Something I was wondering about... for very long distance travel couldn't they build a chain of transporters pads? Just keep expanding the distance like telephone wires. If they expended the effort to do this then Starfleet could transport someone from earth to very far away colonies pretty quickly without even needing a ship.
Transporter chains
- Thread starter Makarov
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People can transport across the Earth, supposedly. This won't work with individual starship-grade transporters which can't go beyond the horizon, so it must be either through a hardwired connection that hugs the horizon, or a relay of some sort.
OTOH, what is the maximum possible distance between two relays? The longest distance we hear of, before STXI, and barring subspace transporters, is Titan to Mimas in "First Duty". That should allow for a reasonable number of relays (that is, not millions) to get people across one star system. Or at least its inner planets...
Going from star to star wouldn't work, though. Way too many relays. And if each of them processes the handover for a millisecond, the entire process may end up taking hours; if for something more akin to what we actually see in "site-to-site" (site-to-pad-to-site, as in "Cloud Minders"), years! And the beamed material supposedly only moves at lightspeed, if that. (It is phased, and hand phaser beams move at about the speed of a paintball gun round.)
You'd be there sooner in an impulse spacecraft.
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, what is the maximum possible distance between two relays? The longest distance we hear of, before STXI, and barring subspace transporters, is Titan to Mimas in "First Duty". That should allow for a reasonable number of relays (that is, not millions) to get people across one star system. Or at least its inner planets...
Going from star to star wouldn't work, though. Way too many relays. And if each of them processes the handover for a millisecond, the entire process may end up taking hours; if for something more akin to what we actually see in "site-to-site" (site-to-pad-to-site, as in "Cloud Minders"), years! And the beamed material supposedly only moves at lightspeed, if that. (It is phased, and hand phaser beams move at about the speed of a paintball gun round.)
You'd be there sooner in an impulse spacecraft.
Timo Saloniemi
Makes sense. Something like this was actually done in Memory Prime, the first Trek novel by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens (who would go on to co-write the William Shatner ST novels and become part of the writing staff on Enterprise's final season). They needed to get to a deep subterranean chamber, so they beamed portable transporter platforms into various small caverns and air pockets in the intervening crust, until they had a path of transporter relays they could use to reach the destination. It was more about getting a signal through dense material than covering a great distance, but the principle is much the same.
There's also the Puppeteer homeworld in Larry Niven's Ringworld, in which commuting was done by teleporting from one "stepping disc" to another, so that one could cross the planet quickly. And a similar interstellar-relay idea was used in Stargate Atlantis, where a series of Stargates were put in place by hyperspace ship in order to bridge the gap between the Milky Way and the Pegasus Galaxy, allowing direct Stargate travel between the two.
Of course, the problem is one of range. Transporter range in TOS's time was only 16,000 miles (25,600 kilometers), and in TNG's time it's 25,000 mi/40,000 km. So even beaming from Earth to the Moon (over 380,000 km) would require ten intervening relay stations -- and that's if you could somehow keep them orbiting in a perfectly straight line between the two. In order to beam from Earth to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, with one relay station every 40,000 kilometers, you'd need over 1.03 billion relays.
So this isn't something that would be feasible for interstellar transport unless you had a much longer-range transporter technology. We have seen a few instances of interstellar transporters, in TOS: "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and "That Which Survives," TNG: "Bloodlines," and the Abrams movies. But those seemed to have sufficient interstellar range that a series of relays might not be necessary. The range of the Providers' transporter in "Gamesters" was on the order of "a dozen light years" per McCoy's perhaps-inaccurate ranting. The range of the Kalandan transporter in "Survives" was a thousand light years. The subspace transporter used by DaiMon Bok in "Bloodlines" had a range of "several light years." And the "transwarp beaming" technology used in the movies was apparently sufficient to beam from Earth to Qo'noS, which is relatively far.
So we have examples of a couple of interstellar transporters with intermediate range, far enough to beam from one star system to another in a single hop, but short enough that you'd need a series of relays to beam over large interstellar distances. Those are the best candidates for the type of system you're proposing. But the "Bloodlines" subspace transporter was considered impractical due to its power demands and its dangerous instability. (Although I've always assumed it to be the same technology referred to as "transwarp beaming" in the movies, since we know it's a technology that would've been familiar to Spock in 2387, and that one was already known as of 2370.) And evidently the science behind the Provider and Kalandan transporters remained unknown to the UFP, since they weren't already using them in the TNG era. So we're talking about a technology that's beyond the state of the art of the 24th-century Federation.
There's also the Puppeteer homeworld in Larry Niven's Ringworld, in which commuting was done by teleporting from one "stepping disc" to another, so that one could cross the planet quickly. And a similar interstellar-relay idea was used in Stargate Atlantis, where a series of Stargates were put in place by hyperspace ship in order to bridge the gap between the Milky Way and the Pegasus Galaxy, allowing direct Stargate travel between the two.
Of course, the problem is one of range. Transporter range in TOS's time was only 16,000 miles (25,600 kilometers), and in TNG's time it's 25,000 mi/40,000 km. So even beaming from Earth to the Moon (over 380,000 km) would require ten intervening relay stations -- and that's if you could somehow keep them orbiting in a perfectly straight line between the two. In order to beam from Earth to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, with one relay station every 40,000 kilometers, you'd need over 1.03 billion relays.
So this isn't something that would be feasible for interstellar transport unless you had a much longer-range transporter technology. We have seen a few instances of interstellar transporters, in TOS: "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and "That Which Survives," TNG: "Bloodlines," and the Abrams movies. But those seemed to have sufficient interstellar range that a series of relays might not be necessary. The range of the Providers' transporter in "Gamesters" was on the order of "a dozen light years" per McCoy's perhaps-inaccurate ranting. The range of the Kalandan transporter in "Survives" was a thousand light years. The subspace transporter used by DaiMon Bok in "Bloodlines" had a range of "several light years." And the "transwarp beaming" technology used in the movies was apparently sufficient to beam from Earth to Qo'noS, which is relatively far.
So we have examples of a couple of interstellar transporters with intermediate range, far enough to beam from one star system to another in a single hop, but short enough that you'd need a series of relays to beam over large interstellar distances. Those are the best candidates for the type of system you're proposing. But the "Bloodlines" subspace transporter was considered impractical due to its power demands and its dangerous instability. (Although I've always assumed it to be the same technology referred to as "transwarp beaming" in the movies, since we know it's a technology that would've been familiar to Spock in 2387, and that one was already known as of 2370.) And evidently the science behind the Provider and Kalandan transporters remained unknown to the UFP, since they weren't already using them in the TNG era. So we're talking about a technology that's beyond the state of the art of the 24th-century Federation.
Maybe with a number of connected space stations specifically built for that form of travel, you could beam from one to the other or even bypass a few to get to your location.
I've often wondered why they never considered beaming an entire ship from one place to another. Perhaps as a battle tactic.
I've often wondered why they never considered beaming an entire ship from one place to another. Perhaps as a battle tactic.
If the Federation ever made official contact with the mystery planet Gary Seven was trained on in 'Assignment Earth' that technology was somewhat compatible with the TOS equipment. It was a site-to-site but we never found out how far the transmission was.
Voyager did occasionally beam shuttles into the shuttlebay -- probably as a response by the producers to all the fans' complaints about how they replenished the shuttles they lost. But that idea never really made sense to me. I mean, transporters work by breaking objects down into their component particles. But surely denser, stronger materials would have stronger interatomic bonds and thus be harder to break apart. You'd think that the superstrong metals like duranium and tritanium that are used in starship construction would be really, really hard to dematerialize, since they need to be resistant to weapons fire and the structural stresses of spaceflight and so forth. So just zip, bam, "The shuttle's been beamed into the shuttlebay" -- that's just glossing over something that should be really, really hard to do. At least it should demand huge amounts of power and take a lot more time than beaming up something as comparatively fragile as a human body.
Which, of course, touches on my common complaint that the transporter is, by all rights, the ultimate disintegrator ray, given that it can apparently dematerialize anything, even spaceships. And yet we've never really seen it used that way. It's always treated merely as a transportation system, and its other ramifications are ignored.
Picard mentioned the possibility of beaming the whole ship Danar was escaping in into a shuttlebay in TNG's "The Hunted." From http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/159.htm:
There was a DS9 comic book featuring an alien ship whose pilot attempted to beam his own ship somewhere. There's an obvious problem with the idea of a transporter beaming itself -- how can a dematerialized transporter possibly control the rematerialization process? So it's just as well they've never used that idea in the shows. Although we did see "personal transporters" that could supposedly beam their own holders, in VGR: "Non Sequitur" and Nemesis. I prefer to believe the former one was just a sort of remote control that tapped into the nearest transporter network and instructed it to lock onto you and beam you away -- sort of a futuristic equivalent of using an Uber app on your phone to summon a ride. I'd like to believe the same about the one in Nemesis, especially since it's far too tiny to be a functional transporter, but the problem is that the Enterprise's transporters are said to be down at that point in the story. But maybe it was just the control systems that were down and the actual mechanism was working, allowing the remote device to activate it.
I suppose one way a ship could beam itself is if it had two separate transporter systems. First transporter A would beam transporter B to the destination, then transporter B would reach back and beam the ship (with transporter A inside) around itself. Though transporter B would have to have a pretty potent energy source attached to it in order to power the transport of an entire ship. And I'd think there'd be a tradeoff in range -- the bigger (or denser) the object you had to transport, the shorter the maximum distance you could beam it, for a given power source.
I suppose one way a ship could beam itself is if it had two separate transporter systems. First transporter A would beam transporter B to the destination, then transporter B would reach back and beam the ship (with transporter A inside) around itself. Though transporter B would have to have a pretty potent energy source attached to it in order to power the transport of an entire ship. And I'd think there'd be a tradeoff in range -- the bigger (or denser) the object you had to transport, the shorter the maximum distance you could beam it, for a given power source.
Hmm... Are you sure? The transporter is a make-disappear technology with an optional make-reappear mode, relying on "phasing". Weaponize that and you have the standard sidearm/naval gun of Star Trek! Both technologies can be blocked by shields (as they are the same technology!), but the phaser beam is the coarser, more robust approach, supposedly capable of greater penetration.
Should it need to? We have seen transportees rematerialize after the originating transporter is destroyed for good (say, "Dramatis Personae").
For all we know, transporters operate by forcing the target into the phased realm, giving it a measured push, and then shutting down - the target continues towards the destination through that different realm, then eventually decays back to our realm, right on target as calculated. Bootstrapping should be quite possible if the above holds true. A bootstrapper would be a bit like a modern sawtooth flight pattern sea glider in function, diving into phased space, slowly surfacing across a distance, diving again...
It's rather unlikely that all of the (no doubt dozens of) pads could have received the same amount of direct damage from Shinzon's disruptors; instead, some sort of a shared bottleneck resource, such as targeting, must have been compromised. It wouldn't be impossible to believe that LaForge repaired that single resource when Picard and Data were away - it's not as if he had anything better to do!
In that case, the transporter pip is no different from a commbadge - its likely features of extra range and penetration are not needed here. Its further feature of auto-activation is: by using it, rather than a commbadge that requires verbal interaction, Data can avoid a debate and actually save Picard.
Timo Saloniemi
One of the old concepts for the transwarp drive on Excelsior was that the engines had a giant transporter in them that beamed either the warp field, or the ship into a different version of subspace that either was smaller than normal space (thus a ship going normal warp speeds would seem like it was faster because it crossed the same distance in a realm that was smaller) or beaming itself ahead in this realm made the ship actually faster.
DC comics took that route but added the Mirror Universe twist and used the warp engine transporters to jump universes by simulating the ion storm from Mirror, Mirror's effect on the transporter.
DC comics took that route but added the Mirror Universe twist and used the warp engine transporters to jump universes by simulating the ion storm from Mirror, Mirror's effect on the transporter.
I've never heard that, and it makes no sense. How can you beam a warp field? A transporter works by breaking a material object down into constituent particles and transmitting them to another location. A warp field is not a material object; it's a topological distortion of spacetime.
I've read that story many times, and I just rechecked it now, so I can say with confidence that this is not the case. The universe jump did not involve the warp engines at all. Rather, a pair of shuttlecraft fired powerful transporter beams at the I.S.S. Enterprise and artificially replicated the ion interference from the original incident in order to recreate the dimensional jump. True, Saavik does later use the transwarp engines to replicate the effect, but it isn't specified how, and it's certainly never claimed that the transwarp engines actually include transporter technology.
...Which would probably be a perfectly valid way to describe a material object, too. Or any item or property of our universe.
We know for certain that the transporter is absolutely blind to what it is transporting. It doesn't go "oh, here we have these leptons and these hadrons, I'll take those and leave the empty spaces in between where they lay". It grabs everything, often including exotic particles and energies and phenomena its designers never even heard of, and successfully displaces them as one integral whole. Grabbing a warp field ought to be no more demanding or exotic than grabbing momentum or heat or duonetic charge.
Timo Saloniemi
Except when doing so causes the transporter to malfunction, such as in "The Enemy Within."
If it were possible to beam a starship while it had its warp drive on and then rematerialize it with the warp drive still working—essentially a site-to-site transport of a ship at warp—then, yeah, I imagine that the warp field would pretty much have to get transported along with the ship.
That's like saying that if you pick up a bowling ball off one mattress and put it down on another mattress, you've transported the dip in the mattress along with it. Which is not the case, of course. The original dip flattens out, and a new one is then created separately. Same with a ship in warp. The warp field is not a property of the ship, it's a property of the spacetime the ship occupies. Remove the ship, and the warp field it produces will dissipate, like the dip in the mattress. Put it somewhere else, and it will generate a new field.
I chose my words very carefully. I said "I imagine." Evidently, you imagine differently, and that's fine. But here is a more detailed defense of what I am imagining and why.
Consider first of all when a person is transported. The contents of the surrounding space must accompany the person too, including all the particles that occupy that space (biofilters and other security protocols notwithstanding, it's like Timo said, but with the provision that only particles that the machine is physically capable of transporting get transported). If this were not the case, it would, for example, interfere with the person's breathing.
We also know that people can carry on conversations (TWOK) while beaming, and also look at things ("That Which Survives") and grab things ("Realm of Fear"). Therefore, the object being transported is not frozen in stasis, but rather it remains active.
Now, one of the hypotheses I was careful to mention is that the warp drive remains in operation. If the volume of space whose contents are transported is not wide enough to encompass the principle and essential part of the warp field, or if it were not possible to transport the particles carrying the warp field (and I'm assuming that the warp field is being carried by particles, something like a magic graviton), then I imagine that the warp engine would basically stall and shut down.
So, if we're going to use your bowling ball analogy, imperfect as it is, then it's not just a question of lifting the ball off the mattress and setting it down elsewhere. If the ball represents the object you're transporting (in this case, the ship at warp), then since what must be transported isn't just limited to the ball, a portion of the mattress that the ball is sitting on must accompany the ball. At the destination, a section is removed, and the part that is being transported is quilted in place. On the other hand, if you want the ball to represent the entire volume of what's transported, then (in this case) that will encompass the warped space, and the mattress will actually appear very flat without a dent at all. It's a really imperfect analogy to begin with, so it's not really useful.
Anyway, this is all a very silly thing to argue about, because we aren't talking about real things.
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Yeah this is the only way I can interpret them that does not make them kill and clone machines. The energy that is actually sent through the subspace carrier wave is just displaced energy from the phase dimension quantum-linked to the phased person and when the confinement beam is removed they just return to their normal states at the location to which the phased energy was sent. If linked energy leaks out of the confinement beam, the person comes back less than whole but the system makes up for that by adding in replicated matter based on the template in the pattern buffer (which is how you can end up with two people). There is normally a tolerance threshold for replicated matter that is bypassed only when something weird happens.
What this version of the transporter means is that there would be a limit to how many transports one could undertake in a short space of time (ill health caused by too much replicated matter as little bits of the original material leak off in transit). It would mean that only someone with Khan's recuperative abilities could undertake such interstellar transports without suffering ill health.
But a warp field is not an object made of particles. It is a geometry. It's basically a very complicated gravity well.
Granted, some kind of exotic particles would be required to keep that complicated spacetime metric stable; those are probably what things like tetryons and verterons are for. But they don't "carry" the warp field. The field is a property of spacetime itself. The topology of spacetime is affected by the presence of mass and energy. That's how gravity works in a general relativistic formulation. A gravitational field is a region wherein the spacetime topology is altered by the presence of mass and/or energy. A warp field is a particular, extreme case of a gravitational field. The exotic particles would contribute to the structure of the warp field, but only in the sense of shoring it up, maintaining the shape of the distortion in the "fabric of space."
No. Because the "mattress" is an analogy for spacetime itself, the so-called "fabric of space." Which isn't an actual material of any kind. We just talk about "fabric" because it's a handy analogy. What's really going on is that the relativistic interaction of masses affects particles' perception of distance and time, thereby affecting the way they move in a manner that's mathematically equivalent to changing the geometry of the spacetime they pass through. And it's convenient to describe that through the analogy of changing the geometry of a flexible "fabric" or sheet. But there's nothing physical there. It's just space. (Well, spacetime.)
So it's a mistake to talk about the "mattress" as a physical object. That's not part of the analogy. The part that's relevant is the shape. Basically, the mattress is made of math. Soft, pillowy math.
The equations of general relativity are entirely real. The physics I'm describing is the same physics that keeps your feet on the ground and makes rain fall from the sky, the same physics that enabled the Sun and the Earth to form and human life to exist. Warp theory is just a more exotic and extreme application of the same equations.
But we're not talking about those. But with respect to general relativity, anyway:
First of all, "topology" is the wrong word; you probably meant to say "curvature," which is not a topological property (topological properties are only those invariant under homeomorphisms, which include bicontinuous changes in metric). Secondly, even with the word curvature substituted for topology, it's not fully accurate either. The point of view you are describing is encouraged by analogies such as the rubber sheet analogy, basically your mattress analogy, in which spacetime is visualized as a rubber sheet and a mass is visualized as a ball resting on the sheet.
The problem with the analogy is that, in general relativity, the actual object under consideration is the stress-energy tensor. Matter and energy are represented as a tensor field in spacetime, and that tensor is called the stress-energy tensor. In short, matter and energy are represented in the theory by the curvature of spacetime itself. Matter and energy don't simply influence the curvature; they are the curvature, at least in terms of the theory.
To highlight the defect of the rubber sheet analogy, in terms more precisely aligning with the actual theory, there is no ball resting on the rubber sheet, there is only the rubber sheet itself. The ball exists only in the analogy to suggest some reason why the rubber sheet is deformed. It is an error to suppose that material objects exist apart from spacetime, because in terms of general relativity, they don't.
You could not beam matter with a transporter without recreating at the destination the exact curvature of spacetime that existed at the source, with respect to every particle constituting the object beamed. Transport would not be complete until the curvature of spacetime in the vicinity of each particle was set as it was at the source. If the curvature were not set by the transporter, then each particle comprising the object would have no mass when transport was complete, and probably the whole object would get totally converted into pure energy that would explode at the speed of light the instant that the transporter beam was disengaged.
And let's also keep in mind that general relativity has not been unified with quantum mechanics in any way that is generally accepted and empirically useful. The classical field of electromagnetism is represented in quantum electrodynamics by interactions of photons, the force exchange particle. In fact, every force in quantum mechanics has force exchange particles. Gravitons have yet to be discovered. But if they are discovered as quantum particles, that will entail a rewrite of general relativity.
I don't recall anything in canon, or even EU, but I remember back in the day, say around TNG Season 1-3 era, there was a lot of nutty fanon going around that "transwarp" involved beaming the engine nacelles ahead of the ship, and that the Enterprise-D had something called "UltraWarp" or something which would beam the warp field ahead of the ship.
One thing that kinda bugs me about transporters in general is the seeming inconsistency as to when a "receiving pad" is required. They seem to be all over the place with that.
Like -- why did Kirk's crew and Kruge's crew need to activate the transporters at the same time for Kruge's boarding party? What's the deal with Ambassador T'Pel's transport to the Devoras? Who's transporter gets used?
That's just bizarre. That sounds like the sort of thing made up by someone who didn't understand the "trans-" prefix and thought that "transwarp" was short for "transporter warp."
I don't know about the beaming part, but "ultrawarp" sounds like something from that hilariously inaccurate FASA TNG Officer's Manual.
Since those are exchanges between hostiles, I assume they require beaming between pads so that both sides can have equal control and monitoring over the transfer, as a hedge against dirty tricks. (Although, ironically, dirty tricks were undertaken in both the situations you cite.)
