Those Mysterious Transporter Controls

[jgf]

Will post a link to the entire parody, "Star Blecch", from 1966, if it's allowed.

 

[johnnybear]

This may also explain how, in the episode where the transporter creates a good and a bad Kirk, James T. Goodkirk steps off the transporter pad and everyone leaves the room, then, with no one at the controls, James T. Badkirk materializes.

That scene made it look like the transporter controls had made the decision for itself by reanimating the molecular signal of Kirk which was still held in the buffer strangely enough after having already successfully materialising the original Captain James T.Kirk!
JB

 

[Mytran]

TOS didn't need no silly touch screens for the controls to act by themselves!

 

[Henoch]

Seven beaming up at the end of City:

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Seven beaming up at the end of City:

But he's a redshirt. Seven leave the planet, how many arrive on the ship?

 

[Henoch]

I guess they held one of them in the buffer and materialized him after the first six got off the pad, we hope.

 

[Timo]

In several episodes they "hold" someone in the transporter buffers, not materializing them til later (such as when a security team gets to the transporter room), so it's possible they could sequentially beam people - materializing one group as the next filled the buffers.

This may also explain how, in the episode where the transporter creates a good and a bad Kirk, James T. Goodkirk steps off the transporter pad and everyone leaves the room, then, with no one at the controls, James T. Badkirk materializes.

I'd love to think that this is a fundamental property of the transport process.

How come the transporter can make people appear where there is no transporter? A simple model would have the machine force the transportee into this unnatural phased realm and then give him a push, after which the transportee starts to float back to the surface of reality all on his own. By coordinating the depth and the push, the machine can make the transportee pop up at the place and time of its choosing - but the popup is not optional and will eventually happen in every case, even if the sending machine is turned off or blown to bits.

(The reverse of that process, with no machinery at departure point but machinery at arrival point, could be some sort of literal "reverse" mumbo-jumbo, a case of the machinery turning the arrow of time instead of actually reaching out to where it is not. But the inevitability of everybody, including Evil Kirk, eventually surfacing on their own unless the machinery keeps actively pushing them under, appears to apply anyway.)

In any case, instead of micromanaging sub-subatomic particles and their states to insane level of detail, the transporter is agnostic and indeed downright ignorant about what it moves, accepting extra salt vampires and whatnot without blinking a transtator. So the very idea of it letting lumps of phased matter do what phased matter naturally does (and not, say, holding each sub-demiquark in virtual tweezers all the time) is attractive as such.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jgf]

Ah, and such leads to the arguments of how a transporter functions at the base level. Does the transporter disassemble you into your atoms, physically transmit those atoms to the destination, and reassemble you (so you are still composed of exactly the same atoms)? Or does it disassemble you, transmit your pattern to the destination, and reassemble you from local atoms?

 

[Mytran]

Reassembly from local atoms would make things like beaming into the vacuum of space somewhat impossible.

 

[jgf]

Space is not a total vacuum, there are plenty of free atoms.

 

[Henoch]

It's not a disintegration machine.

 

[Mytran]

Space is not a total vacuum, there are plenty of free atoms.

Free atoms, certainly. Enough to rebuild even one human body? You would need to sweep a VERY large amount of space to gather them all up!
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml
https://education.jlab.org/qa/mathatom_04.html
Going by those websites I reckon you'd need 7 trillion cubic kilometres of open space per human body.
For comparison, the entire planet Earth takes up a volume of 1 trillion cubic KM

It's not a disintegration machine.

The way it's depicted on screen, you are correct.