Can dilithium crystals be teleported?

[Tosk]

That episode is a little fuzzy, but I thought that was more of a "everyone will find out about our parasites if we beam over" not "beaming will kill it" kind of thing. You know, a lie to obscure a bigger lie.

It's hard to say for sure. Odan is at first quite dramatic, "If you transport me, it will kill me." but later on Crusher does say that the reason he refused the transporter was because "It would have damaged the symbiont." But IIRC, we don't know if that's Crusher's medical opinion, or if she's parroting info Odan gave her.

Edit. *SNAP*

 

[Forbin]

Don't forget "Obsession" - Kirk and Garrovic beam down with antimatter in a magnetic bottle as a creature trap.

 

[Pauln6]

This is the curiosity about transporters. An anti-matter explosion will destroy the ship but this is just a side effect of matter and anti-matter meeting and annihilating each other, converting the stored matter into energy. When you transport something, you convert it into energy, effectively creating the same release of energy an an explosion and yet this doesn't destroy the ship?

So why not have transporter tech in engineering to manage a core breach?

If you convert anti-deuterium to energy and you convert the matter of the container to energy is some of that negative energy? Is there such a thing? If there isn't, then transporters must be able of converting energy to matter or anti-matter at will.

All this said, if you accept that transporters are phasing matter into another dimension rather than dematerialising and converting to energy (the so-called kill and clone machines) beaming anti-matter ceases to be a problem .

 

[Timo]

When you transport something, you convert it into energy

...But do you? Might be phasing and unphasing is a relatively low-energy process in the end, manageable not because the pluses cancel out the minuses but because little jouleage is involved overall.

So why not have transporter tech in engineering to manage a core breach?

Sounds like a splendid idea! We have seen our heroes "beaming explosions", more or less: they grab that weird plasma from outer space in a VOY episode I forget and put it in a bottle.

All this said, if you accept that transporters are phasing matter into another dimension rather than dematerialising and converting to energy (the so-called kill and clone machines)

We do know that beaming out "energy only" is highly exceptional in "Lonely Among Us"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[uniderth]

I think all of this proves that transporters really use some sort of wormhole technology rather than cutting you in to atoms and rebuilding you.

 

[Forbin]

Don't forget "Obsession" - Kirk and Garrovic beam down with antimatter in a magnetic bottle as a creature trap.

And my brain said antimatter when we're talking about dilithium, so never mind.

 

[Pauln6]

And my brain said antimatter when we're talking about dilithium, so never mind.

The properties of dilithium are even more mysterious but probably less explosive.

 

[Timo]

Also, "Elaan of Troyius" involves the beaming of dilithium (the jewelry Petri brings aboard) even though it's explicit that Scotty isn't even aware he is beaming dilithium. So it's the counterpart of "Peak Performance", in that the transporter doesn't care.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PhotoBoy]

I think all of this proves that transporters really use some sort of wormhole technology rather than cutting you in to atoms and rebuilding you.

That's always kind of been my head canon of how transporters work. I'd refuse to use one if I thought it was just copying and killing me! The TNG episode The High Ground does have some sort of crude wormhole transporter, unfortunately it just slowly kills the people using it...

 

[Forbin]

The scary thing, in my mind, is that if the transporter kills you every time and makes a copy, no one would ever know! The original you is dead, so dead-you can't tell anybody. And the copy you doesn't know it's a copy, so copy-you can't tell anybody.

 

[Pauln6]

The scary thing, in my mind, is that if the transporter kills you every time and makes a copy, no one would ever know! The original you is dead, so dead-you can't tell anybody. And the copy you doesn't know it's a copy, so copy-you can't tell anybody.

The problem is that there are several occasions where multiple copies are accidentally made so....

 

[Noname Given]

Can dilithium crystals be transported?
Can someone recall a specific TOS or TAS episode?

Yes - in TOS (S1) - "The Alternative Factor", Lazarus steal the ship's Crystals and beams down to a planet to use them in his ship to create a portal. Ergo - they had to beam down with him.

 

[matthunter]

Okay, I didn't express myself clearly enough. What I meant was that we've never seen any material that resisted being dematerialized by a transporter, e.g. something that was too dense or strong for the transporter to break its atomic bonds.

Correct as of the time of posting, but should add that DSC has now shown us the "dark matter" asteroid sample that Burnham collected didn't transport with the rest of her due to being "non-baryonic".

 

[Christopher]

Correct as of the time of posting, but should add that DSC has now shown us the "dark matter" asteroid sample that Burnham collected didn't transport with the rest of her due to being "non-baryonic".

Which is not the same as being too dense or strong to break its bonds apart. "Non-baryonic" means it isn't made of protons and neutrons, so it's a kind of matter the transporter can't recognize in the first place.

 

[matthunter]

Which is not the same as being too dense or strong to break its bonds apart. "Non-baryonic" means it isn't made of protons and neutrons, so it's a kind of matter the transporter can't recognize in the first place.

Well yes but you only listed "too dense to break down atomically" as ONE possibility for resisting transport.

 

[Christopher]

Well yes but you only listed "too dense to break down atomically" as ONE possibility for resisting transport.

Yes, because it's the specific one that's relevant to the actual point I was making, which is that writers overlook the fact that the transporter could easily be turned into a powerful weapon. If a transporter can dematerialize all materials with equal ease, even the strongest armor, then just leaving out the rematerialization step would make it the ultimate disintegrator ray. Conversely, if a ship's hull armor or superstructure is made of material strong enough to resist phaser fire, then logically it should also resist a transporter beam, and it shouldn't be as easy to beam entire shuttlecraft aboard as Voyager often showed it to be.

 

[matthunter]

Yes, because it's the specific one that's relevant to the actual point I was making, which is that writers overlook the fact that the transporter could easily be turned into a powerful weapon. If a transporter can dematerialize all materials with equal ease, even the strongest armor, then just leaving out the rematerialization step would make it the ultimate disintegrator ray. Conversely, if a ship's hull armor or superstructure is made of material strong enough to resist phaser fire, then logically it should also resist a transporter beam, and it shouldn't be as easy to beam entire shuttlecraft aboard as Voyager often showed it to be.

It wouldn't make much of a weapon against ships, as shields block transporter beams. If you've knocked down the shields, you might save a few seconds beaming away chunks of armor instead of punching through it with phasers, but you don't gain much.

Alternatively, perhaps the transporter recognises that a ship is an object and has trouble locking on to just bits of it - like trying to transport your liver and not the rest of you. It CAN be done (Bashir beams the O'Briens' baby out of Keiko into Kira) but likely not quickly enough to make a feasible weapon.

 

[Christopher]

It wouldn't make much of a weapon against ships, as shields block transporter beams.

They block phasers and torpedoes too, but phasers and torpedoes still get used. And shields can be knocked down in battle. The failure of imagination of Trek's writers is that they assume that what you do when you batter a ship's shields down is to keep shooting phasers and torpedoes at it, instead of using your incredible unstoppable disintegration ray called a transporter. You could beam away their weapon emplacements or even the shielding on their engine core, because unlike phasers or torpedoes, transporter beams can pass through solid matter, allowing precision attacks that no other weapon is capable of. Or, heck, just beam the enemy ship's crew into your brig, or into space if you're really mean, and that way you capture a perfectly intact prize vessel for your own use. There are so many ways that transporters would make better weapons than phasers or torpedoes, but Trek writers never realize it because they're stuck with the assumption that they're just transportation devices.

Alternatively, perhaps the transporter recognises that a ship is an object and has trouble locking on to just bits of it - like trying to transport your liver and not the rest of you. It CAN be done (Bashir beams the O'Briens' baby out of Keiko into Kira) but likely not quickly enough to make a feasible weapon.

But -- if you posit that Starfleet engineers were interested in developing weapons based on the same principles as transporters, then obviously they could refine the technology to overcome those problems. I'm not talking about a spontaneous decision to improvise with a system that isn't designed as a weapon. I'm saying that, fundamentally, the weapons potential for transporter technology should have been developed at the same time as its transportation potential, so that by now, there should be well-developed disintegrator weapons based on the same underlying technology as transporters. I mean, good grief, think about the Enterprise era, when transporters had been invented but deflector shields hadn't. At that time, it would've made perfect sense that military engineers would've explored and developed the weapons potential of the technology, so it would've been refined into an effective weapon well before the DSC/TOS era.

Come to think of it, the TNG tech people missed an opportunity to explain that phasers are based on the same physics as transporters, given that phasers on high settings do dematerialize objects. Maybe the stun and kill settings could've worked by beaming away some or all of the oxygen in your bloodstream, say.

 

[matthunter]

Come to think of it, the TNG tech people missed an opportunity to explain that phasers are based on the same physics as transporters, given that phasers on high settings do dematerialize objects. Maybe the stun and kill settings could've worked by beaming away some or all of the oxygen in your bloodstream, say.

They vaporise you. Which is just another way of saying they break down the atomic bonds in your body.

 

[Christopher]

They vaporise you. Which is just another way of saying they break down the atomic bonds in your body.

Yes, thank you, I've only been a Trek fan for 45 years, so I do basically know how they work. I'm speaking hypothetically about an alternative possibility they could have gone with instead if they'd thought through the ramifications of the transporter more fully. Because thinking about stuff and applying your imagination to it is fun and useful.