Those Mysterious Transporter Controls

I have never understood this reasoning. Every time anybody beams anywhere, you need absolute pinpoint precision. You don't want to materialize inches above the ground and fall, and you don't want to materialize with your boots blended into the soil. The target location has to be mathematically exact, no matter how wide open the territory or how tight the compartment.

 

I always took it as a 2 step process. The transporter operator slides the three levers doeb to dematerialize the person, then slides the levers up to rematerialize the person at their destination.

 

Yes, and it was the same for WNMHGB too! I think in both cases they just put the helm console on some blocks to raise it up a bit.

Except that there is some wiggle room; Captain Christopher went from sitting to standing in Tomorrow Is Yesterday and in ST2 Captain Terrell beamed down with one foot raised on a nearby stone. The suggestion is that transportees can move around a bit in the beam.

 

...Basically, the transportee apparently is a blob of non-matter that gently, passively settles on the destination, then reverts to matter - unless something truly extraordinary happens to preclude the settling bit, and a limb ends up within a wall or a foot within the ground or whatever.

The alternative is to think that whenever Kirk beams down to Vasquez Rocks, Scotty carefully turns the knobs so that the Captain's left foot is raised by exactly 223.8 mm to create the appropriate one-foot-on-a-rock pose. It's lots of work, getting such things right, especially when we learned in a preceding scene that the sensors can't tell crucial details X and Y about the target area (but somehow still get the exact shape of that rock right).

In both alternatives, the transportee also has the ability to actively adjust his pose - to draw a gun from its holster or lower a tricorder, say. But I doubt this is why Terrell can strike that heroic pose; he isn't really looking at his feet to determine whether to lift one before it gets stuck within that rock!

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm still going with the theory that somehow the transporter used some kind of wormhole. So the tranportee is able to move around and be conscious. Captain Terrell could feel that rock there and moved his foot accordingly.

 

Consciousness is confirmed. I'm with you on this aspect. My technobabble theory, the Transporter is another transtator based technology to access subspace:

Transporters - allows matter to be “dematerialized” in our space-time, transmitted through the subspace dimension, and “rematerialized” at a different location in our space. Matter is not converted into energy nor disassembled/reassembled, rather, the object’s molecules are confined in a energy field which is translated into subspace then back as a whole. People stay people; they are not destroyed and re-created, and are even conscience during the process. During the translation into subspace and back, the confinement energy field twinkles throughout the subject as it fades or dematerializes from our dimension and back, again. Having a chamber on one or both ends of the transport vastly reduces the energy requirements and reduces errors. If the confinement field is interrupted or lost during transport, as the field fades, the subject’s molecules are left to either reform in its original location, or if totally dematerialized, disperse into the subspace realm. The transporter uses a confinement field to first move a subject into a fixed but temporary subspace location inside the transporter chamber to maintain the subject's molecular pattern (pattern buffer) which improves safety and security. Instead of rematerializing the subject whole, the transporter can rematerialize a subject into open space with widest possible dispersion; as the confinement field fades, the subject is irrevocably destroyed.

 

If the transporter can beam subjects into open space with the widest possible dispersion (ref. Redjac), then why didn't Kirk do the same to Nomad instead of beaming him into space to explode? Nomad may have had a last ditch circuit breaker to stop its own destruction at the moment of detonation. Then again, a sophisticated machine might also have built-in rematerializer circuits to recover himself from subspace in such an incident, too. It all worked out good in the end in any event.

 

This has basically been my interpretation for some time now. There are too many scenarios where (if the technology could scan & map every molecule of a subject and reproduce it from raw energy) the Transporter would just be the defacto solution

 

I don't believe this can be argued against, logically. Certainly not in ST2 when Saavik is chatting away and Kirk is answering and they are beamed right through their conversation! How they could hear each other, much less speak, is a mystery but they clearly were doing as such. Another, more reasonable occurrence IMO, is when Kirk saw Losira appear in the transporter room to attack the transporter chief, he clearly saw her, there is no doubt at all.

MCCOY: Jim, did you see what I saw?
KIRK: That woman attacked Ensign Wyatt.

 

One of my favorite scenes...Kirk and McCoy both move as they’re beginning to dematerialize.

 

In most episodes of Trek you can see the beamees freeze just before dematerialising!

 

It's just a toggle. If its up, you slide down and if it's down, you slide up. It's never gonna stay in sync with beaming up/down since sometimes there will be other teleports during missions.

 

The transportee actively preparing for his or her "touchdown" is a plausible explanation for the veteran Terrell's pose; not so much for the ability of the novice Captain Christopher to cope with his surprise teleportation.

But preservation of consciousness seems obvious enough: if molecule A knows where molecule B is both before, during and after transport, this makes the work of the transporter significantly simpler, and by the very definition is consciousness. The molecules keep hugging, the heart keeps beating, the neurons keep firing. Which is consistent with all the other occurrences of "phasing" (say, "Time's Arrow" or "The Next Phase" or even "Time Squared"), so why not with the transporter? Getting phased turns you into a ghost, not into an abstract datastream.

It's not a sharp transition, either, as we don't see bodies ripped apart even when the transporter effect slowly spreads out from the thick middle. "Time's Arrow" and "Time Squared" are explicit about this "phasing" thing being the gentle nudging of the victim forward or backward in time; only extreme time-shifting action such as in "Timescape" results in necrosis or the like, and the average hand doesn't mind if the pulse of blood from the already phased heart reaches the veins a nanosecond late.

Such fuzziness in transition goes well with the ability to gently nudge the phased blob as desired, with forcefields or the like, without yet implying any sort of fine control over diseases or other contaminants or whatever.

Further to be considered is that the phased transportee is but a generic package of phased matter, easily handed off from transporter to alien transporter if need be. Handing off a package of abstract data would be much more difficult - although one might argue that the Universal Translator by its very nature makes all data in the universe interchangeable and negates any format issues.

In any case, all of this "gentle fuzzy nudging" stuff is a good candidate for the sliders, which are the poster triplets of gentle, fuzzy and nudging...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The center slider has a slightly longer travel than the outer two; that would be Timo's fuzzy control slider which seems appropriate for this discussion.

 

Exactly what I've always thought as well!
JB

 

In early TOS, you needed two people to run the transporter controls. Safety first. (exception to the rule in The Alternative Factor, but the controls were preset for the planet surface near Lazarus's ship). In mid-TOS, only one person was usually needed, and it was difficult get around to control interlocks to self-beam yourself down (shown in Mirror, Mirror). By late TOS, anyone can press the button and beam yourself down (seen in LTBYLB); no console technicians needed.