This is something that should be easy enough with existing systems on a starship. If someone loses as limb, lung, or kidney, the remaining opposite body part can be duplicated in reverse and attached, for example, by scanning a patient's left leg and replicating it as a mirror-image copy to replace a lost right leg, instead of using an artificial one. If the transporter could make a second Riker, why not?
Invent your own Star Trek Tech
- Thread starter All Seeing Eye
- Start date
I was watching Equinox yesterday. How about an automatic intruder containment unit? It erects containment fields around all transporter beams or subspace anomalies to prevent intruders from moving about the ship. That could be one way fire suppression units already work.
Holographic nanites. They can be completely reconfigured on the fly like exocoms, but you can control how sentient their collective consciousness is. Of course, you might run into the same problem as the doctor's holographic lung (the patient can't move much for it to work) unless better algorithms are created for adapting to motion.
Pocket Universe Computer. You create a pocket universe and you tune the laws of physics to use finite automa to solve the problem. Or you can tune the laws of physics so it creates an ever larger computer... like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but on a more massive scale than Earth.
Microsingularity telescope: instead of using a singularity for power like in a Romulan Warp Core, you use it to focus light like a lens.
Small transport ship: basically the same thing as a Wraith Dart: you beam into the transporter buffer, the ship carries you to your destination, you beam out. Much more space efficient, and you don't age during the trip!
P.S. My theory about dilithium: it is like a very-high temperature superconductor. It has the amazing property of generating a large magnetic field when exposed to large EM fields. This is how it is used to control matter/antimatter reactions easily. It also prevents a sudden magnetic constrictor shutoff on Voyager from destroying the ship: the dilithium maintains the field as the antimatter in the intermix chamber reacts with the matter in there. It automatically regulates the reaction in this manner (separating matter from antimatter via their different charges).
Holographic nanites. They can be completely reconfigured on the fly like exocoms, but you can control how sentient their collective consciousness is. Of course, you might run into the same problem as the doctor's holographic lung (the patient can't move much for it to work) unless better algorithms are created for adapting to motion.
Pocket Universe Computer. You create a pocket universe and you tune the laws of physics to use finite automa to solve the problem. Or you can tune the laws of physics so it creates an ever larger computer... like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but on a more massive scale than Earth.
Microsingularity telescope: instead of using a singularity for power like in a Romulan Warp Core, you use it to focus light like a lens.
Small transport ship: basically the same thing as a Wraith Dart: you beam into the transporter buffer, the ship carries you to your destination, you beam out. Much more space efficient, and you don't age during the trip!
P.S. My theory about dilithium: it is like a very-high temperature superconductor. It has the amazing property of generating a large magnetic field when exposed to large EM fields. This is how it is used to control matter/antimatter reactions easily. It also prevents a sudden magnetic constrictor shutoff on Voyager from destroying the ship: the dilithium maintains the field as the antimatter in the intermix chamber reacts with the matter in there. It automatically regulates the reaction in this manner (separating matter from antimatter via their different charges).
I wonder if this isn't the way Nog's replacement leg was made. Or Picard's right arm, which never appears "artificial" but apparently is supposed to be a replacement at least from the wrist out, since that's how the Borg implant broke off in "BoBW II". (Or, it was supposed to look like that in "BoBW II", even though of course they did it the cheap way...)
We don't really see any of our brave doctors growing replacement organs in a vat, now do we? McCoy could grow kidneys with a pill, and the folks from Crusher onwards should have replicators available. If the EMH can replicate new nerves in "Emanations", Crusher could probably cook up a new hand for Picard easily enough.
Speaking of medically applied replication, we might see a similar system applied on machinery. If half a starship is blown away, replicating it back together is probably not an option - but moderate hull breaches could probably be sealed this way even during combat. The ablative armor of the Defiant could be an even more primitive application of the tech, with replicators creating more of this bulk stuff on the outer hull as soon as enemy fire ablates it away.
Timo Saloniemi
Excellent point. I guess it would be up the programmer to make sure that that particular application limited its reversal process to cellular resolution, sort of like making a new sudoku puzzle by copying an existing one backwards at the byte level (that's how sudoku puzzles are electronically stored, anyway) rather than bit (as in image pixels) level (where the numerals themselves would be displayed backwards!).
Cool idea! K'Ehleyr was pretty brave to travel in a warp-9 torpedeo. Something like that carrying a transporter buffer seems like a useful thing for urgent political or medical situations, at least, perhaps even rescue efforts.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
My apologies for resurrecting the thread, Unicron, but I hope that you will indulge me this one post before locking it. 
If I may quote from the Phase II chapter of Trek: The Lost Years by Edward Gross and/or James van Hise (Pioneer Books, 1989):
I had completely forgotten the details of Bixby's treatment, but it was very likely floating somewhere in the back of my mind when writing this post back in November. Questions of scale aside, the replicator featured in OaM must have held in its product database an isomorphic (i.e., functionally equivalent) global systems model of the NCC-1701 Refit for Kirk to presumably bust his hump snatching one of the parthenogenic kiddies back from the dastardly spineheads before they get the chance to dissect and analyze it. Comedy or not, this episode would have almost certainly propped open the door to other stories dealing with self-replicating technologies. I knew the Phase II production team (RIP, guys) wouldn't have let me down.
TGT, quietly weeping for what could have been...
If I may quote from the Phase II chapter of Trek: The Lost Years by Edward Gross and/or James van Hise (Pioneer Books, 1989):
I had completely forgotten the details of Bixby's treatment, but it was very likely floating somewhere in the back of my mind when writing this post back in November. Questions of scale aside, the replicator featured in OaM must have held in its product database an isomorphic (i.e., functionally equivalent) global systems model of the NCC-1701 Refit for Kirk to presumably bust his hump snatching one of the parthenogenic kiddies back from the dastardly spineheads before they get the chance to dissect and analyze it. Comedy or not, this episode would have almost certainly propped open the door to other stories dealing with self-replicating technologies. I knew the Phase II production team (RIP, guys) wouldn't have let me down.
TGT, quietly weeping for what could have been...
I don't have the Gross/ van Hise book, and I can't recall seeing that story description before. But it does indeed open the door to more such stories. And I can't imagine that the pressure for good, hard-hitting drama wouldn't have soon led to one a bit more punch than Bixby's comedy.
However, the existence of replication from the time of "The Enemy Within" leads there as well. And practically, it's hard to imagine the kind of transporter shown in Star Trek was not preceded by replication. I mean, if you can scan a complex object to the finest possible resolution, then convert it to energy, then send its pattern via some self-terminating carrier wave that magically restores the signal to its former matter pattern -- without a receiver on the other end... Hell, simple ol' replication -- and even self-replication -- ain't nuthin'.
However, the existence of replication from the time of "The Enemy Within" leads there as well. And practically, it's hard to imagine the kind of transporter shown in Star Trek was not preceded by replication. I mean, if you can scan a complex object to the finest possible resolution, then convert it to energy, then send its pattern via some self-terminating carrier wave that magically restores the signal to its former matter pattern -- without a receiver on the other end... Hell, simple ol' replication -- and even self-replication -- ain't nuthin'.
