Ok, silly transporter question...

[The Borg Queen]

I'd imagine it feels like a fuzzy fading, rather than being ripped apart.

 

[miraclefan]

Imagine Borg bees that sting you with nanoprobes and assimilate you.

You know that's not a bad idea for rebooting the borg.Think about it, instead of just destroying every ship they encounter all they do is just beam aboard a cupple thosand borg bees, assimalate the crew and ship and wham they have not only succesfuly assimalated an entire ship, But have also gotten more firepower on there side!

 

[SicOne]

Regarding consciousness while transporting, I am remembering an old Stephen King short story, I think called "The Jaunt", where they have to put people in a drug-induced sleep to teleport them; if awake, the unparticulated consciousness has no sense of time and the "jaunt" takes literally forever, rendering them hopelessly insane.

Maybe Trek does a light zap to the frontal lobe to make them unconscious during transport, and the last part of the transporter routine is another light zap to wake them up.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, that assumes that consciousness is something different from small particles in the head going buzz. The transport process would be expected to stop the buzz, hence no consciousness - or then to convert the buzz to its "phased" analogy, just like everything else about the body is converted to something that is no longer quite solid but still retains cohesion and internal interaction. The latter is what seems to happen, at least to Barclay in what supposedly is a standard if a bit prolonged transporter process in "Realm of Fear". The "phased buzz" works at the same pace as the standard buzz, so there's no danger of the mind wandering...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SicOne]

To that end, Timo, I am also thinking that the transporter would be a handy use to avoid non-synthehol alcohol hangovers the next day...drink too much, have to be on Alpha Shift a short time later, no problem; a waltz through the transporter buffer and you're sober as Sunday!

 

[Myasishchev]

I wonder if they'll ever get rid of sonic showers and just have a transporter refresher--beam everything but the crust and the dust mites. Or even turbolifts--point-to-point transporters would be quicker, especially in an emergency. And I'm still convinced classical toilets don't exist in the 24th century.

Now, granted, it seems a very trivial use of the very energy-intensive technology, but at the same time, look at the ungodly trivial uses they put their holodeck technology to. Or the ungodly trivial uses we put our present-day technology to. I saw a woman park on a sidewalk in front of the ticket outlet at my school's Coliseum the other day. The real parking spaces were ten feet behind her. This [expletive] would have used a transporter to go to the next room.

 

[SicOne]

Although we have seen crew heads off the bridge on deck plans, there may very well be a subtle transporter subroutine that anyone can run at any time, to quickly and discretely remove bodily waste from the bladder and/or bowels without interrupting the flow of the moment, thereby improving overall efficiency.

But I admit I am thinking of the practical jokes a wily programmer can play. "Computer, beam my number two into Number One's pants."

Sorry, it was there, had to use it

 

[JNG]

Although we have seen crew heads off the bridge on deck plans, there may very well be a subtle transporter subroutine that anyone can run at any time, to quickly and discretely remove bodily waste from the bladder and/or bowels without interrupting the flow of the moment, thereby improving overall efficiency.

But I admit I am thinking of the practical jokes a wily programmer can play. "Computer, beam my number two into Number One's pants."

Sorry, it was there, had to use it

I've heard this joked a number of times, but I would only comment that I think the transporter can't necessarily grab unpredictably moving targets safely, so I'd be scared to have such a system used on me.

I hear a lot of people claiming that the transporter isn't used as a weapon as effectively as it might be, but I think Trek canon supports that most enemies (except perhaps for the Borg...not sure) typically cannot beam onto the ship until it is not only unshielded, but unable to maneuver unpredictably anymore. I always think of a scene in a novel where a ship faked being unable to maneuver with shields down, and then got moving when hostiles began to visibly beam in, leaving the would-be intruders to materialize in space.

 

[Timo]

That's a good point: transporter clearly can handle significant relative movement (say, planet vs. ship), but that by no means translates to an ability to handle erratic movement.

One might argue that at shortish ranges, phasers can easily track evasive maneuvers, even extreme ones. But a transporter might need to have greater accuracy - the endpoint of the transporter beam shouldn't move more than a few centimeters relative to the target ship, while the endpoint of a phaser beam could wobble back and forth by dozens of meters and still do the desired damage.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Klaitu]

Can they lock on to a huge swarm of bees and beam them up and flood the ship with 'em? Or do the safety systems disarm the stingers before they remateralize?

(Ok Paul I posted it, now pay up!)

Considering that even a 23rd century Klingon transporter is capable of beaming up a cube of water containing 2 whales, I'd say bees are probably not an issue.

 

[FordSVT]

The closest thing to a swarm of bees I've seen transporterd was from the TNG episode "Power Play", where they beamed up a big swarm of "lost souls" into a cargo bay.

One would assume "bees" to be less complex to transport than "lost souls".