Many Questions - Transporter

[xyzzy]

Forgive me if I haven't searched enough for the answers. I have many questions about star trek technologies which I can't quite work out. I'll start with the transporter

1. What happens if a person jumps from 'the beam'. I think we saw this in The Hunted when the soldier tries to avoid being beamed. There is also the episode where they beam during a drop from warp speed. Troi says "for a second I thought I was in the wall ..."

Is it possible to jump out of the pad? Would you lose an arm, leg?

2. What defines what is beamed up? What if Pickard is to beam up but he is holding a newspaper? Does the newspaper get beamed too?

3. What if Pickard is sitting on a horse. Will the horse get beamed up?

4. If Pickard is in water (wading in the sea) what gets beamed up? Pickard, his costume, the water around him?

I understand that nowdays there are trials of beaming taken place in that it is possible to send atoms from one part of a room to another.

4. But what about a persons soul, memory, thought etc.

 

[Finn]

Forgive me if I haven't searched enough for the answers. I have many questions about star trek technologies which I can't quite work out. I'll start with the transporter

1. What happens if a person jumps from 'the beam'. I think we saw this in The Hunted when the soldier tries to avoid being beamed. There is also the episode where they beam during a drop from warp speed. Troi says "for a second I thought I was in the wall ..."

the person still gets beamed up. they can beam up moving objects, as long as the ship or whatever is locked on that person.

Is it possible to jump out of the pad?

yes

Would you lose an arm, leg?

Depends on how hard your landing is or what you landed on.

2. What defines what is beamed up? What if Pickard is to beam up but he is holding a newspaper? Does the newspaper get beamed too?

I'm sorry but duh.

3. What if Pickard is sitting on a horse. Will the horse get beamed up?

Depends on the plot

4. If Pickard is in water (wading in the sea) what gets beamed up? Pickard, his costume, the water around him?

Watch Star Trek IV

I understand that nowdays there are trials of beaming taken place in that it is possible to send atoms from one part of a room to another.

4. But what about a persons soul, memory, thought etc.

I'm starting to think you are taking the technical stuff too seriously after seeing all those threads you have been starting in a short space of time

 

[xyzzy]

Let's go back to the newspaper question.

So if Pickard holds a news paper, it gets beamed up too.

Now what if at the time Pickard was holding the tail of an elephant. What gets beamed up? Pickard and half an elephant's tail, Pickard and an elephant, Pickard and a gap in his clenched hand where the elephant tail was?

Maybe I am not using the 'magic' of the show for my enjoyment. These are just generic questions about matter transporting in general.

 

[Michael]

I think what it essentially boils down to is the fact that Star Trek is a television series and transporter technology is a purely fictional device serving the convenience of the plot.

 

[xyzzy]

Yep I get that. But some scientists say it is possible to transmit matter from one point to another so this technology may evolve into what Star Trek use as a convenient way of moving people from orbit to planet.

Let's try the same elephant question theoretically

What happens if Pickard holds the tail of a 10,000 pound Sarona VIII elephant?

 

[Tom Riley]

How about this. The person operating the transporter can decide whether or not the elephant comes with Picard if he is holding onto the tail. My example, in The Most Toys, they were able to deactivate a weapons discharge in mid transport. Clearly they can control exactly what they beam up, and what they allow to rematerialize on the transporter pad, assuming they aren't in some big hurry and aren't rushed into just doing it as fast as possible.

 

[xyzzy]

Picard, sorry - my bad

So it would be possible given time. The transporting process envelopes an object like drawing a rough circle around a human.

With more time finer detail can be input such that outline tracing of Picard's hand and not the elephant's tail can be performed.

Similar to magic wand / in depth outline tracing in Photoshop.

 

[Finn]

^It depends on the plot. The problem is how they manage to transport all of the clothes and whatever they are carrying during an emergency transport when the Captain says they have literally seconds to do it and they manage to do it without transporting the matter they were standing on and all. One might say the computer computes it in milliseconds. It probably uses the same program that enables the doors to read the crewmember's mind before opening.

 

[Finn]

My example, in The Most Toys, they were able to deactivate a weapons discharge in mid transport. .

I was under the impression they just neutralized it, not pushing a button. They may just do something about the building energy in the beam.

 

[Timo]

It probably uses the same program that enables the doors to read the crewmember's mind before opening.

People who say the Trek doors must be telepathic are a bit akin to people who gasp "Ooh, magic!" when a light bulb is turned on...

Really, a door doesn't need telepathy or even a sophisticated AI routine in order to determine that a person standing next to a door does not want it to open, yet a person moving toward a door does want it to open. All you need is a tracking motion sensor of some sort (be it a camera; a ranging radar, lidar or sonar; a doppler radar/lidar/sonar; or just a series of pressure sensors in the floor) and an elementary logic, perhaps requiring five lines of code.

There just aren't so many of those purpoted occasions where a door dramatically refuses to open while it logically should, or dramatically opens while it should remain shut. In fact, I don't think there really are any. There are some occasions where a door is open or ajar for no good reason (other than plot reason), but those are another matter...

One might say the computer computes it in milliseconds.

Most probably the machinery is always set to beam up people plus their closest environs, except for the ground beneath their feet or knees. That shouldn't be too hard to do; the machinery already has a good idea of the shape of people, and can easily guess where a person stops and ground starts. If there are exceptions to that, they are specifically noted in the beam-up order: say, "two people plus a piece of equipment" as in "The Pegasus" where Pressman and Riker take along a large cylinder that sits on the floor right next to them.

Of course, beaming up expected people and unexpected elephants or equipment would be equally impossible if the transporter machinery didn't see the targets somehow. Sensors would need to see the shape and positioning of the target, and would automatically pick the people wearing/using the communicator that made the call, but would wait for further instructions on what other visible things to pick. Any decent computer should be at least as smart as Chief O'Brien in identifying an object and selecting or deselecting it; still, a human operator probably always okays the choices made by the computer.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RegFan]

How about this. The person operating the transporter can decide whether or not the elephant comes with Picard if he is holding onto the tail. My example, in The Most Toys, they were able to deactivate a weapons discharge in mid transport. Clearly they can control exactly what they beam up, and what they allow to rematerialize on the transporter pad, assuming they aren't in some big hurry and aren't rushed into just doing it as fast as possible.

In that case, why don't they use the transporter to cure people or treat injuries (other than in some rare instances like Unnatural Selection)?

 

[Timo]

Why don't we use supersonic jets to move between the stores in a department store? Why do we settle for escalators?

The transporter is a good machine for moving people across tens of thousands of kilometers of vacuum, up and down gravity wells. But it's probably still among the least efficient machines for repairing a ruptured appendix.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

If you turned on a vacuum cleaner while the transporter was beaming people in, would it suck their semi-formed particles up before they totally formed?

I understand why transporters aren't used as weapons, they'd have to drop their own shields for it to work while the enemy shields must also be down. Then you'd have to get it JUST right when they aren't moving to beam something aboard.

Too many variables.

 

[Timo]

If you turned on a vacuum cleaner while the transporter was beaming people in, would it suck their semi-formed particles up before they totally formed?

It seems that a person "phased" into a transportable form is still being held together by the same forces that usually hold him together, or then "phased forms" of these forces. It doesn't sound likely that a person would be "less than whole" at any stage of the process - otherwise he or she would be likely to fly apart even without the help of a vacuum cleaner. In ST2, Saavik and Kirk can be heard speaking all the way through the rematerialization process; I'd say they're vacuum-proof there...

Agreed that transporters are finicky things, difficult to use as weapons. But perhaps a coarser version of the same device could be used as a weapon nevertheless - something that only partially dematerializes the target, in a split second, and doesn't get disrupted by the sending side's shields much. Perhaps phasers are in fact such weaponized transporters? Both seem to "phase" their targets, both were invented/introduced at roughly the same time, both can be blocked by shields, and the visual effects are rather similar...

Timo Saloniemi