makes me sad that it's come to be seen that way, because its original aspiration was to be a plausible and grounded SF show. It was one of the vanishingly few SFTV shows in the '60s through the '80s that even attempted to consult with scientists to get the basic facts right. Heck, by the standards of that day, it was impressively science-savvy even to understand what the word "galaxy" meant, or to acknowledge that you needed some special form of faster-than-light drive to travel between star systems rather than just using conventional rockets or drifting powerlessly through space.
Yes but it also had a universe of human aliens and various other completely implausible fantasy elements. Trek can only become "grounded" with a hard reboot. The current iteration of Trek jumps across time and space via interaction with a magical forest universe. It's about spectacle and emotion, not realism. I'm loving it but YMMV.
It's not black-and-white, man, it's a matter of degree. Obviously concessions like humanoid aliens and Earthlike planets were unavoidably necessary to make the show viable to produce at all, since it's not like prose where you can do anything. But as I said, it was practically the only show for decades that even tried to be slightly science-savvy. People today have no idea how unique Star Trek was prior to the late '80s. It was the only show that felt even marginally plausible and intelligent, compared to the sheer nonsense of everything else in SFTV. Modern audiences are spoiled by all the smart SFTV we have now -- you don't understand what it was like to have nothing of the sort except Trek. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying -- that what Trek has become in later decades falls far short of the plausibility it originally aspired to. It used to be the only thing in SFTV that made even a partial effort to be plausible, but later producers have abandoned that and now it's as fanciful as anything on the air. That change is what I regret. Trek used to be the one smart standout in a morass of stupidity, which was the whole reason it became such a phenomenon in the first place. But now it's been surpassed by so many other works that followed in its footsteps, and while it's objectively good that there are so many quality SF shows now, I regret that Star Trek no longer stands out from the pack the way it once did. Which is not to say, of course, that it can't still be smart on the level of character and story. But it was the relative plausibility of the show's universe back in the old days that made us willing to suspend disbelief about its more fanciful elements, and that made us care about and want to believe in it as a future worth striving for. That was important to the foundations of what made it work for my generation and the one before me, even if today's viewers no longer understand that. So I wish it still had that.
Yes. Honestly, Trek was my entry into science-fiction TV shows (because that's what would be shown on Star World in India in the late 90s). For me, it was very sciency back then. Then I learned some physics in high school and some modern physics in college. Also read Lawrence Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek. Reading some science fiction novels by Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and some others, and books from the fantasy genre. Became clearer where Trek stood for me.
Well, there's still hope that some of the many new shows planned and yet to be planned may have a more grounded, sciency feel.
Sure -- as I said, it's a matter of degree. Compared to a lot of prose SF, compared to the stuff I write, Trek is much more toward the "soft" end of the SF spectrum. But compared to virtually everything else in '60s-'80s SFTV, it was much less "soft" and more science-literate. That's why it inspired generations of people to become scientists and engineers and astronauts. It was entry-level stuff compared to what you'd find in the literature, but giving people that entry, laying out the welcome mat as it were, was important to getting them interested in more in-depth science and hard SF.
I thought that myself initially, but... Perhaps the device : - First replicates (from pattern kept in it's memory like a replicator) and transports out a copy of itself to the target location. -The copied unit (in the target location) then receives the pattern of the person, as the person starts dematerializing. -The original unit is responsible for dematerializing the person and transmitting, then it dematerializes itself into nothingness (since it done its job and is not needed anymore) . - The copied device then materializes the person from the received pattern. This whole process takes milliseconds to complete. So within the world of Star Trek it could work, with a mixture of replication and transporter then. Of course in our world it would take a bunch of power and computation.
That's a clever rationalization, but I still can't buy that such a tiny device could do it. I mean, a transporter not only needs high-resolution sensors and powerful emitter coils and a massive energy source to power them -- it also needs a pattern buffer able to contain the particles of the subject being transported. Since those particles are in a dissociated (essentially gas or plasma) state, they would therefore have to take up a larger volume than the intact subject, even aside from the large magnetic coils that the pattern buffer would need to include, along with all the aforementioned equipment. So it should be an absolute physical impossibility for a transporter to be smaller than the person being transported. The only possible way it could work is if 99% of the equipment of the transporter is stored in a pocket dimension and the pin-sized device is just the external interface for it. But that goes way beyond Starfleet technology -- that's a bloody TARDIS.
Yes, I agree there, no Timelord technology for Starfleet. How about a digital dimension? hmm It does make sense for a sort of Replication-Transporter tech to evolve though in Star Trek. Consider, if the Enterprise was going on a rescue mission to a world that needs supplies, normally they would carry the supplies in the ship and then transport them the surface. But with 'Replicative Transporting' all supplies, including food and medicine, 'only' exist as patterns held in memory. When the ship got to the planet the ships transporter would tie into the replication system and change the patterns into matter at the same time transporting the supplies to the planet. Replicators themselves do this on a smaller scale. So the replicator itself sorta has it own sorta digital dimension based on the memory capacity it has, and tieing directly to the transporters gives it an almost infinite (depending on power reserves) capacity to turn digital patterns into a significant amount mass. Lets even go a step further, and incorporate sub space domains! We all know sub space is another layer of space and there are many levels also referred to as domains. these are in essence, other dimensions (for the most part). We have seen life in these domains (like in TNG's Schisms) also. So, if we apply 'Replicative Transporting' (sorry I like the name ) we can replicate and transport machinery into a sub space domain, possibly taping off of energy in the domain (something like Zero Point Energy) . Maybe this machinery exists momentarily for the one time function of transporting someone. hmm Sorry for the hypothetical rant i'm an engineer by nature. BTW, I will be on Jupiter Station if you need me, I hear Zimmerman's got some crazy idea for a medical holographic doctor.. that will never work .
But that's not how transporters or replicators work. They don't convert energy into matter; that idea was thrown out by TNG's technical consultants because it would take an insane and cataclysmic amount of energy by E=mc^2. Rather, they restructure an existing matter supply to fit a stored pattern. The mass still has to come from somewhere. (Although DS9 ignored this with the whole "self-replicating minefield" thing in the early Dominion War arc. I figured there must've been a small asteroid somewhere in the minefield to serve as a matter source.)
Well if we new exactly how they worked, we would be billionaires. It is fun though, trying to use Star Trek science to figure out solutions to things.
You don't have to know everything in order to rule things out as contradicting what you do know. And the TNG Technical Manual did explain how transporters work in a fair amount of detail.
When the plot need it, why not? But after that, let's pretend to be amnesia, and forget about the tech.
I'd rather see starships having Quantum Slipstream propulsion than reliance on so-called trans warp-beaming which could still have limitations and I've always seen it as a one-off that could only be used in very limited circumstances. Though I suspect that Section 31 in the late 24th century has access to some from of long range transport beaming since I think that's how Sloan got on and off DS9.
Pocket sized pattern enhancer perhaps The answer is in Time magazine from 1994. When asked how the Heisenberg Compensators worked, Okuda's response was "Very Well, Thank You" I've never been convinced. I assume that the matter stream is actually transferred by subspace or similar, hence they can beam inside of buildings. How do the scanners work to a molecular, let alone quantum, level, at a distance of thousands of km? I've sometimes wondered what the point of "Verify pattern integrity" at 4.824 seconds -- what are they going to do if the pattern isn't there? It's 1.8 seconds too late to abort to an alternate pad.