It's exists in a TV show set in the future. One charged with creating action adventures. So tech fails.
Salt Vampires, transporters and everything
- Thread starter MarcKle1964
- Start date
If Star Trek plots are any indication, there's a lot of mileage to be had from just that one "What if... ?"
The Savage Curtain
CHEKOV [OC]: Bridge to Transporter room. One minute to overhead position.
SCOTT: Locked on to something. Does that appear human to you, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Fascinating. For a moment, it appeared almost mineral. Like living rock with heavy fore claws. It's settling down now to completely human readings.
SCOTT: We can beam it aboard anytime now, sir.
...
MCCOY: Just what was it you locked onto before you beamed him aboard?
SCOTT: You heard Mister Spock yourself. Mineral he called it, like living rock.
MCCOY: And that became Lincoln?
SCOTT: I couldn't tell. It may have been another figure down there standing by. What do you make of it?
MCCOY: I'm not quite sure.
The Enterprise Incident
KIRK: Mister Chekov, there's only one Vulcan aboard that ship. He should be easy enough to locate.
CHEKOV: Romulans and Vulcans appear to read almost exactly alike. There is just a slight difference which. Got him, sir.
KIRK: Feed the co-ordinates to the transporter room on the double. Have them prepare to beam him aboard on my signal.
UHURA: Captain Kirk. Mister Scott is on the intercom for you, sir.
KIRK: Go ahead, Scotty.
.. .
CHEKOV: Sir, transporter room has the co-ordinates and is ready for beaming.
KIRK: Transporter room, beam Mister Spock aboard.
Apparently TOS era transporters did have the ability to distinguish what they were beaming up. Or, at least, with assistance from the bridge science station. Since Savage Curtain comes later, perhaps there was an upgrade.
Science Station was only involved in Enterprise Incident.
Yet, they beamed up both Spock and the Romulan Commander, and not just Spock right out of her arms if the transporter had discriminating resolution.
Brundlefly!
Would we? How many attempts with various technologies have resulted in deaths? Hell, how many car accidents are fatal? We've had cars for how many years?
Technology is only as good as the operator. If they're looking for the problem then they'll try and fix it, but probably not perfectly and failures will still occur.
Maybe not that much evidence...
If I could just borrow the examples from @ZapBrannigan for a moment:
"The Lorelei Signal" and "The Terratin Incident" suggest a transporter that disassembles and reassembles you according to a stored pattern.
In TLS a "pattern" is used to reshape an incoming transportee's body, but requires special programming of the unit first, suggesting that the Transporter is not supposed to work this way. It also doesn't affect the subject's brain (Kirk asks uhura if the process worked), suggesting that this medical modification is limited to the subject's body and not their brains - in other words, the Transporter isn't simply reloading an earlier, saved file but doing a lot more work!
In TTI the artifically compacted atoms of a body were simply allowed to resume their natural spacing, pehaps as a result of the "null space" effect of wormhole-style transport.
"The Enemy Within" and "Second Chances" (TNG: Riker got copy-and-pasted, and left behind for years)
These are examples of imperfect (TEW) and near-perfect (SC) cloning, a phenomenon seen elsewhere in the Trek universe. Furthermore, both involve a "wild card" in addition to the standard Transporter (weird yellow ore for TEW, an entire planetary energy field in the case of SC)
TNG's transporter had a bio-filter to catch pathogens, and in "The Most Toys" the transporter detected and filtered out a phaser being discharged as Mr. Data beamed up.
Enterprise's sensors detect nearby phaser discharges all the time, why shouldn't they be able to do so for an incoming wormhole?
On the other hand, nothing I can think of about a "dissassembly-reassembly" Transporter process would allow people to speak or remain physically active whilst inside a transporter beam.
Transporters (Klingon ones anyway) still didn't have that discrimination feature by the time of ST4, as Dr Gillian Taylor can testify
Sci-fi writer Steven Gould wrote a tetralogy of books about a young man who discovered he could teleport at will (Jumper, Reflex, Impulse and Exo). By the way, ignore the movie Jumper allegedly "based" on his book. It bears no resemblance.
The writer had to explore the nature of the jumps in order to establish rules about what was possible and what was not. In the first book, Davy handcuffs himself to an iron fence and tries to jump, almost dislocating his shoulder. Other crude tests establish that he is creating a "hole" in space and sliding through, but without "movement" in the usual sense. His girlfriend Millie found that trying to hold onto him was like pinching a wet watermelon seed. But if she, or Davy, got a good grip, Davy found he was able to jump other people through, as well as anything he was able to lift.
In the second book (Reflex) Davy learns through other tests that he definitely opens a doorway allowing things like water or air pressure to slip through, too. (Hence, no "pop" when he jumps, but maybe a draft.) By "twinning"—jumping at fan-blade speed back-and-forth between two places, say the middle of a river and a rooftop—he can cause floods and collapse that roof, etc. During the course of the second book, we learn that Millie, now his wife, has "learned" how to jump from experiencing it so often.
By the third book, their teenaged daughter 'Cent (to distinguish her from her mother) has also learned how to jump, but does not tell her parents right away. After jumping over vast north-south distances (Coriolis), or back to the top of a cliff after falling, Cent realizes she can cancel momentum. Can she add it, too? Thus begins her career at flying, which leads to...
Fourth book, Cent starts her own space program "launching" and retrieving small satellites after acquiring a spacesuit and learning how to jump accurately to any point in orbit. And she goes much further...
The writer had to explore the nature of the jumps in order to establish rules about what was possible and what was not. In the first book, Davy handcuffs himself to an iron fence and tries to jump, almost dislocating his shoulder. Other crude tests establish that he is creating a "hole" in space and sliding through, but without "movement" in the usual sense. His girlfriend Millie found that trying to hold onto him was like pinching a wet watermelon seed. But if she, or Davy, got a good grip, Davy found he was able to jump other people through, as well as anything he was able to lift.
In the second book (Reflex) Davy learns through other tests that he definitely opens a doorway allowing things like water or air pressure to slip through, too. (Hence, no "pop" when he jumps, but maybe a draft.) By "twinning"—jumping at fan-blade speed back-and-forth between two places, say the middle of a river and a rooftop—he can cause floods and collapse that roof, etc. During the course of the second book, we learn that Millie, now his wife, has "learned" how to jump from experiencing it so often.
By the third book, their teenaged daughter 'Cent (to distinguish her from her mother) has also learned how to jump, but does not tell her parents right away. After jumping over vast north-south distances (Coriolis), or back to the top of a cliff after falling, Cent realizes she can cancel momentum. Can she add it, too? Thus begins her career at flying, which leads to...
Fourth book, Cent starts her own space program "launching" and retrieving small satellites after acquiring a spacesuit and learning how to jump accurately to any point in orbit. And she goes much further...
Maybe people start talking, get disassembled, get reassembled, resume their conversation while still in the beam.
I recall McCoy doing that in a film or episode,
Instances where Star Trek does these exact things are TWOK and TNG: Realm of Fear
Saavik and Kirk as they beam up from the Genesis cave while discussing the coded message of hours seeming like days.
You could also add Capt Christopher in Tomorrow Is Yesterday (starts in a seated position, arrives on the pad standing up) and Spock in ST4 (he is beamed up whilst walking, so presumably he stopped moving his legs mid-transport so as to not fall off the destination pad!)
“The Enemy Within” being the primary exception, TOS is otherwise pretty consistent in how the transporter operates: it seems to just grab every one/thing within a particular radius and just reassembles it “as is”, seemingly without any further analysis (salt vampires vs humans, humans in crates, two life forms embracing/grappling). I suppose we can maybe even excuse Kirk being doubled if we go with the idea that there’s such a huge expenditure of power involved in the process (over and above the energy contained in a single person) that a malfunction in the mechanism can accidentally split and then recreate an entire second person worth of mass.
It’s only in the later series where it starts being used for more extreme uses (with “Realm of Fear” topping this list) that the wormhole hypothesis seems to apply more frequently.
It’s only in the later series where it starts being used for more extreme uses (with “Realm of Fear” topping this list) that the wormhole hypothesis seems to apply more frequently.
Since a pad isn't required at the destination, It would seem that the particles of the body want to reassemble themselves, unless acted on by an outside force. So, the Transporter converts your matter to energy, but those energy bits are still connected to each other the same way the atoms were, but are now much more malleable. Once released from the transporter the energy snaps back to it's original matter form and position. If something goes wrong the transporter may have to do some heavy lifting to make sure the atoms don't get messed up. It can also modify their position. But under normal circumstances, you are converted but not disassembled. So from your perspective you can keep talking, you are just temporarily an energy based life form.
Exactly, no assembly required.
This is why you are not killed in every transportation. Also note that your molecules are converted into energy, so the ionic energy that holds your matter-molecules together is still present holding your energy-molecules together, hence, you are still conscious during transport and can still move somewhat within the boundary of the energy beaming area.